If I could not play DarkAge then I'd rather play:

[Stunke]

Which one is it then?
And why?

I would really like a discussion about other game systems.
And I mean systems, not company policies! Although price is a factor when deciding on the games you like, I think we all know which company I dont want to hear unconstructive criticism on.

I'm not going to include Blood Bowl, simply becasue its unbeatable... and not a wargame

So far I cant decide on which game I'd rather play, since I am on the verge of being sucked into the Warmachine world too, but I'll get around to some decent argument later.

[gunslinger]

necromunda for me.. me and my spryr upper hive brats love to mess with the lower hive gangs and remind them who really owns the hive..

(on a side note bloodbowl was the game that got me hooked in GW stuff.. combat football.. what could be better)

for me individual consideration of members was key.. having played so many squad based and regiment based games i was tired of moving whole blocks of troops around..

In necromunda, i can arm my gang individually and move them about individually. terrain is more than must hills and trees in the way.. it is a 3 dimensional ramshackle of old architecture and between the pools of toxic goo and 6 story tall infrastructures, there are many places for snipers to hide, gangs to create a crossfire and the like..

the background was the kicker for me.. being an old school shadowrun player and liking the books about cyberpunk, necromunda had the mix of backwards technology and gang warfare that i was interested in.

on the plus side i could get a gang for about 30 dollars and the main box sold for 50 dollars.. and i was on my way..

necromunda is one of the reasons i was interested in DarkAge. the individual squads and the independant models.. it all makes for a different game than.. movement, shooting, combat, ok, now that i killed half your army, it is your turn.. i always liked the alternating movement..

[Stunke]

That was the intro, as I was writing it, and side-surfing, I fell upon a game that seems to be connected to Urban War in some way.

Its called sabotage from all I can see, and features a simultanious turn system. Appearantly the game designers decided that you would order your minies to complete some certain task per turn, and this will be executed for both warring factions at the same time. The battle report in the link seems extremely detailed for a wargame and smells a bit like the author has taken some liberal measures in describing the way the game actually went down, or the rulebook includes an obscene amount of tactical possibilities.
The report reeks of tactical considerations, and atmosphere, and could be a really cool game, but I dont know the first thing about neither Urban War, nor this game, so I might be mistaken, they could be the same game, this on ebeing an extension, but it sure looks interesting.
It even got the Kevin-guy that sculpts for Darkage involved.

http://www.thefiguretrader.co.uk/pages/sabotage.shtml

Well to start the discussion I'll comment on oen of the games from the poll. Their pros and cons, their have and have-nots. (You get the picture.)

Today is Warhammer Fantasy Battles:

Warhammer fantasy is just played on too big a scale for me.
I cannot get myself to paint 100 models for a single army, and most of the armies I have played contained even more. The task is just tedious, and ruins all the time I could have spent playing. I have always been a game geek more than a brushthrall. This is partly due to my mathematical being overwhelming my artistic sides, but more on this later.

Once I got hold of the rulebook, the Arcane Magic expansion, the Chaos cards and so on, I had spent an obscene amount of time and money reading and learning the rules. I was 13 at the time and this was WHFB 4th edition mind you!!!
So for a 13 year old kid plowing through tons of foreign language, deciphering the meaning of all these hard phrases one by one took some time, and from the very first day I was utterly drawn in to all the plusses and minusses that would be added or subtracted anywhere, if only I was shrewd enough to exploit all the gaps that this game left me with.
Little cogwheels of mathmatics started churning in my head, and all day long i'd device evil plans and earthshattering tactics that would flatten all resistance before me :P
Play chaos, add 25% worth of Darkelf allies with crossbows and repeating boltthrowers and you got yourself a shooty chaos army.
Choose undead. CHOOSE the spells you want, give vampire "flight of Nagash", "hand of dust" and kill Emperor dragons on a roll of 3+.
This would go on wihtout end, and every day I came up with new ways of plowing down my opponents, untill I found myself at a fanatic convention where players had heard of me, even though they never played me, simply because my reputation for being an incredible tactical bastard would precede me.

