Squee! It's here!!!

For those that have not noticed the murmers of joy from those of us based in the UK the Relic Knights kickstarter has finally delivered to their UK backers (and presumably all of Europe but I can't confirm this).

I checked back to my original order and aside from the fact that they have repackaged a bunch of the models to be in different groupings from that setout in the original kickstarter pledges it does seem that I've received everything I'd ordered.  Though I've been warned to check through all the boxes and make sure they all have the correct parts as there are some rumours that the Ceri Speed Circuit boxes were missing some bits.

I'd backed to the tune of two factions, but one of those is being passed onwards to a mate, the ceri are his, and I'm left with the Doctorine.  On a quick scan of the hardback rulebook (full colour, A4, appears great quality) it seems there are 3 doctorine units in the book which I don't own, I must have either missed them being in the KS or they were never included as I'd thought I'd bought the full faction.  That said it's no big deal I should have plenty to be going on with.

Opening thoughts, the wait has clearly been well spent by them, this wasn't just a few restic models tossed in a box, this was a full retail packaged set of figs, counters, mini-rulebooks, cards etc.  The finish on everything looks great and maintains that awesome anime look that got me to invest in the first place. 

That said it is restic models so not the finest of materials to work with, I've only pulled out 4 figs so far and to give them their due the mold lines have been pretty easy to remove and haven't resulted in chopping off large chunks of detail so can't complain but still less fun than working with 'proper' plastics.  But the sculpting being bold animi stylings mean there isn't too much fine detail on the ones I've looked at thus far so hopefully it will remain the case that the material isn't a detriment to the quality.

I'll post up some more thoughts once I've got everything built and cleaned up.

Bristol Vanguard Vengeance Tournament Review

 

So Bristol Vanguard (BV) are back running WFB events again, with a new shiny venue.  The wonderfully named Future Inns hotel in the Cabot Circus area of Bristol, I’m not sure what makes it ‘the future’ as it appears to be the same as every other hotel with conference facilities I’ve been to but it does have a couple of nice features.  The room was 2 sides windows so nice and bright and with the balcony door open was reasonably air, anyone who has suffered through gamer stench will be acutely aware of what a wonderful feature this is, the heat and noise also being helped by reasonably high ceilings so I could hear my opponents speaking which has been a challenge at some venues I’ve been to in the past.  Finally to put the cherry on the cake you can park in the Cabot Circus car park for the day and get it for free, if that’s not a selling point I don’t know what you people want.

 

So having sung the virtues of the venue I best get onto the important part, what on earth was the event about?  In sort a nice friendly 3 game (1 day) Warhammer tournament.  There was the usual smattering of army restrictions and special rules set out in the pack, which in this particular occasion were pinched from another tourney.  As a result there were some rather different armies on show which was fun to see, but those who care about balance and ‘the best person winning’ seemed to be of the opinion it didn’t do that very well (and it was hard to argue otherwise).

 

BV have been masters of terrain (and a brief sidenote here, I’m somewhat lucky in that my previous club ELG were equally blessed with an amazing terrain guy) and it resulted in a 16 tables with a really nice mix of different terrain themes, types and variety of stuff on the boards making it a pleasure to walk up to the tables and not face the standard tournament fare of 2 hills, 2 woods, 2 buildings and 2 ‘other’.  If I were to critique one thing it was that the majority of it still sat towards the edges, I’m a massive fan of impassable terrain being in the middle of the board so it actually impacts the game in a meaningful way and isn’t just used to hide something behind during deployment, but I do recognise I’m somewhat unusual in that view as most players I’ve faced at tourneys consider that a chore.

 

I could bore you all with a detailed run through of my games but for a couple of reasons I won’t be so cruel; 1. You don’t care 2. I did really really badly.  I will talk through my opponents though as basically they’re what make or break an event.  You may have picked up from my preramble that I’ve been doing tourneys for a while, so I tend to know quite a lot of folk and this was no exception.  Out of the 30 people present I’d guess there was over 10 BV members, plus a handful of people from surrounding clubs and then a number of faces I’d not seen before.  I managed to get 3 games against people who I’d not met before, a couple of them were Bristol locals so have been playing down the Old Duke (if you’ve not been, get down there, it’s awesome) but given my gaming hermit status I’d not bumped into them. 

