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.

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.