40K Friday - Slow Motion & Kings of War 4th

 

The miniatures side of things is fairly slow here right now.  I'm still working mainly on the Blood Angels stuff I mentioned before but it's not a super-high priority as we aren't playing  much and there are a lot of other things going on. My online interests have been fairly intensive lately with constant events in Star Trek Online, a big long event in World of Warships, and now WoW Legion Remix coming out (it's a lot of fun, like the remix for Pandaria last year). I'm also having to do more prep for the Temple campaign as big things are happening and it's more than just easy monster swap-outs at this point. I have friends painting Space Wolves and Votann so progress does continue.

Beyond the direct 40K work I've been watching the Kings of War 4th Edition updates as they have come out and it all seems positive in general but I'm just not motivated to dive back in. Edition changes are seen by companies as a way to draw new players in but it's also a reason for existing players to just stop. If all of the books I've picked up in recent years are now not valid, well, I can just not worry about the new stuff and when we get the very infrequent itch to play KoW we can just play one of the versions we already have. 

Also this: "We also have the chance now going forwards to make some armies more “Mantic” and less generic ..." yeah, that's the problem. I came to the game looking for ways to use some old school Warhammer armies and maybe some old Hordes of the Things armies and so the more world-specific you make it the less useful it is for me. I get it from a company perspective, how it benefits you, but it's not what I'm looking for. Having a mix of generic and Mantic-specific factions is great - it means someone can bring their fantasy human army in as Kingdoms of Men while someone else could play Trident Realms or Nightstalkers which are two Mantic-specific very cool armies. The more they drive to phase out the generic part the more it damages their game in my opinion. 

I mean who wouldn't want units of frog-men with frog-cavalry? That's a cool army!

I'm sure I'll play around with it at some point but right now the interest meter is low.

40K Friday: 40K, One Page Rules, The Old World, and Kings of War

 

One of the downsides of playing a Games Workshop game long-term is that they drop models and units out of the game - often without any kind of immediate replacement. This can wear on one's soul. Between buying it, building it, painting it, and playing with it - possibly for years - many of us get attached to these tiny figures and it feels bad to see a kind of forced retirement of something like that.  Blaster has just about burned out on the game after being into it for years. He is really displeased with the current state and edition of 40K and the whole 3-year cycle of book-buying and the regular replacement of perfectly good models. I get it and I've been doing this long enough that a lot of that bothers me less but it has been piling up for me too this year as a big chunk of the classic Blood Angels army was culled in the latest Codex and it really took the wind out of my sails for a while.

As just one example back in 2nd edition when dreadnoughts were still metal the BA's got a special dread with a unique combination of weapons called the Furioso. This continued into 3rd. Then somewhere in 4th or 5th we got a brand new plastic kit that made 3 different dreadnought versions unique to the chapter:

This kit made the Furioso, the Death Company dread, and the Librarian dreadnought - all unique units. There was some weapon interchangeability with the Furioso and the DC dread but but you still had the options of dual fists, dual claws, or mixing in a frag cannon with one of those and then the librarian dread had his own special gear and look.

These were all great and the librarian dread was very unusual in being a vehicle that could lead your army since it was a character. 

If you can't tell I love this kit and have built it multiple times. In fact I still have a couple that need to be built which didn't help my feelings on this.

Well, fast forward to the 10th edition Blood Angels release and these options are now gone from the codex. The librarian dread is no more. We do still have the standard space marine 'dex options for the Redemptor, Brutalis, and Balistus - fine. The Furioso is gone - if you paint your Brutalis red it looks the part at least but no special rules or equipment apply anymore. The Death Company dreadnought is still a separate datasheet at least but it's not all that different from the regular Brutalis and neither one has a frag cannon option so that's gone too. For this particular edition we do have the index rules for these things and so we can still make it work but it's debatable if and what kind of Legends rules these will have for the next edition and going forward. So it's going to be swimming upstream to use any of these models in 11th.