 

But to start the day off I had a grudge arranged through the medium of twitter (again seriously, if you’re not on there get on it, there are so many toy soldier fanatics clearly sat bored in their day jobs putting up a host of wonderful 140 character long ramblings), so the grudge was set up a while in advance to play one Andy Matthews (doubtlessly I’ve spelt his name wrong as I’m really bad for that), he’s a tourney organiser down in Bournemouth and a delightful fellow but I’d never had opportunity to play before. 

 

So we rocked up chatted nonsense, hit it off wonderfully as one would expect seeing as our shared joy of toy soldiers and talking nonsense and to top it all off he brought out a flask of coffee and set me up with a delightful homebrew.  Anyways we briefly played a game (where he smashed me) and then with an hour to spare had a good natter and a look round the armies present.

 

For those not familiar with 8^th Edition Warhammer armies have generally grown in size, not always the case but generally speaking, as a result of the increased model count the painting standard had taken a dip a few years ago.  But now we’re 4 years into the edition and everyone knows the good stuff to take in a list the painting quality has been ramping up at a rate of knots.  Locally lots of people will be familiar with Ben and his Beastmen. Frankly put they’re beautiful, and he’s a git for that, but it’s hard to hold it against him as he’s more or less a nice guy, plus they’re Beastmen so it guarantees that he’s not doing it for the filth. There were also some really nice Empire (Richard Burdett, again names, meh), Matt Lees OrcGers (yep that’s Orc themed Ogres but painted white rather than greenskins, matt does all his armies white, it’s his thing), Ian Scovells utterly gorgeous Dark Elves (similar to his previous gorgeous dark elves but an entirely new army), Daemons by Les (I’ve already forgotten his second name) and one of my all time favourite armies in Russ Veals WoC (though he did have a few new bits that he’d not entirely finished to his top standard).  Anyway safe to say that for a 30 person event it was punching well above it’s weight in the painting stakes.  What would have been really helpful would have been some pictures, but I’m far to forgetful/lazy/easily distracted for that but I’m pretty sure Jan has posted some up on the BV forums.

 

A spot of lunch later (being gamers healthy salads all round…) and it was onto round two.  I got a relatively new player with a good looking VC army, lots of terrain built into the movement trays and stuff like that.  Russ is a Bristol local so hopefully will see him down the Old Duke (plug plug) again as I really enjoyed the game and it was actually 2 surprisingly similar lists despite being from different books!  Ultimately I made a stupid mistake which let him get to me earlier than I wanted which tied up my light mage from casting that made my life difficult.  Plus I couldn’t quite kill the terrorgheist despite the 3 WMs shooting it for 4 turns (eventually died to archers).  A fun game and a small loss ensued but at least I had some models left alive at the end!

 

Final game saw me hit my ideal matchup, an ogre army with no magic, I should have just blasted it off the table.  Of course I didn’t!  Again a new player in the Bristol area Matt had a lovely and incredibly fluffy army (no ironblasters, no magic!).  He also had a giant which he informed me had never survived a single game, if it survived it would be named after me… Guess what there is now a giant walking around called Dave Fraser.  God damnit.  I should probably apologise as I got a tad frustrated this game as nothing worked, but Matt was a true gent about it and just played his game and took my army apart, another tabling.

 

So overall a day of results I’d happily forget but 3 fun games with new people so I have to say I really enjoyed myself and will be back for the next BV fantasy event (though maybe I should just help out with organisation on the day given my performance!)

 

In summary there was some winners, some losers and a lot of abuse for the comp pack but everyone (that stayed for the whole event, a story I won’t tell) seemed to have a good time.  Congrats to Warren Brewster (BV member) for winning the whole thing and a massive thanks to Jan for organising and managing the rabble at the event.

 

On a personal note this marks the TK going back in the cabinet for me, they require making no mistakes to work well and I'm not playing often enough at the moment to spot things, so I'm going back to a more forgiving army. 

