Nothin' To See Here

The title pretty much sums it up, i've been a little busy and so haven't really done much 40k related to talk about.

I did manage to grab a Necron Lord though despite the GW in town removing them from the shelves in anticipation of the new release. So yeah, i've been working on painting and putting in together and I hit a dilema:

Shiny New Necrons or Old Rusty Necrons?

This seems to be the big choice with painting and honestly i'm not sure. I  used to prefer old and rusty, because it fits the characterisation of necrons as zombie-robots that only want to kill stuff. But rumours suggest new Necrons are becoming sentient and are having likes and dislikes and peccadilloes. This seems to lend itself to the shiny paint scheme, because most things that are fully self-aware care about how they look, and would interest themselves in a paint-job so they don't look like they need a new lick of paint.

I guess it boils down to how they're written, but i'll be going with the old scruffy look, although I have hit the snag that looking at my Lord I thought "Damn, that really needs a new paint job" which may be a problem.

Pre-Release Bandwagoning: Scarabs

Now, bandwagoning the FOTM army is something the internet suggests that everyone does, and that every game store is full of unpainted Space Marines who are used to Counts-As Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Grey Knights or any other FOTM army that exists.

Now, it's a pretty well known piece of speculation that Necrons are getting an update pretty soon, and as such there's a plethora of rumours about what's coming up. And if you believe everything you read, Scarabs are going to be awesome.

A few of the changes i've read include:

1. Inclusion in WBB (along with every unit in the army). Not massively overpowered, but a nice buff if true.
2. Attacks on vehicles reduce their AV by 1 with each attack (penetration? glancing hit? With S3 how are they going to scratch a tank?). I don't know the specifics of how this'd be implemented, but if you had 10 bases, you could turn a tank into tissue in one assault.
3. Unsuccessful wounds on models turn their armour save to - (nothing). With (currently) 3 attacks per base, the ability to Deep Strike and move through Terrain, means that you're probably going to be able to get into combat, and as soon a you do you have the ability to turn Terminators (or any other high-value high-armour target into easy targets). Of course WS2 waters this down, but still sounds great.

If all this is true, it's a relatively cheap unit, which will excel against small-armies of elite troops/tanks. Not only that but it doesn't FOC-block you from stuff like Heavy Support/Elites, which are usually the guys who take down big targets, and with a +1 cover save and the ease you can LoS with them, they sound pretty awesome.

Scarabs sound awesome.

And the great thing is, the codex isn't out yet, so noone can prove me wrong, noone can show Scarabs are shit with actual playtesting and if they turn out awful, I can always blame the rumours I got my information from.

Space Marine: No Gore Is Too Much Gore

There's a couple of new video's out, which you may/may not have seen, if you're interested in the game. There's so much gore in these clips (especially Chainsword) that i'm fairly sure even 12 year olds are going to get bored of it 20 minutes into the game, and i've played the Fallout games, so i'm no stranger to gratuitous gore. I'm honestly worried ranged combat is going to feel sidelined in gameplay, as it's not as dramatic (read bloody) as melee, but we'll see.


If you're interested in some videos, check these out:


Chainsword: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw4MwZEHcuE

Power Axe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC-4spYSn2I

Thunder Hammer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-fkiFu3c8I

Why Good Sisters Would Be A Good Idea

Despite being a successful company, which is generally quite good at exploiting the small % of people who play its games to make loads of money (like with the LOTR releases), people on the internet like to claim that GW have no business sense. Now I don't run a business of any shape or form, let alone a games store, but to me the new Sisters Codex seems to lack any kind of business sense.

Sisters seems to be a marginal Codex for various reasons, here's a couple off the top of my head, there are other and better reviews of the codex available:

1. White Dwarf codex, which means that unless you read White Dwarf you're unlikely to ever see it, won't be up on the rack with other Codex's and so won't attract attention.
2. Consensus is that most things are weaker (D6 Faith, Immolaters, removal of old units) and more expensive, with the exception of a few units.
3. No big release of new models, none of the attention a release usually gets.

So we can probably all accept that this was a release they wanted to get out of the way and largely ignore.

There seem to be three kinds of really successful releases, ones which attract players to the army from within the existing pool of players, ones which attract new players altogether, and ones which do both.

Dark Eldar attracted players across from other armies, because it offered an interesting playstyle and the chance to field an army that wasn't Marines (whether Chaos, Regular, Blood Angels, Grey Knights, Dark Angels, Space Wolves or some other unspecified variety). LOTR attracted new players, because it connected wargaming to something already popular (LOTR) and attracted fanboys from that over into GW. Something like the New SM codex, which combined a successful varied army with a release that was the poster-boy of 40k would do both, attracting internal and external new players.