Dealing with this for years means you expect it here and there but when it hits a big chunk of a favorite army it hits harder. You might start looking for a refuge from the constant grind. I dug back into One Page Rules looking for relief. It's there, to a degree. Grimdark Future (the 40k type module) has rules for many obsolete 40K units that are perfectly valid and they even divided "Battle Brothers" (firstborn marines) from "Prime Brothers" (primaris marines) and then each of those has subdivsions into the various specialist chapters like "Blood Brothers", "Wolf Brothers", "Dark Brothers" etc. Under the Blood Brothers list there are options for all of these dreadnoughts including the psyker option. So there are ways to keep them on the table within a modern set of rules. This is honestly pretty gratifying to see.

The other option of course is to just play an old version of the game. I have kept all of my old rules and codexes from each edition so I have the full range of options. I do like this idea but I can also tell you "edition bleed" is real so trying to play an old version at times and the current version at other times ... it's more challenging than you think as rules from various editions collide in your head. There is defintely some nostalgia at play here too and if I can get one of the crew to try it I will make the attempt but I suspect using a different set of rules - like OPR - is probably smarter in the long run.

The only downside to OPR is that they change up the rules and the army lists once per year. They did make the promise that it will only be once per year - unlike GW's quarterly (or more) rules updates - but it still does change once per year, which can cause some upset when your army gets nerfed. I still think it's easier to live with than GW's current approach. 

A similar thing happened with fantasy. When GW killed off classic Warhammer Fantasy after 8th edition and replaced it with Age of Sigmar we were left with a completely different setting, the outright elimination of many armies and dramatic changes to others, and a completely different approach to the rules. If you had been playing Warhammer for 20 or 30 years when it happened there just was not much left that looked very familiar. Along comes Kings of War and, well, look at this - square bases, large blocks of units, similar maneuvering, and a lot of very familiar-looking armies. It was an incredibly welcoming refuge for orphaned Warhammer players. It was also willing to make some interesting changes such as eliminating individual model removal and cutting way back on magic items and spells. It was a little less flavorful in some ways but it worked really well and felt like your units were doing the bulk of the work, not your tooled-up level 4 wizard with Von Carsten's Ring riding on a dragon. Hey, nobody said Warhammer didn't have a few problems - but this was a well-done approach that respected what had come before. 

The only negative thing I will say is that over the course of 3rd edition and now going into 4th edition (coming in December) is that Mantic is really looking to promote their own setting and put it out in front rather than being a simple shelter for old Warhammer players. If I'm being honest I don't care at all about their World of Pannithor - not the background, not the armies unique to it, and not the fiction they are publishing. I get it, they are trying to build their own thing and I certainly understand that from the company's point of view, but there is no lack of settings in the fantasy genre and for miniatures I am anchored pretty deeply into the Old World of Warhammer.

Now when a beloved game goes out of print there are usually some fan driven options as well  - like OPR -  and they can be really good. Heck I played some NetEpic 25+ years ago when GW dropped support for Space Marine/Titan Legions and it is still around today! Warhammer had Ninth Age and Warhammer Renaissance seems to have some fans but GW eventually did the unthinkable and brought it back!

They even added a new army this year - Cathay!

Warhammer: The Old World is a truly unexpected gem. They brought back the old setting (pretty much), the old armies (pretty much), and even the old miniatures line (pretty much). The rules are new and are a really nice mix of things from old editions with some new ideas mixed in and I think most people were genuinely shocked to see this kind of product line coming from this company. It was a real effort to bring something back to life, not a token Specialist Games one-off book. It's just amazing and it absolutely kneecapped my interest in Age of Sigmar and even some of my feelings for Kings of War. 

I have a few armies for Sigmar that I will keep for Sigmar, either because they are unique to that game or because I am not going to rebase yet another army. These are my Stormcast Eternals, my Fyreslayers, my Seraphon on team law, then my Chaos Warriors and all of my chaos daemons for team chaos. The rest, including Undead, Beastmen, and some of the Chaos Warrior stuff are being retasked for Old World and I am pretty happy about going square-based with these. 

Who thought we would see these guys hitting tables again as part of a new army?!

So yes, as the years and the editions roll by it is possible to find refuge from much of the chaos. I'm still going to play 40K, but I'm also going to play some OPR. I will pay some attention to Age of Sigmar and Kings of War but I am heavily leaning in to Old World, and I am happy to have the options - some really good options.

Planning for 2018: The Miniatures

With the resurgence of Warhammer 40,000 last year it was somewhat easy to maintain focus as we were rally only playing the one game - everything else fell by the wayside as dove back in to 40K full time.

