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Post by commandersasha on Mar 15, 2014 21:48:51 GMT
GW nerfed it. The dataslate for the new unicorn cake oven looks awesome though...
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Post by commandersasha on Mar 15, 2014 20:34:44 GMT
Living in London, I have the luxury of several independent stores in range: I commute past Dark Sphere, which is very well stocked with many manufacturers. I have always liked Proxy models and armies, and I like all sorts of games, so GW's exclusivity never satisfied me.
An independent shop will sell me scenic bases, minis my friends haven't seen before, and Munchkin. GW's recent business approach has driven me away further, so I vote with my wallet, buy their books as I need, from alternative suppliers, then make my armies from other manufacturers. (My new project is DEldar, using the very sexy Raging Heroes girls).
A good FLGS is a wonderful thing; I happily pay for personal service, real-life browsing, and over-the-counter cash transactions.
Oh, and the best gaming shopping experience? Saving up a few hundred in cash, then hitting a convention, such as Salute in London! Struggling home with armfuls is WAY better than waiting for a jiffy bag, and hoping you didn't get e-boned!
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Post by commandersasha on Mar 15, 2014 20:05:31 GMT
The trouble is that the only people who are well served by the game at the moment are those who like constantly buying new models. The friends of mine who can buy and paint a new army every month are loving 40K at the moment, are riding the power wave, and are spoilt for new models, new books, new builds.
Meanwhile, those of us that wanted to carry on playing the game we love, with the models we invested in, are now left behind, asking our friends to pity us and leave their new models at home. This isn't fair to us, or them.
On another front, GW are putting so little care into game development and balance that they shove out cut and paste rulesets, a new army with only seven actual rule pages, and allow weapons only suitable for Apocalypse fun games into regular troop battles.
In 7 years, I have spent thousands of pounds on rulebooks, models and supplies; I did not consider this to be a running charge, but an investment: I built 3K+ of Skaven-Counts-As-Tyranids, and by the time I had finished, I knew how to play a 1,500 well. I expected to add the odd unit here and there subsequently, but to find that without a slew of new units, my army was defunct? Whine? Heck yeah!
Similarly, my friend has waited decades for a Knight, and the prospect of a knight army was amazing! But a half-codex, with 2 models, no wargear and little fluff, for £25, to be followed by extra books and slates, all costing more...that is just a scum drug dealer offering a taste of something good to get you hooked. It's not just about making money: it's a confidence trick; bait and switch, pay-to-win.
They could have played nicer. THAT is what I am whining about.
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Post by commandersasha on Mar 14, 2014 23:04:52 GMT
C:IK has 7 pages of rules. SEVEN. The fluff is limited, although there is another nice book full of fluff, for another £25...
This should have been awesome. I have friends who have been waiting since Epic for Knights.
They could have had a few sizes of Knight, variants within the sizes, then lots of wargear options, allowing you to customise off basic kits. GW and Forgeworld could have rolled out endless upgrade sprues. Most geeks love big robots, we would have blown £££ on Knight armies.
Stompa counts-as-knights. Revenant and Riptide Knights. Renegade, Cultist or Ecclesiarch Knights. Shooty, Combat or defensive patterns.
Who the hell in GW thinks that the Tyranid cut-and-paste, and the Knight 2 page codex formats are going to impress us?!?!
My steampunk pirate count-as-Dark Eldar will be getting an Armoured Core model for their Knight, GW gets nothing from me until their development team gets better!
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Post by commandersasha on Mar 14, 2014 22:53:31 GMT
Anybody know how to put a Sony Experia (Android) on random?!
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Post by commandersasha on Feb 1, 2014 22:23:16 GMT
I think it's a conceptual issue: IG fight like normal, contemporary regular armies. SM are like comtemporary elite armies. In both cases, you think about the person when designing the troops, and about the engineering when you design the tanks. All of the special rules, traits, and even psychic powers are what you and I would want if we went to war.
I don't think Cruddace "gets" Tyranids. He created named characters: bees don't have them. He allowed challenges: ants don't do that. He allowed cannibalism: a galactic super-locust-swarm would never allow that. He allowed us to suffer Perils Of The Warp, even though our powers are not warp-drawn.
I think the Space Marine codex was excellent, many fluffy builds that are viable; the problems it has are more due to the problems affecting 6th in general.
It's just a shame that they let him do it again.
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Post by commandersasha on Feb 1, 2014 20:00:22 GMT
Fleetofclaw has a strong point: a lot of us are suffering from a crashing letdown. I think 6th is the best ruleset yet, but there is the opportunity for abuse, and both the powergamers, and more sadly GW, have abused it sorely. It is definitely all about the shooting, so this codex should have had some mechanic-breaking army-wide rules to bypass this: if it had, Tyranids would have been fluffy and balanced.
Instead we got a half-baked cut-and-paste codex by committee, guided by a shameless priority to sell models. EVERY dual model kit has had the previous build nerfed, the other boosted, to re-sell the kits.
I personally am boycotting ALL GW products, and the only reason my group are still playing 40k is because we have agreed on a set of house rules (no fliers/swooping FMCs, Wyches get invun against overwatch, Tau don't get supporting overwatch, Ignores LoS is snap-shot only, multiple flamers overwatching do 1D6 total hits)
If I were you, I'd jump ship for a bit, as my group largely has: X-Wing is an awesome exciting game, the pre-painted minis make you want to pick them up and zoom them round the room; Malifaux is great fun, with small crews and exquisitely sculpted minis, Dreadzone is a great BloodBowl re-make, Studio McVey's Zombie game is beautiful...and there's also some amazing themed board games: Battlestar, Firefly, Arkham Horror.