Duke it out!

This was a 14 person local tournament at 2,000pts over 3 rounds, reason I’m mentioning it was I took the new WE book out for a spin. I’d obviously scoured the internet for all the broken combos which the WE book can throw out (after getting agreement that arrows could be duplicated across multiple units). I wrote a list on that basis, posted it up for everyone to view on the club forum and got feedback on how it looked pretty good. So I then threw it away and wrote something which would actually be fun to play with and contained all my nicer painted models for the army!

Dragon Lord, 4++ ward, charmed shield, spear
Eagle BSB 4++ HA, shield, spear
Lvl 2 Fire, ruby ring, dispel scroll
20 Glade Guard, Std, Muso, trueflight arrows
5 Glade Riders, Muso, Hagbane
5 Glade Riders, Hagbane
9 Wardancers
10 Waywatchers
Treeman

I’d not really considered it in advance but it’s only 3 drops plus characters which doesn’t really help the 20 glade guard out much, they become a really obvious target to aim for as a soft squishy unit of shooters. But the unit is 20 of Skarlocks archers so I really wanted to field them as a single unit because the way it looks is cool!

Round 1
First off I got a doozy of a matchup against HE.

Alariell, her banner on BSB, lvl 1 fire all in 25+ White lions with ‘that banner’. Backed up by 4 RBTs, 2x15 archers, 2x5 reavers and 2 eagles

Kinda felt like I was being punished! But that said I suspect my army was possibly better off than the netlist WE list against this as I was able to get over the table and smash up his weaker units with the dragon and BSB. I killed everything but the WL deathstar but sadly lost everything but the dragon (lord dead), BSB and 1 unit of glade riders. Overall lost by around 400pts so was pretty happy with how it went. 1,000+ pts in a single unit at 2000pts w/l/d event makes it rather difficult to pull out a win when the deathstar has a 2++ against 90% of the attacks in your army!

Round 2
To make up for that next round I got to play a daemon player who won their first game, the joys of being the smallest loser of the first round… This was a bit of the standard build and a bit of different stuff in the characters.

Lvl 1 slannesh general, nurgle BSB, 2 tz heralds (tz & metal), 2x10 horrors, 25ish PBs, 5 BoN, 2x1 BoN, 3 fiends, 5 furies, Cannon

Basically I couldn’t deal with the 5 beasts, What I should have done is made my wood a stupid wood and put it in the way in front of my army to force his movement to end in it if he just marched up twice, but I didn’t think of that so the beasts ran at me, my dragon ran at his horrors and I charged and killed them then he did the same to the rest of my army. My dragon then got pinned by a single BoN before ultimately getting charged by the cannon and broken from combat to run off the table.

I was left with 5 WW at the end of the game and only killed his tzeentch stuff, a beast and the furies. A big loss but one that was largely of my own making, that said if I’d sat back and played it tight he’d have just cannoned off my dragon and treeman to win anyway so might as well try throwing it all forwards.


Round 3
I was on 2nd bottom table and rewarded with a dwarf army with 2 OGs but no cannons or GTs.  

Lord on shieldbearers 5++ dunno what else, runelord 4+ steal a PD, BSB 5++ vs shooting in 6” and stubborn, 30ish GW warriors, 15 xbows, 20 hammerers, Gyrobomber, 2x organ guns.

From what I’d discovered the last couple of games I just sat so I could shoot off 1 OG at a time and the whole army attacked it & the Gyrobomber T1, I failed to kill either but his return fire was through my strategically placed citadel wood and bomber wasn’t in range to fly over anything. Next turn I shot both off (ambushing poison shots are great) turn after I got the 2nd OG and then surrounded his 3 blocks.

