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.

40K Friday - Blood Angel Intercessors

 

I've been working on putting together my Vampire Counts army for Old World - sorting through the pile and repurposing things from my Kings of War Undead and Age of Sigmar Soulblight armies but when I sat down to do some painting I kept looking at the red army on my painting table and I just got pulled away.

I had some assault intercessors that had been sitting at "almost finished" for months now. It's a weird hang-up of mine that I can get a model most of the way to "finished" and then stop and overthink the final stages and eventually move on to something else instead of just finishing the damn thing. I have units that have been at this stage for literal years, sometimes since my kids were still "kids" kinds of years. I have been making an effort last year and this year to clear out some of this pro level of dumb backlog and I am liking the progress. The armies that are mostly still on the sprue - like the Black Templars primaris stuff - are just going to have to wait until next year.

Last month I managed to knock out those assault intercessors - all 20 of them - and get them into the display case which is pretty much the finish line for me. That's two full squads which is as much foot-type regular assault as I should need. I also finished up a custom Sanguinor that I had sitting on the table as well. 

3rd shelf yellow helmets are the assault guys, winged guy on the right is the new Sanguinor

My takeaway from these 3 units is that you would think I would know by now that picking up someone's old half-painted squads on eBay is not nearly the shortcut that it appears to be. Finished squads -sure, but then you lose some of the options to make them "yours" and customize them a bit. I've long been a sucker for that unit that someone started but didn't finish - maybe they are built with some custom parts or have some other interesting tweaks or have the beginning of an interesting paint job but that need someone to finish them out. That someone is me - though it may take 5 years to actually accomplish it. The way I build & paint I would probably be better off focusing on one or two armies ... well that horse left the barn about 1989 so I am way past that now.

This week I am working on regular intercessors, the ones with guns, and I am actually close to finishing them too. I am at the putting-the-shoulder-pad-decals-on stage which will be followed by some touching up, painting any other details I have ignored thus far but have decided now that I want to paint them, then a final shade wash, then the clear coat, then finishing the base with flock and tufts, then cussing over any mistakes I missed prior to all that, and then finally putting them in the case. I might finish all of that next week or it might be 2031. Hopefully it's next week. Three finished five-man squads would cover basic troopers for the foreseeable future.

That's another quirk I've realized I have: if there is a type of unit I want to add to the army I tend to want to do all of them at once to ensure they all look like they belong together. I could have focused in and done one five-man intercessor squad but I had set aside three for team red and I am unlikely to take just one squad if I take any. So I end up painting fifteen of them all at once which is a bigger effort and tends to drag out - for me anyway. At lest it's not Orks where I'm doing 20-man squads of boyz - and I can't take just one of those either.

Next up ... I am not sure. I was thinking maybe aggressors - hey it's only a 3-man squad - but I need some leaders here too. Individual special models can turn into an infinite project for me too but if I just try to get them done maybe I can avoid that particular tendency this time. I should probably look into my jump pack intercessors too since that's kind of a signature thing for Blood Angels.

I also have to decide what kind of elite stuff I want to focus on next.  Sanguinary guard? New terminators? Carve out some of the pile of death company that's waiting to take the field? This is where the analysis paralysis can take hold if I let it. One unit at a time ...

If I can finish these guys up this month that puts me up to 37 BA models finished so far this year as I did finally finish the biker chaplain I mentioned in August. I think 50+ sounds like a decent goal.

One final note: as is fairly evident from the shelf picture up there my army uses a lot of different reds. Being complied over many years and from multiple sources it was inevitable but I actually like it - my justification is that the whole force is out on campaign - it's a fighting company, not a parade company - and between battle damage, environmental effects, and supply challenges everyone's armor ends up slightly different. I know within the force there is GW Blood Angels Contrast Red, GW Mephiston Red, Army Painter Dragon Red, and Testor's Flat Red at least. Add in various highlighting techniques, stains, and washes and there is a lot of variation in there when you see them up close but on the table they look pretty coherent. 

One thing that helps is that a few years ago I went back and made some deliberate choices on how I wanted to base the army going forward. I wanted it to be fairly simple so I could replicate it on every model, I wanted it to comprised of easily acquired materials, and I wanted it to show off and contrast the color. I'm not a huge fan of all-green basing on mostly red models so no grass this time. I probably could have gone with snow bases as it looks great with a nice bright red scheme but I already have snow on my Eldar, my Iron Warriors, and all of my chaos daemons so I wanted to do something else. I ended up with the sort of grey desert bases you see above. This is:

• Base color is GW Mechanicus Standard Grey
• Flock is Gale Force Nine Ash Waste
• Tufts are Army Painter Highland tufts

Once I had this figured out I went back and applied it to all of my existing models and I've been doing it to all of the new ones as I go. When your army is a sort of home for wayward miniatures it goes a long way towards making them look like they are part of the same force.

