HeroScape is coming back!

[SkyWhale]

Probably also worth noting that there isn't anything official saying "-Na" denotes a Hivelord... fairly certain that is just the conclusion the community came to. While I don't like the lore (especially the bio), I really like the design of the figure. And at this point I'll accept great gameplay with subpar lore that I can ignore (just like with D&Dscape!).

And how else would one pronounce "Bok"?

[TheSparkleInYourWater]

The Kyrie heroes Loviatak and Misaerx look awesome.
Any good army ideas for Loviatak?

Loviatak
Runa
Marro Warriors
Zombies x4
Isamu
19 spaces, 500 pts. I love the speed boost here.

I just noticed Renegade has Evil Raelin's point cost as 100, was it 130 at some point?

https://renegadegamestudios.com/hero...-kyrie-warrior

[Just_a_Bill]

Originally Posted by SkyWhale

And how else would one pronounce "Bok"?

That's not the part I was mocking.

Originally Posted by boromir96

the Death Knights ... do not receive Knight synergies, as their class is not “Knights”. The ruling is already in place.

Originally Posted by Lord Pyre

Yeah classes are classes. If something does a synergy callout for a class, you don't assume its going to look at a name.

Right, it makes sense to experienced, serious players who hang out in online forums and have been educated by expert consensus or an FAQ or whatever. As far as I know, the concept does not exist anywhere in any rulebook, so in some sense it's a bit of "secret knowledge" that you can't get from the box you buy at the store. This is more pronounced when it also contradicts common sense. If I was 10 years old and playing Heroscape, I don't think I would accept someone trying to tell me that Capt. John Varan is not a captain or Sgt. Drake Alexander is not a sergeant.

So yes, an answer exists. But it's not a game's finest hour when a player's natural expectation turns out to be wrong, idiot! according to an unwritten rule. And it's even worse when that player gets belittled online for not knowing. Now to be clear, that's not what's happening here today, but I have witnessed it in the past. We tend to forget that some of the things we take for granted are not actually spelled out properly for the larger player base ... often because they were not thought out properly at design time. So now all that can be done is a patch in an FAQ or online conversation that might reach 10% of the player base at best.

I've seen this issue manifest itself in a variety of games of different categories and genres, and I've been personally involved in more than one development process where a game eventually became so cumbersome from its own inconsistencies and "structural debt" that even the FAQ couldn't keep up. Sometimes the people trying to prevent or fix the issue will eventually hit their futility threshold and exit the project, and then there's a natural tendency for the problem to accelerate because now even fewer people on the team (or none) are calling for this kind of design discipline. I'm not making any particular claims about that having happened to Heroscape under Hasbro, or WotC, or Avalon Hill, or Renegade, but I've seen it happen on other games and I can recognize at least some of the situations where it's a risk.

So whenever I was in the position of design lead, or had some degree of influence, I never let this stuff just slide. It's really important to get the foundation right because a little more work up front can save you such bigger headaches down the road, and sometimes it even affects the longevity of a product line. The complexity and intuitivity of your rules engine and your growing network of game components have a direct impact on the health of the player base.

Magic the Gathering seems to have figured this out early enough to put guidelines and design rules in place to keep things as future-friendly as possible. One of their biggest competitors back in the day was slower to do so, and that other company's biggest-selling TCG was facing ever-decreasing revenues. It would have collapsed under its own weight if the licensor had not canceled the license first (and then some time after that the company began its death spiral).

This is why I pontificate on things that may seem like trivial details. Every reasonably avoidable problem that makes a game less enjoyable for a slice of the player base is an unforced error that's setting things up for defeat, or at least decline. Look at how many people on these forums have already gone from "hooray, the Haslab project is back from the ashes" to "oh, I don't think I'll buy these initial offerings." There are of course many reasons for that, but how many of those reasons can be safely dismissed? Perhaps we will find out over the coming months.

[Sherman Davies]

Yeah, Avalon Hill/Renegade had no obligation to design around stuff like Capt. Varan or Captain America (debatable), but using something like "Unique Pirate Hero" would've accomplished the same thing while simultaneously leaving the door open for them to design future characters named "Captain XYZ." It's a bit of an unforced error.

[Hogg]

"Pirate Captain" would even be an acceptable class that is specific enough not to get confused with Captain America.

I think the reason I'm not arguing about this stuff as much as I did with the DnD phase, is that I just don't care as much. AoA is like, HalfwayScape and I'm about as enthusiastic as I would be of some nice customs. In fact, I think I like C3G better.

Renegade has a long way to go to win over the player base, and so far rehashed mediocre units from the failed haslab and reprinted old terrain ain't doing it for me.

