Post by killercroc on Jul 25, 2020 14:57:21 GMT
After getting my hands on the rulebook I read through it but was really only interested in one section, Crusades. And after reading it... I don't know if it's just me or GW was over hyping it but it feels so basic. It has the feeling of something really promising but reading into it more it all seems surface level and not much deeper. Now before I continue I want to say I know this is a Narrative game and is suppose to be played for fun and for the story, and you can add/remove any rules we want so I'll probably end up tweaking some things to make it more interesting. However even though it's jsut for fun that isn't a reason to have very little thought put into the rules so here are a few things I've noticed.
First off this I could have just missed in reading it due to being exhausted, but I thought crusading armies were suppose to get army wide rules? Now idk if this is just something I read online and never an official point but I thought as your army grew you got army wide crusade buffs as the campaign grew, I'm just not seeing those.
Requisition:
So the requisition points, these are sort of the magical point crusade gimmick to make the game more interesting. You start with 5 and gain 1 after every game but can never have more than 5, so cool-cool limited resource you have to use carefully. However... the more I read what you can spend them on the less of an impact they seem to have in the grand scheme of things.
~ Increase supply limit, So the first thing you can use Requisition for is to increase your supply limit, which is just a fancy way of saying you can make your army bigger. Issue I'm seeing with this is the size of the mission played vs the size of your crusade force are not the same so your crusade army starts at 50 PL and goes up 5 with each upgrade but the missions you play on are in PL orders of 25, so 25, 50, 75, etc. So really increasing your supply limit doesn't do much if your opponent doesn't increase theirs because why would they agree to play a higher point mission if their force isn't larger? You can bump up your crusade force twice and have 60 PL worth of units in your army as a whole but if you're only playing a Combat Partol mission you're only taking 25 PL worth of units. You can increase your army size but not what you can take on a mission so at most it'll just give you a bigger roster to play with. The players could easily just agree to have a large crusade force to start or just say after every 3 games increase the size by 10, something like that. You can add/remove units whenever you want from your force too so if you don't like a unit there is nothing stopping you from changing out. The only time you wouldn't want to is for a unit that's gained a bit of exp and battle honors.
~Fresh Recruits, spend 1 RP to increase the number of models in a unit, can't do it to any unit with more than 1 Battle honor and if the unit has at least 1 battle honor you up it's crusader level. The reason this one seems so off is... you can add or remove units at any time for free. Why would you spend a Requisition to add more models to a unit if you can basically only do it with fresh units if you can just say drop the 5 man marine squad from your army and add a 10 man marine squad instead? This would be more useful if you could do it to veteran troops so if you have a squad that wasn't full strength when the crusade started but it had gained some upgrades so now you'd wanna bump them up to a full strength unit but you can't.
~ Rearm & resupply, spend 1 RP to change your wargear as long as it doesn't change your PL. Ok kinda basic but I can get the idea that maybe you change your mind and want some anti-tank firepower over the anti-infantry you took, especially as the game goes on and the other players add more untis to their army you're not equipped to fight. Basic but fair.
~ Repair and Recuperate, spend 1 RP to remove a battle scar (negative attribute to a unit) cool it's a point to heal, alright again basic but fair.
~ Psychic meditations, spend 1 RP to change a psykers powers. Wait... you cannot just change powers at any time they're fixed and you have to spend limited resources just to pick a different power? Kind of lame imo, changing wargear makes sense as a narrative because in the middle of a campaign getting new weapons ain't easy, but the brain boy cannot switch his powers after battles? If you can spend RP to get powers it's safe to assume the psyker "Knows" all the powers they just have to concentrate on which ones they will be using so this sounds more like a resource drain just to exist.
~ Specialist reinforcements, 1 RP to basically... when you add a unit to your crusade force you can give it Stratagem upgrades that gives it stat upgrades or abilities now and they always count as having them. This one I actually really like, it lets you add some real veterans or special units to your force and they don't drain your CP every single battle. So +1 for this one
~ Warlord trait/Relic. Combining this one, 1 RP both to add a warlord trait to a character and a relic to him, both of these are permanent. To me these seem kind of like "Hey we added a thing but not really!" Your Warlord doesn't start with a WL trait but you can give him one for 1 RP... sounds like just a way to drain RP at the start of the crusade and you can just agree with your opponent you both get a Warlord trait for free. This exists just to exist and make it look like there are more uses for RP than there actually are. As for the Relics, I actually really dig the Crusader relics they're pretty awesome bits and you can have a lot of fun with them, buff your character with a piece of special gear is totally what I wanna see in a campaign.