I can admire those people who have an entire army painted at once by one person or service using all the same paints but it's never going to be a thing for me.

More to come ...

Not-40K Friday - The Old Chaos Army for Old World

 

I've had the 3D printer running this week to finish out the movement tray expanders for Old World. Something bit me and I got fired up to get the trays I needed done and I also decided to go back through and check figure-by-figure what kind of shape they were in after a decade of disuse.

Somewhat to my surprise they were in really good shape. I haven't used my chaos warriors "in anger" since the first few months of Age of Sigmar and I think the last time I talked about them here was right after the move. I played a lot of chaos armies back in 4th-5th-6th with 7th trailing off into not much by 8th. In the earlier days a chaos army was truly "Chaos" as it mixed warriors, daemons, and beastmen all together and as they were gradually separated in the rules I found myself without enough of any one part to make a real army. I decided to focus on the warrior branch of things and had a pretty solid army there painted up during 5th. That continued into 6th with many battles against my friends' Empire and Dwarf armies and people playing my High Elves.

The silver chaos warriors here are that first multi-part Warhammer regiments set they did in the 90's promising us that troop costs would be a lot more reasonable ... uh, yeah. I liked the rough metal look and so did most of the army this way, discovering that drybrushing silver over a black base coat went pretty quickly and looked pretty good. The banners in this army are paper, drawn up in Visio which was fairly new at the time, enahanced by some interesting fonts - an Ultima font among them - and then printed out, painted, and with some decals added on I thought they worked pretty well. They are still holding together 25+ years later so I can't really complain.

Old Two-Blades over there on the left has seen many hours on the table in both Warhammer and as a D&D character, maybe a GURPS character, and maybe even a Fantasy Hero character so he is well-loved here.

There are a couple of converted chaos wizards in the back and then a unit of marauder horsemen after I mostly got over my "I don't need puny skirmishers" phase. At the very least they are good for soaking up those goblin fanatics before they hit my real units. 

Here in the center is the real heart of the army. The red-armored warriors were my Chosen of Khorne - yes kids there was a time when "chosen" were a paint job, not a special model. The kits at the time only had weapon & shield, then later they added a halberd option - in metal. But in the rules we had an option for two weapons and with Khorne's frenzy rules you can bet I wanted that two weapon option. So, I hand-drilled all of those left hands and added in weapons from various other kits, including 40K Ork melee weapons from Gorka-Morka I believe. The unit leader has a pair of spiked maces and a big cape and he has served as an RPG character more than once too.

On the left middle is my first converted mounted hero - he's one of the metal champions of Khorne (he has a bloodletter-y head) that I cut in half at the waist and mounted up I think using a rough rider of Attila lower half. He usually ended up with a magic sword and then for a long time my favorite thing to put on him was the Chaos Runeshield. Unfortunately his shield has gone missing but I remember what it looked like and I am going to have to recreate it and get him back on the table.

On the right in the middle is my usual warlord for my later games, the metal mounted chaos lord that came out a little later than the rest. He has a huge axe, a decent-looking shield, and is on a nicely sculpted horse. Smaller fights were led by the bloodletter-head guy above but any bigger fight from probably 6th edition on was led by the Horned King there. 

Then in the back we have my beloved chaos knights - no. no one really needs a block of ten chaos knights but it is the hammer of all hammers if you do use the full unit. Shoot them, fireball them, drop a cannonball on them - they can lose half the unit and still blow almost anything off of the board with a charge. They were usually led by the Horned King or Bloodletter-Head which just made them nastier. Granted, for many fights I just took 5 or 6 of them and I'm sure I broke them into two units a few times but the back rank is mostly fill-in guys (including some plastic Battlemasters chaos knights) so I didn't really like fielding them separately.

Almost every force selection started with these two units and one or both of these leaders.

The righthand section of the army has another big block of chaos warriors and these are the earlier chunky monopose versions that I think originally came out with Heroquest but were later sold as a straight-up Warhammer unit. I ended up with a bunch of them through trades and such and decided to make another regiment. I liked the irony of a unit of "chaos" warriors made up of identical models. I used the metal 4th edition era command trio for them, did the same drybrush look as the other unit, and painted up their shields to add some nice contrast. They've been used as guards and evil fighters in many RPGs as well.

Next to them is one of my favorite character models for chaos that I used as a wizard. he has a staff, and has a helmet with no face, but his raised hand has what could be an eye in the middle of it - very strong on the creepy to weird chaos scale.

Then in the back we have a unit of chaos knights from about 3rd edition, with weirder poses, proportions, and looks than the later ones. It's good to mix in some older units into your army when you can - especially a chaos army.

Yeah, these guys. I like mine better but they definitely have a look.

