In October, onepagerules released their major yearly updates for all of their game systems. In years past, this has primarily been when they rebalance points costs, add a few new units based on upcoming model releases, and add or remove some upgrade options based on player feedback. This year, we saw a major reexamination of every army list and a fundamental change in the game's design philosophy. We've been using 3.5 and the new army lists for the last few months of our Border Princes campaign and, despite what some of my IG and discord posts may have implied, the game has not been destroyed by all of the changes. Regiments remains what I consider the best rules light rank and flank option, though it has nearly all of the same problems it had in 3.4 and several new ones.
Before I get into the details of any changes the update introduced, it is worth noting where Regiments sits among all the games OPR produces and supports. Grimdark Future and Age of Fantasy are the primary focus of the developers and act as the gateways into OPR's little world. They are both clearly intended to be alternatives to 40k and Age of Sigmar for people who are not interested in the complexity or expense of Games Workshop's rules. These two games are completely compatible and most OPR tournaments allow for army lists from both games. This, along with a few anonymous playtesting groups, is where the feedback on the health of the game comes from. Regiments uses the exact same army lists as regular Age of Fantasy with some minor changes to rules that would not function properly or fairly with the movement restrictions it introduces. GDF and AoF are fairly boring games, but the addition of restricted movement adds a strategic depth the game was missing before. This is not the kind of game the designers are trying to make nor the game most of their playerbase is looking for. Per their yearly community poll, it is their least popular game by far. With no organized play structure like GDF or AoF, there is no pipeline for design feedback from skilled players. What they did with Regiments was accidentally make a great game that they do not care about at all.
So, why the big exposition about Regiments, its player count, and the inattention of the developers? I think all of that explains the strange decisions they made rolling out 3.5. A common complaint from people about OPR's games is that everything feels fairly generic. Coming from games where theme and game mechanics are heavily pushed (like GW!), I can understand the feeling that your special little guys just don't feel as special as they could. It takes time to see how evocative and game changing one or two rules can be and to really understand the totality of the system. Regardless, the complaints won out and they added a lot more razzamatazz to everything. More AP, more movement, more saves! Maybe this makes AoF or GDF better; I have no idea. I don't play those games. But, I do not think they did anything positive for Regiments. Remember! Regiments shares all of its army lists with AoF. I am almost certain Regiments and how these changes would play there was not on their minds when they made these decisions.
The good news is the core of the game is almost entirely unchanged from 3.4. There's no added flexibility with movement, line of sight is still very much a consideration for shooting, and there are still few opportunities for a free reform. As a bonus, it seems like they realized how difficult they made life for people taking multiple casters (ME) and requiring line of sight to wizards to help you cast AND the target of your spells. 360 degree casting is back, baby! That's going to save at least 20 minutes of geometric problem solving in all of my games. For a lot of people, this is all that's going to matter. Regiments still plays like Regiments and if all you want is some basic rules to play a less time consuming version of WHFB while you have a beer with a friend, you will continue to do just that with no concern. You can stop reading here!
The bad news is that there is a lot to complain about otherwise. To prevent this post from spiraling out of control, I am going to write about what I see as the worst offenders: the proliferation of bonus movement, new rules that are small variants of existing ones, and a failure to correct problems from 3.4 and earlier.
One of the most powerful tools in Regiments is threat extension. If you have some way to break the symmetry of movement and threaten a charge when your opponent can't, you are in very good shape. As 3.4 wound down, the development team stated they were going to be removing rules like March (Once per activation, move another unit within 12" up to 6") from the game because the asymmetry they introduced was too powerful. Who won the game was often correlated with who had March in their army list. There were also a number of spells across the armies that provided bonus movement and armies with the best versions of those spells and access to cheap wizards were, you guessed it, really good. Those had to go, too. I think these were positive plans for the game's health and it felt like the developer truly understood what needed to be done. Instead, the developer gave 10 of the 35 armies a static movement advantage as their army-wide special rule. All of these are able to be further improved via spells or hero abilities. Beyond this, there are a few spells lists where a bonus movement spell survived or somehow got even better! The bonus movement spells and abilities are almost entirely in lists where they already have a bonus as an army-wide rule. This is a huge proliferation in bonus movement that goes completely against their stated goals of reducing movement asymmetry. And because the spells are not well distributed, you're much more likely to see match ups where a player has no bonuses while their opponent has +6" to rushes/charges. The additional mobility lets you pick your fights, minimize counter-attack, and trade units more favorably.
