All of my models get a white stripe on the back of their base, which I then use a roman numeral on to identify the model. This is great for when I have half a dozen of the same model in two different troops and they both meet up in the middle of the field; I can easily tell which models activate with which troop. The white stripe also served to ID their rear base, but even tho that is no longer necessary, I still find the white stripe handy for numbering.
And honestly, if you were familiar with Warlord 1.x, you'll know that Cohesion didn't matter the majority of the time, and even when it did, the area of Cohesion for a leader was an 18" radius... that's a 36" diameter circle, and considering Warlord is generally played on a 4'x4' table, there was very little area of the table that was not in Cohesion range. With the battlefield representing a little more than the size of a football field, it was hard to justify keeping Cohesion (which added little to the game before) at this scale for a skrimish game. The other route would have been to entirely rework what Cohesion meant and how it worked, likely to the detriment of the speed of game-play. Also, from a personal perspective, one of the biggest gripes about what Cohesion did before was opened the door for a model to be totally lost from the board (regardless of point-cost) for failing a DIS check.
Strength in numbers (especially since it is now more difficult to get support bonuses) is still going to be your greatest reason for keeping models somewhat close to one another. If you opponent has any speed at all on the table, if you spread too thin, he will piece-meal you to death.
Finally, as has been indicated several times already, what you have in your hands is *only* the core rulebook. It only contains the rules and the 10 core armies; the game had languished without a new rulebook for far too long. It could have been kept in development for another year, and we could have added all the "mini" factions, the new factions, campaign rules, stunts, and more to it, but it would have meant even more time that players would have had without the new rules. It also would have meant a massive rulebook that probably would have had a price point twice as high, which would have made it far less attractive to newcomers or to old players that had walked away from 1.x because of the instability of the game.
I hope this gives you the answers you are looking for regarding why some of the things worked out the way the did. Not everyone is going to like all the changes; you can't please all of the people all of the time. The design team put forth its best effort to keep the things that worked, tweak the things that were cool but just not quite right, and revamp or discard the things that didn't work at all. I think I speak for all us when I say that we just hope that you like it enough to give it chance.
~v
Edited by Shakandara, 06 August 2009 - 09:40 AM.