So there is the army that's intact after 25+ years and getting ready to get back on the table. I do have some additional units of similar vintage that I either never quite finished or took a beating in a move at some point, or that my kids got a hold of when they were toddlers - never leave your army out on the table overnight if you have toddlers! -  so I have some additions to make and I am really looking forward to working on them again. 

Old World-wise my next-most-finished army is my High Elves so they will be getting some attention this weekend, then I have a huge pile of orcs & goblins to go through, some Undead to assemble, the Beastmen I finally caved and converted over to Sigmar bases two years ago only to see them eliminated and returned to the Old World line ... sigh ... and then that shiny box of Bretonians guilting me from the shelf. 

More to come for sure.

40K Friday: Introducing Some New Players to 40K

 

I mean I've done this before - starting around 2008 - but it has been awhile. Apprentice Boom Gun Brandon has been getting interested in 40K for a while. Not enough to actually read a book on it - that's a real challenge with the younger set now - but enough to keep asking me to play a game. Battletech Terry, longtime veteran of the Succession Wars, has also gotten interested. Invisible Patrick has also gotten interested but was not a part of this game. So, with a pool of interested players and having had a few tryout games in the past year I felt like it was time to get the wheels turning more consistently.

So we did 1000 points per side, Terry playing Eldar, Brandon playing Marines. I had things set up before they arrived and I picked the armies but I gave Terry some options on speed vs. firepower for a few units and Brandon mostly played his own forces with a few reinforcements from mine.

The Eldar - pretty much a sampler force to try them out:

+ FACTION KEYWORD: Xenos - Aeldari

+ DETACHMENT: Warhost

+ TOTAL ARMY POINTS: 1025pts

+

+ WARLORD: Char1: Maugan Ra

+ ENHANCEMENT:

+ NUMBER OF UNITS: 10

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Char1: 1x Maugan Ra (100 pts): Warlord, Maugetar

Char2: 1x Spiritseer (65 pts): Shuriken Pistol, Witch Staff

5x Dark Reapers (90 pts)

• 4x Dark Reaper: 4 with Close combat weapon, Reaper Launcher

• 1x Dark Reaper Exarch: Close combat weapon, Missile Launcher

5x Dire Avengers (80 pts)

• 4x Dire Avenger: 4 with Avenger Shuriken Catapult, Close Combat Weapon

• 1x Dire Avenger Exarch: Close Combat Weapon, Avenger Shuriken Catapult

5x Wraithblades (170 pts): 5 with Ghostaxe and Forceshield

1x Warlock Skyrunners (45 pts): Destructor, Shuriken Pistol, Singing Spear, Twin Shuriken Catapult

3x Windriders (80 pts): 3 with Close Combat Weapon, Scatter Laser

1x Wraithlord (140 pts): Ghostglaive, Wraithbone Fists, 2x Flamer, 2x Starcannon

1x Falcon (130 pts): Pulse Laser, Wraithbone hull, Bright Lance, Shuriken Cannon

1x Wave Serpent (125 pts): Wraithbone Hull, Twin Shuriken Catapult, Twin Bright Lance

 I don't have the Marine list handy but there was a Gravis Captain leading some Aggressors, some Bladeguard, a Ballistus Dreadnought, a Repulsor Executioner ("Boom Gun" needed the biggest gun the marines have of course - he has that nickname for a reason), and some assault intercessors.

Initial deployment

So we had the big marine tank plus the dread facing off against the Falcon and the Wave Serpent at one end of the table. Aggressors and the Captain looking at the Wraithlord in the middle. Bladeguard & half the assault intercessors just looking to secure an objective at the other end. The Marines went first.

Somewhere in Turn 1

Here the Jetbikes + Warlock are already thinning the Aggressors while the tanks are busy hurting each other  

The big fight in Turn 2

In turn 2 the Marines jumped out of the Repulsor and onto the objective but the Wave Serpent moved up on the Eldar turn and dropped out 5 Wraithblades and a Wraithseer who eventually wiped out the Marines completely.

We only managed a few turns as this was the first time in a long time for both of them and this was also before our weekly D&D game so there was a hard time limit. We ended up with a score of 8-5 in favor of the Eldar but the main point of this game was to shake off the rust and also to learn how Secondary Objectives worked since we had been leaving that out thus far. It's very energizing to fire the game up again with new players and certainly engages the painting circuits once again. We had a lot of fun and we have another game coming this weekend - which I will try to document better

40K Friday - Monday Edition: Death Guard

 

The Death Guard codex coming out and all the hype around DG being good again did get my attention and inspired me to break out the Plague Marine kits and get those built. I'm also working on finishing or fixing some of the unfinished & broken vehicles etc. to be able to get them on the table in a presentable fashion as opposed to the "well if this helbrute had an arm it would be an autocannon" kind of approach. Since they are "good again" my poor Defiler is even being reassembled after losing legs and guns etc. in various drops and moves and I'm pretty happy about that. I may even manage to get the various terminators all built (finally!) and usable as well. 

