WFB RUMORS: Whispers of 8th Edition
Our scouts scour the land day and night without rest. Here’s the latest chatter on the wind regarding Fantasy 8th Edition: (with commentary by your favorite Fantasy fanatic: Iamaddj)
1) Army construction is moving back to percentages. (you may have 25% of your points spent on heroes, 25%-50% on core… etc.)
This change seems ok at first. A nice way to make people put more points in core and to limit over the top spending on characters. However after review it doesn’t seem they will be able to make it work with the current army books. Sure limiting a 2250 empire army to not more then 400pts of rare choices means only 1 steam tank (hooray!) but it does allow for 4 Hellblasters. A decked out Slaan would now be your only character while the undead player could fit 8-10 Necromancers in his list. Overall this change would seem to favor spamming. -iamaddj
2) Expect many changes to the magic phase, including giving irresistable force a downside, while making miscasts harder to have but much more devastating.
Again at first these changes seem alright, and independently they aren’t anything I wouldn’t like to see. However when viewed with the game as a whole they are worrisome. The big powerful spells that have become a staple of the newer books effectively die with these changes. You still have a good chance to miscast, only now it will be REALLY bad, and even when you get irestible force, which these spells really need to go off most of the time, there will be some type of downside. These changes once again seem to favor spamming lots of little spells; flicker fire, invocation, etc. combined with the possibility of being able to take lots of cheap lvl 1 wizards it could turn the magic phase into a spam fest. -iamaddj
3) The return of “lapping-around” in combat.
This is a throw back to older editions that was removed in 7th. In 6th lapping around was complicated, often forgotten and a pain in the butt, but a lot of players liked it. We will have to see what they do with it. -iamaddj
4) Speeding up of combat in general. A possiblity of introducing a type of combat familiar to Flames of War players, something in which there are no multi-turn combats. Instead combat is fought over and over again until one side is dead or breaks, all in the same round of combat. For example a 6×5 block of Saurus Spearmen fight a 3×6 block of Swordmasters of Hoeth. The Elves attack and kill the front rank of the Lizardmen. The 6 back rank spearmen attack, get luckly and kill the front rank of the Swordmasters, now the next rank of the Elves attacks, and so forth until one side breaks or is wiped out.
While it is possible Fantasy could uses some speeding up, this sounds worrying. Can you imagine how powerful a combat lord, a Vampire for instance, will be if he gets to fight more then once in a single close combat phase? Will have to see how these rules work out. -iamaddj
5) In general the design changes are said to make the game play faster and at least partial nerf Daemons of Chaos after the huge community backlash against them.
~Have at it guys. I’m sure you all have strong opinions of what is wrong with Fantasy 7th and what needs to be changed. Remember as always caveats apply.
