Warmachine In Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

This was our first game of Warcaster: Neo-Mechanica. I was originally hoping to finish assembling and painting all my starter box models before playing ("starting on the right foot" sort of thing), but it just didn't happen. Also I forgot to bring the "wave2" cards so I didn't even run the heavy warjack or hero solo. But one of the good things about WNM is that the game is still pretty balanced even if you have less units in total. So I proxied some Warmachine models for Marcher Worlds:
Coalition Weaver (Koldun Lord)
Ranger Fire Team squad (Cutthroats)
Hunter solo x2 (Widowmaker & Kell)
Duskwolf light warjack x2 (railgun, battle rifle, chainsword)(Khador jacks)

Speedy meanwhile had most of his ISA basecoated, but the jacks were being magnetised:
Paladin Weaver
Paladin Enforcer squad
Paladin Commander solo x2
Firebrand light warjack (Vanquisher)
Morning Star heavy warjack (Crusader)
Justicar Voss hero

Summary
I'm not going to try to give a blow-by-blow here; the game is still too unfamilar to me. So I'll just post a quick summary and a bunch of photos. To start we rolled for a skirmish mission and got the first one: "boiling point". I was under the vague impression that Warcaster worked best with a fair bit of terrain, so without too much thought I tried to put a lot of terrain on the table in such a way that it was not exactly symetrical but wouldn't give one side an advantage over the other. Speedy won the roll and chose to go first. He drew first blood, and from then I spent most of the game trying to keep my forces on the table; anything I brought in generally didn't last long (the blast rule was a big contributer to that...), and of course I was still trying to figure out the activation and arc management aspects. In the end he was able to hold the objectives more consistently, taking the win.

Even though I felt on the back foot most of the game, it didn't feel nearly as disadvantageous as it does in other games I've played, since the limited activation system coupled with the constant deployment system meant that I never felt like the game was un-winnable; I always felt like a couple of good turns could even things out. It was... relaxing I guess, compared to other games I've played.

I also felt like distance measurement was less important; moving squads for example is much more relaxed than in other games I've played. Overall the game feels more casual and new-player friendly, while still having more depth than I had expected. The game is still developing so we'll see where it goes, but I'm liking it so far.