Battle Honors:
This is the fancy shiny coat of paint on a unit going "Hey these guys are veterans and are super cool!" I like the idea of BH and they are kinda easier to get that the CA 2018 campaign battle honors but my biggest issue with them is... there are so few. Each unit type: Character, Monster, Vehicle & Other each have a D6 chart on Honors meaning there are only 6 any one unit can have so you're going to see a lot of repetition in honors across your own units and your opponents. You can roll the trait or pick it which is pretty standard because rolling an upgrade for a unit that doesn't help the unit always sucks. Hey your shooty character just got +1 attack! Woo. So looking at these I see a lot are copy and paste. Vehicles and Monsters both share 3 and then have 3 unique ones that are similar to traits available to other units. And Characters and the other units share half of them as well.
Over-all, this is what I think kinda drags crusades down because the point is getting grizzled veteran troopers with new abilities gained from fighting the opponent for a long time, advanced tactics and personal growth on the battlefield a real reason to grow your force and make an epic crusade! Then you realize there are only 6 available to each type of unit and half of those are just copy-paste between the units and some are even going to be pointless cause your army has abilities or character auras that already do what the Battle Honor gives you. Sad...
Weapon Enhancements & Psychic fortitudes:
This is a section I actually really like and have no real issues with. Instead of a Battle Honor a Character, Vehicle/Monster or squad leader can take an enhancement to a ranged or melee weapon or boost any psychic powers they may have. This is particularly great for those armies that don't have a whole lot of options for wargear for some units and you can buff something they have. Taking A Broodlord as your Character and you can give him a weapon enhancement to make his rending claws even rendier, perfect since he has no wargear. If there was one complaint I'd have at this point it'd be that because this is taken instead of a battle honor it really limits how much you can do. You basically get an honor ever 5, 15, 30, 50, etc. experience but you don't get experience overly much so choosing between a slight tweak to a weapon over an stat change is a big choice.
Out of action:
These is basically the negative side to the campaign, the damage a unit takes as they get slain. Negative buffs be bad for your units but great for a narrative, any time a unit is slain roll a D6 and on a 1 something bad happens. My biggest issue here is with one of the results, now you get to choose either a Battle Scar or a devastating blow, and the devastating blow is... devastating! You don't gain Exp for this battle and lose D6. Which is this so overly bad? You only gain 1 Exp per battle and 1 every 3 units your unit kills. It could take you 6 battles to get to 6 exp and with the roll of a D6 you can go right back to the start with 0 exp which is just plain brutal. So... don't take that take Battle Scars instead, they're like Battle Honors but in the reverse, almost completely. Battle Scars have the same issue as Battle Honors in my opinion, they're copy and paste between units and are just mirror reflections of Honors. One Honor gives you +1" M? Well one Scar gives you -1" M. One Honor gives you re-roll hits on 1s? Well one Scar gives you re-roll hits of 6! Now there are a few unique ones in here but it's basically like whoever wrote it just put in an Antonym for a Honor and called it good.
Agendas:
Now as most the things I have pointed out are negative Agendas are the real shining star of Crusades, these are your armies goals during each mission and the main way your forces gain EXP and will change up how you play your forces. Pick an Agenda and fight for it, wanna control the battlefield? Wipe out enemy forces? Perform Spec ops missions or just some overall Warp shenanigans? That's all here! This is where most people should focus with their army to get the "feel" of what their force is doing. Playing some Guard desperately fighting off hordes of Orks? Cull the Hordes. Playing Inqusition and hunting down heretics in need of smiting? With Hunter! Want to just take some big friggin guns and blow up as much as you can? Priority target or Titan hunter. Agendas be cool, Agendas me like.
Missions:
I'll sum this one up really quick cause this whole thing is getting long. Missions are unique and varied and have many different conditions so the entire time you play Crusade you can potentially never play the same mission twice which is great. Variety is the spice of life any you can only do kill point pitched battles so long before you want to cry. My only complaint with the missions is that the rewards to the victory are both boring and repetitive. If you win you either get an EXP boost to one unit, extra Requisition, a relic or an Honor. For the 18 unique Crusade missions you'll see the rewards are nowhere near as unique, which is sad. It's not something that'll ruin the mission, more so it's like when you order an ice cream sundae and it's missing the cherry on top.
