Well it was a ridiculous May for this game and I expect June will be even more so. A faction focus almost every day! Much online discussion! Salt and tears! Then Thursday they go and nuke Horus Heresy models by Legend-izing them out of "competitive" play! I admit I've raised my eyebrows at some of the changes but in general I'm still excited about the update. The streamlining, the new data card approach, and getting it all out up front for free are very positive in my view.
Some of my enthusiasm may be coming from actually getting in some games again after a long gap. So far my Necrons are batting .500 against Blaster's Eldar which is fine but working through all the layers of running a 9th edition army is a lot of effort and there are a lot of opportunities to miss or forget things and I am even using the cards. I think the core of my dislike is the level of many of the strats - here's a set of 50 cards and 10 of them only apply to one specific unit in your army under specific conditions. "Only Canoptek units" - sure, maybe. "Only when a character dies near a Doomstalker which is not engaged in melee" - not so much. It's absurdly specific and that is the kind of thing that should be on the unit data sheet in some form, not on a card. Cutting out those kinds of stratagems can only help the game. Strats were a cool idea when they first appeared but they have mutated too far. Add on the dynastic protocols, character auras, the general rulebook strats, some of the more esoteric wargear ... it just piles up like the last few seconds of overwhelmed Tetris game.
Getting all motivated meant sprucing up some armies and adding ... a few. That's been my month.
- I decided that if the Crimson Fists are going to be my all-time Marine chapter then they should be far more up to date and the process I started here have
only gotten worsecontinued. Progress was made so I added more to the pile and now have ... more progress I need to make. There has been a lot of filling in units I did not have - Intercessors, Incursors, Invictors, Aggressors, Inceptors, Suppressors, Repulsors ... heck I even picked up a unit of Reavers in the hopes they will be decent in this edition! Optimistic I said! - I have not gone nuts with then other loyalist marines. I set the Dark Angels aside for now, added one or two painted units to the Blood Angels when an opportunity presented itself, and reallocated some stuff to the Grey Knights I already had. I did recently decide to jazz up my Imperial Fists Deathwing army a bit since that should be even more playable now. Mainly some dreadnoughts, which had been painfully lacking since I first acquired the army. Of course they were Contemptors and a Leviathan so ...
- Other Loyal Imperials: The Guard got a pretty massive upgrade as I decided it was time to make them more than just a tank army - A bunch of the new infantry, some Chimeras to move them in, some new Sentinels, Hellhounds, ordinance batteries, Basilisks, Wyverns, Ratlings, Ogryn, officers, even a Rogal Dorn - it was a major add-on as I finally decided I do love the guard. I am really looking forward to trying them out in 10th.
- The other other Loyalists - I have been eyeballing a Custodes army for a long time and decided the time was now. They are kind of the opposite of the Imperial Guard so it will make for a nice change after playing one or the other. I did make this a "painted stuff only" force so I am not adding to the backlog. Given that they're a small elite army it's not too hard to put together a few thousand points and they tend to be painted similarly anyway so it really worked out.
- The other other other loyalist force I tuned up was my Imperial Knight group. With none of them painted the same way - because I wanted a gathering of individual knights, not a space marine chapter - it is ridiculously (some might say dangerously) easy to add one here and one there. I'm up to 7 of the big ones with 5 painted, one needing paint, and one needing to be built as Canis Rex. Then I have 6 of the small knights which I intend to paint up similarly to each of the larger knights (but not Rex) so the effectively each one has a squire. That's the plan anyway.
- Of course once I started with the good knights I started noticing the bad knights. Not having any of them made it easy to see them as a gap and to justify getting some as the logical opponent to my loyalists ... and to try and convert some of my friends with "40K Battletech" as an option. So I bought a chaos knight army. In an interesting contrast to my good guys, this army is all painted to match. Well, except for the one big knight I added on which is close-ish, and the one I still need to build. The best thing is that it is all magentized! Given the largely fixed loadout of the chaos knights it's a handy thing to be able to switch form one type to another as needed. More to come on these for sure.
- I added a couple of items for the Iron Warriors but not all that much. I didn't want to create a backlog where one did not already exist.
- The Death Guard did get some significant upgrades as mentioned in that earlier post and I am working on them in between Crimson Fists. Lots of Terminators and a lot of the newer style plague marines which I had avoided up until now. They will be ready soon enough.
- Finally I did pick up some Tyranid stuff - hey since the new boxed set is half 'nids I figured I might as well. Nothing too extreme here - some genestealers, some warriors, and a hive tyrant. I have some ideas on a color scheme but I figure I will build them all at once and see what direction I want to go with them.
So yes, the hype worked on me and I'm looking forward to getting these things on the table with some new rules. Batreps to come!