Being nice I committed to killing his GW warriors (and I’ve just realised I played them as S6 vs my dragon all combat thinking they were longbeards… He had only played 6 games ever so I was basically calling all the stats for combat so my own fault). Regardless I beat the block up killing them all and got to treewhack a BSB to death too, which was fun! Shooting dealt with the 20 hammerers and the 15 quarellers easily enough so it was only the 2 lords (runelord and dwarf lord) left on the table round 6. Dragon ate the runelord and the dwarf lord took 4 wounds from shooting (flaming sword on waywatchers was awesome!) and to end the game he suicide charged the lord into my wardancers who went killing blow and chopped his head off.

Great guy to play as kept his head up and was a gent throughout despite being utterly out of the game from early on. Having only played so few games before he’d never come across my style of list and it just does horrible things to a static army as I get to choose who fights when and where and there is very little he could do about it.


Overall had a great day play, 3 enjoyable games despite my feeling 2 of them I was really up against it and the third was a bit too easy. I do wonder if this will be a common occurrence for the WE, but will have to wait and see.
One thing I can say is playing the build I had was a whole lot of fun, having been heavily into the TK for the past while I'd forgotten just how enjoyable it is to throw a big dragon 20" forwards and say 'deal with that', in all 3 of my games the dragon was never really much at risk, flubbed and ran off the table vs the DoC and almost chopped up by the dwarfs (but I chose to go into that combat without really needing to).  Sure there will be games where someone just goes 'take it off' with a cannon but most of the time it's great fun to play with.

Next event is 2,999pts and I'm now going to take the WE again, still don't plan on buying any of the new units for the army yet, as there are plenty of the old ones which I still need to try out to see how they work first.

Army Book Design

So over the past year or so we’ve had a slew of army books released, going back to Feb/March last year you have Warriors, Daemons, High Elves, Lizardmen, Dark Elves, Dwarfs and Wood Elves.  Wow that’s almost half of the armies have been updated in a year, first off Great going GW, truly fantastic achievement to turn out so much work so quickly, secondly great work GW as they’ve not overly suffered from horrendous power creep  and unbalancing the game (unlike prior editions).

So that said what do I think about the books, are they well designed?  For this I’m thinking balance of rules and units rather than aesthetic and background, while those are really important for choosing which army to play they are somewhat less important for the decision of what to put on the table.

If pushed I can probably put the armies into tiers, unlike prior editions though I don’t actually think this is all that meaningful as there are more matchups where A>B, B>C but C>A so overall it levels the field over the course of a few games.  But again pure power and tiers isn’t really what interests me, I’ve always preferred to play the underdog armies as an additional challenge on myself.  Though reading a blog recently it suggested that this was just a protection mechanism to explain away losses and I should really try playing with the gloves off and accepting the truth about just how good a player I am.  An interesting point and definitely partly true, but I’m comfortable that it is very unlikely I’d win any tournaments if I did take the hardest thing, so I prefer the personal challenges I set myself.

What does interest me is the longevity of a book and the flexibility of the book.  Obviously not all armies can do everything but most can be played in a few different styles and then secondary to the playstyle (or partly feeding into what defines them) are what the different units in the book can do and how effective a ‘bang for their buck’ they provide in doing it.

Those who listen to podcasts have probably heard some people saying that the cost of a unit is somewhat irrelevant if it does something in an army which nothing else can.  This is hugely true, but for me the sign of a good book is where there are multiple different ways of achieving one thing.  For example take the Dwarfs, sure they’re pretty limited in certain ways but if you need to kill a big monster there are a multitude of options from WMs, Characters with multi wound weapons or slayers with always wounding on a 4+ and getting extra hits as they die.  All sort of do the same thing but in very different ways.  So if I want I can make the decision my army won’t have any cannons and I don’t overly have to worry that suddenly there is one area of the game I can’t cope with.

So considering this and looking at the books what do I think?  Well I’d say GW have been getting a whole lot better at this than they used to be.  Are they getting it right every time, no not quite.

