Reply To: Talking about Kings of War 4th Edition

[nightrunner]

Hi everyone,

Last night the Mantic team had a roughly one hour stream addressing some of the community’s questions.  I came out of it with mixed feelings, but with some hope.

First of all, I was not surprised to see that Mantic owned their misuse of the basing convention confusion, with words like ‘legacy and obsolete’ basing and they reassured us that the basing convention is the same and they will also publish the base chart/matrix they had in 3rd edition.  Good for them. They also agreed with me in the first post, that they should have just said from now on when we say infantry we mean infantry and heavy infantry.  Problem solved.

The stream also confirmed that the Varangur is going to be fleshed out in the future, as well as the return of Vanguard (which we already knew) which is great news.

The new ranges of plastic elves and dwarves were also confirmed – about time!  Ronnie also gave a passing mention of new Elohi and Abyssal Immortal Dwarves.  He also said that metal miniatures would no longer be produced and the future is plastics and 3D printing.

Ronnie confirmed that Mantic want to move to more  propriety ranges like the Twilight Kin which were originally Dark Elves.  Moving forward, all refreshes will be in this vein, that is making something new and original.  So Kingdoms of Men, when they come out will not be like Medieval French or the Normans.  This is a stark step away from the original intent of the army lists, which were done in 1st to 3rd to accommodate armies from other systems when their worlds blew up.

I think Ronnie wants KOW to be like Conquest from Para Bellum Games with its strange and original armies.  You can’t really use traditional armies in Conquest with good effect, and Mantic want to have a foot in that door.  I don’t blame them really, because this move will allow them to sell more of their product, instead of gamers playing their games with models from other ranges.

He also recommended everyone to not build any armies for KOW if the plastic kits do not exist.  So do not build any Kingdoms of Men armies because when Mantic do them, they might change everything about them.  Same thing goes for the Varangur, Silvan Kin, Forces of Nature and so on.  The Varangur, for example, will not be a list to accommodate Chaos Warriors and  Marauders from the GW range – they will be something else or new.

Also, the development of armies now will be intimately tied to the narrative.  So armies like the Brotherhood, and the Order of the Green Lady are no longer  part of the current narrative, so will not be supported.  All armies will now take shape around the lore – period.

Several rules issues were discussed like yielding and yielding characters. Also some spells, but nothing about the combat system was discussed.  Part of the reason was that Ronnie would go on long rants and took up a lot of the time that could have been used to answer more questions.

In the end, after listening to the stream I have come to some conclusions for the future. I will continue to play KOW because it is a fun (even though it is not the best) wargame.  I have a proxy army for Ogres which has not been made redundant – so I will continue to play them for KOW. I also have an 80% non-Mantic Undead army which I will also will build up and use for KOW, but I will build, base and use my Wood Elves for a different system.

I am not happy at all with the move to the app subscription, and I prefer an updated free pdf of the rules.  I bought a 50 euro rulebook from Mantic.  I think they should at least give you the pdf for free.  They will be publish an errata and FAQ at least.

I will not be building any new Mantic armies for KOW until most of the campaign books come out and the armies are finalized with regards to what will be produced in the future.  That is it.  I will not be posting anything else for now, and will concentrate on playing, learning and enjoying the game  and the rules for my proxy Ogre army.

I hope this write up was useful and until I post again stay safe and have fun.

NR

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago by nightrunner.