This interacts very poorly with the facing rules for Regiments, too. The biggest part of the game is managing unit placement and facing. Carefully moving outside an enemy's threat range and adjusting your facing with a pivot to prevent a flank charge is the meat and potatoes of the game. Units with 20" threat ranges (there are more of those than you think!) invalidate that as they threaten such a huge portion of the table. Their speed makes it easy to get past the enemy and threaten long range flank charges. Fundamentally, your decisions about movement and positioning matter less as overall mobility increases in the game. Why they acknowledged the power of these abilities and then chose to make the situation worse is the most bewildering part of the army list changes. I can't imagine they play much better in AoF.
OPR grew in popularity because it did exactly what was on the tin: it gave you the core of the 40k, AoS, or WHFB experience you wanted without the bloat or time investment. A big part of making that work well was having minimal overlapping rules. 3.5 goes in the exact opposite direction, adding a slew of conditional special rules and variants of existing ones.
Let's start by looking at one of the conditional weapon rules they added to the game:
Shit like this is everywhere. One gives AP(+2) if who you are fighting is Tough(3) to Tough(9). Another is like Rend but on a 6 gives AP(2) instead of AP(4). There's distance dependent rules like "Get AP(+1) when firing at enemies over 9" away" that need to be checked. With the way things are statted and pointed in this game, there just isn't any benefit to the kind of granularity these rules are attempting. In addition to this horde of variants and conditionals, there are some just plain garbage rules. My personal favorite terrible rule is this one:
Not only does this rule barely do anything, but it makes you roll Def twice. Just make it ignore cover or give it Shred! This is complicating the game for no discernable benefit. That's kind of how I feel about 3.5 overall.
What is maybe the most painful part of the change to 3.5 is the total failure to address Ambush. In 3.3, it worked almost exactly as it does in AoF and GDF. At the beginning of a turn, you could place the ambushing unit anywhere on the table so long as you were more than 12" from an enemy. This was a good idea, because the facing part of Regiments makes getting a free rear or side charge incredibly powerful. However, many ambushing units either had easy musician access to get a 13" charge, an Ambush variant with an exception to how close they could be placed to an enemy, or an innate movement bonus. It was bad and in 3.4 they tried to fix it by restricting Ambushers to being placed within 6" of a table edge and more than 6" away from enemies. On paper, this looks like a reasonable fix but this made things even worse, as now you no longer needed a movement bonus to be able to charge! Sure, your opponent could run straight forward towards the middle of the table to avoid it, but there were probably bad guys waiting there, too. This made Warning Cry (Can't Ambush within 18" of this model) an absolute must-take to prevent your opponent from getting free rear or flank charges. Ambush was so powerful that when discussing why Vampiric Undead were so good in 3.4, I thought having cheap casters with a good spell list and easy Warning Cry access was better than ignoring Shaken. Yes, Ambush is that fucking good.
So, what does 3.5 do to address it? They maintain the need to be within 6" of a table edge but now an ambushing unit must be 9" away from enemies. No exceptions. If you've ever seen numbers before, you'll immediately realize that 9" is less than 12", which is how far most units can charge. Sorry zombies, you suck now but everyone else can still slam into the back of a unit of Steve's Guard Knights turn 2 and make him question why he bothers playing this game. "Well I guess it is good that Warning Cry exists" is what my smartest readers will be thinking about now and I sadly have to inform you that they removed it in favor of a new rule called Repel Ambushers that does the same thing but is only a 12" range. Yeah, 12" like it was in 3.3. Meaning Ambush is still a problem, they've just limited who gets to use the most powerful rule in the game to the armies with movement bonuses! The number of units who can't charge from ambush in 3.5 but could in 3.4 is just zombies as far as I can tell. Even Dwarf Coal Miners can hit the magical 13" charge! None of this solved any problems, they just changed who gets to be an asshole and removed the only counter-play.
I could go on about smaller issues I have with the direction the game is going but those gripes are not things that make or break a game system. They do add more to the mountain of evidence that suggests OPR neither understands what kind of games it wants to make nor the kind of games their players are looking for. They seem desperate to break from the perception that they are just Temu GW with the IP filed off but don't know how to do it. Whatever is behind these decisions, it is a tragedy that they do not see they have something very special with Regiment even with all the problems they've created. 3.5 isn't the end of the game or anything like that, but it is an indication that the players cannot look to OPR to fix any of its problems. Almost all of the problems of 3.5 were introduced via army lists and that provides players with a place where they can implement their own solutions. In spite of the flaws I have written about, Regiments is still a good game that is worth playing - please, do not let my gripes deter you from trying it. It’s just a shame that it’s being held back from being a great one.
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