Warhammer has (or had )that really grand feel to it, where unfathomably powerful heroes would smite all resistance from the back of a mighty mythological steed, and dark wizards would raise legions of undead to wage war on their former comrades. Rows upon rows of soldiers stand beside eachother, banded in brotherhood to repel an intruder from their homelands supported by countless comrades. The sky is dark with arrows raining upon your enemy, the earth trembles as you lead a brettonian unit of knight straight to the heart of the enemy galanty clad in the colours of their homeland and my GOD(!!!!!!) it is cumbersome.

Even though the games LOOK really cool at a distance, you just wait and wait for hours as your opponent brings his entire arsenal to bear on you. You roll bucketloads of dice, and it just doesn't get anywhere.
The statistical span of dicerolls is so short that I cannot believe that I never thought about doing it differently. Seriously, my guess is that 90% of warhammers dicerolls are either 3+ or 4+. Boooooooooring!
And the fact that you roll to hit, to wound and to save in order to kill a cowardly rat wearing armour just drains the gasoline from my mind and makes me want to go back to devising evil plans for others to pull off for me. The rules are too vague and are way too easily exploited by retards like myself who cannot turn the carnage-o-meter off, so the designers will have to create a maze of extra rules and additions to the first ruleset, simply because they neglected to make the game playable, instead of collectible.

A fully painted warhammer army sure is a sight to behold, and I will say without a hint of doubt, that no one has as much incredibly cool fluff and atmosphere as the world of warhammer. This goes for fantasy, as well as 40K and Necromunda in my opinion. The atmosphere is just incredible and catchy, but the game itself does not stand up to this feel, and this is where I choke. I still got my old skaven books lying around, 'cause the stories are just utterly creepy, but thats all i do with them... read them once a year.

So to sum up.

Warhammer fantasy battles biggest
Pros: Incredible atmosphere! The visuals and background stories are just superb.

Cons: The pace of the game makes me afraid of playing anyone above fifty as they might die before I'm done with my next turn. It's just not playable enough.

Thank you, and goodnight!

[Stunke]

necromunda for me.. me and my spryr upper hive brats love to mess with the lower hive gangs and remind them who really owns the hive..

Heh, replace spyrer with orlock, and you stole my post.

But why is this game so great for you?

I can ramble on and on, but I have already done so for WHFB, and my head (and fingers) might fall off if I get into another spree. I just wanted to know what makes eveyone else outthere tick. I might even get my wargaming horizon expanded a bit, which is always nice.

[m0nk3yb0y]

I'd rather play with myself

I play Warmachine and Urban War, and many other games o.O Won't touch GW games, though I would like to try out Bloodbowl and Battlefleet Gothic.

[Stunke]

Usually I wil quote pr0fane and say: Gimme the pictures. For this particular thread, I'm aiming for WHY?
Why is urban war so cool?
I don't know the first tihng about it.
The game "sabotage" I mentioned in the intro post, seems somehow connected to urban war, and I just found out its cheap as he** to get strated with, so I'm totally itching to know more.

MORE I TELL YOU!

How does warmachine and Urban War compare?
What do they have in common, what are the pros and cons?

[m0nk3yb0y]

I don't think Sabatoge is related to Urban War. The Figure Trader is just in charge of producing terrain and extras (kind of like Forge World is to GW I think).

I haven't played much of Urban War, but I try to keep up on it. Being that it's a UK only game it makes it a bit expensive to get here in the states. It's skirmish level, fairly close to that of Dark Age. Average minis per side is somewhere around 7-10 I think. It's more of a traditional styled sci-fi game than Dark Age is. ie. the marine themed faction, the asian themed faction, cyborg themed faction, etc. (though the gladiators are a nice unexpected touch) Turns are a little odd from what I remember. You have 3 different orders you can give each model (they operate on a model by model basis, no units I believe). Depending on which order you give the model it limits what they can do. The odd thing is you give these orders at the beginning of your turn, hidden from your oppenent then reveal them when it gets time to activate that particular order type. Then I think models of that order type are activated based on initiative.

As for Warmachine, well if you haven't played it I suggest you do. I'm guessing it will take over Warhammer & Warhammer 40k as the most popular game before too long, if it hasn't already.

