SpectralTime

It was more a case of "I'm not as good at Colette" than anything else. And he didn't really "steer me away from other models." It's just... well, I've heard him rant for hours upon hours about how much he hates Perdita, and I just didn't feel like antagonizing him, ya know? The same reason I never bought Epic Haley in Warmachine.

Well... two things. First: he only played Pandora, he told me, because he didn't have any other models with him and he'd forgotten his cards, and before he borrowed some from the shop he was going to try to do it by heart. If he hadn't, he meant to use Colette instead. Second: I feel their complaints about Perdita boil down to her incredible statline more than anything else. Both are fond of complaining that her lowest stat is a six, which would be great on anyone else. And, well, neither one is shy about admitting that their hatred of her is biased. Is Hoffman really that hard to learn? I had thought he was just one of the tougher Guild masters, but that the Guild was easier than the other factions to get into... Should Hoffman only start out with a cache's worth of soulstones?

Heh. I got that impression too. In fact, without ever having played eHaley of Warmachine on either end of the table, I know enough to compare her to... her. My main beef with it involves having to beat your opponent's (opposed) flip by a considerable margin just to get a flip at all, then beat it by a good margin in order to get more than a negative twist. In Warmahordes, you hit, and that's the end of it, more on to damage. Furthermore, in Warmahordes, the to-hit and to-wound defenses are static, meaning that you know who to try to hit with what, whereas, here, luck has two chances to screw you. Finally... I dislike the fact that negative twists can't be cheated. I appreciate WHY, but still feel that it's adding insult to injury by making the positive rewards of a positive twist less important than the negative results of a negative twist. Or, to put it another (probably unfair) way, in Warmahordes, you can boost when you're likely to fail, but it's a base gameplay mechanic in Malifaux that you aren't allowed cheat when you most want or need to. ... ...>_> ...A-anyway. I don't think it's anything so formal as all that. I'll ask, though I'm not sure what to borrow if I AM under for a 35. Thanks for the help.

...But, well, here I am. I've really been more of a Warmachine player for a while now, but, hey, one of my friends is a gigantic Malifaux fan and was willing to pick up my game after a while, so when my local game shop started a league and I got some extra spending money, I bit the bullet and decided to give this game a try. Looking over the factions, I determined that, while I liked some individual masters in other factions, the Guild as a whole was my favorite. For one thing, I love cowboys and shooting people, and for another, they seem to be, with my limited knowledge of the fluff, the closest thing to "good guys" in this grimy, violent world by virtue of being the faction whose ground-level troops are trying to stop nasty things from eating, soul-sucking, thrill-killing, or reanimating civilians for their own purposes, whatever the general dickery of Lucius and the Governor-General. However, when I talked to some of the guys at the shop, they derided my first pick, Lady Justice, as too straightforward and easy to counter, and my second, Perdita Ortega, as brokenly powerful. Both are hardcore Neverborn players, so take that for what you will. In the end, I went with Hoffman. As far as I could make out, you see, the other three Guild Masters require a specific opponent to thrive in a scrap, but Hoffman simply prefers certain types of mission, and I'druther have a generalist before buying more into the game. So, the other night, I played for the second time ever. My Mission Thingummy was to get to an objective, my friend's was to kill Hoffman. Secondary schemes were for me to have more non-totem minions alive at the end than he, and whatever Hoffman's Hoff-specific quest is, while HE was trying to kill Hoffman with Self-Loathing from Pandora. My secondary faction objective, in the league, for 5 victory points, was to kill no living models. The match was 20 ss, I had Constructs of Order and the Mechanical Attendant, whilst he had Pandora, Candy, a Doppelganger, and some sort of spirit. It think it's the one that CAN be her totem, but doesn't have to. Anyway, his first move was to, upon winning initiative, use a spell from the spirit to shuffle Pandora forward a little, then force his entire crew to go last. With some trepidation, I threw my crew forward at a dead run, reaching the objective and giving Hoffman Immune to Influence before trying and failing to give the Guardian a second turn to bunker up and protect him from stray mind-lasers. His army activated, and Pandora got pushed a good foot up the board before activating, sending the Iron Kitty running with a Crow Thingummy from a mind-laser (thankfully, Dampening protected my crew from the fallout) before forcing Hoffman to stab himself with his own armor-ignoring torch repeatedly leaving him half-dead, then breaking him and forcing him to run to the table edge with the kitty. It was around here that the second round started. I drew a great hand, full of Jacks and Kings and the Red Joker, but I had a negative twist on every daggome flip I made, so they did me little good. Pandora wrecked the Hunter, then killed Hoffman. I burned every soulstone I had keeping him alive, and it wasn't enough. Afterward, the match was mostly over. Pandora finished off everything holding the objective, though the Watcher gave her a little trouble as it flitted about and tried to hide behind walls, and the Guardian, as I determined to do some damage and get more of the combat system down, waded into her brick of models, managing to wound Pandora and Candy before being poisoned and mind-damaged to death. It was over by turn five, though his ego compelled him to keep playing solitare, healing Pandora to full and moving her into my deployment zone just to add insult to injury. Apparently, he likes to role-play while he wargames, and when playing Pandora he turns into a jerk... though he reined it in admirably before that. Comments? I don't actually like the combat system in this game. It's too hard to hurt things, especially when you need to beat your opponent by a wide margin just to cheat on damage. Killing only really seems possible if you're willing to grind at people like Pandora's crew did. But, hey. I had fun, sort of, and I knew this game wouldn't be as easy to pick up as Warmachine. Picked up a Peacekeeper and Ryle at the game shop today after an unexpected financial windfall, and I'll be coming back on Wednesday for another go. I was going to run everybody but the Hunter in one 30 ss game. Is that a good idea? Are 30-point matches weird and not done? Was I just the victim of a bad match-up? I looked over the list of Hoffman stuff on the Guild thingummy, but is there anything else? All comments are welcome. Also, on a side note, whoever decided that the Guardian's legs were just fine needs to be shot in the gut, drawn, quartered, reanimated, shot again in the appropriate reproductive organ (depending on gender), then forced to glue it together for all time. So, I modeled it sitting on the ground, legs in front of it, leaning on its shield, and said that Hoffman's peerless mechanical prowess allows it to crab-scuttle at the speed most of its counterparts can walk.