WE being the new kids on the block are what has inspired this.  At first glance at the book it’s a horribly one dimensional gunline army with some mobile avoidance thrown in.  Forest spirits are ‘nerfed’ and it has no combat power.  But actually try digging g a little deeper, what if I put 3 units of Wild riders into the army, all of a sudden that’s a lot of S5 AP attacks on a relatively small frontage probably with rerolls to hit most things.  So what happens if you throw them into the current ‘meta’? Armour isn’t going to like it a great deal, sure a 4+ save will deflect a decent amount of that damage but with multiple units and only about 150pts for a unit it’s a decent bit of punch for a throwaway unit.  Then try pitting them against infantry and suddenly they’re utterly shredding them.  Wild riders into White lions, Executioners or even T4 infantry like saurus, dwarf warriors even WoC are doing lots of damage before they die.  Sure their damage output falls off after a single turn but that initial impact is pretty intimidating.  The only unit I’ve thought of which still doesn’t really care are Plague bearers but even they should lose about 5 guys on the turn of charge to killing around 2-3 back. Combine all that with the hugely flexible movement then it’s such an appealing unit, of course they have frenzy so you’ll occasionally lose them to running off into something they shouldn’t but I just find that makes it even more fun to play with as it’s yet another control element to consider.

So all of a sudden that one dimensional gunline army has a new focus for me.  Out go the 100s of shots (Zzzzz), in comes something like 18 wild riders! Do I need an anvil unit to go with that maybe?  Well you have core dryads or their harder cousins the Treekin, sure the damage output isn’t spectacular but that’s not really what an anvil is all about.  Plague bearers seem really popular still despite their weakness to death magic, admittedly they’re better in virtually every way than dryads due to poison, better ward and inbuilt -1 to hit plus access to command including a magic banner.  But DoC can’t put down high volumes of shooting on the board to thin units down.  Or maybe even moderate volumes of shooting and some mobile combat punch for a more balanced army.

Another look at the army and another model to consider.  Captain on horse with spear, shield, probably throw on AP arrow too 93pts (with the arrow).  3S5 AP attacks with rerolls, 4+ save or enchanted shield, or dragon helm gives a 3+.  Suddenly a couple of great chaff/WM killers again for throw away cost.

So the defining feature of the good books that GW has been turning out is variety and flexibility of how to do a particular thing with an army, all of this whilst they manage to maintain the theme of the background. 

So where do I think this has been done well?

Obviously from the above I think WE have got it right, but also HE have it in spades.  DE have a decent shot at it but I think there are some slight internal balance issues (basically read warlocks) which have very quickly driven them into a single build which has become hugely popular at the expense of all others.  If you choose to ignore that build though there are so many good options in the book that you can get great flexibility out the list.

Sliding down the scale a little you’ve got DoC and to a lesser extent WoC.  Both books have a standout build that has become very popular but actually stepping away from that doesn’t really hurt the power of the books significantly and they can still perform fantastically with a lot more variety of units, but in the case of WoC it is still all about getting stuck into combats largely by charging front on into your opponent and smashing them. DoC have a bit more subtlety about them but do rely heavily upon horrors and skull cannon for a pseudo gunline element to support some good grinding combat ability with the powerful smash element of a GD.

Pulling up the rear are Dwarfs and Lizardmen – Both of the books made attempts to diversify through the addition of new units, all of which are cool in their own way, but ultimately the tournament builds are exactly the same as before and the flexibility to build them in different ways generally results in weakening the build. 

It’s pretty small things to be honest, Saurus need certain magic buffs to work, the changes to slann means you don’t really see them any more, so saurus remain substandard choices which with the core being the way it is results in only skinks amounting to much, the changes to skink-krox units has made them less flexible so again you don’t see them used and the builds become very one dimentional. 

Dwarfs I’d say was a missed opportunity through a couple of very small things.  1. The hatred special rule should have been before deployment not after, the army doesn’t have enough flexibility of movement to change it’s setup to reflect a huge change in combat ability, so it forces a more defensive deployment.  2. Runic Anvil but no other bound items in the list.  I think runesmiths should have had a lore of magic effectively added through bound spells, all buffs not damage output, not debuffs so it’s very much an internalised thing.  Basically like the warrior priests do with empire.  It would have made them able to compete in combats where they potentially go in as underdogs.  All to often when playing dwarfs you set up for an even fight and then the opponent gets off a spell and you’re done,  being able to have that same option to swing things would have made them a viable combat army so moved them away from the reliance on defensive gunlining.

