Reasons for the Section Sizes.

[Morgs]

Is there any reason why the infantry sections are only 9 models? It's really bothering me so I have to know.

[Da Git]

It's divisible by 3?  It's 3 squared so looks nice aesthetically?  I'm just spit-balling here... Anyone with any military experience?

[JDAntoine]

Because a Fireteam usually is composed of 3-4 members and a Squad 9-12. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireteam

Hope that cleared things up

[Dstinct]

Because the Models are essential glorified wound counters. When it boils down to it, TOC isn't that big of an army game. Each fireteam is a model, and each model is a wound counter. If you have 5 models in a fireteam, that would be like having a 5 wound model which would be a hero in most other games.

[-Loki-]

There are actually also units that are 2 5 model Fireteam bases (Gibbering Hordes Barbed Crawlers come to mind).

Probably just came down to simplicity, which seems to be the aim of the game. It's very streamlined. To speed up model movement, they decided on Fireteam bases to group models. To do this in a simple way, you need to stick to a uniform number of models per Fireteam base. So we've got 2 types of Squads, 3 Fireteams of 3 and 2 Fireteams of 5. To get exactly 10 models, you can only go with Fireteams of 2 (which defeats the purpose) or 5 (which we have for some units).

From reading the available cards, the squads with 2 Fireteams of 5 tend to be cheaper horde units, as more models per Fireteam makes a Fireteam harder to wipe out and more likely to reinforce, while 3 Fireteams of 3 are the rest of the squads.

[AverageBoss]

Well, there are also a hand full of units that are 2 fireteams of 3.

[Da Git]

13 hours ago, Dstinct said:

Because the Models are essential glorified wound counters. When it boils down to it, TOC isn't that big of an army game. Each fireteam is a model, and each model is a wound counter. If you have 5 models in a fireteam, that would be like having a 5 wound model which would be a hero in most other games.

I'm not really sure why people are making such a big deal out of this.  The old rank & file Warhammer Fantasy was basically the same in that the units were giant blocks with only about 5 models able to attack (up to 8th Ed, then it became more), with all of the models behind basically "wound counters" for the unit and that had a huge following.  This, to me, is definitely a army game in that it's played on a huge board with 50 odd models across 15-20+ odd bases.  This is much more than Malifaux (unless you go rat spam or summon spam).  More than that, having 50 odd models on the table just feels army, same as a six unit, 120model Warhammer Fantasy game felt like an army.

The next is a little off-topic, but follows the previous line of though...

This looks super streamlined as apposed to any GW game or Malifaux (the only other miniature games I've played) with much tighter rules (than GW).  The games should be faster to play with what looks like resource management and skill being the main cause of victory over rules lawyering and mass special rules.  Although the Hand size is smaller than Malifaux (with what looks like fewer ways to manipulate it, I could be very wrong on this though!) it looks a little more luck based than Malifaux, but the fact that it's cards and there even is a control hand, makes it much less luck dependent than any dice based game.

Please note, I'm not part of the playtest, but this is just my impressions from what we've seen so far.  If Malifaux is anything to go by, this should be a cracker of a game!

[Dstinct]

I dont think it is a big deal. I just think advertising it as something that it isn't sets it up for failure when pitching it to someone. It is closer to AoS than KoW in terms of unit composition on the battlefield. The difference is that 9 models in a squad mean 9 attacks for AoS. Even in WHFB, you often got bonuses for multiple rows in your units if you were carrying certain weapons. For the KE faction, It seems kinda weird to have 3 guys with guns in a fireteam and only 1 manage to fire. You'd figure trained soldiers would understand how to coordinate attacks. Why should a fireteam with 3 models get the same number of attacks as one with 5 or 8? Yes with enough damage you can take out more than one model, but that just further pushes the models into the wound counter space. If that is how damage is to be conveyed, then units with ranged weapon attacks that have higher numbers in the fireteams should have greater strength to their attacks to represent a greater amount of firepower.

I think the game looks great. I dont think it will catch on here as nobody plays anything but 40k, but I do plan to pick up some characters and maybe a titan to paint when it's released.

[-Loki-]

They never sold it as being like Kings of War or mass battle. They sold it as a company sized battle game (which is how it's described on the kickstarter page), which it is. How any large scale battle game chooses to represent units is going to be different. And to be fair, in Kings of War models are essentially wound counters and morale tracking as well, and you consider it to be mass battle.

On the note of Games Workshops games, I find that in their mass battle games each model being able to perform independently is far too cumbersome. When you've got upwards ot 100 models on a table for some armies, moving each individually, rolling their to hit, to wounds and saves for each of them (even though you can mostly pool these) is just too cumbersome in a game of its size. They've got skirmish level details (individual model interactions), battalion level details (squadrons of tanks) and mass battle level details (supersonic aircraft, Titans) wrapped up in a single ruleset. It's just an absolute mess, and depending on how much of that someone brings to the table, games can last half a day.

What they seem to have done with The Other Side is take that same concept - we've got infantry, cavalry, huge monsters and mechs, mixed infantry and mech groups, morale to track, different unit states to track, off board support, etc - and streamlined the game to a point where it appears to take about as long to play as a game of Malifaux. In that, you're going to lose some of the gritty details, like individual model interactions, for the sake of speeding up the gameplay.