My vision for this army is built around 2 squads of Plague Marines in Rhinos moving up the board built for up-close melee with melta and flamers as the main ranged weapons. I'll have a 3rd and maybe a 4th squad built more for shooting to either hold the backfield or move up as a second wave. A max squad of Deathshroud Terminators with a Lord of Contagion will be one of the heavy-hitters, deep striking in. Blightlords will be utility players, likely in 5-man squads. 

I have the aforementioned reassembled Defiler, various Helbrutes, Daemon Princes, Blight Drones (also being built and painted), Blight Haulers, and Plagueburst Crawlers to add in as needed. I don't know that it will fit The Meta but it should look like a Death Guard army at least and I'm looking forward to playing it. 

Also of note - we actually played a game of 40K this weekend  which has inspired me to make some more progress. I'll post up some pictures in Friday's entry.

40K-ish Friday - Battletech Gothic

 

I'm so glad to see the return of one of my favorite out of print GW ... wait it's what? From who? Well, alright ...

I waited a week to let this thing percolate before I posted on it but my thoughts on it haven't changed and they come down to 3 main questions: 

• Who is this for? 
• Who is excited about this? 
• Is this the best way to spend your resources on building the BT game?

Prologue:

I've been playing Battletech for a long time. I've had ebbs and flows as far as my time and interest level but it's never gone completely away and I still have the first miniatures and books and things I bought back around 1986. I've been playing 40K since it came out in 1987 and I've been playing Warhammer Fantasy since the second edition came out in 1985. Yeah the 80's were a busy time. 

I've never heard anyone say, while playing Battletech, "I wish this game was more like 40K". Not once. Ever. 

When BT came out there were some surface similarities. The 3025 universe was post-apocalyptic in that much technology had been lost, very few places could make new mechs and even making parts for them was rare. Most mechs were repaired and rebuilt from salvaged machines and components. It made even a lance of four mechs a considerable force in the lore. Scenario books recreating "historical" confrontations would mention which mechs were present and what kinds of damage should be applied to them pre-battle to represent that bad leg actuator or missing laser. They got away from that aspect of the setting pretty quickly though and eventually that lost tech thing and damaged mechs being a standard expectation disappeared. Nowadays we have thousands of new mechs being constructed every year, not to mention the whole Clan situation.

Today it's much more of a "future Tom Clancy" type setting with new technology and specific weapons platforms taking the lead alongside political machinations between the houses and clans and whatever version of ComStar exists at the time. This makes for decent novels  and provides plenty of hooks for a campaign whether purely BT or going full RPG. It's "clean" in comparison to something like 40K - not a lot of tentacles, if you know what I mean.

But now we have this latest effort. Yes, I assumed it was an April Fool's joke. It's not. Alright so ...

Who is supposed to be excited here? 

Is this to try and draw in 40K players? I would think a lot of them would already be aware of Battletech as a game between the Battletech PC game from ten years ago or so,  the more recent Mechwarrior 5, and the resurgence of tabletop BT driven by Catalyst's Kickstarters  and boxed sets and new miniatures over say the last 5 years. I'd say Battletech has a much higher profile in the last 5 years than it had before - since the 90's at least. So I don't think awareness is a problem.

A part of this may be the thinking that if you make it look like 40K it will get more attention from that crowd. Well, maybe, but I don't think so. It appears to be mostly the same game underneath and that's a very different animal than any version of 40K. The look is only a part of the appeal of 40K.

• Both games have been building up their lore for roughly 40 years. BT is a combination of Historical Novel and Techno-Thriller. 40K is Epic Myth and Action Movie. The feel, the "vibe" is completely different between the games and the universes. People like the "grimdark" and 40K originated the grimdark - taking on the original when it's as strong and popular as it has ever been seems like a mistake. Battletech has strong lore but it is completely different than Warhammer 40,000 (no aliens, no psychic powers, no AI) and making a new offshoot of that is putting your new lore, unsupported by any prior products, up against the massive juggernaut that is the Warhammer Universe. 
  
  
  

  

  You know what quote goes here don't you?

  
  
•  There is also the scale and scope of the game. BT tends to focus on mech action with a side dish of tanks, infantry, and aircraft for some players. I'd say 20 models per side is a big game in BT. In 40K the focus is driven per-army and could be a 100+ infantry on one side against fewer than 10  Knights or superheavies on the other - typically it is a mix of both. The look of a "typical" game of each looks wildly different as far as terrain, unit type, unit count. A lot of BT games happen on a hexmap, even with the miniatures, while a 40K game is always a pure measuring tape on an un-gridded table kind of game. 
  