Get back to gaming with mates, beer and pretzels, favourite music playing, and no bunch of corporate bullies wrecking your precious hobby and gaming time.
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Post by commandersasha on Feb 1, 2014 8:53:05 GMT
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 30, 2014 23:51:01 GMT
Psychic powers, like Warlord Traits, should have been made choosable, not random. Infantile approach to a game mechanic.
Real armies don't turn up to a battle, then open their lunchboxes to see what guns their wives packed for them.
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 28, 2014 23:25:26 GMT
The problem isn't Allies, it's the Allies Matrix:
There should only have been one or two Battle Brothers: (Dark)Eldar, and just one or two Marine combos.
Allies Of Convenience should have been done as follows: The armies should have been divided into 5 groups: Imperial guard, Astartes, Chaos, Tyranids, and other Xenos. -Imps can Ally with anyone (humans will join any cause), but not get access to their tanks(cults don't get the heavy vehicles). -Tyranids cannot ally with any (totally unfluffy). -Any army within Astartes, or Chaos, or Xenos, can ally with similar armies.
After that, ALL armies should be able to take Desperate Allies with ANY OTHER ARMY, and it should have been made more punishing: One Eye Open should have been on a 4+ or something.
Desperate Allies should represent a canny general orchestrating a simultaneous attack whilst his enemy is being harangued by a third party: deploy your Desperate Allies on the opposite flank, let the enemy deal with THEM first!
Tyranids should NEVER ally, but the above mechanic would have allowed us to make use of another army's detachment as a strategic asset; this is what Allies SHOULD be for, not just a way of crowbarring Farseer buffs onto your Dark Lances.
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 27, 2014 10:17:47 GMT
BUT STILL, even at a casual level, the game is painfully imbalanced. Every (and I mean EVERY) time we get together to play, some broken mechanic will rear its head, grinding the game to a halt as we double check rules and gripe about how poorly it's handled. it doesn't help GW's case that some of our players are actually game designers, and have a good laugh at how poorly the rules are crafted. It does help US, however, as one of them will suggest a simple fix within seconds that plays better, and we all quickly agree that it should be implemented as a new house rule. I couldn't agree more. I play in a casual group, but we are all intelligent, tactical players, who want a coherent rule set to play by. Losing valuable gaming time trying to figure out a badly worded rule is frustrating, and detracts from the cinematic flow. Our group has had some minor friendship issues due to the past few months' imbalances, with accusations of whining or gloating actually resulting in bad feeling; fortunately most of us are now drifting from 40K into X-Wing and Malifaux, to reduce the problem. Well played, GW, that's a few dozen adults no longer shopping with you... I agree. These books, judging by their size, their cost and their wording, HAVE been written by rules lawyers; those lawyers are simply not very good.
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 27, 2014 9:58:06 GMT
I think even MY shabby GS skills could pull that off! Great tutorial, lovely design.
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 18, 2014 11:05:53 GMT
In what world is this acceptable behaviour? A new £30 rulebook is released, and SEVEN DAYS LATER they are adding chapters, that you have to pay £9 for??? WHY was this not a sub=chapter in the main codex? By all means release new rules when codecii are aging, as an interim measure, but these people are withholding rules in release days, just to extract more from you A WEEK LATER!
What UTTER contempt they clearly have for us. I got a pirate codex, and this makes me very glad I did. By the time this "Trilogy" is complete, you will have paid £57 for your rule set, and half of that will be home- printed pages falling out of your badly-bound hardbook, full of pictures of Nottingham's display models, some years old.
I'm sorry, but I have LOVED this game, for the 6-7 years I have been playing it, both supervising my young son and his friends, and then getting seriously into it myself. I have spent thousands of pounds, and thousands of hours, reading, browsing, visiting, learning and developing; my long-suffering wife has had to come to terms with my "affair" with what she calls "Snorehammer", and I have developed some of my tightest friendships with gaming buddies I would never have met otherwise.
The past year's power creep, the past few months' mechanic abuses, and now this utter betrayal of a loyal fanbase, is more than a cynical bait-and-switch: this is a contemptible act of an immoral abusive partner.
We don't want to quit, because we have so much invested already, but this is just not fair.
At this point I really do hope that GW folds, the board of directors go bankrupt, and that the only thing that stops them losing their homes is that they sell off the IP to every open source Tom, Dick and Harry who turn it into a community-owned game, with fandexes, independent mini manufacturers, and the freedom for FLGS's to act as they wish.
I can't believe how few people seem to be passively accepting this particular release: guys, you spent £30 on the rules last week, and now your book is out of date with the current rule set! Get angry!
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 17, 2014 22:34:21 GMT
Personally I used to photocopy/reduce my Codecii to A5, add some homemade pages with unit summaries and USR reminders, add a personal coverpage, then get the lot spiral bound. A5 Codex that stays open on the page you left it. Win.
Really sorry that your book got damaged, hope it settles out with time. Stick it under your mattress whilst you're in bed for a few nights
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Post by commandersasha on Jan 16, 2014 9:30:16 GMT
My main artillery unit in the old codex was 3 Hiveguard and 3 Biovores, plodding up the middle of the field, with a naked Prime attached, giving Synapse for both units and the centre of the table. This came to 365pts.
In the new codex, it comes to 385 if I change the now over-priced Prime to a pair of Zoeanthropes. Haven't tried it yet, but that's what I'm going with :-)
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