Well, this weekend I stayed the at my friends place from saturday to sunday and we managed four games of Oathmark. It was so long since I last played a rank and flank wargame so it was a great expirience.
The game system have its rough edges and weird things but with a cap of maximum 20 models per unit you can forget about deathstars. It means larger armies means lots of units on the table.
The setting is dark age and more Tolkien than Warhammer in technology. No blackpowder, not even crossbows, so the bow and to some extent the sling is your main ranged weapon, backed by catapults and ballistas. There seem to have been a deliberate desicion to limit the impact of missile weapons to avoid archer spam. The catapults can hurt your large units but you cannot relly on them to win.
In short, the missile fire is there to pave the way for your combat troops to get the upper hand.
The same goes for magic. The magic is mostly about manipulating and boosting troops and terrain with a few direct damage spells. Also, you can only throw one spell per spellcaster per turn. So you must choose wisely. So while magic is useful and helped me at critical moments, it does not win any battle on its own.
While you can with the expansion Oathbreaker create a legendary hero that gets a special trait and can gain more if he or she survive long enough and gains enough XP can buy another that hero becomes increasingly expensive and you can only have one per army. You can take magic items but once again, they are pricey and most of them really are there to boost units more than single heroes.
Lone characters can be used but both commanders and champions first and foremost are there to amplify the unit they are part of, not go on a killing spree through the army.
Monsters are really mean though, but once again, they cost accordingly.
The kingdom building enables you to mix and match what units and races you want, but it always means losing something else. You start out with 10 territories that each enable you to recruit a certain type of troop or troops, but you can never have everything you want. The kingdom building aspect is really a cool feature that forces you to make though desicions that will affect what army you can actually field.
I highly recommend the game and hope more people here desides to try it out, and maybe makes it gets its own subforum here. It is the perfect platform to start a Age of Sigmar Heldenhammer setting. So if you have always wanted to field an Unberogen army, this is the opportunity.
My human kingdom is named Istiria in homage to Stirland, by the way.
