Today we’re happy to finally release v3.6 of our games!

After three rounds of beta testing, we are excited for this large update that introduces the Assault rule, updates weapons across all our games, refresh our skirmish games with Triplification, and more.

Looking Into the Future

Whilst some players appreciated the continuous release of large-scale updates, many others have let us know that they’re not enjoying the frequent changes to the games. With v3.6 we’re hoping to get to the end of large-scale updates for years to come, and future updates will be smaller and more focused on tweaking individual armies (about a third of the armies per year), adding new units, but overall not touching the fundamentals of the games or the rulebooks.

The plan would then be to change the updates to the following pace:

• One small update every 6 months, used only to add new units and fix bugs and exploits.
• One balance patch every 12 months, used to tweak armies and units. We might also update the rulebooks at this time, but only to fix typos/errors, and not touching any of the actual rules.
• New edition every 3-5 years, used to update the rulebooks, but only if necessary (otherwise we will delay a new edition until we feel it’s actually worth it)

This is what we’re hoping for, and it seems like a realistic goal that provides a more sustainable update frequency.

Overall Goals

The overall goal of v3.6 is to tweak some of the new rules that were added with v3.5, re-work weapons balance across the board, as well as completely re-design the skirmish formats to be more enjoyable.

This update should bring the lethality of armies down to the more balanced level players were used to pre-v3.5 by changing some of the army-wide rules to not always be active, as well as re-work long standing issues with weapon balance to hybrid units, and tweak a lot of small rules here and there to make the experience overall smoother.

We’re also completely re-designing the skirmish formats to bring them more to the standards set by the other games, making them less swingy, more streamlined, and generally much more fun to play.

Finally, we’re adding some new ways to play the games via the advanced rules, which we hope you will enjoy.

Alright, let’s get to it!

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Tweaked Army-Wide Rules

Since v3.5 we’ve introduced a lot of different army-wide rules, and now we’re tweaking them to make sure that they have a more balanced power level. This means that some of them now have some simple range conditions added to them, so that they’re not always active. We’ve also tweaked ranged conditions to be 9”/6” for shooting/charging, so that they are universally usable by all armies and avoid edge-cases.

We know that army-wide rules are a big topic for the community, and we’re planning to keep tweaking them in the future during our yearly updates. Something we’re curious to try in future alpha/beta tests is to give some of the original army-wide rules ideas from the v3.5 beta a shot again, and see if they fare better now (especially since we now have a more democratic vote via the surveys).

Tweaking Hybrids & The Assault Rules

One of the small grievances some players have are what we call “hybrid” units, which are units that have both lots of ranged attacks and lots of melee attacks, which makes them a little less efficient compared to more specialized units. With v3.6 we’re now allowing those units to specialize into either being ranged units without lots of melee attacks, or melee units with a few ranged attacks.

To help do this, we’re introducing the Assault weapon rule, which is pretty simple:

• Assault: Counts as both a ranged weapon and a melee weapon.

This allows us to create much cleaner weapon profiles, using a single Assault weapon that can be used both for shooting and melee, instead of having to give those units two weapons to represent the shooting and melee parts separately.

Some examples of units that are affected by this change:

• Units with special pistols can now use those in melee as well
• Destroyer-style units with storm guns and heavy melee weapons can now specialize for shooting or melee
• Bikes can now be specialized for melee, with bike-guns that can be used both to shoot and charge
• Cavalry/Chariots with javelins can now use them both to shoot and charge
• Monsters with mounted weapons can now use them both to shoot and charge
• Vehicles with pintle-mounted weapons can use those for shooting and close-range defense

Weapon Re-Works & New Toys

One of the big goals of v3.6 was to re-work weapons as a whole. Some of the key issues we’ve had with weapons so far is that AP has slowly crept up to be on too many weapons, that many weapons didn’t feel like a trade-off between each other, and that units were not following equal rules when being designed, so that some had too many attacks and others too few.

