Tuesday, May 6, 2014


A few words about the 7th edition rumors from The Overlord:




FOC Changes or "Unbound Armies"/"Battleforged Armies"

Battleforged Armies are built much the same way as our current 40k lists. The sole exception is that there are defined “in-game bonuses” for taking a Battleforged Army. This is intriguing. I wonder if the new mission cards will have different stipulations depending on your Army type. From what I gather Battleforged Armies will be able to take multiple FOCS just the same as now, so dataslates, supplements, and such are all in.

Unbound Armies are lists without an FOC. Examples given are riptide/Broadside lists or leman russ lists. There is a lot of potential for narrative gamers. Lots of fun things can be had here, when you just take x points of whatever fits your scenario. I'm very leery of this due to my competitive nature. I am already building insane lists in my head based on this free form style. I would think this type of game would require a little more fore-thought from the players involved, to ensure there is some reasonable amount of balance and a fun time. 

Mission Changes

I think I'm most excited about the mission changes. The Tactical Objective mission cards can be drawn during each turn (if you discard your current one, or complete said mission)... this is cool. I like a more dynamic battle with ever changing objectives and missions. It sounds like a lot of fun. Multiple ways of scoring victory points has always been a good way to help balance the scenarios. This is much the reason we use the LVO missions so often. I think this is a good way to keep the game flowing and changing... as every battle you have with an opponent is different and a lot of that will be based on the Tactical Objective cards you draw. The game comes with 36, so depleting that supply should be difficult, but I'm sure they will be easy to replicate and reproduce, so we can expand upon them based on a campaign need or something. This should help keep the game from getting stale.

Psychic Changes

I am in love with this. I always wanted a psychic phase and now we are back to it. This is going to help people from casting out of sequence powers (oops, I forgot to cast my blessings, do you mind?) as well as add a whole level of tactics and strategy to the game. Much like psychics or magic from past editions of Warhammer, we will have a limited number of resource pool to draw from for nullify (yes!), as well as casting. Granted we don't know the fine granularity of this yet, we do know you get a pool of D6 + total mastery levels... this can give some armies an immense amount of dice to roll, and the order of casting as well as the level of the powers are going to greatly impact this phase. I have nothing negative to say about this, other than I truly hope this helps balance the nids psychics with everyone else. Also, Demonology seems interesting, with 2 subdivisions of its own.

Book-keeping


With all of that being said... the book-keeping in this game has just gone through the roof. Missions/Tactical Objective cards/psychic pools/codex abilities - there is a lot of things to keep track of so the speed of a game is going to slow for a while, until we get accustomed. It is just something we'll have to adapt to. Coming from a deeply rooted RPG and table-top background, this is nothing any of us are new to, but it is something that you'll have to deal with and something you'll have to ensure the enemy is dealing with properly. So many times in 6th edition, the man who keeps better notes and such, tends to do better because his thoughts are organized and he is operating at full capacity... hopefully the new shuffling of phases and the addition of these additional factors isn’t over-whelming, but instead entertaining. I’m very much looking forward to cracking open the new rulebook and settling in. 


Keep rolling them 6's !!

-The Overlord