How to fix LI

[Pacific81]

My thoughts on the future of LI is that it will survive based on people collecting the minis and small gaming groups, but it is far short of critical mass that the game will need to become ubiquitous.

 

Some colleagues and I on the Dakka forum tried to run an event earlier in the month. Despite it being held in one of the UK's biggest gaming centres, very cheap ticket prices, it being held as a charity event for ex-WD editor Paul Sawyer, offer of free attendance gifts & the event being advertised exhaustively on both Epic & Horus Heresy social media for months leading up to it we struggled to get 50% attendance. A number of those were people that myself and the co-organiser had brought on the day. Several others were playing the game for the first time.

The positives are that we managed to raise over £300 for charity and the attendees enjoyed the event, but the interest level (and especially there not being repeat players) is not a good sign. Meanwhile, 50 miles down the road the Epic GT group continue to sell out of event tickets for Epic Armageddon, a game that has been out of production for 20 years. 

This isn't just anecdotal as I know of other groups who have similarly struggled with event attendance.

 

You could put this down to LI not suiting the event format (even in a softer 'narrative setting) and I think that is definitely true to an extent; we could only fit two 2k games into the day and even then most players didn't manage to finish their games in the 3hr time slot.

It could also be because LI is not a game that you can take lightly - the extremely granular rules, dozens of special rules, complex unit profiles etc all add to the play difficulty. I've probably played 12-15 games but because I'm not playing week in week out I'm still stood there with a rulebook most of the time, and it makes the games a slog. I found it pretty funny that one opponent and I had a completely different interpretation of a rule, despite having both played a similar number of games. Again we are both stood there leafing through a rulebook.

I do wonder if this is why the game hasn't picked up a solid base from Age of Darkness Heresy; there just aren't the hours in the day to commit to both.

 

My own feeling is that this game definitely has some positives: it has spawned an absolutely wonderful range of miniatures; A poster commented above, it's an excellent site to see them arrayed on the tabletop. But it is dragging along behind it possibly the worst set of rules that GW has released for an Epic scale game. It's the year 2025 and the wargames industry has moved on; we should expect accessibility, speed of play, not to have to carry out pointless and excessive bookkeeping. Most importantly, the game should be 'fun'. I don't think that Legions succeeds on any of those fronts.

 

[Crablezworth]

8 hours ago, Pacific81 said:

My thoughts on the future of LI is that it will survive based on people collecting the minis and small gaming groups, but it is far short of critical mass that the game will need to become ubiquitous.

 

Some colleagues and I on the Dakka forum tried to run an event earlier in the month. Despite it being held in one of the UK's biggest gaming centres, very cheap ticket prices, it being held as a charity event for ex-WD editor Paul Sawyer, offer of free attendance gifts & the event being advertised exhaustively on both Epic & Horus Heresy social media for months leading up to it we struggled to get 50% attendance. A number of those were people that myself and the co-organiser had brought on the day. Several others were playing the game for the first time.

The positives are that we managed to raise over £300 for charity and the attendees enjoyed the event, but the interest level (and especially there not being repeat players) is not a good sign. Meanwhile, 50 miles down the road the Epic GT group continue to sell out of event tickets for Epic Armageddon, a game that has been out of production for 20 years. 

This isn't just anecdotal as I know of other groups who have similarly struggled with event attendance.

 

You could put this down to LI not suiting the event format (even in a softer 'narrative setting) and I think that is definitely true to an extent; we could only fit two 2k games into the day and even then most players didn't manage to finish their games in the 3hr time slot.

 

It's often the case it seems of players wanting/needing the scale to justify itself in terms of having a BIGGER army than they ever would in 30k/40k and the problem is there is never enough time allocated to the point level events try and do. I sorta feel like any event doing more than 2k is a bit out to lunch, especially with only 3 hour rounds. We used to allocate like 6-8-10 hours for big 40k games back in the day, we were at least realistic about what was involved, now a days, no to defend gw, but it feels like players somehow want a game with hundreds of models to play like kill team, and already this games biggest problem is its trying to do that, make alternating activation work at scale, and its one of the games biggest problems. A point myself and others made about 30k 2nd edition was its introduction of reactions would basically destroy larger/multi player per side games, and it created an absolute cluster f for them. LI needed to be like sm2 and suggest 1500pts to start, but modern gw marketing team would never have that. That's also why they don't even bother showing games or trying to have a realistic standard, its all aspirational so no one puts any limits on their spending. 

 

It's a nice thing you guys did for mr sawyer, sad to hear attendance wasn't as high as one might hope for such a thing. 