So overall I'd have to say again it has some promise but most of it falls short, Crusades will probably get a few house rule tweaks especially if you're going to want a long form campaign out of them. This was really the only thing I was interested about in 9th ed and after getting it and reading it it mostly comes out to a "meh" Crusades are probably going to end up as basement games drinking beer while a movie plays in the background playing with the guys that like to convert and paint and name their models more than the guys that like to play to win. It's not a total loss at all, just not as much as I was hoping it'd be.
First off this I could have just missed in reading it due to being exhausted, but I thought crusading armies were suppose to get army wide rules? Now idk if this is just something I read online and never an official point but I thought as your army grew you got army wide crusade buffs as the campaign grew, I'm just not seeing those.
Requisition:
So the requisition points, these are sort of the magical point crusade gimmick to make the game more interesting. You start with 5 and gain 1 after every game but can never have more than 5, so cool-cool limited resource you have to use carefully. However... the more I read what you can spend them on the less of an impact they seem to have in the grand scheme of things.
~ Increase supply limit, So the first thing you can use Requisition for is to increase your supply limit, which is just a fancy way of saying you can make your army bigger. Issue I'm seeing with this is the size of the mission played vs the size of your crusade force are not the same so your crusade army starts at 50 PL and goes up 5 with each upgrade but the missions you play on are in PL orders of 25, so 25, 50, 75, etc. So really increasing your supply limit doesn't do much if your opponent doesn't increase theirs because why would they agree to play a higher point mission if their force isn't larger? You can bump up your crusade force twice and have 60 PL worth of units in your army as a whole but if you're only playing a Combat Partol mission you're only taking 25 PL worth of units. You can increase your army size but not what you can take on a mission so at most it'll just give you a bigger roster to play with. The players could easily just agree to have a large crusade force to start or just say after every 3 games increase the size by 10, something like that. You can add/remove units whenever you want from your force too so if you don't like a unit there is nothing stopping you from changing out. The only time you wouldn't want to is for a unit that's gained a bit of exp and battle honors.
~Fresh Recruits, spend 1 RP to increase the number of models in a unit, can't do it to any unit with more than 1 Battle honor and if the unit has at least 1 battle honor you up it's crusader level. The reason this one seems so off is... you can add or remove units at any time for free. Why would you spend a Requisition to add more models to a unit if you can basically only do it with fresh units if you can just say drop the 5 man marine squad from your army and add a 10 man marine squad instead? This would be more useful if you could do it to veteran troops so if you have a squad that wasn't full strength when the crusade started but it had gained some upgrades so now you'd wanna bump them up to a full strength unit but you can't.
~ Rearm & resupply, spend 1 RP to change your wargear as long as it doesn't change your PL. Ok kinda basic but I can get the idea that maybe you change your mind and want some anti-tank firepower over the anti-infantry you took, especially as the game goes on and the other players add more untis to their army you're not equipped to fight. Basic but fair.
~ Repair and Recuperate, spend 1 RP to remove a battle scar (negative attribute to a unit) cool it's a point to heal, alright again basic but fair.
~ Psychic meditations, spend 1 RP to change a psykers powers. Wait... you cannot just change powers at any time they're fixed and you have to spend limited resources just to pick a different power? Kind of lame imo, changing wargear makes sense as a narrative because in the middle of a campaign getting new weapons ain't easy, but the brain boy cannot switch his powers after battles? If you can spend RP to get powers it's safe to assume the psyker "Knows" all the powers they just have to concentrate on which ones they will be using so this sounds more like a resource drain just to exist.
~ Specialist reinforcements, 1 RP to basically... when you add a unit to your crusade force you can give it Stratagem upgrades that gives it stat upgrades or abilities now and they always count as having them. This one I actually really like, it lets you add some real veterans or special units to your force and they don't drain your CP every single battle. So +1 for this one
~ Warlord trait/Relic. Combining this one, 1 RP both to add a warlord trait to a character and a relic to him, both of these are permanent. To me these seem kind of like "Hey we added a thing but not really!" Your Warlord doesn't start with a WL trait but you can give him one for 1 RP... sounds like just a way to drain RP at the start of the crusade and you can just agree with your opponent you both get a Warlord trait for free. This exists just to exist and make it look like there are more uses for RP than there actually are. As for the Relics, I actually really dig the Crusader relics they're pretty awesome bits and you can have a lot of fun with them, buff your character with a piece of special gear is totally what I wanna see in a campaign.
