Retrospective of Overthinking Warcry first year

As first post appeared in the middle of January its a great moment to discuss the current state and future direction of this blog. I have a lot in mind writing this and to not end up with complete mess I need to structure my thoughts a bit. I will split it into 3 parts: history of the blog, my Warcry related personal experiences this year and finally, plans for 2024.

Blog history

The blog was born for 2 main reasons. As I was already spending way too much time thinking about the game, analyzing and listbrewing (as a person, when I really like something I will overthink it a lot and have my mind process “in the background” topics related to my current “obsession”, while doing other stuff. For example, Thunderlizards list was created when I was shopping with my wife) I decided to try and dedicated all that “wasted” energy into creating something valuable and write some of my thoughts. Second reason was simply my disappointment in how shallow the online discourse was. I was naive to think that detailed analysis or more complex ideas will provoke some interesting conversations, but I failed to get any responses that actually challenged my ideas and online discourse while a bit better now (mostly due to theSaltySea introducing terms like “activation advantage” to the masses) is still quite bad. I will keep trying, but my hopes are way lower than a year ago (I am working on big text about activation advantage and sequencing that I hope can generate some conversations).

Obviously over a year of working on OverthinkingWarcry.com a lot of my initial ideas evolved. I want to thank Dan from theSaltySea here as the whole “Netlists” part of the blog was inspired by the idea he wrote on Discord, that for the article based blog to survive and get any following some additional utility has to be implemented that will make people revisit the page. He also threatened that if no one will create a compilation of netlists he will do it himself, so here I am a year later with 25 Netlists, each containing mini-guide on how to use it. As I already mentioned a number lets go to the numbers. Until now the blog was visited 29160 times by 10202 visitors (opening different articles counts as separate views, so the actual number is lower as it also includes visiting navigation pages like “All Lists” or “All Articles”, which are 2 most often visited pages). As I already mentioned the number of Netlist mini-guides I feel I should also mention that this is the 24th Article.

Removing navigation pages from the equation 3 most popular articles were:

1. Universal Abilities and Reactions Guide (May 2023)
2. Best abilities in Warcry (April 2023)
3. Listbuilding to counter the meta (May 2023)

Similarly, the 3 most often viewed Netlists were:

1. Thiccboi Cardio (theSaltySea’s list, no longer legal due to CoS update)
2. Kharadron Overlords for Rumble Pack (3-1 at Adepticon)
3. Ironjawz for Core Book (it’s my list that I won a tournament with)

The WordPress yearly stats nicely show how the views and visitors were changing over the year (with views per visit staying quite consistently around 3)

The blog slowed down after the May spike as the articles following the 2 big hits (first and third most popular texts this year) failed to generate similar reaction. I learned from this that the more attractive for beginners my topic was the more traction it received (this seems obvious, but this kind of observations are always obvious from hindsight). As my main focus was the competitive part of the hobby I had a big dilemma there – do I go for the popular topics to maximize views, or do I go more hardcore path that won’t be as attractive for casual players (that heavily outnumber us “tryhards”). I decided to go with more tournament oriented route, but decided to build some bridges (for example the Dictionary article, that I hoped will be very popular and often presented to new players by people from the community, sadly it wasn’t) for less experienced players that wanted to follow. I also didn’t want to go the “easy” route and simply react to new releases and news. Currently I’m happy with how the blog function and since some time my posting schedule averages to 2 articles per month. I hope I will be able to keep releasing articles at similar pace next year, but I expect my first baby at the end of January so it might be difficult. More on the future in last part of the article.

Lastly I’m happy that some things from this blog impacted a community a bit. I’m very happy that Thunderlizards list became quite popular and my battlepack was used in few tournaments (including 2 editions of TTS league, greetings to TTS folks) and some aspects of it influenced work of other people (like for example the minor/major victory change). Lastly I heard few times that I changed the listbuilding approach to quads for some people and changed or inspired few people in some other ways – thanks for this kind of comments as reading them is the most fun part about this whole Overthinking Warcry project.

What was this year for me (game wise)

This year I played a great variety of different warbands. The most numerous was 14 fighters Gitz spam, the most elite warband was only 4 fighters (Destruction “greatest hits” – Tyrant, Gnashtoof, Megaboss and Torka for the 2+ net). I played 11 factions in total this year: SCE Thunderstrike, CoS (pre change), Daughters of Khaine, Tzeentch daemons, Soulblight Gravelords, Ossiarch Bonereapers, Flesh-Eater Courts, Nighthaunt, Gloomspite Gitz, Ironjawz and Kruleboyz. The power level of my lists varied even more than the factions I played, as I played both Wanderer based CoS list and filthy Grave Guard spam. As far as my competitive results are concerned I played 6 tournaments:

