Prodos Games

Andreas Micheel from development crew shares his thoughts on Warzone 2.3

First of all: Why did we do this?

We have a very dedicated rules crew behind the scenes – some of which are hardcore players and really playtest a lot. Still, even the hardcore gamer gets bested by some even more hardcore gamer who at some points finds out that you can use the “Pivot” (now Orientate) free action to get into CC with Rapid Deployment Troops without losing an AP.

Now, things like these are bad.

Also, 2.0 made many characters much more available – but still some of them are overpriced and aren’t used much. Take the Immortal. In 1.0 he was at 285 Points. 1.5 made him 235 Points. In 2.0, he dropped to 160 Points, which still proving too much, so that in 2.3 he will finally settle at 145 Points. Other characters will get a similar attention. In the end, it turned out to be a lot of balancing changes. We know for a fact that there will never be a perfect balance, yet we aim to make as many units and characters playable as possible. Obviously there are many changes in here and we can’t explain each and every one, so I´ll stick to the big topics:

Character cost

While we made vehicles, especially the light variants of the heavy vehicles, much more available, characters still were underused, generally. So – chop chop – off came a LOT of points! From The Venusian Marshal (-25 PTS) to Mitch Hunter who is now joined by his dog for free we did a lot to bring these heroes back to the tables! Obviously, perfect balance doesn’t exist and if you look at every unit from a competitive perspective, you still will have variances. But we try our best here.

Cleaning up

Since 2.0 some things piled up that really seemed superfluous or just didn’t work out. One example were some weapon types that never got used (LE/ SE etc.) so they were deleted from the book. Another thing were unused or underused abilities like Stay Frosty or Unblinking Eye so we patched those to be more meaningful.

Balancing

Most changes though in this errata are balancing changes. We know for a fact (see above) that there´s never a state where two units have different abilities but the same power regardless of circumstances. Any Rapid Deployment squad will now agree wholeheartedly. But still there were units that turned out way too good for what they were designed to do. One example are Macurian Maculators that not only were super hard to kill but also abused the Grenade rules so that they did much more damage than they should. Visionaries on the other hand seemed to perform quiet the way they should until someone found out that they could be buffed with Impenetrable Armour and thus were neigh impossible to kill. So that option is now gone.

My personal favourite on the balancing front are Mirrormen. They never really worked the way they should. Now opponents within 18” must test to not shoot against them regardless of their own facing. I hope they add a lot to Cybertronic strategy and can be seen on the battlefield often!

If you feel there´s something missing in this errata, there probably is. There are some items on our watchlist that we are aware of. One example is Ilian as a faction. You may have noticed the nerfs we put into place, especially regarding shooting through portals. In the end we all will have to wait for Ilian as a faction to be released so that we get more feedback from players, because if we learned one thing, it is: Something is not broken because it dominates YOUR meta - we consider it broken if that thing breaks multiple metas. Sometimes you just haven’t found the right solution to the problem. We encourage players to seek advice by others in the Facebook group but also consider this: if something in this game makes the game totally un-fun: why not just make a house rule? Even for tournament play, this would be an option if made public by the tournament director beforehand.  Obviously we still would want to know, gather data and try to seek a solution that leaves the unit playable but not broken anymore.

Our goal is for you to have fun playing the game. And as it is a game, I can only encourage you to set having fun as your goal too.

You can download Warzone 2.3 Errata from your Downloads section:

(PDF) Corporate Warbook 2.3.1