8th Ed. The Not So New Empire

[Lord Tsunami]

totally off topic, but in my gaming group we houseruled the "big death spells" to allow ward saves and do "multiple wounds (3)" rather than instantly killing things. that made them much more enjoyable tbh. we also made mindrazor unable to reduce enemy armour.

 

[Eladimir]

I think that the mono building being gone is the best thing, for us and for empire. They can have more fun and variety. And I don't have to get smoked by a gunline and can considering bringing monsters again.

 

[Scalenex]

Apparently the empire book doesn't even have 1 arcane item of its own. Sad to see so many of the unique items from army books getting removed in favour of the extended list of common magic items...

Priests fill some of the niches arcane items would normally fill. To a lesser extant their magicky chariots do as well but that's a small part of their role.

 

[strewart]

In my gaming group, we don't use spell 6 in the 8 lores because most of them are broken so none of those options will work... And yeah you are right, a carnosaur would be blow away before it got close.

I think that's a brave stance to take actually. All three of those spells are very risky, they require you to spend a lot of power dice (even with a Level 4) to get it off, and if you don't IF they can be scrolled/dispelled. I don't think they are broken really, they exist to provide a hard counter to certain units (the 'unkillable monster' being the primary thing, along with Deathstar blocks). If you don't have them, you can't kill such targets effectively, and they just steamroll you. Lizardmen and High Elves are especially exposed by not having nukes or counters like 'Mindrazor', as we have no decent monstrous infantry to slay monsters with, and our infantry blocks are overcosted and underpowered.
By forbidding '6' spells, you ignore 'Pit' anyway, which is technically the best nuke the game (it's own Lore nerfs the enemy before it's cast, it doesn't backfire like 'Sun' can, and it kills monsters instead of infantry unlike 'Dwellers').

Well this is a little off topic for this thread, but essentially what I found was I could drop a dwellers every 2-3 turns and essentially nullify an opponent's unit just like that. I didn't find it much fun, and obviously my opponents definitely did not find it fun either, so we agreed to ditch them. It does make it a bit harder to deal with monsters and hordes, but IMO they should be hard to deal with otherwise we are just playing scissors paper rock on a large scale.