Best wave.

[Jason]

The Gladiatrons are superior to the knights, they have cyberclaw and are faster. The Sacred Band have Death Defy whereas the Romans have Shield Wall which is a very big difference + their Hero is cheaper. They are quite significantly different

[Jason]

I guess if you want to talk in general almost all squads are similar to each other.

Melee Squads pretty much have like 5 movement, 4 figures, 3/3 stats (give or take a slight change to 1 of the stats)

Ranged Squads pretty much have 2/2 or 3/3 with 6 or 7 for range and often only have 3 in the squad (give or take a slight change in 1 of the stats)

[Agent Minivann]

Originally Posted by Hex_Enduction_Hour

Choke on it a little longer.

My vote is going to have to go with 4.5. The ice pack is not as versatile as the roads, but the thing has a lot more tiles (1.5 times not counting the ice, or glacier bases, but that is stretching a bit), 21 ice (vs. 11 molten lava), and 6 glaciers (vs. 5 trees). The glaciers are going to pop up painted (if it hasn't happened yet) making it a great set for terrain customs. Plus the clear ice tiles are just a thing of beauty. Then the heroes...

[Jandars_Hope]

I like characters from all the waves, it would be too hard to choose the best wave, IMO anywayz!

[toddrew]

Terrain fan here, so it's between 2.5 and 4.5, 2.5 has better terrain (row-ads, bridges + trees, o my, not to mention the lava bonus), but 4.5 has the better figures. So I'll take 2.5, but with reservations

[gorillanator]

Originally Posted by reapersaurus

wow - can't believe the Wave 4 love here.

It was evicerated pretty convincingly in a LONG discussion on HQ.

Where IS Thor, and maybe jcb321, who IIRC tabulated how many duplicate abilities Wave 4 had.
It was pretty convincing evidence that it was one of the worst waves.

Just not creative enough for some people.
I actually thought Wave 3 was less creative, but both of them are pretty dang uninspired compared to Waves 1 and 2, or the Large Heroes packs (course, all but Charos in Wave 2.5 are almost unplayable competetively).

Agreed.

I thought Wave 4 was the worst of all the Waves. Major X17, Morsbane, and Sudema are all good but I think Sudema may be overpriced because of her low defense and life. But Parmenio and Valguard are just pure garbage.

But I disagree about all but Charos being unplayable.

Su-bak-na is good in an all Marro army to just stay back until the end of the battle and if your Marros didn't finish the army off Su-bak-na can fly in and end it.

I like Brunak onfields that have maybe lava islands or volcanoes.

I like to use Deathwalker 8k to counterpick against large amounts of gruts or vipers and he also works well against Krug.

And Dund is... well Dund is pretty unplayable unless your opponents whole army is the same common squad.

[markwars]

gorillanator said:

Agreed.

I thought Wave 4 was the worst of all the Waves. Major X17, Morsbane, and Sudema are all good but I think Sudema may be overpriced because of her low defense and life. But Parmenio and Valguard are just pure garbage.

But I disagree about all but Charos being unplayable.

Su-bak-na is good in an all Marro army to just stay back until the end of the battle and if your Marros didn't finish the army off Su-bak-na can fly in and end it.

I like Brunak onfields that have maybe lava islands or volcanoes.

I like to use Deathwalker 8k to counterpick against large amounts of gruts or vipers and he also works well against Krug.

And Dund is... well Dund is pretty unplayable unless your opponents whole army is the same common squad.

If I were to rank all of the waves I don't believe 4 would be last. The additions of Gladiatrons, Major X17, Deadeye Dan, the Tagawa, and the Aubriens was pretty significant to me. Heck, the Armocs taught me to love Vipers and actually begin using them. I would agree that some of the choices seem less that original (the Greeks especially), but I wouldn't call any of these figures pure garbage yet.

As for Wave 2.5 I think that there are a great many players that have had tournament success with Charos, DW8K, and Brunak to prove that there are playable units.

[reapersaurus]

Originally Posted by markwars

As for Wave 2.5 I think that there are a great many players that have had tournament success with Charos, DW8K, and Brunak to prove that there are playable units.