So reading back I do wonder is it just the fact that it’s been elves that makes it look like the wonders of diverse flexible books has become a regular thing?  It has always been a hallmark of theirs that they do all things fairly well so I’d expect them to be the more flexible books anyway.  Hopefully we’ll find out when Brets, Skaven and Beastmen get updates (hopefully they’ll be the next three books before repeating any of the 8^th Ed ones).

Winter War (Reading version update!)

So I finished 2013 tournaments by attending Winter War in Dunfermline and opened 2014 by attending Winter War in Reading.  Both 1 day tournaments, 3 games of battleline, then it diversifies a little Dumf was 2250 (just to mix it up) and un-comped, reading was 2400 and some restrictions.  Both were in the region of 50 players so up there with the bigger one day tournaments but not so big as to be really unwieldy.

Overall I think the army balance at Dumf was better than at Reading, the comp clearly missing the power of Daemons whilst hitting a few other armies, so un-comped actually allowed a more balanced field.

Both held at Community type venues, so nice locations for events, Reading had a bar, where Dumf had better food facilities with a sort of kitchen thing on the go.  Reading takes the win at the tables with the extra 6” round the side to dump junk on but Dumf had the better scenery, the stuff at Reading was a combination of badly placed (nothing in the middle of the table) and pretty ineffectual for what it was (low hills that don’t block LoS, woods & difficult ground on the whole) so combat armies at a real advantage.

My results also flip flopped between the two, Dumf I came 7^th pushing daemons around and Reading 49^th (6^th bottom) with TK.  A fine combination of Daemons being far better than TK in general and matchups (the daemons flier army got to run at a dwarf gunline, who they should smash most of the time! The TK got Ogres with the biggest gutstar in existence!).

My Reading  games were a fantastic fun monster mash WoC list featuring Scyla, Kholek, a giant and a shaggoth plus a bunch of other things running across the table at me! A fairly standard skaven list from a couple of years ago with a bit of everything and an Ogre list that was the most character heavy deathstar I’ve ever faced. Results were big loss, small win, big loss.

Both really fun events, was able to catch up with friends from the tourney scene I’d not seen for a while at each and that’s pretty much the main reason for doing these things!

New Years resolutions

Last year I never posted up my resolutions. I'm not entirely certain I made any!

This year I'll commit them to print and see how I fare. Last year was meant to be a bit of a free for all trying to finish off some projects and the likes. In reality I ended up painting 5.5k of daemons after everyone said the new book wasn't all that strong, they lied. Also painted just short of 2k of Brets but never finished them off and sundry other bits. 

Specifically wasn't doing the model a day challenge but come the end of the year I only missed it by about 10 figs. 

So 2014, what to do?

1. Buy less than 25 models (the mrs said 10 so may try for that but suspect I'll fail with a few bits I want to add to make a HE army). 

2. Finish painting the last of my TK figs. Not many left about 20 I think. 

3. Finish my Brets to 2400pts, finish all the models I have for them (again less than 20). 

4. Paint my HE army. Very specific build planned and have most of the models for it so not too much conflict with 1.

5. Get back into malifaux and finish painting all my stuff (7-10 figs for guild/neverborn)

6. Strip the rest of the CD stuff I bought and paint up a few units. (Not committing to a playable army this year as purchases would be needed).

7. Empire or DE 'should' be next army I target as have majority of both owned, commit to painting without buying for either to continue to build them up. 

8. Improve the quality of a specific 2400 pts WE list to target a paint nomination at an event (if I get to any). 

With writing it all down it feels rather a lot, so suspect some will fall by the wayside. But as ever there is still a mountain of models waiting in the wings to full their place. 

My only real aim is to start eating into the unpainted mountain, which is big enough to last the rest of my life I'm sure! How that happens is somewhat irrelevant right now but I generally find an army focus helps with getting a volume if stuff done. 

Motivation is high but time is a massive premium so will just have to see how it goes and try to ensure I enjoy my painting.