• In January I finished 7th (2-1-1) with my SBGL in 16 player tournament. Tournament prep and battle reports from all my games are available as articles. It was the biggest tournament we had in our city, few players traveled 350km (220 miles for imperial folks) to this event and one of them defeated me. This is what happen when you bring a knife to a gun fight – I didn’t have a monster and 4 out of top 6 places had monsters in list, including both Zombie Dragons I met and lost/drawed against.
• In March it was me who traveled 350km to the biggest tournament in Poland (it was planned for 32 seats but sadly only 25 players showed up, but it was stacked, as there were representatives of 7 bigger cities, from our local community we also sent quite a strong team as whole top3 from our tournament that happened last month was there, one of us took first – congrats Tomek). My SBGL finished 14th with a disappointing 2-2-0 score, my prep is also available as article HERE.
• For the next tournament in April I ditched SBGL for Ironjawz and finished 1st with 3-0-0 score in 14 player tournament. Short tournament summary HERE.
• As I already had top 2 finishes with both Destruction and Death (2nd place with SBGL late 2022) for June I decided to switch to Order and used my freshly created Thunderlizards (HERE is an article with list creation) and finished 2nd with 3-1-0 score.
• In September our TO decided to give “Test of Champions” a chance and we used battleplans from White Dwarf. I played SCE Thunderstrike (list creation HERE) and finished second with 2-0-1 score.
• In December for the last tournament of the year I decided to move back to SBGL. It was a small local tournament but as we used Mark of Chaos battlepack designed here on this blog it was special to me. I finished 2nd again with 2-1-0 score. My prep is available HERE and the design process of the battlepack is HERE.

Overall this year my combined tournament score is 14-5-2 with 3 different grand alliances, which is not bad considering that for a second year in a row in our local community there is only single player that I lost to (my combined score against this guy is currently 2-3 across different tournaments, good job Andrzej).

Moving to less hardcore gaming, my biggest “casual” achievements is definitively having positive win rate with DoK and Tzeentch deamons. The craziest Warcry experience I had this year was definitly a casual game I had in first half of the year. I played Gitz and my list was basically Stabba with spear spam, single bounder and a Loonboss (for his quad, see picture below) and played against Seraphon mix of Saurus and skinks with Slann supported by Company Captain.

This game I had 2 quads of sixes that I spent on +6 attack bubble in the first 3 turns. I rolled a ton of dices (I had 13 bodies so there were a lot of fighters in 6″ range) that resulted in … 2 kills … in total, for the whole 3 rounds. As it was a treasure mission not everything was lost, but starting last turn it was looking quite grim for me and … I rolled a quad of sixes again (this time Loonbos was already dead and I had only 3 fighters left). My opponent started and killed on of my guys (now 2 left) and it was time to give another Gitz specific quad a go (see below).

I did the measurements, calculations and the only play that could give me a draw (it was 3-1 in treasures at this point and one of my 2 remaining gitz was relatively safe boingrot bounder with his treasure) was a double move towards unharmed company captain (16 wounds), rolling 2 crits on 2 dice and then picking up treasure and surviving to the end of the round. I obviously managed to roll this 2 sixes and I never was more happy from a draw. The whole game I killed 3 fighters, lost 11 and ended up with a draw.

Plans for the future of Overthinking Warcry

I will start with the simplest plans – articles that are currently in various stages of development, so you can expect topics listed below to appear sooner than later:

• Tactics for treasure missions (had half of it ready and deleted it :/)
• Randomness in battleplan generation in competitive environment
• Slaves to Darkness miniguide in Netlists (allied Fomo and Myrmidon)
• One box collection extension: Ogors
• Lessons learned for designing a battlepack and release of next one
• Huge text on Sequencing and activation advantage

I would love to keep the average of one article every 2 weeks for the next year, but due to my first baby arriving in January the beginning of the year might be rough.

I would love to extend the type of content I do and seriously attack the topic of battle reports with heavy emphasis on planning and strategy. I will have to switch to a better phone next as my current one makes very bad photos.

I think I should try to implement AI tools into my writing to improve my language. I am aware that my “style” isn’t the easiest to read especially due to very long sentences I tend to write and over usage of both brackets and quotes, not mentioning the incorrect space that I put on purpose before every bracket.

Lastly – I will start Patreon, but I don’t expect it to do extremely well as I promise that none of my content or help will ever be behind a paywall (if you want to consult your list with me just write directly to me on Discord as few people already did and I will try to offer some feedback. I’m very glad that some of the players that already did this managed to win tournaments with the lists I was helping with and some even won a tournament with the list where they ignored my advice)

I would also want to finish my “Beginners corner”. My initial idea was to have 3 articles for people that want to start playing Warcry, 3 articles for people that already started but are very new to the game and 3 articles for people that want to prepare to their first tournament.

Let’s hope that I won’t fail at all of this goals and that most of my articles will end up being decent. As always thanks for sticking to the end and happy new year.