Anywho, maybe someday soon, RB will do a new line of ED mini’s.

(also lol & /dap at Wolvie ;-})

Thanks for the compliment on the minis. I’m actually way behind on taking pictures of miniatures. Still discouraged of my results as of late, but I need to get back into it. I’ve been tossing around the idea of what to do with my gallery as well as trying to get time to photograph everything I’ve done lately and I keep putting it off. I’ll try and make a concerted effort to get to it in the near future.

It’s very very clearly a port to the PC–the menu controls are counter intuitive for a PC and the fact that you have to use Page Up / Page Down to scroll through some of them instead of the mouse wheel is bad design.

There’s also some issues that you wouldn’t even know about without digging into config files. The font size for the item cards that display stats is so large by default that you can only see 4 properties, even if the item has more. I tweaked the font size so that 5 were visible, but found out the game was hard coded to only display 5 properties, even if the item SHOULD have more. That was kind of annoying.

The built in VOIP chat was poorly implemented as well. It was always on and had no mute or volume controls, so my buddy and I just disabled it through config files and used Ventrilo.

I had an unbelievably hard time playing the game with my friend. At first, I was able to host a game that anyone could join–except my friend. Then, without any explainable reason, I was unable to host games for anyone else either. I also couldn’t connect to anyone’s games, so I figured it had to be some setting on my end. I spent a few days forwarding ports (which is the norm for a lot of games and I’m able to set up pretty quickly), messing with modem settings, and messing with VPNs before we were able to find any combination that worked. I finally had to use GameRanger (which I read as GamerAnger the first time and felt it was a pretty appropriate name to the solution of my multiplayer troubles) to just be able to connect to my buddy’s game.

The game itself is fun, though. If these bugs and annoyances were fixed, I’d definitely be more inclined to play the game more. As is, especially after this SecuROM nonsense, I’m going to uninstall it and just stick with other PC games.

On an unrelated note, I hope you plan on painting/photographing more WM/H miniatures in the near future. I admire your work and enjoy seeing them.

And by that I mean your kids can sell them on whatever the future’s equivalent of ebay is. ;-}

@ Dankelzahn: I think ‘accurate’ and ‘catchy’ are probably mutually exclusive. To describe the difference in mechanics with the depth and clarity that it deserves, you’ve left short, punchy taglines far behind. My own instinct is to say that Warmachine is about managing a finite, top-down, safe resource and Hordes is about managing a flexible, mobile, dangerous resource, but that’s not the sort of thing you’d put in the marketing copy unless you were actually selling through Developers’ Weekly or something.

My biggest problem with the comparison is that there is no good accurate catchy comparison. The closest I can come up with is Hordes being organic and Warmachine being more mechanical or regimented, but truth be told those aren’t much better.

I think people forget Warmachine has far more risks than Hordes. You can always risk a frenzy, but you can’t always get an extra focus when you just beat that heavy to 1 point from 1 death. Same goes for transfering, it’s much risker to spend focus than it is fury, where a weapon master hitting you with four 6s isn’t half as bad as doing the same to a ‘caster because you can always throw it off to a beast, where as a Warcaster must pre-judge the situation and camp focus to survive it, risking insane rolls 1 hitting them (and no, a beast exploding is a joke compared to you losing the game by the same dice roll).

And so long as the rest of the party remembers to loot his corpse. >;}

As for that second Matrix, yes and no. Mostly due to the changes in the rules regarding Matrices for multiple discipline mage types.

If you are say, a Wizard/Elementalist, that factor would actually be a disadvantage or an issue to work around. As a wizard you could possibly have say, the 2 first circle spell matrices (by availability) and up to 2 more for second and third circle. The maximum Spell Matrix talents (basic types, not including Enhanced or Armored, etc.) a mage discipline can have is five. So that means, you’d get the one from your second discipline and everything else you choose would have to be talents that might for all intents and purposes be those “never used” talents.

Now there are those that would like this setup, but there are those that would probably like to allow themselves room to choose talents from both sides that they would like to be able to use. By going your route, you would essentially make only 1 choice of spell matrix available to the players and that would be at least in my view, not such a good thing in comparison to other disciplines. At least that’s how I see it.

Honestly I think thread weaving (for non-magicians) could be the same, and magicians could be compensated with the second matrix free at first circle.