[Just_a_Bill]

Originally Posted by Sherman Davies

It's a bit of an unforced error.

Exactly. Every design team needs a nerd with a spreadsheet going "Uh, gUY-ys, what about this?" A nerd who has the tenacity to stay in the debate when they all start giving him crap about wanting to fix something they claim "nobody cares about."

Different people care about different things. Some people even care about all the things coming together in an elegant design. Successful products can focus on only specific groups and continuously woo the crap out of them with things like strong momentum, super-efficient production and economies of scale, or they can try their best to offer something for all the major groups and thus maintain a broad and healthy customer base. The latter is what MtG did very successfully, and their player psychographics concepts, while not perfect, helped them maintain a process that tried hard to not leave significant parts of the player base feeling left out.

Personally I'm pretty tired of feeling left out by ongoing decisions at WotC, Avalon Hill, and Renegade. Not just in the specific content being offered, but in the storytelling, attention to detail, service to the canon, and whatever else should be contributing to craftsmanship but gets sidelined. Every time somebody says again that what really matters is the gameplay, they're not wrong; bad gameplay (or even just weak gameplay) will kill the whole thing. But so will cringy lore, inconsistency, typos, disregard for the canon, short-shrifting key factions and genres, and so on.

These things may not be a big deal to you folks in the front row, or those of you whispering off to my left, or you there in the back by the Coke machine, but they matter a lot to others. Others who previously participated in keeping the game alive with their wallets. Partly by buying, keeping, and collecting not only the "good" units but also those that the gameplay-is-all-that-matters folks would never draft into an army. Some of these people even just bought to collect and never actually played the game; how long are they gonna stick around if the gameplay is outstanding but nobody's putting effort into the collectability? If those of us who are aesthetics, story, and design elegance whackjobs don't buy in, or don't keep buying in, then your game's economic feasibility goes into the toilet. The publisher can't maintain the economy of scale they need to keep making things for you to buy at a price everyone can afford.

We need you; and you need us. Neither "side" can fund this game alone.

This is probably one of the reasons Haslab tanked. Many of you were willing to shell out one or more multiples of $250 for Scape, any Scape, as long as it was Scape -- but unfortunately there weren't enough of you to satiate the appetite of the mercurial overlord Haslabius. You needed additional cohorts who were perhaps in the battle for other aspects of the game that might not matter that much to you. And now you just might need them even more, because the Renegade pricing structure has a higher per-piece cost than the Haslab scheme.

And surely Renegade is not oblivious to these economics. Some of us have bristled at the fact that they want to collect all the money now but not ship until August or whenever. It's entirely possible that they need to feel confident they have enough orders before they actually spin up production. What happens if they don't get enough orders? Are people holding off on ordering while they wait to see how Renegade responds to the critiques thus far? Will they fix the card errors? Is it too late to get actually decent biographies published? I have no idea. But I can tell you at least for myself that seeing how Renegade responds will have an effect on whether or not I want to buy this stuff. Seeing some activity (not just words, but actions) from them that they "get it" and are really working to shore up some deficiencies ... well that would be kinda huge.

I need to know how the future looks in terms of the reasons that I fell in love with Heroscape. Spoiler: It never had anything to do with building tournament-winning armies. Not that I wouldn't enjoy that, I actually would; I just never had the opportunity. For me it was about my dining room table, my family, and the stories that came out of us trying to kill each other's monsters while enjoying the silliness of me foolishly sending the lost Ninth Legion against my daughter's Mimring on a castle wall.

Maybe that seems lame to many of you, and there's a good chance you're right. But that lameness is part of what kept Heroscape alive. I don't expect anyone to like that or respect it if they're a high-caliber tournament winner or a serious competitor in adult-focused games; in fact they have my admiration. But I hope people won't sweep it aside as irrelevant. I actually do want to help you keep getting good stuff we both enjoy, but I'm not going to invest in content that asks me to forgot why I got into the game.

If it turns out to be true that gameplay is so overridingly important that these other things simply cannot be done alongside good gameplay, then I'm out. My wallet can't help you keep your game alive if I can't fall in love with the new bits. And maybe it's just me, but I don't think so. Granted, a lot of the other old fools like me don't hang out here any more, but I hope they're still around. And I'm pretty sure new old fools are made daily. The right product just has to be there to woo them with good gameplay and good story.

* * * * * *

Anyway, sorry about the sermon nobody asked for. I guess I'm extra wound up today. It's just hard to keep hearing "yeah, I know they screwed up on this and that and the other thing, but it's the gameplay that really matters" when we already know where this leads. For the game to be healthy enough to continue, it needs to be good; not just in one area but good in ALL, or at least most, of the areas where it had been outstanding, once upon a time.