[LunarSol]

It's actually a rather elegant solution to the old problem larger model count games have with creating quality attacks that aren't completely ineffective against the quantity of models mixed with the inherent advantage a large number of attacks with any chance of success has over a small number of attacks with any chance of failure.  It's a system that keeps the size of units to around 10, but reduces the hero vs unit disparity to 3 to 1 to help reign in some of the big advantages of numbers.  In that regard its got some clever ideas and I'm curious to see how the whole thing plays out upon release.

[JDAntoine]

While I can't speak too much about it the units do really feel like units and the Other Side itself does feel much more like an army game as a skirmish game like Malifaux is. The models on the bases do much more as just being 'wound tokens' and the impact of having several units removed is and feels larger as having a Minion removed from Malifaux. The differences come in the tactical variance the units have compared to Malifaux. 

However there is more to it as tactical difference and models on bases, the general flow of the game shows how an army operates, where Malifaux most certainly operates on individuals. Depending per Scheme and Set up I feel Malifaux rewards the spread of models much more and in fact is a larger part of winning the game.
The Other Side in that aspect is indeed comparable to what you see in other larger army games, sometimes things get in the way and sometimes you can deploy in such a manner that your opponent cannot reach your key models, which feels both very fun and 'army like' for a lack of better words.

I love both systems so far but one of the things that makes Malifaux is it's use of terrain and how it is the only significant way to ensure your models are 'protected' to the point where we have several 'top tier Masters' creating their own terrain (50mm wall/pillar tokens) and the prime reason as to why this is so good is because it's significantly more difficult to protect key models that are on 50mm to 30mm bases and only number 8 to 12 models on a regular competative level on a 3'x3' board.

So in short the dimensions used for The Other Side make a much larger impact as the some currently seem to suggest. Upscaling from 30-50mm to 80-120mm is a massive difference even if the table goes from 3'x3' to 4'x6'. The 'flow' of battle between army and skirmish games is just very hard to compair and as a result units most certainly do not feel like glorified or simple upscaled single models. As said I can't go deeper into the rules as why this is not the case but the dimensions themselves are allready one of the larger reasons.  

[Da Git]

As someone who once dappled with 'Nids in 40k, I appreciate not having to push around 100+ individual figures!

[Inefficiency_Expert]

Nids? Amateur. Come back when you've played Skaven. 100 models was just my slave allowance.

And with the remaining 1800 points of my 2000 point army....   

[koronuslight]

5 minutes ago, Inefficiency_Expert said:

Nids? Amateur. Come back when you've played Skaven. 100 models was just my slave allowance.

And with the remaining 1800 points of my 2000 point army....   

Until you've seen the 1,001 Gnoblar Army in person, you haven't seen anything...

Most unnecessary, most hilarious force ever assembled. 

[-Loki-]

To be fair he said pushing around 100 individual models. WHFB you had nice, convenient movement trays.

[Parker Barrows]

I thought I it was a picture of brownies at first.

Now I'm hungry.

[JDAntoine]

Your general The Other Side army will be much more fun to collect and paint, that's for certain :D. I will however attempt to create a nice ammount of scenic bases, making them small diorama's and likewise the most awesome part of this game remains on how Reinforcements allow you to really enjoy your own models for a longer ammount of time as usually seen in other army games. 

[retnab]

Oh yeah, the Fireteam plug bases should make for some awesome scenic bases.  I'm planning on really stepping up my game on basing when I get the models!

[Beetle941]

The Malifaux/TOS universe seems to take place arround WW1 which, to me, makes the fireteam mechanic make more sense. On a small scale thats how units were organized. You didnt have a horde of people running around without any organization

 

[DocSchlock]

Reinforcement, Glory, and Fireteams - Wyrd is doing some amazing work on army-scale game design, solving the problems of un-fun attrition, poor morale systems, and long play times, respectively.

Making Allegiances really different on a high-level with the Allegiance cards is also a great twist on the standard "Army-wide" rules sections from other games (and since they are cards, there's always the possibility you can swap Allegiance cards inside the same Allegiance, like taking a sub-Allegiance or special command Company without changing your overall Allegiance).

[LunarSol]

On 1/18/2017 at 1:28 PM, koronuslight said:

Until you've seen the 1,001 Gnoblar Army in person, you haven't seen anything...

Most unnecessary, most hilarious force ever assembled. 

I legitimately thought this was a tray of decorated brownie bites.  

[doombladez]

I think the idea of having dozens of models per squad in an army game is frankly outdated for most games. Warhammer makes it work through sheer momentum mostly, and as was mentioned Fantasy has movement trays so it's less of an issue. The idea of having so many models probably originates from when wargaming was an historical hobby, where so many models was a major feature. When all of those models have to be deployed and moved all the time it's far less entertaining. 

[solkan]

On January 23, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Beetle941 said:

The Malifaux/TOS universe seems to take place arround WW1 which, to me, makes the fireteam mechanic make more sense. On a small scale thats how units were organized. You didnt have a horde of people running around without any organization

 

It's around 1908.  I'm required by law to profess "Good heavens, how could you? " but you can blame the confusion on the sliding scale of progress that steampunk creates.