  Most people could play both without much effort but most people also have a preference for on or the other and despite BT's standard approach being easier to set up I'd say 40K's approach  has more popularity and that's not likely to change by putting gribby monsters into the robot game. 
• Speaking of monsters let's talk about that. They're putting some kind of monsters/kaiju into the Gothic game. That's a huge change for Battletech. That's breaking at least one of the main rules of the universe and hey it might broaden the appeal. I've thought for a long time that a "mechs vs. kaiju" type option for BT would get some attention but I was envisioning something more like Pacific Rim than chaos beasts and daemon engines from Warhammer. So I like them working this angle in somehow, but then they go and leave them out of the boxed set! It's all mechs, and I believe it's alternate sculpts of mechs that already have new miniatures! This is effectively the starter box for a new setting and you can't include the very thing that makes it different from the old setting? That seems like a terrible decision. Even including paper stand-ups of the monsters is a fail - that may work for Battletech players but that hasn't been acceptable for 40K players since 1993 ... and it's still a meme today.

Who is this for? 

Effectively there are 3 groups at play here: Existing Battletech players, Existing 40K/Other miniature game players, and people who are not actively involved in any of these games at this time. 

• Existing (and lapsed) Battletech players: Existing players seem to be somewhat split on this one. I see a few people saying give it a chance. I see a lot of people not liking it at all - for various reasons. I can sum up my own take as a BT fan like this:
• If I want Gothic 40K exists and does it better than anyone has done or is doing
• As an existing player and fan of the only setting they've had up until now splitting this off into an "Elseworlds" side story means I can just sit this one out. It has no impact on the story I like and know and I have no history with it so unless I just really want to have my Thunderbolt punch a Great Uncelan One in the face I can skip this. It's the first boxed set in years that the core Battletech fan can ignore. And if I want to have a big robot punch a big demon in the face ... again, 40K exists. 
• Also a new setting and a new style of mech and the introduction of monsters means I would need to consider building up one or two new armies just for this game. Or I could just keep adding mechs and other forces to the stuff I use in the main game. 
  
  The one real opportunity here might be with people who stopped playing Battletech at some point because it was boring or the universe seemed stagnant or they were just burned out. This does give a new type of combatant and a new look to the old combatants and that might be enough to convince some people to check it out.
  
  
• Existing 40K/GW players: They mostly don't care about Battletech - or any other miniatures game either. 
• This is the main factor they are up against: the general arrogance of Games Workshop players. A large number of 40K players only play 40K and if they do play another tabletop game it's another GW game like Age of Sigmar or Kill Team. GW markets it as "the Games Workshop Hobby" and a lot of people buy into that - they won't even look at another miniatures game. This is something that all other miniature games face and it hurts Kings of War, it hurts Flames of War, it hurts Bolt Action, it hurts Crisis Protocol, and even the Star Wars games. Many of the companies publishing miniatures games today were founded by ex-GW employees and they often view the GW customer as their customer but the Fortress of Arrogance is not just for Comissar Yarrick. Non-GW games are looked down upon and dismissed as inferior by many of the people playing 40K and the other GW games. One element of this is popularity - as in, if Game X is good then why isn't it more popular? Battletech is reasonably popular but I don't think it measures anywhere near the numbers 40K hits in sales, convention & tournament attendance, and online presence. This new take might help but I don't think it's going to make a big dent in the state of things.
• Lapsed 40K players might be a different story as there is a fairly high turnover in those games and they often come out of it looking for something new. For them BT's rules barely changing in 40 years will be a feature when compared to GW's 3-year cycle and constant FAQs and points updates. A more 40K-like version of Battletech might gain some followers here.
  
  
• People who don't play miniature combat type games at all right now: I don't think this is likely to pull in much at all as these people also don't care. If they did, they'd be playing 40K or BT already and if they're new they will probably pick one of those "pure" options instead. A new RPG that's more like 5E D&D would likely pull in more new players to the BT universe than a new flavor of tabletop Succession Wars.

Finally, resources: 

Assuming you can only support one boxed set for Battletech per year - and they've needed Kickstarters to do that - then is this a good move for the game, the players, and the brand in general? Players are already talking about this taking resources from the main game. 

