Yeah there is a lot of hit and miss in Man O' War, but I don't take the game as seriously as I do other games where I might be more concerned with balance. Man O' War is pure fun to me, and there is so much character in the fleets, even if some border on ridiculous. I have heard even modern GW criticize the Bretonnians for having cannons, for example. Maybe they should have trebuchets but who cares. In all honesty I hardly think in a real world setting, that the Bretonnians themselves wouldn't adopt Empire cannon anyway. Or even the Elves, but whatever. Should the Skaven even have a fleet? Who cares? Its fun!
The thing that amazes me still is that with the limited number of ship types for each fleet, how whatever strategy you might try to employ gets thrown out the window when ships start taking damage, making each game different than the one before it. You can have three ships of the line, each with a different damaged area, completely mess up what you are trying to do with them. And the scenarios are really fun too. I normally don't bother with many for most games but I made it a point to play all of them.
Then the expansion sets... geez. They add so many layers it can be a little overwhelming remembering all that can do what, but that can be a joy too. When you look at the basic game, you think, "Oh there is not much to this" but there is a ton of game in that starter set, but the expansions just kick it out to infinity. Then you ally different fleets and come up with different combinations and so on. Its pretty remarkable.
It just seems to have so much covered. Even the Man O' War cards, giving you a way to even out points between opposing fleets, and the variety in the cards. Those kind of mechanics are long gone and are probably never coming back. I can see why, and understand, but at the same time these older games just have so much more character, and Man O' War just oozes character. I don't know many games where a single model like the Great Winged Terror or Black Ark are so visually imposing on a game board yet so small compared to something like a 40k Baneblade.
There were some great supporting articles in White Dwarf too, like for different kinds of shore forts. I have some Citadel Journal articles too introducing Undead fleets as well, and some other goodies. The cool thing is that the writers knew no models would ever be made so they based the ships off existing models from various fleets you could just customize.
I had some hope for Dreadfleet, but I heard it was terrible and not what Man O' War was. I did however, pick up the gorgeous play mat that was included in the game and I use that for Man O' War.
I think if my house was on fire and I could only grab three games, they would be Man O' War, Warhammer Quest, and Epic Space Marine v2. Its kind of amusing how much I like Man O' War and Warhammer Quest, both set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, but I never got into WFB until recently. Man O' War and WQ are light-hearted, fun games, and I wonder if WFB around those days was the same. Things def got darker in 6th, I can tell that.
