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Author Topic: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??  (Read 3991 times)

Offline mkultra99

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Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« on: February 10, 2021, 06:51:40 PM »
Now I know SPQR was to Ancients gaming what 2020 was to a lot of people. Seems like Warlord has hired on a new dude to fix it and release it as SPQR 2.0? One Darron Bowley. Seems he works in the biz, so maybe not all bad..? Couldn't be worse than Matt Sprange..? Any one got an inside scoop on what kind of changes?

Offline pixelgeek

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2021, 07:32:33 PM »
Now I know SPQR was to Ancients gaming what 2020 was to a lot of people.

Such a perfect summary of the game

Online Mammoth miniatures

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2021, 08:59:52 PM »
My biggest hope is that they actually nail down what they want the game to be - the rules read as a man on man skirmish ala mordhiem but the troop options and units just made it into a smaller hail ceaser.
it's a shame they botched it - play it with a handful of heroes and one or two individual troops and it's quite fun.

Offline Wiegraf

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #3 on: February 11, 2021, 02:09:17 AM »
Quote
My biggest hope is that they actually nail down what they want the game to be - the rules read as a man on man skirmish ala mordhiem but the troop options and units just made it into a smaller hail ceaser.
it's a shame they botched it - play it with a handful of heroes and one or two individual troops and it's quite fun.

Mordheim style would be interesting. I did not like horde VS space marine sort of style when I last looked at the rules.  . I ended up selling the rulebook really quick. Hoping 2.0 is a decent game!

Offline Ninefingers

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #4 on: February 11, 2021, 07:43:59 AM »
My biggest hope is that they actually nail down what they want the game to be

I think you nailed it. It was sold as skirmish warfare, but from the gameplay videos it just seemed to be - each side has two units, they run at each other, you roll some dice and then ten minutes later you declare a winner. There didn't seem to be any substance to the game. I think Warlord have to develop their games a lot more and stop publish things that people have been working on in their lunch break.

Offline NurgleHH

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #5 on: February 11, 2021, 08:29:05 AM »
SPQR is a coloured Book with nice pictures and in my opinion the reason why warlord is in the moment not working on the planned Armybooks for Hail Cesar...
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Offline mmcv

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #6 on: February 11, 2021, 08:34:22 AM »
Interesting. I'd picked up a copy a while back in the hope it might give me something to do with the 28mm figures I'd bought before moving into the smaller scales but found it pretty underwhelming when reading, never even bothered to test it out and essentially forgot about it. Didn't realise how much negatively there was towards it until this week when I started seeing comments about a V2.

Offline SteveBurt

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #7 on: February 11, 2021, 11:20:14 AM »
I'd think that Saga: Age of Hannibal or Infamy, Infamy have filled the niche SPQR was intended for

Online Mammoth miniatures

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #8 on: February 11, 2021, 04:15:11 PM »
Didn't realise how much negatively there was towards it until this week when I started seeing comments about a V2.

You clearly never checked the SPQR facebook group!  lol

I think you nailed it. It was sold as skirmish warfare, but from the gameplay videos it just seemed to be - each side has two units, they run at each other, you roll some dice and then ten minutes later you declare a winner. There didn't seem to be any substance to the game. I think Warlord have to develop their games a lot more and stop publish things that people have been working on in their lunch break.

Yes it was a huge issue in the community - I actually pre ordered it because I was quite excited for a skirmish warband game for historicals from a big publisher, but went into it kind of having to guess what warlord were actually trying to promote. Apparently most who bought into it had the same issue, with some people saying it played best as an age of sigmar sized game with small armies and others like me saying it worked well is you played with less than 10 men. I think which side you fell on was decided by which of the mechanics you chose to actually use - since there were rules for protracted man on man fights and then rules for phalanx maneuvering that just didn't mesh together. 
Add the apparent lack of quality control with regards to photos (minis having arms cropped off due to bad formatting) , stylistic consistency and spelling and it all felt very rushed.
ultimately the botched launch and apparent dumping of the system into warlords growing mass grave of unsupported games killed alot of enthusiasm. then the fact that 2nd edition was announced before some people had even finished reading the first book and yeah...not a great start.

