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Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

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Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#61

Post by ddevault »

Fnoord wrote: post #54
Symbiote wrote: post #10

I haven't played the game since about 2001, when my friends decided it wasn't cool any more. They (we) moved on to Magic: the Gathering instead, which was a problem as I was the teenager with by far the least money in our group. My parents had just about accepted that Warhammer was expensive but intricate and time-consuming (equivalent to my dad's train set in the 1950s), but 15 cards for £$€ ? No way. I more-or-less…

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it. Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same…

I don't play Magic much anymore, but the Commander format is a good balance. The decks stay competitive longer, and the format is mostly casual anyway so most players are there to have fun rather than to win. The format encourages a lot of jank and fun play styles that aren't possible in competitive games, and the cards needed are therefore a lot cheaper.

Even outside of Commander, most players keep a few "casual" decks around which aren't especially competitive, but are designed to play with interesting ideas. If you ask someone to pull out a casual deck, they'll usually agree.

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#62

Post by evandena »

raister wrote: post #18
thickbill wrote: post #11

I'm curious how video game sales will be affected by COVID-19. Anecdotally, I've noticed all my friends who were never previously interested are now messaging me about setting up group matches in Age of Empire, Fortnite, Civilization.

What about the implications on bandwidth as well? Internet will be pushed to its limits in streaming and teleconferencing, among other things.

I've already noticed issues in my inner ring suburb. During the business day, my 200Mb Charter cable connection is only pulling 20-50Mb. I've never had capacity issues in the last 10 years.

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#63

Post by Symbiote »

Fnoord wrote: post #54
Symbiote wrote: post #10

I haven't played the game since about 2001, when my friends decided it wasn't cool any more. They (we) moved on to Magic: the Gathering instead, which was a problem as I was the teenager with by far the least money in our group. My parents had just about accepted that Warhammer was expensive but intricate and time-consuming (equivalent to my dad's train set in the 1950s), but 15 cards for £$€ ? No way. I more-or-less…

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it. Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same…

> The pinnacle of P2W

I bought one deck, and maybe two booster packs, total.

My friend's sister's boyfriend was very wealthy, and would buy several entire boxes of booster packs (like a shop would have on display) when a new expansion came out. In return for helping him open and sort these, he'd give anything he couldn't use or didn't want to my friend and me. This worked OK for a while, as we had fairly similar strength cards.

The one day, the third player in the group bought 8 rare cards from eBay for about £20 (maybe even each?) and was unbeatable. That basically ruined the game for us.

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#64

Post by nappy-doo »

I would add that I recently started getting into Bolt Action, a WWII based miniatures game. It's got surprisingly clean rules, the lore is more realistic, there's even some movies about the lore, and it's way cheaper than any Games Workshop game.

As I'm new to the hobby, I'm a slow painter, but I can see why people do it.

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#66

Post by CocaKoala »

Fnoord wrote: post #54
Symbiote wrote: post #10

I haven't played the game since about 2001, when my friends decided it wasn't cool any more. They (we) moved on to Magic: the Gathering instead, which was a problem as I was the teenager with by far the least money in our group. My parents had just about accepted that Warhammer was expensive but intricate and time-consuming (equivalent to my dad's train set in the 1950s), but 15 cards for £$€ ? No way. I more-or-less…

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it. Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same…

You could play Limited, where everybody gets six booster packs. Everybody opens one pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their left. Once the first pack is all picked up, everybody opens their second pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their right. Repeat until you're out of booster packs.

Now you have 6*15 cards, and you need to compose a deck of at least 40 cards out of them. You can add as many basic lands as you want. Play your deck against everybody else's.

This avoids the idea that you can just buy strong cards to win, because you only get what's in the booster packs. And if you take only the strong cards from each booster, there's no guarantee that your deck will actually function as a deck - do you have a good mana curve? Are all of your cards the same colour?

Even once you start drafting to put together a deck instead of just grabbing all the strong or rare cards, you have to figure out which colours the people upstream from you are drafting so that you can try to draft the colours they're passing over, otherwise you'll be competing for the cards they want.

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#67

Post by zimpenfish »

mysterydip wrote: post #15
thickbill wrote: post #11

I'm curious how video game sales will be affected by COVID-19. Anecdotally, I've noticed all my friends who were never previously interested are now messaging me about setting up group matches in Age of Empire, Fortnite, Civilization.

I know there's several sales going on right now (GOG even has a nice selection of games discounted to free to get started). https://www.gog.com/partner/stay_at_home Anecdotally my twitter feed seems to have more people gaming now than normal. Empirically, steam stats show a marked increase in logged in users and those playing games: https://steamdb.info/graph/

itch.io also has had a whole bunch of devs drop their prices or make their games free for the moment.

https://itch.io/c/757294/games-to-help-you-stay-inside

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#68

Post by Onawa »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #58
Fnoord wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it. Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same…

A few of us have did successfully a Non-play2win format, called "Commoner decks". All cards have to be commons. Also, commander games in groups also defeat the P2W ideal - if one person grows too fast and is too big a threat, everybody else will smash them. I've played games with 11 people before. The nail that sticks high gets the hammer.

Isn't commons only an established format called Pauper?

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#69

Post by Fnoord »

ddevault wrote: post #61
Fnoord wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it. Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same…

I don't play Magic much anymore, but the Commander format is a good balance. The decks stay competitive longer, and the format is mostly casual anyway so most players are there to have fun rather than to win. The format encourages a lot of jank and fun play styles that aren't possible in competitive games, and the cards needed are therefore a lot cheaper. Even outside of Commander, most players keep a few "casual" de…

Sounds like a fun format. Yes, formats can (somewhat) work around the P2W issue. I've played various experimental formats (back then these were suggested in mags such as Inquest).

There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG.

I had very expensive Type I decks, and could not be bothered with the hypes around Type II because I disliked how I suddenly wasn't allowed to use certain cards. Which sucks if you got them not right away but later in the game (hence the hype to "buy a box" in start).

The most fun for me, with MtG, was trying to build decks, and win with them (or polish them, and then win with them). Unfortunately, we later found out that the competition was skewed: we had to pay 1 guilder (~half an EUR) to enroll, but the guy who ran it always opened the packs and replaced expensive rares with cheap ones something he previously denied doing.

I had a faerie deck back in the days, with only one expensive card: Pendelhaven. It was a quick weenie deck, and I could add some more expensive cards if my opponent had these as well, such as Nevinyrral's Disk.

Re: Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

#70

Post by themodelplumber »

nappy-doo wrote: post #64

I would add that I recently started getting into Bolt Action, a WWII based miniatures game. It's got surprisingly clean rules, the lore is more realistic, there's even some movies about the lore, and it's way cheaper than any Games Workshop game. As I'm new to the hobby, I'm a slow painter, but I can see why people do it.

That's cool to hear. I didn't even know there was lore. I bought the Bolt Action book but haven't cracked it yet. Operation: Whitebox and Osprey Black Ops are just ahead of it in the queue here.

I did recently test out One Hour Skirmish Wargames and One Hour Wargames, and discovered that I'm a major house-ruler. So where minis are concerned, I've been curious to try out that side of the hobby and see if I'm somehow better suited to kit bashing my own minis, which I would guess might be the equivalent there. Currently I use LO Draw and Inkscape for playing out games.

Oh and I've also been impressed by some of the Ogre minis I've seen...

Anyway, you got me excited. Fun stuff. :-)

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