I would be interested in hearing battle reports about DW8000 or Brunak being successful in tournament, or even friendly-but-competetive play. In fact, I hardly ever hear of them even being played, much less successfully being played. Brunak has been supplanted by Theracus, except for on the VERY rare lava field match. And DW8000 goes down like a biatch every time I've seen or heard about him used.
For that matter, the majority of competetive matches that someone fields Su-Bak-Na in, they lose.
Every match I have seen personally where SBN is fielded, he loses badly.
The critical thing is not whether he CAN do well - it's that at 160 points, every +1 to the D20 he provides is 160 points that's not directly in battle.
And once he gets into battle, he WILL fall to any number of cheap squads and god forbid he ever gets shot at.
His 5 Life is one of the biggest oversights in the game, in fact, IMO.

As for Dund - well, enough said.

Seriously - other than Charos, Wave 2.5 Large Heroes are woefully underrepresented in serious play.
I use that as one of the main criteria of whether a Wave is successful or not.

Now, as for creative abilities (which is the other main criteria for ME), I think Wave 2.5 Large Heroes was wonderful. Every one of the 5 was new and different.

[jcb231]

I voted for Wave 4.5, but it was a close vote between that and Wave 1 for me. I think that Wave 1 added the most new ideas, while nicely completing the Master Set. I think Wave 4.5 is great in that it's totally self-contained....none of the figures require you to buy any other figures except the MS in order to use them to their fullest.

[jcb231]

I didn't tabulate Wave 4's repeats in order to say it was bad. I don't think it was a bad wave. It wasn't my favorite wave, but it wasn't bad either. IIRC my percentage of repeats compared reasonably well to other waves, except for 1 in which everything was shiney and new. When I broke it all down, I used three categories: totally new abilities, tweaked repeats, and full repeats. Tweaked repeats are things that folks could say are new variations on old ideas.

Wave 4, off the top of my head, has the following totally new abilities:
-Rod of Negation
-Cyberclaw & Improved Cyberclaw
-Disciplined Influence
-the Tagawa experience power (damn me not knowing the name offhand)
-Sharpshooter
-Ullar Enhanced Rifle
-Melee Defense (two versions)
-Defy Death
-First Assault

And the following tweaked repeats:
-Ullar Warlord Bonding
-Einar Warlord Bonding
-Disciplined Army Bonus (tweaked repeat of Valiant bonus)
-Berserker Enhancment (tweaked repeat of Frenzy or Fury enhancements)
-Whip (tweaked repeat of Paralyzing Stare)
-Stone Stare (some may say a tweaked repeat of Chomp)

And the following full repeats:
-Frenzy
-Slither
-Double Attack
-Shotgun Blast Special Attack

Wave Four added other ideas or filled in certain gaps that made it a decent wave for me....we got some more Elves and Samurai and Vipers, fleshed out the Cowboy heroes, gained a really cheap unique, saw ranged frenzy for the first time, started a whole new line of Soulborgs, saw the introduction of the Dreadguls, saw ranged insta-kill, and so on.

Morsbane, one of my favorite figures, is in wave four.

[Jason]

Here is how I rank the Waves:

#1 Wave 4- Best Heroes By Far, good squads

#2 Wave 4.5 - Greatly conceived units to balance the power of squads + new Terrain

#3 Wave 3 - Worst Heroes by far (only Sullivan and McDirk are good) but offset by having the Best Squads of any wave (5 of the 6 squads are fantastic)

#4 Wave 2-2nd Best Hero Pack (Krug and MBS are both great, Swogs are popular with Orc armies who would greatly diminish without the Swogs, Denrick is more useful with 4.5 out than ever before, and then there is Khosumet...) Wave 2 also has very good squads units. The 4th Mass are probably the Best common squad in the game, the Wolves are fast and dangerous, the Drones and Minions can all be devastating, and even the knights can be good.

#5 Wave 1 - 2nd Worst Hero Pack (Marcus is Great, Taelord is SoSo, the rest overall are weak comparably to other Hero packs) The squads are decent (the Snipers are the Best of the Wave 1 squads even though many consider them the worst. Orcs and Vipers aren't nearly as good as people try to claim-their ranged units are lacking compared to other armies. The Roman Legion is good but the real star of the Roman army is the 4th Mass)

#6 Wave 2.5- Best Terrain Expansion but terrible Heroes. The RTFF adds alot to a board (Trees/Roads). The Heroes though are the opposite. In a competitive game only Charros is really a viable threat (maybe Brunak if there is lave) and I would not consider Charros to make a competitive army

[reapersaurus]

Originally Posted by Jason

Orcs and Vipers aren't nearly as good as people try to claim-their ranged units are lacking compared to other armies.

Jason - I have a question.

Have you ever been to a competetive HS get-together, or tournament?