• Some miniature sets have already been delayed. Players don't like it when announced projects are held up for a surprise side-project
• There are major areas of the game that could use a refresh -like fighter combat. Wouldn't a cool boxed set of new spacefighter miniatures featuring a streamlined air/space combat system make more sense? It would give a new (refreshed at least) angle on things and still tie into the main universe. Your goal should be something like X-Wing which was really popular for a few years until the company screwed it up: A game based on small numbers of units playable in a relatively short amount of time by more casual fans. This would also provide an avenue to draw new players in to the rest of the game, allow an option to upscale things by making a Dropship expansion, and potentially tie in to a capital ship combat game (which they have said is in the works) by introducing ships and characters to new players and re-introducing them to the old players who may not have cared about space combat for years. Note that this is not "reprint Aerotech with new art" - this should be a new system that makes it simpler than and distinct from classic Battletech but can still interact with it in some way. That's just one example.
• They've talked about supporting the new line with additional miniatures - many of which would not fit in with or be usable with at all in regular Battletech games. Yet another resource draw.
• There is also talk of this being the first of an ongoing series of parallel universe games. This from a company that's had trouble keeping elements of their main game in stock. Now you're going to have a bunch of "stub" universes with limited support alongside the main game? They mentioned a more anime-flavored universe, a 50's style retro-tech universe (aiming for the Fallout crowd?), maybe a steampunk universe ... but what does that do for me as a player? That mostly sounds like alternate mech designs but how does the game change? If it's just republishing the same mechs over and over  - as we see with Gothic - who cares? That is seriously catering to existing fans, not attempting to expand the game or bring in new ones. Support is a real question - in 5 years how much support will there be for Gothic? For whichever other universes get the greenlight?  Will there be Technical Readouts? Timeline updates? Novels? What's the realistic lifespan of these things?

So yes, I'm pretty negative on Battletech Gothic. I totally understand wanting to expand the product line but this just seems like a misstep and a sidetrack.  Additionally this year's hot new 40K challenger is Trench Crusade which is also grimdark and violent and has all of the usual make-your-parents-mad imagery. I suspect the bulk of the "wanting something like 40K that isn't actually 40K" crowd is being pulled in that direction, further limiting the opportunities here. 

PostScript: 

If you're willing to compete with GW head to head and want to make something new why not make a 28mm skirmish game set in the Nth Succession War and have your basic units be infantry squads and individual vehicles with an occasional appearance by battlemechs? You could make basic infantry squads for each house (and merc unit and periphery bandit group) and also for each major time period (fewer bullets, more lasers as time goes on) and then make some vehicle kits as those are universal across houses. You have some interesting unit variety in the universe already with rifle infantry, laser infantry, and jump infantry and the basic trilogy of wheeled/tracked/hover vehicles plus the VTOL option. We have light medium and heavy tanks, transports, artillery, scout units, recovery vehicles, and even coolant trucks already. We have special elite units in many houses like Liao Death Commandos and the inevitable ninjas from House Kurita. Later in the timeline you get powered armor units. Battlemechs could be a limited use option like knights in 40K and would make for awesome centerpiece models in 28mm scale. 

It just seems like both a new and an obvious way to go to please existing fans while getting some attention from people playing other games that might be looking for something. Yet instead of this we get Mechs vs. Squiggoths ... 

 

40K Friday - The Practical Side of 3D Printing

 

He's upset about being resized

I know the dream of 3D printing is "I can print all the miniatures I want for almost free" with a side order of "any time I want them" and to a point this is true. It's more true with a resin printer than a filament printer in many ways but I am happy starting out with the melted plastic option. One of the reasons I feel that way is because I already have too damn many miniatures - what I need is more time to play them. Barring a terrible physics accident that alters the flow of time (and hopefully grants some cool superpowers) one of the areas a 3D printer can help with is the supplementary stuff that you will use -with- all of those miniatures that you already have.

One of the big ones is Terrain with a capital T. I have a lot of plastic ruined buildings - because that's kind of a 40K thing. I do not have as much Fantasy/Medieval type terrain - because those fights tend to happen more in open fields like the historical fights of the medieval era did. I don't have a lot of building type terrain that isn't "blasted Imperial gothic architecture" because that's what GW sells and what GW used to show in White Dwarf and what 3rd party makers think everyone wants based on what's in all the GW photos and artwork.  I don't have a lot of WW2-appropriate terrain. As it turns out a lot of terrain is perfectly amenable to FDM printers as the occasional layer line doesn't really get in the way or ruin the look compared to how it would impact an elf face for example. 

I have some spaceship corridors. I bought two sets of the stuff GW put out a couple of years ago for that whole Boarding Action thing they did with Kill Team and for 40K. It's cool. I can see using it for all kinds of things. I'd like more but I'm not buying another one of those sets. As it turns out there are a lot of people making those kinds of things and putting the STLs out online at very reasonable prices. 

People and companies run kickstarters for big sets of terrain and the costs there are pretty affordable with those as well. You can acquire models for an entire table's worth of whatever you like and make extras of the parts you really like at almost no additional cost once you own the files. It's great. It can work for RPGs too - if you thought the Dwarven Forge stuff was cool, well, you should see what's out there now that you can print yourself.