(Well, except for the RPGs - more on those coming later)

Now X-Wing, Attack Wing, and Armada are virtually painless as "side games" as they come pre-painted and have all of the relevant rules included with the model, I don't need to build them, I don't need to paint them, and I don't need to buy an expansion book to run them. The only downside is that I am a little less attached to them as I didn't paint them. Now you can paint them or customize them:

...but that does eliminate the huge benefit of being pre-painted. One of these days, but not right now.

This month, though, I have re-discovered Fantasy mini's via Age of Sigmar: The Second Look A Few Years Later much like I did with Pathfinder and 4E D&D and 5E D&D. Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in...

So how to manage this? I'm still building and painting armies for 40K and now I'm charged up about this Sigmar thing and looking at what I have for that has also re-sparked my interest in Kings of War. How do I make usable progress on armies for these games instead of ending up with a bunch of half-efforts? Let's look at it in the context of "2018". How do I get things done for all of these games this year? This guy has a pretty good idea: Nick Williams blog post.

It took me forever to get a full, painted Warhammer army together. I got my first set of Warhammer rules in 1984 (second edition) but didn't play a ton in the 80's and when I did it was with my Battlesystem counters or with other people's miniatures at Cons. I had multiple armies in the 90's, mainly High Elves and Orcs, but only some of them were painted. I finally got my Chaos Warriors organized, built, and painted in the early 2000's during 6th edition ... and they are still my only fully painted fantasy army! Those same High Elves and Orcs now form the core of the Kings of War armies for blaster and myself and yes, they are still only partially painted.

Given this, I like Nick's ideas:

• Limit your games! This is similar to my constant reach for "focus" in my gaming. Play the same game a few times in a row. Play the same army for a while! Learn how the game - and a particular army - works! I have a tendency to jump around between games so I have to keep this in mind.
• An army for each that I am proud of! This is more complicated as I have several painted armies:
• 40K - Crimson Fists, Imperial Fists, Iron Warriors, Iyanden Eldar, Grey Knights (new for 2018!) and my old Howling Griffons - but I am always working on more. Plus there are unfinished units intended for those painted armies too. 
• For Warhammer/KoW/Sigmar I have my Chaos Warriors
• Bolt Action is the other game that lurks on our fringes and I have some sprayed 20mm figs but nothing I'd rate as "proud"
• Oh, and Frostgrave, but that runs off of our D&D mini collection so no real worries there. 

So, limit games and try to finish one army - I can work with that. I just have to decide which one!

Games is fairly easy: 40K is top dog, with Kings of War a neglected favorite and Sigmar my current obsession. 

Armies: 

• Kings of War - finish my old warhammer Orc army! I see others that I like but I would like to push this one over the "Finished" line before I start another.
• Sigmar - I have a box full of Stormcasts and Chaos guys now so I should probably start with them. I have an idea for a fairly easy Stormcast paint scheme so that's probably where it will start. The 40K Daemon army works as-is in this game so that could be a bonus. After that I am split between Lizardmen (have some leftovers from the Warhammer days) and Vampire Counts and a "Death" army in general.
• 40K - So many options - build new stuff for my Iron Warriors? finish the Blood Angels? 
• I just put together 30 bloodletters so I'd say a Daemon army is probably at the front of the queue. I have all of the units I just need to finish building and painting them. Being able to use it for two games really makes this one important.
• I've been playing around with the World Eaters for a while and they're mostly built. I really should finish them up and paint them
• After that I'm leaning towards my Dark Angels as I have several lists I like that use a mix of certain units that would not take that long to finish if I just locked in and worked on them for a while. 

That's the plan for now. We will see to what degree I can stick to it. Maybe I can work up some kind of split schedule where I work on two armies per year - start one this year, finish up the one from last year, play both as the year goes on. That would be nice.

For 40K I'd like to finish the Blood Angels but I'm reading a bunch of DA books so they're more in my head right now. I love my Orks but I've made a conscious decision to set them aside until their codex comes out. Death Guard are an army I go back and forth on so they may show up at some point too. 

