Kings of War 3, What i would have done

Kings of War 3
What I would have done

So KOW3 has hit, and to most of us its time to reinvent the wheel, a time to creatively seek the strong and weak and have fun playing in a changed environment.  Sadly for the community many others have decided to seek to hang on to the past and proceeded to incessantly moan about the current state of the game.
So this article is about my thoughts of the base of mark 3 over the coming weeks others will come about elves and trident realms and likely some content on other stuff.  I have to start with a disclaimer, I'm opinionated and not intentionally offensive but if any individual takes offensive I apologise but you need to man up its a war game blog not a personal attack unless of course you know you've done something wrong??  If you read my contents carefully they are virtually never just a problem but also what I would have done, I find this more constructive than telling people what you don't like.

So my initial thoughts, the book is beautiful but was edited by Mr Magoo a few glowing errors that 100% should have been picked up in a publication where clearly effort has gone in to the overall content.  For me there are far, far too many factions in the game and this has led to issues throughout the content of the book and in addition to the viability of the game from a retailers stand point and from the manufacturers perspective in the medium-long term.  I think the game would have been far better served having about 10 factions and then had theme lists from those factions in order to add to flavour and diversity, I think this leads to less rule and range complexity as well as the game being far easy to balance and play test.

The values of the game I don't know anymore, the game seems neither casual or competitively balanced I think that's an issue, and I think a casual book and a competitive supplement would have been far more successful and well received by the wider community. I would love to know the brief but the decision to make army selection more complex and in many cases divisive (unnecessarily) by the addition of so many irregular units was an appalling fix to 2 issues. 
I can see that allies and the proliferation of shooting and speed were the concept and if I were to guess the brief was to make infantry played more and I feel the edition has failed in that.
To cancel allies don't make a unit irregular have the rule faction only
To sort out shooting and speed either add more field allowance restrictions(max number) and balance the units better(points or stats)
Its only my opinion but slapping irregular everywhere has massively decreased the longevity of the edition and ultimately not solved any issues as 1 horde of spears could mean 4 drakon hordes or whatever.  In addition to this the concerning vector for me is that most of us enjoy tweaking a 100 or so points maybe 200 after most events, that will often lead to a full rewrite of list now, a lot of lists that aren't even close to being broken will be illegal and most concerning of all peoples painted armies are now illegal.  The later is always something to avoid in any game, the same as the chariots changing base sizes, its a huge WHY? 

On to some positives though I love the background so finally we can start to develop a connection with our forces, I love the bubbles of stats, I love the book layout, I like the quantity of spells and the fact not everyone can have everything, I also like the scenario pack. I think the company has done a good job I'm just not enamoured with the core rules development and sadly it falls apart at army balance stage.
I wish the edition change felt like an edition change though and frankly it doesn't to me at least, in an edition change core mechanics need to change, if not then its essentially a revision of the previous edition, for me this is KOW 2.2 its basically a load of COKs rolled into one book, but essentially except a couple of things like melee charging distances and a few terrain rules MK2.  This seems an own goal because I think that familiarity has led to contempt in unit entry changes as people can easily visualise the approximate power at least in the way they used it before. 

Myself, I was really hoping for

Individual rules to go to 180degree LOS to at least mean they need some skill to use and is some counter play, 

Melee wise I would of really liked to see the end of clipping counter charges (corkscrew) as I think its so unnecessary and isn't skilful its borderline rules abuse and very counterintuitive for new players, I think maybe only nimble stuff should be able to disengage and even then I may not allow charges as feign flight seems more logical than charging units other than that with no penalty or casualties its war not Queensbury rules, on that note I think mighty and yielding are simply brilliant additions to the rules set. In addition I feel the game either had to pick a direction, which was become a little more random and fun or become even more chess like, if the former I would have added random chargers d3 or d6 or something, if the latter why is double 1 still here ?

Magic items, seems decent but I really think had they have had the 10-14 factions I proposed earlier 1 or 2 faction specifics would be welcome, however is nothing ridiculous, would anyone have been upset with just a little more variety I don't think so, but I love the changes to the points costs depending on unit size so overall a big tick from me.

Terrain, far more intuitive I love the use of hills for TC personally id have made you hindered charging up them and I think id have added some fun terrain that had different effects on you rather than every wood being a wood, whether the effect be the unit has dread or feels the effects of dread etc would just feel cool.  I lastly would not have terrain give cover id have it give concealment, this ill talk about later.

Shooting, ok this is likely the most divisive topic here, I'm going to call this Brexit of KOW, but lets be real, its been nerfed in the following ways

1) irregular units
2) no way of buffing piercing through either items or spells
3) often costs increased or ability decreased
4) increased charging distances
5) no more breath ignoring individual
6) changes to the terrain ie hills and woods
there may be more

so on paper this looks horrific, but in reality its not as bad as first seems there are buffs

1) piercing one, steady aim 4+ to hit shooting seems ok and bizarrely non piercing non steady aim shooting isn't, hence they have added loads of the former
2) war-machines are more accurate
3) lightning bolt ignores stealth
4) no more critters call and less weakness
5) imho a larger propensity of hitting medium or even smaller units that can be killed at range
6) less flying or mounted characters because of the points cost

so I think 1,2,3,5, were unnecessary and complex or unbalancing additions to the game, id always aim to improve gameplay rather than change core design values of troops.
For shooting id have cover ie you cant see half the unit and then concealment which would be what terrain gave you for being in it, so between using hills, impassable and other units good players could mitigate the damage of shooting where bad players would suffer. 
The destruction of horde based shooting and the subsequent changing of breath weapons etc is going to make this edition chaff and MMU heavy, these are great counters to horde infantry and thus I see infantry except in a few cases disappearing from the game, this genuinely feels like the opposite of the design brief if I were to look at the other changes but its so over cooked its a problem.
Now add to that how good lightning bolt is and how cheaper a lightning bolt caster is compared to a shooting unit and you can see what's going to happen here, lightning bolt vs MSU- MMU, its Warhammer 7th tbh (by the way I loved 7th)

Ok that's me on the core stuff, ill be adding my thoughts on elves, on trident realm and overall army balance in next few days, criticise, compliment, or feed back.
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we don't have to agree by the way, you can stay wrong if you want to 😉