It’s been a little bit since I put down my thoughts on how things are going with the Forge Star developement so I thought I would! With all the odds and ends so far It’s been a bit hectic and testing has been a blast.
Firstly the Necrons have seen some sweeping changes. Rich has played dozens of games himself and we’ve tested every concievable game combination. We’ve farmed the dex out to skilled necron players and are making changes. The over all theme is there but balancing has become a lot of fun!
The Cult of Ere has developed a new “Edicts” system to replace orders and we found ourselves focusing on “cult” more than “Guard with Daemons”. While they are certainly allied with the ruinous powers they have their own pantheon they worship. We’ve focused on their ability to sacrafice their own guys and possible sorcery in every squad.
Lastly the “Relics of the Scale” are shaping up nicely. I’m painting up a test army (which will be photographed for the dex) and should give us some great marine alternative lists. It now has a focus on Techmarines (allowing units to be lead by them) as well as gravity adaptive power armor taking a back seat with more limited options than originally invisioned.
Finally we have special characters for each army. That’s going to be a pain to test! We will need to rely heavily on feedback from forum goers on this one. The aim is wacky fun and things like ‘Big Mek Blindspot’s Reverse Drop Pod’ are just that kind of crazy fun!
We are now entering the home stretch of the document. Once we are all happy with the rules I’ll begin the process of building a PDF document that’s bigger in scope than anything we’ve done before. I’m going to build every page in Photoshop or InDesign. This will make the new codex much more polish and give it a great look!
Lastly I leave you with some things we’ve definately learned:
1) Necrons need more help than we thought. Their focus on “mid range shooting” isn’t as potent in 5th edition as it was in 4th. The volume of transports leaves necrons really hurting in that range, they have to focus on transports while allowing long range support to hammer them down. It’s doable but the army is punished for “a little bad luck” more than any other army.
2) Marines are far more difficult to tamper with than we previously thought. It gives me a new found respect for the writing in Dark Angels, Black Templar and Blood Angels. Making a new chapter (or successor chapter in our case) that still feels like marines but also has uniqueness is an interesting challenge. There are a lot of limits that need to be creatively handled.
3) Nothing can be sacred. No matter how much we might love a change we have to be willing to abandon ship for something new. Often times trying 3 different things and then choosing… or building a hybrid… is the best option.
4) 5th Edition has far fewer “internal conflicts” than we thought it would. It’s a testament in clean game design that way. We found that making well worded changes really plugged well into 5th ed codex’s without any work. Nothing functioned different than we felt it should, letting us look to 5th ed wording and rules as a powerful guide. Now if only all the codex’s were 5th ed!
5) Our team is able to yell at each other and still go for pizza without batting an eye.
So there you have it. We are aiming to release the book at the end of July, hopefully you guys will enjoy playing it as much as we have!