MiniWargaming did a Kickstarter recently for this set of interesting stuff.
"The Ruins of Drakenfell"

The other side of supplementary materials here include my personal nemesis: Base Expanders. These have been a pain for a very long time. The main culprit here is once again Games Workshop. The triggering incident is when they decide that a certain army, most of whom have been on 25mm round bases for decades, really look better on 32mm round bases. So all of the new units now come on 32's, the sure-to-be-coming-upscaled-new-versions-of-old-units will come on 32's, and random strangers whether at a store or at a con assume that all of your fully painted armies should be on 32mm bases the day after this is noticed - because they don't actually announce something like this. They just start putting new bases in all of the boxes and let people discover it on their own. 

Yeah, it's a sore spot.

You could say "but if you play with friends they probably won't care. Sure. But if I go outside the friend circle it's tricky and I also do not like to see one marine army on 25s and then my other marine army on 32s. Or mixing in Ork boyz on various differently-sized bases - that's not a good look.

Guess the main two armies this has happened to? Guess which are two armies I have tons of? Bonus if you can guess which are two of my oldest armies and thus more likely to be on 25mm bases?

Somewhere around 2017 GW started shipping new marine boxes with 32s in them. I noticed it with the new Blood Angel sets first but I don't know for sure they were the first offenders overall. Then in 2018 we got the new Primaris Marines and we all saw why they really went to 32mm bases - bigger figures need bigger bases!

Somewhat later -  it might have been earlier but I noticed it later - they decided to do this with Orks as well. Now I have a lot of marines across multiple armies but I have 120 2nd edition Goff Ork boyz in just one Ork force - so you can imagine I was not pleased to see this change. People also get a lot twitchier about orks being on smaller bases than they do marines as it means you can pack more of them into melee where they are a lot more dangerous than a tac marine.

So what does one do when one's old classic 40K figures are deemed to be on too small of a base? Well I did write a post about this a few years ago that has pictures of the base expander options I had found at that time. I have used all of those at some point but some of those were very unsatisfying as I dug into them more. The silver half-ring things gave me a lot of trouble trying to line them up straight and level. The wooden rings were definitely the cheapest and I was planning to use them on my Orks but ... I hate the way they look once they are on. The cup-style are the best looking and the least trouble in my experience but were also the most expensive. Not stupidly expensive, but when you're buying them 100 at a time you start to think about how much you are spending on stuff for your miniatures that is not actually a miniature. I had a bunch of orks, a bunch of loyalist marines, and a bunch of chaos marines that all needed this treatment. In my head, at least.

I've been trying to finish up the Goff boy updates this year and then I acquired a 3D printer ... and one night while putting the new shoes on the boyz it occurred to me that I had bought 3D printed versions on eBay - maybe I could just print them myself! As it turns out I could! You can too! I poked around various sites and found several styles of the things including some that looked pretty much like the ones I had been using. 

The tan-ish ones are the expanders I purchased a year or two back (sprayed with Zandri Dust). The black ones (and the white one) I printed myself this week. I stuck one of my Evil Sunz boyz in one to do a test fit and then printed the rest. This will save me some money, even more time, and just makes things a lot easier going forward as I don't have to worry about  buying more of them, shipping them here, or keeping some on hand for future acquisitions of old miniatures - if I need some I can print some. Case closed.

There are other practical benefits. You can print custom bases too, not just expanders! You can print objective markers and banners and nifty score-keeping things and a bunch of other stuff that you might have a use for in a particular game. Spell or area effect templates and other measuring devices seem to be a popular option. 

A lot of rank-n-flank games like Warhammer Fantasy and Kings of War use blocks of figures moving around the table. Movement trays are a way to facilitate this and have been in use for many years but before you had to make them out of plastic sheet or wood or something that took at least a little effort. Now you can just print them - do search, pick the correct size, and off you go.

The crowning jewel of this is the "Movement Tray Adapter" which combines the powers of a movement try AND a base expander into one handy option. Behold:

GW brought back old school fantasy in the form of The Old World (yay) but decided to bump all of the bases up a notch (boo) so all the old humans and elves that were on 20mm squares are now on 25s and the orcs and chaos warriors that were on 25s are now on 30s  <sigh> because that's just what they do. But, by using one of these beauties you can keep your figures on their old bases but still have them take up the correct amount of space on the table. It's a triumph of human ingenuity.

Anyway much like base expanders vs. actual miniatures, here's a 40K Friday post that's not really about 40K very much. Sometimes it's not a hobby - it's a lifestyle choice.

 

40K Friday - The Treadmill

 

I haven't posted much 40K stuff here lately because I'm kind of burned out on the game itself. Not the setting, not the novels, not even painting the miniatures. I've actually run a training game a few weeks back for some new players and probably will again soon so it's not strictly a lack of playing the game but ... man I am tired of the Edition Treadmill.

