I’m quite excited about the KoW “ambush” for smaller KoW battles - a good opportuntiy for a horrendously slow painter with no ability to stick to one faction for long enough to paint a full KoW army like me to occassionally play a game of KoW! However, I love Vanguard and it got me thinking about how Mantic may take Vanguard…
Note, I have heard not a lot beyond “it hasn’t been forgotten” from Mantic so this is uninformed and a topic for some discussion, but I think the “ambush” rules are great news for Vanguard. I know some people may think that it will limit the number of people taking up Vanguard because they will just do KoW Ambush on the way to KoW, but my take is that it will allow a new edition of Vanguard to be marketed as how the original was actually made… Not an intro to KoW, no need to heavily link the two, just a great fantasy skirmish game that uses the great features from various mantic offerings.
It will give the rules committee/game designers freedom to make Vanguard however they like and will hopefully allow the question “What is Vanguard for…” to be answered. It isn’t an intro to KoW, it’s just a great skirmish game set in Panithor.
Thoughts? Am I reading too much into this? Is this actually terrible for Vanguard as even fewer people will want to play? Does it make absolutely no difference whatsoever?
I agree with you. I always liked Vanguard because it’s a classical Skirmisher and not KoW-light. Let it have it’s place!
Ambush is nice for testing new factions or luring new players into KoW, but Vanguard is a detailed, fun and easy to learn skirmisher. The announcement of Ambush for me personally means one thing: A Vanguard → Ambush → KoW → Siege battle campaign against my friends dwarfs! I’m excited!
I also think the KoW Ambush is not related directly to Vanguard, at least game-wise. It seems that Ambush will just be a tweaked version of KoW working well for games of smaller size, most likely just additional restrictions for army composition, maybe a few special scenarios. Vanguard is a completely different game that only shares the Pannithor universe, fluff and miniatures with KoW, so it will keep its place.
Yes, I realise that KoW ambush is basically a trimmed down/reformatted slightly KoW, but Vanguard was thought of by some as “the way in” to KoW. I feel that if KoW is your thing then you are better going for ambush then into KoW, but this allows Vanguard to be marketed much more as its own stand-alone thing. As such, it opens up the options for V2 as it doesn’t need to be marketed or designed as the “way into KoW”, which I feel kind of hindered it when released version 1.
This will be an interesting watch (thanks!) but it doesn’t really address the question of what mantic might want to do with vanguard. I think ambush allows mantic to market and design vanguard as its own thing and abandon any pretence of it being a route into KoW, which I think is a good thing!
From what I’ve seen of Vanguard, it was never a road into Kings of War. Model-wise, maybe, but not in gameplay.
Model-wise it doesn’t even work out that well, since you can’t use most models as heroes so its a little funky. Plus the whole ‘prototype models in Vanguard make them for KoW’ didn’t work out. I hope Vanguard gets to be its own little thing, Skirmish games are the best.
Absolutely - I feel vanguard suffered from being seen by some, and perhaps marketed, as something it wasn’t. Skirmish should mean that it can be it’s own (awesome) thing!