Battle Honors:
This is the fancy shiny coat of paint on a unit going "Hey these guys are veterans and are super cool!" I like the idea of BH and they are kinda easier to get that the CA 2018 campaign battle honors but my biggest issue with them is... there are so few. Each unit type: Character, Monster, Vehicle & Other each have a D6 chart on Honors meaning there are only 6 any one unit can have so you're going to see a lot of repetition in honors across your own units and your opponents. You can roll the trait or pick it which is pretty standard because rolling an upgrade for a unit that doesn't help the unit always sucks. Hey your shooty character just got +1 attack! Woo. So looking at these I see a lot are copy and paste. Vehicles and Monsters both share 3 and then have 3 unique ones that are similar to traits available to other units. And Characters and the other units share half of them as well.
Over-all, this is what I think kinda drags crusades down because the point is getting grizzled veteran troopers with new abilities gained from fighting the opponent for a long time, advanced tactics and personal growth on the battlefield a real reason to grow your force and make an epic crusade! Then you realize there are only 6 available to each type of unit and half of those are just copy-paste between the units and some are even going to be pointless cause your army has abilities or character auras that already do what the Battle Honor gives you. Sad...
Weapon Enhancements & Psychic fortitudes:
This is a section I actually really like and have no real issues with. Instead of a Battle Honor a Character, Vehicle/Monster or squad leader can take an enhancement to a ranged or melee weapon or boost any psychic powers they may have. This is particularly great for those armies that don't have a whole lot of options for wargear for some units and you can buff something they have. Taking A Broodlord as your Character and you can give him a weapon enhancement to make his rending claws even rendier, perfect since he has no wargear. If there was one complaint I'd have at this point it'd be that because this is taken instead of a battle honor it really limits how much you can do. You basically get an honor ever 5, 15, 30, 50, etc. experience but you don't get experience overly much so choosing between a slight tweak to a weapon over an stat change is a big choice.
Out of action:
These is basically the negative side to the campaign, the damage a unit takes as they get slain. Negative buffs be bad for your units but great for a narrative, any time a unit is slain roll a D6 and on a 1 something bad happens. My biggest issue here is with one of the results, now you get to choose either a Battle Scar or a devastating blow, and the devastating blow is... devastating! You don't gain Exp for this battle and lose D6. Which is this so overly bad? You only gain 1 Exp per battle and 1 every 3 units your unit kills. It could take you 6 battles to get to 6 exp and with the roll of a D6 you can go right back to the start with 0 exp which is just plain brutal. So... don't take that take Battle Scars instead, they're like Battle Honors but in the reverse, almost completely. Battle Scars have the same issue as Battle Honors in my opinion, they're copy and paste between units and are just mirror reflections of Honors. One Honor gives you +1" M? Well one Scar gives you -1" M. One Honor gives you re-roll hits on 1s? Well one Scar gives you re-roll hits of 6! Now there are a few unique ones in here but it's basically like whoever wrote it just put in an Antonym for a Honor and called it good.
Agendas:
Now as most the things I have pointed out are negative Agendas are the real shining star of Crusades, these are your armies goals during each mission and the main way your forces gain EXP and will change up how you play your forces. Pick an Agenda and fight for it, wanna control the battlefield? Wipe out enemy forces? Perform Spec ops missions or just some overall Warp shenanigans? That's all here! This is where most people should focus with their army to get the "feel" of what their force is doing. Playing some Guard desperately fighting off hordes of Orks? Cull the Hordes. Playing Inqusition and hunting down heretics in need of smiting? With Hunter! Want to just take some big friggin guns and blow up as much as you can? Priority target or Titan hunter. Agendas be cool, Agendas me like.
Missions:
I'll sum this one up really quick cause this whole thing is getting long. Missions are unique and varied and have many different conditions so the entire time you play Crusade you can potentially never play the same mission twice which is great. Variety is the spice of life any you can only do kill point pitched battles so long before you want to cry. My only complaint with the missions is that the rewards to the victory are both boring and repetitive. If you win you either get an EXP boost to one unit, extra Requisition, a relic or an Honor. For the 18 unique Crusade missions you'll see the rewards are nowhere near as unique, which is sad. It's not something that'll ruin the mission, more so it's like when you order an ice cream sundae and it's missing the cherry on top.
So overall I'd have to say again it has some promise but most of it falls short, Crusades will probably get a few house rule tweaks especially if you're going to want a long form campaign out of them. This was really the only thing I was interested about in 9th ed and after getting it and reading it it mostly comes out to a "meh" Crusades are probably going to end up as basement games drinking beer while a movie plays in the background playing with the guys that like to convert and paint and name their models more than the guys that like to play to win. It's not a total loss at all, just not as much as I was hoping it'd be.
