The Case For Company Of Iron...

I'm going to preface this blog with a few "disclaimers", for lack of a better word:

1. Play what you want to play: My thoughts below are just that. My own musing on the games Donna & I enjoy. I'm not bashing the other games / formats I mention here. When I discuss them below, I'm just explaining why they aren't for us...or at least aren't as big of an interest to us as Company of Iron. I'm not trying to convince anyone they should or shouldn't play it; just explaining why we enjoy it.

2. I'm not singling out any person: When I go through the complaints / gripes below, it's simply to offer my thoughts / counters. I'm not saying the person / persons who had those grievances are wrong in their opinions; just explaining where my opinion differs. 

* Found this in another forum where the poster said they took it from a completely different forum...no clue who to give credit to, but it gave me a laugh all the same *

With that out of the way....it seems like even the mention of COI can get some people royally pissed off. We were already interested in checking it out once we'd gotten into WMH, but seeing all the contention and back & forth that comes out any time the game is mentioned online piqued our interest even more. 

Never one to "judge a book by it's cover", we chose to play it ourselves to see what all the fuss (good & bad) was all about. I'd like to say that we went into it unbiased, but that would be a lie. We'd read way too many things (mostly bad) before we ever broke the shrink wrap on the box and those things would linger in the back of our minds as we played, whether we wanted them to or not.

To say "mostly bad" isn't really fair to the game since (unfortunately) by nature it seems that negativity gets pushed harder / screamed louder on social media in general. The conversations I've read / researched about COI seem to be no different.

We had our first "proper" play of COI last night. Before that we'd only played a couple of rounds where we barely scratched the surface of the rules; only focusing on learning how / when casualty rolls happen, the basics of the cards, etc. 

How was that first play? It is no small understatement to say that we absolutely LOVED it. It had many of the things we love about WMH, but offered a smaller, quicker game with some interesting tweaks. 

No...we're not going to stop playing Warmachine. We love Brawlmachine. With our family / work / gym commitments, we typically get 2 game nights in each week: Tuesday & Saturday. We thought that if we ended up liking COI, it could become our Tuesday night game; leaving Saturdays for Brawl. The smaller / quicker set-up & shorter play time would make COI fit better on a work night. If we ended up not liking COI, no big deal.

Over the past few months as we've been talking about playing COI, I've spent a fair amount of time going through the WMH FB group to read up on discussions of it. Interestingly enough, it seems that over the past 3 years or so, there's a post every 6 - 9 months along the lines of "Is Company of Iron dead?" that always gets a ton of replies ranging from "It's not actively supported, but my group loves it" to "Yes. It's awful. Burn it to the ground"; with the loudest / most passionate being the latter.

My blog for this week was originally going to be about the negativity that seems to frequently pop up in WMH discussions online (in general, not necessarily about COI), but decided to hold off on that for now & focus on this. 

It's Not Faster Than "Regular" Warchine (2 points here)

This complaint is one I'm genuinely curious about. For our first play, it played in roughly 75% of the time of a game of Brawlmachine & it was only that long because it was our first full game; which meant we had to check the rules to clarify things as we played. No doubt, the first play will be longer for anyone for this reason alone. 

The need to check the rules drops off sharply after the first play or 2 of any game. This would especially be the case for experienced WMH players coming to COI. Most of the core game play is the same. So, there's not that much new stuff / differences to learn. To further fix this, I'm in the process of making a cheat sheet to serve as a quick reference during game play.

Yes, there are things that work differently between WMH & COI as far as things like "Tough", "Incorporeal", etc are concerned. However, when you consider that each player only averages 3-5 unique types of models per COI game, the number of these differences in play in a given game is likely very low. 

The second issue that is brought up as far as the game play length is that casualty rolls supposedly slow things down. Without the 3-6 models that typically make up a warcaster / warlock + battlegroup, the 20 - 25 points in a game of COI make for an average of 5-12 total individual models. The idea that making casualty rolls for such a low number of models would make a 5-round game of COI the same length as a full 7-round game of Warmachine sounds highly unlikely; certainly not a full 75 point Steamroller game.

If someone does experience this (or even close to it), my guess is that it's based on unfamiliarity with casualty rolls producing a combination of having to reference the rules / not performing them correctly. From what I've read, there seems to be a lot of confusion about casualty rolls (especially for Injured models) in people's first games of COI wherein they're making casualty rolls when they aren't supposed to (the infamous pg 21 missed explanation). This is another thing that can be fixed with a good quick reference guide.

I expect that after a couple more plays with the addition of a quick reference guide, our games of COI will average 50% of the time of our plays of Brawlmachine.

It's Too Different Than Warmachine / It's Too Similar to Warmachine

These complaints coming up in the same posts gave me a legit laugh.

Reading through old posts, it seems like one major complaint was that COI changed too many things that the player likes about Warmachine. Removing the use of focus / fury took away a big part of what these players liked about WMH. "It's too different & I don't like it"...but then, I'd see just as many replies that COI didn't change enough things from WMH to make it unique enough for another player, leading them to just choosing the game they already knew / loved. That dichotomy definitely made me laugh & goes back to the meme I started this off with.

That said, I want to look at some of the key differences people pointed out. For starters, the removal of focus / fury seems to come up first as a point of contention. Yes, I absolutely agree that one aspect of WMH that makes it so fun & unique is the economy of focus / fury and how you have to manage them. While it's not an exact 1-for-1 conversion, the different ways cards can be used similar to how focus / fury are used keep a bit of this game play in place. Also, it should be noted that each warjack / warbeast essentially has 1 focus / fury that they can use once per activation as covered in the Advanced Rules, as well as the addition of "Inner Beast" allowing warbeasts to cast their animi without needing to spend fury.