For fantasy in general I've always wanted a dwarf army and I'd say a Mantic Dwarf Starter is in my near future, probably for KoW. It's easier than hunting down an old Warhammer dwarf force unit by unit. I'm also liking the idea of an undead army and I'm thinking a more VC-type force for Sigmar and rescuing some old Tomb Kings stuff for a KoW Empire of Dust army. Not sure how far any of that will get in 2018 but it's good to have a plan, right?

40K Friday - March & April

We have been playing our miniatures games and I have not posted much about them for some reason.

• The Reign of the Eldar continues
• Apprentice Blaster and I are still building and painting (or in his case "repairing" after the cat got into his room and took a strong interest in giving his space elves the old American Tourister luggage test ). 
• We played another battle over Spring Break (3000 points of Apprentice Red's Orks vs. a combined Eldar force of 1500 each for me and Blaster) a few weeks ago and recorded video of it as a first attempt at maybe doing a series of video batreps. We will see what comes of that. 
• I finally managed to get my wraithknight built, if not painted, and it performed very well. This weekend I might have time to get some painting done on it leaving only the Spiritseer unfinished out of the whole Wraith Host formation.
• Supplemental: I finally acquired a hard copy of the Dark Eldar codex. I know they're not that popular right now on their own but they make damn fine allies for an Eldar army and I intend to expand my force as time, money, and the painting backlog permit.

• Kings of War
• I picked up that second unit of boarboyz I wanted but have not had time to build or paint them yet. My orc army is pretty much complete for now I just need to base everything permanently and get to painting. 
• Apprentice Blaster's High Elves are also complete - he just needs to build too. He did get his own rulebook so he's all set there. 
• Apprentice Red is also starting to work on his Wood Elves and figuring out how to adapt them to the game. He's going to use either the Elf or the Nature list as his core.

• Command and Colors Ancients
• While not strictly miniatures it has been scratching the ancients itch and we've actually been playing regularly which really makes me happy. Our standard approach now is to set up, pick sides, play the game, then switch sides and play again. It is a lot of fun and it plays fast enough that this is completely possible in just an hour or two for most scenarios.
• We have most of the Ancients sets and we also have Memoir 44 but I like this system enough I've actually considered getting the Napoleon game and previously my interest in Napoleonic games was right about zero. I may wait until we've plowed through more of the ancient scenarios but I am surprised to say I am seriously thinking about doing it.

40K Friday on Monday: Kings of War Postgame

I've been watching this game for a while, and once word of a second edition came out I decided to hold off until it was out. That happened last summer. Since then I have watched some battle reports, read some reviews, and tried to get a feel for how the game works. I've liked everything I have seen, so I downloaded the free rules and lists on the Mantic site and figured we would give them a whirl.

Background: 

I'm a longtime Warhammer player, and by longtime I mean since 2nd edition circa 1984. It was the new hot thing in fantasy miniatures rules back then (and somewhat controversial with it's 1:1 figure ratio) but by the 90's it was The Standard. I'd say I played the most with it during 4th, 5th, and 6th editions, trailing off over the last ten years with 7th and 8th.

I didn't have enough minis back when we started to play very big games but luckily within a year or so TSR released Battlesystem, the mass combat rules for AD&D, and provided a load of  counters perfectly sized for use with Warhammer, so my first year or so of games with it were fairly two-dimensional. It was never our main game as Battletech and later 40K and then Epic all took over that spot in turns, but it was always around.

The last few years it appears that sales were really down, possibly somewhat due to some of the changes in the 8th edition of the game which turned off a lot of longtime players. Games Workshop spent 2014 selling "The End Times" which was literally the Ragnorok of the Warhammer setting and it ended with literally the end of the world. I liked the background that had grown up around the game over the last 30 years so I was sad to see it go.

What replaced Warhammer midway through 2015 was Age of Sigmar, a totally new rules set. Apprentice Red and I played it for the first time over the summer and while I like some elements it is a very different game from Warhammer and just didn't feel like there was much to it. A lack of formations and facing pretty much removes the maneuver aspect of the game,  Sure, we could go back and player older warhammer but it would be nice to have something current that was closer to the old game. 

Enter the challenger: Kings of War.

We played two games over the weekend. I had written up a pair of 1000 point army lists for Elves and orcs, stuck figures on some improvised cardboard formation trays, and had it ready to go when Apprentice Blaster arrived.