8 hours ago, Pacific81 said:

It could also be because LI is not a game that you can take lightly - the extremely granular rules, dozens of special rules, complex unit profiles etc all add to the play difficulty. I've probably played 12-15 games but because I'm not playing week in week out I'm still stood there with a rulebook most of the time, and it makes the games a slog. I found it pretty funny that one opponent and I had a completely different interpretation of a rule, despite having both played a similar number of games. Again we are both stood there leafing through a rulebook.

I do wonder if this is why the game hasn't picked up a solid base from Age of Darkness Heresy; there just aren't the hours in the day to commit to both.

 

 

It just deviates too much and in too many ways from sm2 for no real reason. SM2 for example had fairly common sense rules around like march order/transports and they functioned very similarly to older 40k. They've also done zero to even remotely faq/errata anything, so its no surprise to have differing opinions/takes on some rules. Speaking of granularity, just wrapping one's head around order of operations can sorta leave one spinning, like how detachments in transports function, basically we joke the transports are "booting them out" because its not a fluid interaction, one can't have troops get out for example half way through a transports move and get inside a structure, oh no, the transports have to finish their move, and you have to wait for a whole other activation to do anything with the squad that gets out. Then you have stuff like point defense allowing units to move and shoot in the movement phase, what even is first fire then? Why isn't overwatched tied to it? Its complex in a bad way most of the time. It doesn't help either that stuff has been left totally unfunctional, the cyclops bombs still can cause their own formation to break (speaking of pointless book keeping) and worse still, can't actually damage structures because their small blast has to be centered over the cyclops, meaning it will never be able to be over the structure. I feel like enough of these things add up and people just lose interest. 

8 hours ago, Pacific81 said:

 

 

My own feeling is that this game definitely has some positives: it has spawned an absolutely wonderful range of miniatures; A poster commented above, it's an excellent site to see them arrayed on the tabletop. But it is dragging along behind it possibly the worst set of rules that GW has released for an Epic scale game. It's the year 2025 and the wargames industry has moved on; we should expect accessibility, speed of play, not to have to carry out pointless and excessive bookkeeping. Most importantly, the game should be 'fun'. I don't think that Legions succeeds on any of those fronts.

 

 

No question it looks amazing. The book keeping was noticed very early on, tracking break points feels like being an accountant at the morgue, absolute opposite of fun. Add to that, resolving combat is a slog, it feels like working as a cashier in a cash only business and you're forced to do the mental math for every damn transaction. Definitely feels like a slog. I do think the game is at its most "fun" when things are just exchanging fire. But so many things can bog the game down. The fact that templates feel too rare, and things like plasma just feel wrong not having some sort of overheat mechanic or optional fire mode with better ap or range or both but rolls of 1 like cause a wound or something. Also why the titan weapons don't seem very fun either, very little usage of secondary fire modes or any kind of heat damage or risk/reward stuff. Rounding back to how good the minis look, for me that's enough to sustain my interest in the game, just an excuse to photograph cool minis on cool boards. 

 

Because the thread was meant to round back to how to fix li. I still think it's possible to improve it with a clear vision/direction of where to go with it. I still think simple global objectives like shifting back towards more focus on shooting (on account of all the granularity and special rules largely being on the shooting side) and making combat perhaps more difficult to engage in successfully, or more granular/contextual and less hammer loves nails that it is currently. Part of fixing the game is also a re-alignment of expectations. A lot of new players on reddit or facebook are surprised to find people suggesting just a battlegroup box for starters, and that game of 1k are a lot more practical for learning than thinking 3k is the starting point. A lot of people somehow though they'd be banging out 3k games on a weeknight at a games store and like, if that's what makes one stop playing its unfortunate but 3k was never going to work in that amount of time. I get gw marketing doesn't want to show off the game at 1k or 1.5k but we all can. 

 

A bit of a tangent but, if LI like say full spectrum dominance, could be played initially on a 2x3 at I dunno somewhere between 500 and 1000pts (like not all deployed at once) it would mean gw could make double side card-style boards like they do for kill team. A boxed game with that and a handful of civitas buildings or hell card buildings would do wonders, like the hawk wargames citysape stuff but civitas style. The biggest thing holding this back is the fact that the close combat rules as they stand would make it a silly game. It doesn't make sense at any scale of play/board size, but at this small of one, 10-14 inch blind charges (possibly through empty structures) would do enough on its own to poison th whole thing, So to round back to fixing the game, something closer to sm2 for infantry movement and charge ranges feels like a must, would also make transports more needed.