In addition, I'd add that there's so much more to enjoy in how Warmachine plays that are still prevalent in Company Of Iron. One thing that really draws Donna & I to WMH / COI is the fun & challenge of finding cool combos and synergies between different models / units. There is plenty of opportunity for this game play in COI.

Also, even when you consider the things that are different, we're not trading out WMH for COI...and in doing so losing out on being able to ever play with focus / fury. For some odd reason, many of the replies make it seem like people view it as a binary either-or situation. There's no reason it has to be that way.

Another similar complaint is losing out on warcasters / warlocks & heavies. Yes, being able to throw down with heavy jacks / beasts is a ton of fun, but like I noted above, there's so much more to the game than that and you can get your fix of casters / heavies from WMH. That doesn't meant that COI should automatically be a no-go. The Command cards played during a game of COI are essentially fun mini-feats, as opposed to a single powerful feat for a warcaster / warlock.

Lack Of Support / Cards / Updates

Easily one of the most often mentioned complaints is that PP is no longer actively supporting COI. One of the tag-along complaints with that is that the Commander Upgrade cards aren't in the card database or included in the download you can get from DriveThruRPG. These are no doubt legitimate gripes. However, I don't think that alone is reason to write off the game.

Coming from the board game world (as both a player & a professional published game designer), I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see a company like PP that regular interacts with their players online. Two of my designs were published by one of the largest, most-notable Euro board game publishers in America and they communicated SIGNIFICANTLY less with us as paid designers / developers than PP does with their players.

For a publisher / developer to regularly communicate directly with players is almost unheard of in the Euro board game world. Games are published & all but forgotten about as far as publishers are concerned. They quickly move on to the next game / KS (which is a topic for another day / blog) with no regard for answering player's concerns about things that are unbalanced or need updating in a game. That doesn't stop many of these games from still seeing plenty of table time for years and years after they're published.

I say all that to say that PP not actively publishing updates for COI is hardly reason to consider the game dead. Is it fun to play? Obviously, that's subjective, but from what I've seen online, quite a few people enjoy it to this day. That alone means the game isn't "dead" and it's from these players that the game gets new life breathed into it.

For instance, I just discovered & joined the COI group on FB and the first post I saw was a quick reference for casualty rolls made by another player. Along those same lines, I started working on making a PDF for the updated / newer Commander Upgrade cards that I can put on DropBox. I also plan on making a quick reference guide to cover the differences between WMH & COI for things like "Tough", "Grievous Wounds", "Arc Node", etc.

In the same way that the community has kept Mordheim going for all these years since GW stopped supporting it, I can see the community around Company of Iron doing the same for it. 

Miscellaneous Complaints

"But...but....but model X doesn't work / is too overpowered and without PP to balance it, the whole game is broken". I see that as the same thing with Brawlmachine's epic list. Obviously, we haven't come across any models that fit this description in our 1 play, but if / when we do, we'd just opt to not play with that model. Since we pretty much play Brawlmachine exclusively, we don't tend to have any of the more super powerful models that could potentially break smaller games.

"I don't like cards". Well, then COI clearly isn't for you. Personally, Donna & I enjoy how the card play adds a new element into our decision making as the game plays out.

"It doesn't have a continuous narrative where my warband improves from game to game". To that, I say try out Fallen Corvis. For Donna & I, we have no desire for an RPG-style continual narrative campaign sort of game. What we're looking for out of COI is a quick skirmish game for work nights, where each play is its own unique game without the concern for what happened in the last play.

Why Don't You Just Play X?

Whenever COI is brought up, a number of replies counter with suggestions to play Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika, Riot Quest, or Fallen Corvis. I'll start off by saying that from what I've read / seen in videos, all 3 of those games look to be solid and there's a decent chance that we'll try each of them at some point.

The game play to Warcaster looks really, REALLY fun. It looks like they took what they started with COI, streamlined it a bit, & put a new skin / theme on it. Our problem happens to the that new skin. Before we knew anything about how Warmachine played, we were drawn in by the steampunk theme. On top of that, the overall feel of the designs of WMH models really connects with both of us. Warcaster's sci-fi theme & overly-robotic vibe doesn't really appeal to us.

While Riot Quest essentially has the same aesthetic as WMH, the game play is too different for us to feel justified in spending the money at this point. We were able to use almost all the models we already have built & painted for Warmachine to get into our first game of COI last night. That made the choice an obvious one when faced with which one we were going to jump into first. 

Also, if I'm being honest, the somewhat "silly" feel to the art in RQ isn't as appealing to us, but that's not enough to keep us from eventually trying it out. From what we've read, Riot Quest is going to be getting a new KS campaign some time in the next few months. It's pretty safe to say that we'll likely use that as our jumping on point to give it a shot. 

Last, and most certainly not least, is Fallen Corvis. When I first started reading the rules to FC, I was blown away. There is SO much to love about it. How they handle difficult terrain, moving up / down terrain, and so much more to make for clean, well-thought out rules. 

Unfortunately, the more we dug into it, we learned that because FC is meant to be a continual narrative game, characters are not allowed. I hate to say it, but that was a deal breaker for us & not just because our limited models owned / built / painted include many characters, but because we LIKE those characters. So, the option to just proxy model A to be something that's allowed in FC doesn't work for us. Also as noted, with one of its main draws being the continued narrative campaign play being something that doesn't appeal to us, we chose to go with COI instead for our first foray into small WMH skirmish games. 

Wrap Up

Company of Iron certainly isn't perfect, but then again, no game is, and the situation with a lack of support from PP isn't ideal.

However, at the end of the day, Donna & I are faced with one simple question:

Is it fun?

For us, the answer to that is a resounding "yes" and that's all that matters in the end.