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.

Defending A Metric

I'd like to start out by saying I really like Nikephoros Metric*.

But then I read this: http://thepontificateofnurglitch.blogspot.com/2011/08/warhammer-against-nikephoros-metric.html

A pretty harsh attack on it I felt, and also one with a lot of long sentances, which took a while to get around. Anyway, I commented, and then he replied, and so did I. Except that moderation on comments takes forever, so I thought i'd start a blog.

I was commenting Anonymously, so if you care, you can go and read my comments, but i'd like to post a general defence here.

Nurg seemed to have a problem with a set of data saying that the numbers at the end don't represent how you win tactically in 40k, and to this I have to say, of course they do. The proof is the Metric was built on lists that do nothing but win tactically in 40k. There are tonnes of arguments against this, different armies win in different ways and play differently with different terrain on different mission objectives against different armies all depending on how different die roll on different boards on different days depending on different rules in the differnet editions. But the scores show that, because all 4 armies had different (i'm starting to hate that word) scores in the 4 categories. It did show a few things however, all the successful armies could kill Rhinos.

The numbers aren't going to be perfect some units will get scores that are impossible (such as a unit popping more Rhinos in a game than there are turns in the game) but the bias treats all units and armies the same, and to be honest we're assuming some common sense. The numbers reflect the tactical breakdown of 40k, what you need and what you don't need. By the time we get to 8th edition who knows what'll happen, maybe Rhinos will be redundant and we'll all be packing our armies with foot-slogging troops with flamers and putting 500 points into 1 HQ in a 1,000 point game because the rules favour that. 

But guess what, as the tactics change so will the numbers, flamers have higher DMS and lower DLRPG than lascannons and you can read that shift. The numbers work, it's all about how you read them and what you count as important (DRPG) and what you discount as seemingly irrelevant (the total numbers of Dead Marines after a certain point).

So what i'm trying to say is, if you don't think the metric reflects what's important in 40k I defy you to create a list with: <40 DRPG, >60 Dead Marines per Game and win in a competitive setting.

If you do that, i'll do what noone on the internet has ever done before: Accept that i'm wrong, and you're right.

*In case you haven't read it: http://nike40k.blogspot.com/2011/06/40k-theory-its-all-about-numbers.html