"Warmaster a good game?" Topic

Great breakdown, Parzival. I've never played the DBx games so this gives me a good sense of where they part ways with WM.

I am a fan of the Warmaster Ancients rules with the latest errata. The new rules have toned down skirmishers making them a problem to be overcome but not over-powerful.

I have put a battle report of a game at our club (Yorkists vs Lancastrians) here
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Nice battle report! :)

Makes me want to dig out my Warmaster Ancients rulebook and my half finished Romans.

I may have to order the Ancient Armies and Medieval Armies supplements too before they get hard to find. Are there any "must have" rules or articles in the new books? or are they mainly just army lists?

The Ancient Armies book is army lists, some corrections/additions to the lists in the first book, a set of campaign rules. I don't have the Medieval book, yet, but it has got siege rules.

Campaign rules sounds interesting. Are they just a couple of pages? or is there some "heft" to them?

I find WM a great one off game, but all miniatures games are better with a good campaign system. hehe

WM is one of the best designed mini wargame rules I have ever played period. It has been adapted into other excellent games such as Cold War Commander and of course the Warmaster Ancients. I have even considered adapting it to larger sizes such as 28 mm.

I think you should check out the errata for Warmaster Ancients, I much prefer the game with them

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I'd like to know which DBX game Parzival was referring to with this comment :
"there's very little of the "+2 for being French" "+1 for being British" aspect that I noticed in DBx."

Army specific rules or modifiers are not something that appears in any DBX game as far as I'm aware.

Marshal Mark:

I'm not sure how much DBX Parzival has actually played as there are a number of errors regarding the DB system in his write up.

I can only strongly suggest that people try the DB stuff (esp. Hordes of The Things) as well as Warmaster Ancients and make up their own minds. I play both and have made up my own mind. (Prejudice: I find rolling massive numbers of d6 mind numbing and this no doubt influnces my preference).

TomT

My views have played several rule sets for years… DBx was introduced to try and fix a DBA then DBM system that secretly claimed to be historically accurate yet fell over if one looked at the combat resolution any deeper than a shallow glance. DBM though worthy (and I have been playing it nearly 20 years and still do occasionally ) does not look like an ancient battle, it's far too finicky and deeply floored light troop effectiveness prevent many games evolving into a battle line contest, but nit picking on the flanks. WM ancients looks better and actually plays very well and is far less pedantic particularly in its movement. WMA does suffer from the Warhammer Yahtzee dice contest method but isn't spoilt by it.

I'd like to know which DBX game Parzival was referring to with this comment :
"there's very little of the "+2 for being French" "+1 for being British" aspect that I noticed in DBx."

Army specific rules or modifiers are not something that appears in any DBX game as far as I'm aware.

Yes, they do. My teammate in a recent Napoleonics event had a stand of British Light Infantry that got a +1 for being British Light Infantry, and yes, it was there in the rules (someone even looked it up at the table). No such bonus for other nation's Light Infantry; just the Brits. Also of note was the Old Guard unit which was being used as a proxy for something else, and therefore would not have its customary bonus for being Old Guard. I was being a little facetious in the "+2… +1…" joke, but not much.

My point, of course, is that the problem isn't whether or not a unit gets a bonus for whatever reason (certainly Old Guard should be more formidable than a regular French line troop), but that mathematically because of the system DBx uses to determine combat results, each bonus or penalty has an increasingly more significant effect on outcome. At some point the result of a combat can become inevitable, when one considers that the sole random elements are the rolls of 2 opposed d6, heavily modified to produce higher or lower results. For some typical DBx units, a modified roll range of 6 to 11 or more is not out of the question, whereas others could be conceivably limited to a range of -1 to 4— in which case, why bother rolling at all? Why not simply state that, for example (in my best Barkerese), "Blades supported by Psiloi in close combat with overlapped Light Horse without support in bad going automatically win and destroy their opponent." (Which, if I read the rules correctly, they would.)

In a WM combat situation, however, the opposed die rolls are always in the 1-6 range. Odds advantages either come from more dice or from limiting the effectiveness of attacking dice, or from a chance to offset the attacking roll. But if a unit rolls one 6, it's a hit, regardless of how weak that unit is, and if its opponent rolls multiple 1s, 2s or 3s (with rare exceptions on the 3), they're all misses, no matter how strong that unit is. So a unit down to two or three dice could still win out in a contest against a unit rolling ten or more dice, just by having great luck versus horrid luck. There's never a "why bother rolling" moment, even when a force appears to be doomed.

Of course, I must admit a fondness for rolling more than 1 die, and not being overly fond of the "you rolled a 1, I rolled a 2, you're dead" effect in any game.

OK, so it comes from DBN. Now I wouldn't really consider that part of the DBX series of games anyway, but that is especially so when we are comparing ancients games. It's not particularly helpful to compare the rules for a Napoleonic game with an ancients game.

But the first point you are making is your explanation above is valid – a single +1 in an opposed d6 combat mechanic is very significant.
However, the rest of your comments above are just wrong. Yes, some combats are unwinable for one side, in that they can't destroy the opposing element, but that isn't the same as saying the outcome is inevitable. In fact I can't ever remember a combat where the outcome is inevitable regardless of the dice roll (and that's from playing DBM most weeks for about 5 years). Yes, you can engineer one if you tried by finding the most extreme case possible – something like a blade general uphill, double overlappping an enemy psiloi. Or the example you give above. But these never happen in practice. In 99.9% of combats the outcome does depend on the dice, so your "why bother rolling" point is, well, pointless.

Granted, I can see that my examples are extreme and probably rare… but they can happen. As for DBN, it's a DBwhatever game. Aside from the cannon, I didn't really notice much difference between the game mechanics for DBN and those for DBA, so I think the comparison is valid.

And no, I've only played DBx games a handful of times. I admit that. And while I enjoyed the company, I still found the game cludgy and fiddly; a tweak of a base here or there would have meant the difference between a decisive advantage and a near guaranteed loss. I actually have multiple times been in the situation where one tiny corner of a base protruded in front of an opposing unit, so the attack was to the front rather than the flank. I find that fiddly and nonsensical, whether it worked in my favor or not.

Of course, WM has its quirks too, and when movement is by ruler, it's easy to get fiddly and ridiculous. What, my forces can't step forward one scale foot to contact your guys?!? That's silly, in any game.

But horses for courses. DBx just isn't my cuppa, as they say. And I do see the advantage of being able to play a DBA game on a 2' x 2' board (or smaller) with a limited army size. For quick battle, that's got a lot of appeal. But when I want the more epic scale fight, WM gets my nod. I just like the way it flows.

Just started playing warmaster ancients, testing it using bases with pics stuck on.

Enjoying it so much I've put an initial order in with Baccus for some 6mm celts (will get bulk of army when the new 6mm celt releases come out in approx. 4wks).

Plays quite quickly and has a very 'sweeping conflict' feel to it with the way units can pursue/advance into further engagements, at least that's the impression I'm getting from early plays.

And another Warmaster ancients battle report. This is a siege set in the Holy land
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I own Warmaster, Warmaster Ancients, BKC, and now Black Powder. I've had many great games from all these systems over the past years.