Whilst there were too many individual weapon changes to go into all of them, here are the general highlights:

• New weapon options were added across the board, so now almost every unit has a few weapons to choose from, especially in fantasy (where upgrades used to be few and far between)
• Weapons were tweaked to have more interesting trade-offs between each other, and special rules are being used to add more variety to the loadouts units have access to
• Number of attacks on units were tweaked to make them more equal and balanced, especially for units that had too few attacks on them (usually found on Tough(3) units).
• Army weapon special rules were tweaked, and a handful of new rules were introduced that bring new mechanics to the table (this is an expansion on the tweaks from the v3.5.3 patch)
• In the fantasy games, Hand Weapons now have the Parry rule, which allows them to ignore hits in melee, and is a way to help represent units having swords and shields too

Weapon Re-Naming

Whilst working on the weapons update, we’ve used the opportunity to go back and re-name a lot of the weapons in the games to be more fitting for our universes, which is a necessary step towards the future for OPR. We know that this might cause some initial confusion when playing v3.6, but once you’re used to the new names, it’s back to business as usual.

Hero Improvements

As part of this update, we’ve tweaked heroes in a few different ways, making them more exciting to play, without them becoming too powerful on the table. Here’s the general highlights that’s changed:

• All heroes have more weapons and customization options than before, with different upgrade paths to make them more focused on melee, shooting, or casting spells.
• Hero weapons now always try to maximize the amount of attacks they can have, and we’ve tweaked mounts to maximize the numbers of attacks they provide based on their Tough value.
• We changed rules that used to have a “all models must have this rule” clause to be “most models must have this rule” instead, making it easier to put heroes into most units in their army.
• Friendly units within 6” of heroes with Tough(9) or higher can now take morale tests using the hero’s Quality value, as long as the hero isn’t Shaken, giving some extra utility to monstrous heroes.

Tweaking Spells & Caster

With v3.5 we reduced the power of caster attacks, which has made casters feel a little limp for some players. Whilst we won’t be increasing the attacks again for balance reasons, we’re introducing a few changes to improve casters as a whole.

Here’s the general highlights of the ways that we’ve gone about this:

• Heroes can now be upgraded with a Caster Staff, sacrificing attacks to get +1 to casting rolls. This means that your spells will now go off on a 3+ and you only need to spend 1 spell token to make it go off on a 2+.
• Needing line of sight is not part of the caster rule anymore, but instead is part of the spells themselves. This means that some spells don’t need line of sight anymore, and that you don’t need line of sight to give casters +/- 1 to their rolls.
• The order of spell lists has been tweaked so that specialized spells are at lower levels to be easier and more useful to cast, whilst more generic spells are at higher levels to affect more units and have more potential targets.
• All level 3 spells now get +6” range, making it easier to apply buffs to multiple targets, as well as making it easier to find the right target for your strongest attack spells.

Re-Worked Vehicles

For many years we’ve received feedback from players that vehicles don’t feel quite right in a few areas, and we wanted to address those issues with the v3.6 update.

There are lots of small ways we’re tweaking vehicles, and here’s some general highlights:

• Sponsons now have fewer attacks, so that those vehicles can have more attacks with their main guns. This makes vehicles rely more on their main battle cannons, instead of focusing so much on sponsons.
• Instead of having Impact, vehicles now have an Overrun melee weapon with the Thrust rule. This way vehicles can now defend themselves a bit better in melee, and they get a small bonus when charging.
• Pintle-style weapons now have the Assault rule, and are optional most of the time. This gives players the option to add some extra melee protection for their vehicles, to more reliably avoid being Shaken by a handful of melee attacks.
• Transport numbers have tweaked across vehicles, with dedicated transports keeping Transport(11), whilst attack vehicles and tanks have the option to get Transport(6), and Aircraft have to sacrifice a attacks to get Transport(11).
• Aircraft weapons have been tweaked to have half of their current range, as well as 25% less attacks. Since this means that they now have to get closer to the enemy to be effective, they now give units -1 to hit rolls again.