[Hogg]

Renegade has a huge uphill battle ahead of them.

First they have to prove they can be good custodians of the product. There are standards from the old version that have to be maintained, it was an important part of why the game lasted as long as it did. The keyword example above is an example of where they may have already made a misstep. They got handed the keys to a classic car and can't wreck it on their first few drives. Keeping the dice, order markers, and card shape were good moves though.

Then they have to design new content, beyond the AoA haslab figures. We have no indication of what they will eventually turn out, so its too early to judge. They can't coast on goodwill forever though, and have to generate actual enthusiasm on their own.

So far, all we can see is that they're going to sell us the AoA haslab stuff, painted, for like $900 and stretch it out over a few years it looks like.

All the organized tournament stuff might as well be smoke in the wind. Its months away, there are already organized events happening without them, and that's not really what the game is about anyway. Plus the new units are fairly boring and don't have much synergy so I don't even want to play in all AoA events, which is what they will want to promote.

They have a long way to go.

[IAmBatman]

My over/under for Heroscape published by Renegade is 2 years, and I lean under.

[wriggz]

I really don't think banking on fans from 20 years ago is a significant part of the business plan. I'm sure they are happy to have exisitng fans, and want to give product to those are most likely to buy, but I doubt that is the primary goal.

My assumption is that they are looking at the Warhammer crowd and want a piece of that. Selling a simpler game to get into with a really nice terrain system does set heroscape apart regardless of painted figures. Some one has figured out how to make the terrain cheap enough to mass produce and that is what they are banking on I bet.

They do need cool figures and designs to suck people in, but really Armored Bears, Space Pirates, Huge Dragons and Alien Wizards does seem exciting when you write it out like that.

IF they can get enough people interested in the terrain AND enough people casually interested in the game, I think they could have a decent run. If successful, Renagade already licences and has minitures for G.I. Joe and a few other hasbro properties. I'm sure someone is already planning to marry the two, to sell more of terrain.

[Nukatha]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

My over/under for Heroscape published by Renegade is 2 years, and I lean under.

You know what, I'd be fine with that. If that means we end up with only the War Council-tested ~70 figures from Haslab, that's still just about equal to RotV+Wave 1&2.

When I look back to what Mallidon's Peophecy and Utgar's Rage included in that 70-figure set (maybe throw RttFF, VW, and Orm's Return in there as the other 'early' sets), we see:
The Orcs promised by Grimnak's ability. Additional Kyrie heroes, and the first Kyrie squad. Plenty of common squad leader sets, the Marro being worked into a complete faction with Me-Burq-Sa, Drones, and Su-Bak-Na buffing all of their d20 abilities.


It'll pad my collection out a bit, include a few neat options for old armies (I especially like the new Dwarf hero), and I'm actively looking forward to doing some miniature painting. I might even paint my Arena of the Planeswalkers sets.
It'll be just emough new terrain, glyphs, and figures to be a solid experience for new players. When it comes to new 'Scape, I'm here for a good time, not necessarily a long one.

[nyys]

Originally Posted by wriggz

If successful, Renegade already licences and has miniatures for G.I. Joe and a few other hasbro properties. I'm sure someone is already planning to marry the two, to sell more of terrain.

Oh man, don't tease me like that. I would go bonkers if they made GI-JoeScape.

[Hogg]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

My over/under for Heroscape published by Renegade is 2 years, and I lean under.

Do you start the clock from March or August?

Originally Posted by wriggz

Some one has figured out how to make the terrain cheap enough to mass produce and that is what they are banking on I bet.

They really need to separate the terrain from the minis/rest of HeroScape.

"HeroTerrain" could exist indefinately, independently of the rest of HeroScape and would likely become the industry standard for hex based miniature games. Weighing it down with the minis is preventing sales. New terrain types could have a small rules insert to update the HeroScape rules, or suggest how to use it for generic gaming.

HeroScape, in a box with no terrain, only minis, cards, dice, rules, and markers, could exist for a long time too if the units were designed well and kept the game fun, but it probably has a limited lifespan regardless. They would probably have higher sales of just the minis from the new sets because a lot of existing players already have enough basic terrain. They could advertise the HeroScape game in all the "HeroTerrain" packs and try to get people from other games to play HS too, you already know they're into mini games if they're buying terrain.

The old boosters were great and they could sell the figures exclusively in that type of packaging and it would be fine. That would let people buy lots of multiples of commons, as long as they weren't packaged with uniques. The occasional box expansion could have the larger figures. But so far they haven't shown us that type of product, regardless of calling the releases Waves 1 and 2. (Which is also weird because there is already waves 1 and 2, they should call it 11 and 12, or R1 and R2 or something.)