Offline Easy E

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #9 on: February 11, 2021, 06:11:01 PM »
I think there could be some scope for a small scale, man-on-man skirmish game for Ancients but I don't think Warlord are the ones to do it.  They need to move models! 

I think the hardest part about small scale skirmish, man-on-man Ancients is that our sources tell us next to nothing about this very subject.  They barely tell us anything about the big battles, much less skirmishes and man-on-man fighting. 

As I think about it more, I believe such a man-on-man skirmish would need an incredibly tight scope (Like Gangs of Rome) or be placed in a time of "Homeric Myth", or just alt-History  (Like Broken Legions) to make any sense.  Anything else might be a bit..... disjointed feeling. 
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Online Mammoth miniatures

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #10 on: February 11, 2021, 06:27:45 PM »
I think there could be some scope for a small scale, man-on-man skirmish game for Ancients but I don't think Warlord are the ones to do it.  They need to move models! 

I think the hardest part about small scale skirmish, man-on-man Ancients is that our sources tell us next to nothing about this very subject.  They barely tell us anything about the big battles, much less skirmishes and man-on-man fighting. 

As I think about it more, I believe such a man-on-man skirmish would need an incredibly tight scope (Like Gangs of Rome) or be placed in a time of "Homeric Myth", or just alt-History  (Like Broken Legions) to make any sense.  Anything else might be a bit..... disjointed feeling.

I think any light fantasy system could handle it. SOBAH does it well enough, MESBG could be useful too.

Whilst you certainly could go down a mythological avenue, I don't think it's too hard to do it by simply limiting the narrative scope of of the game.a paragraph of intro text can go a very long way in telling us how a game is intended to be played.
Instead of "hey 5 romans and some gauls had a little battle and that is in some way related to the conquest of gaul" you'd have your games be more scenario based - raiding missions, escorting diplomats, city riot control, scouting groups getting captured etc.

as to the reality of it once you take the focus away from the actual recorded history of the armies you'd likely find the physical reality was as brutal and vicious as at any other point in history. sword goes in man, man dies, other man steals his sheep.

with SPQR warlord didn't do this, they didn't commit to any real scope - it was at once a game of grand battle and kebab shop fist fights.

Offline Easy E

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #11 on: February 11, 2021, 09:40:15 PM »
Yeah, I get that scenarios and such are the way forward. 

I am more thinking about how do you expand to a Mordheim type experience where you can have a battle of Romans vs Gauls week 1, Romans vs. Numidians week 2, Numidians vs. Successors week 3, etc.

That would be a strained narrative, hence why the "scope" needs to be a bit tighter.  Such as a certain year with a tight set of forces available. 

I am not sure I am making sense, but it could be a limit to my own creative vision. 

Online Mammoth miniatures

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #12 on: February 11, 2021, 11:30:20 PM »
Yeah, I get that scenarios and such are the way forward. 

I am more thinking about how do you expand to a Mordheim type experience where you can have a battle of Romans vs Gauls week 1, Romans vs. Numidians week 2, Numidians vs. Successors week 3, etc.

That would be a strained narrative, hence why the "scope" needs to be a bit tighter.  Such as a certain year with a tight set of forces available. 

I am not sure I am making sense, but it could be a limit to my own creative vision.

I get what you're saying - a bridging narrative to explain the change of time/location etc.
I think perhaps if SPQR had pitched itself as small battles between mercenary/veteran units it could have got away with having a larger geographical scope.
Then they could expand with new time periods in sourceboks/campaign expansions. ancient greece/rome/romano britain etc.

SPQR as is just says "eh, spartans vs romans sure whatever don't care." and it seems most people figured out very quickly that romans are basically space marines in this game so you may aswell play them.

Offline Codsticker

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #13 on: February 12, 2021, 03:41:30 AM »
I get what you're saying - a bridging narrative to explain the change of time/location etc.
Hard to do convincingly in a generic historical game which I think Warlord must have intended of SPQR even though they didn't do a very good job of explaining it.

Offline craigjwoodfield

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Re: Sooo... SPQR2.0 ??
« Reply #14 on: February 12, 2021, 06:09:43 AM »
Just one or two play test games should have demonstrated what a steaming turd they had on their hands, but I honestly don't think that Warlord do that anymore. Just rush it out and move onto the next thing.