On one level, looking at these criteria for a good release, a marginalised Sisters of Battle might make sense. They don't seem unique, another Imperium army, with a lot of their old niche units in Grey Knights, with good guys in Power Armour already taken by 15 Space Marine codex's and the role of underdog non-super mutant taken by Imperial Guard.

On every other level, it doesn't make sense. Sisters of Battle offered something truly unique: the chance to play as girls. This might not seem significant in a game in which gender has next to no role in actual gameplay. But nearly ever game has been scrambling to offer the chance to pick your gender where possible, from MMO's where your characters looks are a cornerstone of the game, to stuff like Fallout where you play in first person as the default setting and never even see your character. The idea to let you play as what you want is fairly intuitive.

It breaks down the male dominance that prevails in 40k, remember when back when people used to say "there are no girls on the internet", that's been proven a lie as companies have worked to make their games more accessible. Does that work? I don't have any figures, but I bet WoW has more female players as a proportion of users than CS, and WoW offers the chance to play as women. That could be correlation not causality, there could be tonnes of reasons why, for starters they're completely different genres. But then again WoW has 11 million players, and with that success if they believe allowing different genders broadens appeal to girls, i'll go with it.

LOTR allowed GW to tap into a mass market; the number of people who liked LOTR as popularised by the films. Sisters offered an even bigger opportunity, a chance to tap into a market that is roughly 50% of the country, which from what i've seen is vastly under-represented in 40k and could have made some money.

As I said, I don't own a game store so maybe i'm missing something, but if I was running GW i'd have thought Sisters of Battle would be an excellent opportunity to draw in new customers and change the image of a pretty male game. But hey, i'd like to see a Codex: Salamanders, so I don't really mind if GW focus all their efforts on giving you choices of Marines in boxes.

Space Marine: The Demo

In retrospect, I probably should have got a better screenshot of one sexy graphical bug. But yeah, this picture sums up most of my thoughts about the game, so far it looks good, except for a few details.

So I got the demo today. I figured i'd wait for a few days after it officially came out, because GW seems to dislike the UK and thought they'd make it difficult for us to download it. Although I heard rumours that was Games fault, because they got upset that everyone loved Steam and forced Relic/GW to restrict access.

It's always hard to know what Relic are going to do with 40k games, when Retribution came out they made the came much more like Company of Heroes (a plus) but then decided to only make enough campaign missions for one race and forced all the campaigns to effectively be the same, with different models and voice actors.

But Space Marine feels fun, in the way that most hack 'n' slash games tend to be. Ranged weapons, perhaps because the demo only had a bolter/bolt pistol, felt insanely underpowered, I guess to make the melee feel even more impressive when one Chainsword stroke rips in half an Ork who's exact clone took 15 bolt rounds to the face.Maybe they'll deal with that when you can access more weapons. Jump Packs are as fun as they look, although getting the hang of it is difficult at first, mostly due to bugs and the fact the game froze randomly for 20 seconds whenever it felt like it was flowing too well.

But bugs are to be expected in a demo, and honestly it looks like a fun game. If the issues, most of which i'd say stem from it only being a demo, are ironed out it should be fun. It's just a shame it takes an extra 3 days to  release a game in the UK compared to the USA.

Who Knew Painting Could Be Fun?

One of the reasons I don't play very much is because i'm a terrible painter, and my armies are always atrocious. But I had a day off, so I thought i'd try and do a model I could be proud of. I choose an old Eldar Farseer, from when I was like 12. After stripping all the paint (there goes my morning) i've re-based it, and have started painting. About half an hour in, i've painted basically none of it, but i'm happy with how it looks, and surprisingly i'm actively enjoying painting.

I guess the key with painting is to look at it as an enjoyable part of the hobby, not an annoying step between buying and having an army.

I really don't know how to play Eldar, and I doubt I have enough stuff to even build an army, but i'm going to paint a few models and see how it goes, especially because I can't afford to buy any new stuff without salvaging and selling the old. If Eldar fluff wasn't just "We're all really arrogant, and pretty much the punching-bag of the Galaxy" I might try to put together a list following a fluffy theme, which is what I normally do in the absence of the knowledge to do a list that actually works.

So I guess for now my challenge will just be to paint a few models, and try and avoid the trap Eldar fall into really easily: Looking like clowns.

Tournaments

A lot of people have been writing about their experience at 'Ard Boyz. Of course if I was a legitimate blogger, who understood 40k I should be too.

Unfortunately, i'm not. But as we're talking about tournaments, here's a video you might find interesting/rage inducing/incredibly boring or a range of other emotions, depending on how much you care about illegal models and sneaky underhand tactics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUxjS-wOxNY

There are a lot of cheap people out there, and on the one hand I was a little bit shocked at how far someone would go to try and cheat at a wargame, on the other hand I was slightly impressed by his deviancy.

You can do a lot of cheap things, from wasting time to arguing about petty rules for the sake of it, but this ranks pretty high on the list of ways to lose friends at a tournament.