Sell me on Warmachine

I have a LOT of Khador as well but I wanted to put in a word for my current favorite faction, the Mercs. No battleboxes available but they do have battlebox equivalents. An underdog faction to be sure but a lot of fun combos available.

Just be prepared that if your friends have been playing a long time you will take a beating in unexpected ways for quite a long time

I dabbled in the Privateer Press games with Cryx (warmachine) and Circle Oboros (Hordes), but I had one big issue with them at the time.

In Warhammer, there are rules for creating your own heroes and generals. You can select their skills, purchase their equipment, etc. As a hobbyist, this made the modeling/painting portion fun as I was creating a faction for a character of my own creation in the Warhammer universe. It allows for a bit of role-playing and creativity.

In Warmachine, all of the characters are named, so there's no customization of individuals at all. Painting units under this restriction felt like a chore. If the characters are all pre-built and tied so strongly to the fluff, I'd prefer the game to just be pre-painted, since the players don't have much say regardless. Cryx, is Cryx, is Cryx. No creating some rogue khador necromancer who lives on the boarder of Khador and has cryx units that are made up of undead khador models. You play only with the characters in the fluff.

So, in that regard, I didn't care for the game at all. It's no different than simply painting up a napoleonics army where you aren't going to go wild on the colors or theme there either. In both cases the players are too tied to the histories and background of the games.

To be fair, this could have changed in MKII (I got out prior to that). I also saw the rise of the units and how the game went from a few models to spiraling into Warhammer levels of models. Again, this could all be different now.

Warmachine has some really nice game features, like the focus system, and warcaster feats. Plus the ability to assassinate the enemy caster makes it tense down to the end, whereas I find that 40K often devolves into an attrition grind-fest.

But before investing in the starter set, I would strongly suggest trying a game with your friends' models. Or stores often have models you can use. That should give you an excellent idea of whether you'll like it or not before investing money and time.

The main thing about Warmachine over Warhammer is that there are a lot more in game decisions to be made. Too often with Warhammer you feel like everything is decided by army selection and deployment and then you just spend 2 hours after that point finding out the result.

@Jeff White: That's the main reason I'm buying 4 boxes of 40k plastic crack recently. I really enjoy putting together plastic kits and make it mine!

It's been long for me that if it's miniatures... then it's mostly collecting and the creative aspect. If I want a game I'd rather have board games or turn on my laptop.

Sevej wrote: I even dislike it more than Warhammer.

The thing is, I recently drift more toward games with great core gameplay.

Warmachine core gameplay is so-so. What makes it "shine" is the special rules... dozens of special rules & abilities, and the combo you can create from different special rules within a model or between models. This makes the game quite restricting when creating list, as unit A works best with unit C, unit B can support D, blah blah.

Strip the "special rules" and all you've got is basic miniatures game with hit boxes.

I'm guessing that this is what I played. It also appears that no matter what I say, Josh will tell me I'm wrong, despite the fact that I was there, and I was bored, and thus everything I said was fully accurate.

Like I said, my experience is very limited with this, but from what I played, I'd far rather play Infinity, or any of my niche games like Wreck Age or Strange Aeons.

I do have to say, though, some of their metal models are BAD_ASS. The Cryx monstery ones are the ones my buddy had, now that I'm looking them up. I played the Convergence roboty-dudes. Those Convergence Attunement Servitors are fucking brilliant looking - I wanted to kitbash them and make Fallout-style Eyebots.