What do you look for in a battle report?

[Brother Chaplain Tyranus]

Hey there guys. As I have been going further into this hobby, I have been learning and seeing a lot. I live watching batrep and I couldn't help but wonder what do people actually like about some of these?

 

Now I do watch different batreps for different reasons. Some are more entertaining, while others are more informative.

 

What do you guys look for in a batrep? Does a flawless story of how the armies showed up at the same place at the same time matter? Does having units that aren't often played draw you to it? Or is it simply the guys are funny? Do you like army lists posted with the videos? Like watching dice rolling? So on.

 

What do you like? What don't you like?

[PhilB]

It's length and production quality mostly.

Back in the twilight of 7th quality producers like Winters SEO, Grim Resolve, Visi Cast & The Legion Wargaming were hovering around 45-60 mins for a standard batrep.

Then were was Miniwargaming, StrikingScorpion82, Tabletop Tactics and countless others coming in at around 60-75 mins 'ish.

 

These days in 8th a lot of my favourite channels are uploading batreps that go for 2-2.5 hrs or more sometimes. I simply don't have the time to park up and watch two and a half hours of battle report these days and due to brutal nature of 8th I tend to only watch the army intros and first two turns of a game where most of the time to outcome is already decided. You do get the exception though, when control of a game swings back and forth every turn, these ones tend to suck me into the whole episode and I end up paying for it the next day at work when yawning all day in the office... lol.

[Solrac]

In general I want to be entertained not just go through the motions of a game. I also like to see the dice rolling because sometimes you get attached to someones performance and when someone rolls bad a crucial moment I can relate lol.

 

I do watch different channels for different reasons though depending on what I'm feeling like watching. I usually hover around the below channels:

 

The Glacial Geek - Phil is just all round entertaining and a great dude. Love his batreps. I like how he puts a bit of a story on every batrep and plays both optimised and non-optimised lists.

 

Miniwargaming - They have great production quality and some amazing stories/narratives. I like to put hem on whilst I'm painting mostly.

 

StrikingScorpion - Again amazing narratives and story and his production quality is superb.

 

Tabletop Tactics - I love these guys as they are fun to watch but also have quite a few competitive games on their channel.

[Kasper_Hawser]

For me, Miniwargaming has the best "production values", but unfortunately sometimes the guys can't even get basic rules correct. I remember one time I was so enraged that Dave, a so called Space Wolf player, actually used Logan Grimnar as able to embark/disembark his sleigh.

 

anyway to answer the OP question, i used to like watching the entire 1hr plus video of everything including movement and dice rolling. However, it is getting really tedious, and what's worse is it also lets us see ALL the details of their mistakes and depending on what the mistake is, could be potentially rage inducing.

 

So now I prefer this format:

 

1) Introduction of players

2) Introduction of armies

3) Deployment, then showing seize initiative moment.

4) Show only END of turn result, preferably each player turn, as opposed to Game Turn.

5) End of 5 turns show result, then see if game continues

6) Continue until game ends with victory/draw announced

7) Post game analysis

 

Sadly, most reports don't have enough of even half the criteria above. Frontline gaming by Reese is actually good but for some reason his voice just sounds ...... not nice to me. No offence to him.

[Chaplain Lucifer]

I prefer to read rather than watch. Time is money ;) and I just can't sit for  around one hour watching a battle report when I can read on in 10 minutes.

Also If the battle report is written, I can offer feed back and ask question by quoting paragraphs. No such things on a video battle report.

Other than that I like a battle report were the army is explained and there's thought on what went wrong, what went right and what could be changed/improved upon.

[dtse]

Batreps definitely fall into two main categories. Those who have the time to make productions (the full time guys, guys who do it for a living) and those who don’t have as much time (like myself and others like me sub-10k subs). I know couple guys here who do batreps with superb production quality but takes them 8 hours to film a batrep.

 

It has to be said that while good production quality is a personal pride thing, it certainly does not usually result in having more subs. It’s really about quality but also a lot of quantity. You won’t get to the vaunted 10k+ sub club unless your putting out 2-3 batreps a week and that’s very hard to do if you have a full time job and maybe family duties as well.

 

I actually don’t have much time to watch anymore something that use to love doing and what got me into producing content in the first time. I barely have time to watch my own videos other than wen editing. But I used to love all content. Long narrative ones like SS82, and shorter summary types.

 

Keep in mind that longer videos are favoured by YouTube SEO formula something I only recently discovered when trying to revamp the channel. Since cutting out most of my shorter batreps, the viewer numbers and subs have been climbing nicely. Obviously there’s other factors (rebranding, better SEO and keywording, switching to slightly more competitive content, tactics series etc) but generally you will find more longer videos than shorter ones. All the big boys do longer videos generally as majority of their content