I'm not going to do a turn-by-turn battle report here. Game 1 was a dead-even tie, Game 2 was a decisive win by the old 4th edition High Elves under Marshal Blaster against my equally-vintage Orcs.

Rolls like this should explain my lack of a win
(it's a "roll high" kind of game)

We talked about the first game and we both agreed that we liked it a lot. We then played again with the same lists and a better understanding of the rules the next day and it was even more fun. Some thoughts after playing:

• Even not knowing the rules the first game played pretty fast
• The second game we knocked out in just over an hour even with all the laughing at my horrible rolls
• The free lists are plenty to get started and are mainly beneficial if you already have an army or six gathering dust around the house. The book lists are very nice and there are quite a few of them. 
• Magic is way less important in this game, regarding both items and the impact of wizards on the fight.  
• Point values feel pretty balanced, nothing screamed "broken" to us.
• It's IGO-UGO but it plays so much faster that this is not the downside I was afraid that it would be. It's nowhere near the old Warhammer turn cycle time or even 40K.
• While you cannot customize units and characters the way we did in most editions of Warhammer, it still feels like you're building an army - it just lacks the nitpicking over dropping that last grunt or two to fit in one more magic item for your overpowered character. 
• While the customization element is less, the maneuver element is heightened to at least the best of Warhammer. Movement and positioning is crucial to winning. Units have a certain number of dice they roll in attack, mainly based on the skill and size of the unit. In a flank charge this  is doubled and in a rear attack it is tripled. that's huge.

In our games this maneuver element was critical as in game two for example, elven archers and bolt throwers destroyed one of my two big infantry units as I was ready to charge his infantry. This left my flank exposed and sure enough my orc boys got smashed by elf cavalry who took advantage of it. 

Steady ... steady, looks pretty good

From our experience and what I have seen online the game is built so that it's fairly difficult to just flatten a unit with a single charge. Most of the time units will smash back and forth until one finally breaks. Shooting can soften up a tough unit in advance and of course a flank or rear charge can do all kinds of damage. Setting up that charge, avoiding or minimizing missile fire, the tension as damage piles up on your units, and keeping leaders close to prevent routs by those severely damaged units - it puts the focus of the game on playing it, not preparing for it and that's something I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of these days. There's plenty of prep already in a miniatures game - I don't need army-building to be the best part of the game. I'd like playing it to be the best part and I think it is.

Stupid elf archery!

 It is a little bit of an adjustment from Warhammer  - it's not "orcs come with light armor and a hand weapon and are 6 points." You can take a unit of 10 orcs, or 20 orcs, or 40 orcs, and there's a statline for each size - that's Troop, Regiment, and Horde. No more min-maxing the numbers with 23 orc boys.

Characters don't join units. Your leader or wizard or army standard bearer are out there all by their lonesome and in general they are not beatsticks who are capable of destroying units on their own. They are mainly there to be inspiring and re-roll bad nerve tests, and throw some spells or some extra dice to push a combat your way. They are not hammers to be feared just because they showed up.

We really liked the game and I have ... several ... old armies laying around so it's a very economical game for us to play. I've already ordered and received the main book and the Uncharted Empires book (which is army lists for the rest of the old Warhammer armies not covered in the main book) and I am trying to figure out the best way to make some progress in getting them painted without losing too much focus on 40K.

 

Should you try it? Well ...

• If you have armies for Warhammer and have the itch, go download the free rules and the lists and give it a try!
• Lord of the Rings armies will work here too with some base adjustments.
• If you do not have multiple armies but the massed fantasy battle thing intrigues you, again, the rules and lists are free. Mantic makes some nicely priced starter armies and with the current state of warhammer, well, there's always eBay.
• I suspect that with a few adjustments for scale you could play the game with Warmaster, DBA. and Hordes of the Things armies as well.

So yes, I'm a fan, Blaster is a fan, and Red was around for our second game and is now a fan too, eagerly looking forward to blooding his Wood Elf army in our next go. Expect more posts on it in the future as it moves in right behind 40K at a comfortable #2 in our preferred miniature games. 

40K Friday: Kings of War

So we're going to dust of the long-neglected Warhammer minis and try Kings of War tonight ...

I'll let everyone know how it goes. Saturday may be Frostgrave's first run so I may have two new games to discuss next week.