Point Cost Tweaks

There have been general point cost tweaks across the board, and they’re too many to list here, but here is the overall gist of what has been changed with some general highlights:

• Morale point costs were tweaked to scale better with Quality.
• Attack point costs were tweaked to better scale with range, as well as overall being a bit more expensive.
• Defense point costs were tweaked to scale better with Defense, this includes Regeneration and similar rules.
• Toughness scaling has been tweaked to scale better with Tough values.
• The point costs of everything have been adjusted as a whole, so that whilst the proportions between costs have changed, the total cost of armies shouldn’t be impacted dramatically.

Grimdark Future: Firefight / Age of Fantasy: Skirmish Triplification & Doublification

Over the last 5-6 years there has been a general shift in the skirmish wargaming landscape, and with that there has been more and more demand from players to significantly modify how our skirmish games work to reflect that. With that in mind, we’ve modified some of the core tenets of our skirmish games to make them more streamlined for a new age.

Gone are the days of the wound check. Whilst back in the day this was a staple of skirmish wargames, times have changed, and many players find that it’s a clunky mechanic that gets in the way of the fun, and is hard to learn for new players.

Starting with the v3.6 update, all units in the game are “triplified” and all weapons are “doublified”, that means that all basic units now start at Tough(3) whilst heroes have three times their toughness at Tough(9), and weapons have their stats doubled so that a Battle Rifle now has 2 attacks instead of 1 attack. Different special rules have also been tweaked to better fit this new system, so for example Impact(1) becomes Impact(2) and so on.

Additionally, multiplying everything by three increases the cost of everything, so that a “standard” game is now 600pts/800pts, which has the nice effect of smoothing out a lot of the rounding issues that were present in skirmish before. Whilst there might still be a few edge-cases here and there, they should be much less common, solving another long-standing issue with skirmish.

Morale now works the same as in the other games, unifying everything together, so you take morale tests when units are down to half of their size/toughness, and you compare wounds to see who won melee. Finally, we’ve also re-worked the special movement section to be simpler and fit better with this new style, plus a handful of special rules were tweaked to match.

On the surface the changes are simple, but they do a lot to give the game a completely new feel, and honestly we can’t look back anymore. Playing the skirmish games feels like such a breath of fresh air, and we can’t wait for you to try it.

Advanced Rules Tweaks & New Ways to Play

For those of you that like to play with Advanced Rules, there’s lots of existing stuff that’s been tweaked, and new stuff that’s been added, making for a much better experience. Here are some general highlights:

• Objectives in progressive scoring now provide as many VPs as the current round number. This means that early captures are not as important as late captures, but still give you a leg up.
• 2D6 Casting has been added as an option in the Advanced Casting section. This is an alternative to the Magic Pools casting, and is compatible with the Spell Books and Explosive Backlash system.
• Escalating Battles has been added to the Fog of War rules as a new way to play the game, where players divide their army into different detachments which are deployed in sequence throughout the game.
• Political Intrigue is another new layer that can be added to the game. During the game, instead of activating a unit, players may choose to get a directive which gives units a bonus, with tweaks on which politicians each player has.
• Meat Grinder Battles with Respawning Units is another new way to play the game, where destroyed units are put in reserves with a chance to come back later, ideal for a long afternoon slugfest.
• Meat Grinder Battles with Unit Recruitment adds RTS-style recruitment to the game. Players start the game with a small amount of points to recruit their initial army, and then get more points every round to recruit new units.
• Finally, a new to play with Small-Scales miniatures has been added. Instead of using multi-basing rules, where each base represents a unit with combined stats, you play the game normally but each base represents one model.

Final Thoughts

That’s it for now, below you will find a more comprehensive changelog with all the various tweaks. We’re looking forward to your feedback, and hope that all this work will make players happy for many years to come.