[Stunke]

Yup I'm going to a warmachine game on sunday, but warmachine seems on the expensive side, just to get started, and Urban War is dead cheap compared to it!

The activation rule in sabotage works in the same way it seems, and there has been talk of introducing an experience system to Urban war too, and any kind of game where the models grow as you play are infinitely rewarding to play. The activation rule, just seems to be a really nice touch, a strategic element and something I have been craving for ages.(read the long rant on WHFB)
Darkage realy falls right into my lap, when it comes to my wargaming needs, but I can feel some of my old nerdyness coming back to me at the moment, and I just need to find out what the wargaming market looks like at the moment.
I cannot forgive myself for living in such ignorance for so long, believing that GW where the only ones out there. Heck I'm even meeting people who have been playing for years who still dont know about confrontation, warmachine or Urban war, the grip GW's got on the danish market is astonishing. So I just want to make sure that I have found some systems where i can find players, where I can afford the models, and a game that lets me do some strategy instead of hardcore numbercrunching.

Warmachine seems to be a real powerplayers treat, but I am actually trying to steer clear of that... for the moment that is. The possibilities of combining everything just seems to have no end in that game, and I am very excited about the demo I'm attending. I don't really know what to expect, since I appreciate the openmindedness Privateer Press is having about the game, unlike others, but this is a matter of company politics, not game systems.

[Vaxillus]

I put myself down for Confrontation, because before I discovered Dark Age (I should probably say 'before I picked it up', because I discovered it when it first came out) I pretty much only played Confrontation. I still play it too. I'll try a summary:

Pros: First of all, easily the best miniatures in the business. Maybe not very durable, but the sheer quality is godlike. It does also have a few pieces of trash, but on the median, the line is miles above anything else, even our beloved Dark Age. It also has an extremely developed style, with flowing robes, swirls, and exagerated figures.

As for the game itself, it utilizes a card system to its fullest. The system allows for some very tactical dealings, since you have to comit your units to an order of actions. It also does an excellent job of solving the 'minmaxing' issue in an alternating activation system.

It also does an extremely good job of utilizing D6s but allowing for a lot of variety. The numerous abilities also provide for a lot of variation in the way you can fight combat. The number of abilities also flesh out the races very well. You won't find any two warriors who are alike in different factions unless they are supposed to resemble each other.

Cons: Modelling issues. As a contrast to the high detail level, the miniatures are flimsy and the bases are crap. They also require that you spend a long time painting them due to the detail and the way paint seems to abhor adhering to any of the little holes and indetations.

The shear complexity of the rules is also quite daunting. While I feel I can play DA right off the bat after picking up the book and giving it a good read through, I still do not fully comprehend Confrontation. The fact that it has a few translation issues doesn't help either (HIRE A NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER FOR A FUCKING EDITOR ALREADY!). My inexperience also means that I get run into the dirt by anyone with even remotely more experience than me.

With the new edition, a few problems have also arisen. My favorite faction, the Dwarves of Mid-nor really took it hard, and are difficult to use unless you 'cheese' them out. It's being remedied, but not as quickly as I would like. The brutal wounding system is also a pain for expensive figurines, since they can get pummeled very easily by a few nasty die rolls. It's actually improved a bit with the new rolls, but bad luck (like mine) can really hurt.

The number of factions is also an issue. Since Rackham (the company that publishes Conf) releases the rules along side the miniatures, one faction can get a very powerful (but expensive) new miniature while other factions are still waiting for theirs. It's also hard to remedy an imballance or typo on a card. The release schedule also makes fans of a faction that hasn't gotten anything in a while quite whiny on the message boards (like me ).

Basically, it's a very tactical and deep game with a very slow learning curve and a few issues with releases and ballance. The miniatures themselves have good points and bad, but I'd say the good far outways the bad.

[Stunke]

Its kind of odd that you mention it, 'cause I feel that characters get maimed in DA too, it's actually one of the things I appreciate about it.
But this can of course be a lot worse in confrontation, you are the one to know the best. Murtros is an exception. He'll crawl out of a collapsed building and start whooping some a** right away, unless someone torches him first!