GW releases a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 every 3 years. This has been their policy for15+ years now so it's not like it is new but as a player it is relentless. Now Age of Sigmar is on the same cycle and there is a chance they pull some of their other games into the vortex as well. The Old World is too new to tell how it will go but Horus Heresy is getting a new edition this summer. It looks like it's mostly an update of the existing 40k 7th style ruleset but we won't know for sure until it gets closer. Kill Team is on a similar cycle as it just got a new edition too. 

I get why they do this - their business model depends on it. Much like RPGs releasing a new edition typically jump starts sales and is seen as an remedy when things slow down. GW gets a big income bump when a new edition of 40K is released. I'm sure AoS gives a similar, if smaller, effect. The problem for me - beyond the basic expense of doing that every three years - is that they also want to sell a new set of army books alongside that new edition. These are hardcover books and priced similarly to a typical RPG rulebook, so 50-60$ officially. A new starter box set with a rulebook and a bunch of miniatures will cost 150-200$ typically. If you only have say, two armies, you might be looking at 300-ish dollars to move to a new edition and if you just want the rulebook outside of a new box then it might only be 150-200. Now they have started selling card packs with the stats one needs to run each army and those are another 30-50 so you can certainly spend more. 

Then you get to people like me who have way too many armies. 

• Marines (multiple armies - Crimson Fists, Imperial Fists, Others)
• Blood Angels
• Dark Angels
• Black Templars
• Orks
• Eldar
• Harlequins
• Chaos Marines (Iron Warriors)
• Death Guard
• World Eaters
• Chaos Daemons
• Imperial Guard
• Dark Eldar
• Tyranids
• Necrons
• Grey Knights
• Custodes
• Tau
• Imperial Knights
• Chaos Knights

Every one of those bullet points has been a separate codex at some point though Harlies have been folded back into the Eldar book at this point and Daemons look like they are losing their standalone codex and just joining the individual chaos legion books. Just taking the list above as an example as-is I would need to buy -twenty- separate books to run all of the armies I have sitting on the shelves. That's $1000 worth of rulebooks just to play! That's not even counting buying any new miniatures for those armies or, god forbid, starting a new one! I could spend another 600+ if I wanted to get the cards for each one.

It's just untenable.

To add insult to injury some of these books won't release until the end of the edition cycle. In the past edition Imperial Guard and World Eaters released less than 6 months before the new edition came out. Which means those players spent most of the edition limping along on either old codexes that were "compatible" with the new edition - the actual functionality of this varies widely by army and by edition - or on an "Index" which released when the edition was new as a get-you-by codex. The Index stuff is usually free so there is that at least. 

Not kidding ...

On top of this GW - largely in response to the tournament scene - has started doing quarterly updates of the rules and point costs, alongside the inevitable errata that comes out following the release of each army book to fix things they left out, broke, or just want to change. That means that the rules are in a constant state of flux even during the life of edition. They constantly over-adjust and over- and under-tune the rules for various units and at the same time change the point values for multiple units so you can't even maintain a single, stable army for one edition. Sure, we'd all hate for them to just ignore some broken rules or point values for years at a time but it's become a constant state of change and I don't think anyone was asking for that either. 

At some point, knowing all of this - because most of it isn't new - we have only ourselves to blame. I'm not playing in tournaments so why should I care about these minute adjustments? If they gave out rules for every army for free in the form of an index at the beginning of the edition why should I rush to buy codexes? Well ... for this edition I decided to stop.

Part of it was the cost as it's just stupid at this point to try and keep up to date on all of them. Part of it was the realization some time back that I don't play frequently enough to get in multiple games with every army I own over the course of an edition these days. So my thinking now is to pick up a couple of the main books for me  - Space Marines, Orks, Chaos, and whichever other ones come out fairly early in the edition so I have those available but otherwise I am in no rush to spend on these things. The index rules will work just fine for the 2 or 3 games I play with most of them before the whole thing gets turned upside down again anyway. I'll just spend my time learning a few armies for Edition X and playing those and not worry too much about the others. 

So my training game was Marines vs. Orks and my next one probably will be as well. I have bought about ten army books for this edition and if someone wants to get into one of those that's cool but for the others we will likely use the index option.

This all gets compounded even more when you consider their other games follow a similar model. I have multiple Age of Sigmar armies, multiple Old Word armies, multiple Kill Teams ... I've managed to hold Blood Bowl to just the starting two from years ago so I have some sanity there at least. 

Despite my general discontent with the state of the game I am still painting  - I may finally finish the last of my old-school 1E/2E Goffs this year. I doubt that side of things will ever completely go away.

That's enough rambling. Limited activity will continue and maybe the state of things will change down the road.