Those three points were me boiling down what I was told, not them actually putting out those points. Again, I don't know enough about the game to clarify too very well, but the description my friends gave me was this: You always know what Lady Justice is going to do: charge you. So, to counter that, make sure she can't draw line of sight to anyone by putting anyone she could hurt behind at least 3'' of cover. Furthermore, she is best against certain kinds of enemy, namely, those who stockpile counters to make things, and her effectiveness rapidly decreases against others. Now, both of them favor Neverborn and the trickier Arcanists and Ressurectionists, so I can't say with any certainty whether that colors their thinking, but that's the description I was given. I understand the "board control" bit, though I'm not sure I'm smart enough to pull it off. Finally, with regard to her crew, I was kinda hoping to stick with a boxed set for a while.

So, I'm thinking about starting Malifaux. I've played a decent amount of Warmahordes and Warhammer, as Cygnar in the first and the Tau in the second. For those who play neither, both are heavily range dependent factions. Both are also the closest to "good guys" in the morally ambiguous world of tabletop wargaming, and while I don't know much about Malifaux's fluff, I've read enough to know that the Guild are a decent, if not nice, bunch of people with some genuinely moral folks working for them and some truly evil people in charge. For starting out Malifaux, I decided I'd try something different, and pick up a melee monster. I hit on Lady Justice, both because, near as I can make out, she's a hero of justice trying to do the right thing in a rotten world, and also because she's a blind samurai cowboy and that's awesome. However, I had a talk with some of my friends at the friendly neighborhood game shop tonight who actually play the game. Neither is terribly fond of the Guild (I know one has Hoffmann and Criid, two of the other Masters I was thinking about, but he prefers Neverborn) so neither has actually played as her, however, both are experienced players whose word I trust. The gist of their arguments is that, while potent under the right circumstances, she suffers from several major flaws: a) She's extremely straightforward, and is thus ridiculously easy to counter for anyone who has even the slightest inkling what they're doing. She's easily beaten by others when getting the short end of the stick in great game of Rock, Paper, Scissors that is Malifaux, even more so than is usual. c) She's a one-trick pony, without any ways to work around her flaws, via either models or clever play. Now, I don't know the game at all, and I only bought the cheap (comparatively, anyway) $15 dollar rules manual tonight, so I'd like to ask the board: to what degree are they right?