Monday Morning Gamer 22-5

Hello and good morning! I think this is a first: me actually posting a Monday Morning Gamer post on an actual morning! (It’s 8:14 am here, for those wondering). Sure, pessimists might point to the fact that it is Tuesday instead of Monday, but I choose to look at the glass as half full!

Anyway, another shortish post for you this morning. I have a few thoughts on the new Empire book. I know it’s been out for a while already, but I didn’t do a proper post on it before so I’ll mention some thoughts now. Secondly, we have another installment of our Farewell to 5^th painting challenge. We’ve hit a sizeable snag last week, which I’ll mention below, but most of us managed to push through and get some painting done. Lastly, just some thoughts on the way army selection works in our group currently. Nothing big, just some thoughts I’ve had while playing in our Blood in the Badlands campaign.

Let’s get to is, shall we?

Game Night! - Invasion Narrative Campaign

Adapted from this

Welcome to Game Night!

I like campaigns. I think linking battles and connecting a story to those battles is a very rewarding way of playing Warhammer. While I enjoy playing one-off battles as much as the next guy, and those are usually the kind of games I play, there is just nothing that beats playing in a narrative campaign and seeing my Order of the Moon Chaos Warriors, led by the great Master Borazel, trying to kick my mate's Dwarfs out of their Hold in the northern mountains. Or something to that effect. If Balephon is reading this, I'm sure he remembers mighty Master Borazel!

As I was flicking through the big rulebook looking for the rules for the Battle Royale, I noticed all these other scenarios I never play. Two weekends ago I had a chance to sit down and read through them, and I was inspired to link a few scenarios up and make a narrative campaign. At first I thought about making it specific for two armies to use. Maybe my Skaven would attempt to attack a High Elf colony in the east, or my Ogres would come across a band of Chaos Warriors as they both sought access to an ancient ruin. But then, as is most often the case, I couldn't decide which armies would be the best to include. All of them are cool! So I decided to just make a more abstract storyline and allow anyone to use whichever armies they want. Aren't I nice?

Game Night! 11-11-11

*let me preface this by saying I'll be uploading this from my phone, with no chance to fix the layout until sunday or monday. So if blogger app eats my  layout again, don't say I didn't warn you!*

Welcome to today's episode of Game Night! I'm all about tomorrow's tournament this week so everything that comes up in this post will be on that as well.
I'll start things of with a preview of the tournament, looking at the different scenarios we'll be playing, including how I think my army will do, and how victory will be determined. Next I have a battle review of my Ogres vs my mate Balephon's Tomb Kings, both of us using our tourney armies. Finally, a quick word on my painting and how I think I'll paint score-wise.

Off we go!

The Tournament and the Way to Victory

This is a pretty bog standard, Dutch, one day Fantasy tournament. Three battles, a different scenario for each battle, and enough Soft Score points to compensate for average play.
There's 100 points to earn overall. 25 max for each of the three battles, plus 20 for painting, and 5 for handing in your army list 2 weeks prior. Which I did.
Now, before we continue, a little info on me as a torunament player. I go to quite a few tournaments, but I'm not particularly good at them. You see, for whatever reason I can never bring myself to going all-out competitive (nothing wrong with that, btw) and almost always end up somewhere in the middle of the pack. Or sometimes lower. And I'm absolutely cool with that. So, over the years this has let me to develop the following target to aim for in tournaments: if I can score, on average, slightly above a draw for each of my battles, I'll be a happy camper.
Obviously I've put that little caveat in to make sure expectations won't be too high from my audience :p
Now, let's take a look at the missions.
As mentioned, there's three. One is a standard Battleline, two are tournament specific.
We start off with one called "Intercept the Messengers". Each side will have three single infantry models to use a Messengers. For every Messenger you can get off the opposite table edge, you earn points. The more to the centre of the board the messenger goes off, the more points you get. So the aim is to get the messengers off in the middle 24" of the opponent's board edge and get maximum points.
I think this is actually a fun mission, different enough to make it interesting. Since normal victory points will probably play a bigger role in final victory, the Messengers are a nice addition, but not absolutely essential. Of course, to score max points for this mission you'll need max victory points and all your messengers off the table. So, note to self: if all else fails, kill opposing messengers and I'll earn some Battle Points even if I do get wiped. Not that I expect that to happen, obviously, but just saying...
The other scenario is more or less an adaption of a 40k scenario, and I don't mean that in a good way.
For this scenario, three objectives are placed, parallel to the long table edge, in the middle of the table, with 18" between each, and between the outer two and the short board edge. Might sound complicated, but it's not really.
Winner is determined by victory points, with the distribution of objectives determining final score. Only Core units eligible to count for the minimum 25% can claim an objective. No enemies can be within range of an objective (6"), or noone will earn the bonus.
So this scenario will probably be about who can plonk the biggest unit on top of an objective, and stay there. I see Undead doing well in this scenario, with summoning back models and such. I will not do as well, since I only have two Core units, and things will really have to go my way for one of them to claim two objectives an the other the final one. Luckily, most of the victory is still determined by straight up VP, so I'll just gor for that and worry about how many objectives I can claim later.

Overall, I think the tournament is well thought out. While it imposes quite a few limits (no special characters, max on duplicate choices, etc), I do not see how these limits will favour one army over another too badly. So kudoes there. We'll see what I think tomorrow :p

On to the Battle Review!

I'll keep this short and sweet because a) it's late and b) I don't have Balephon's list here, so can't go into precise details here.
Suffice to say we played the Messengers scenario, and I won.
Here's what I learned from the battle:
> I do not have enough units to devote to messenger-chasing. It my Sabretusks don't kill them, and my maneaters don't shoot them, they will most likely survive. Oh well. I'll have to focus on killing the enemy instead. As a last resort I can use my Messengers to shoot my opponent's, but only if all else failed.
> I switchex my Maneaters' Stobborn rule for Poisoned Attacks, and boy, did that pay off. Both a Necrosphinx and a unit of six sepulchral knights died by my Maneaters' hand. Good stuuf.
> I wonder hoe many people will complain about Hellheart. As far as I can see there is only one other OK player, so not too many people will face a Hellheart. Should be fun if people aren't used to facing it :p
> Pay attention while deploying! Important!
> Btw, I predict rolling a 1 for Hellheart at least once.

Painting - What's the Score

For this tournament players can earn 'soft' points for painting. 25 points can be accrued, with a max of 20 of those counting towards your final score. The criteria of when you get how many points is clearly outlined in the Rulespack. The way I see it, my army should receive 12 points for painting. And just so we're clear. My army only has the most basic of base colours, and, to be honest, it looks abysmal :p So it'll be fun to see if I've managed to 'cheat the system' and will be awarded 12 out of 20 points for basically 2 half days of painting.
I can be evil like that :p

Alright, that's it. I'm off to bed! Good luck to me, Balephon, and Shalen tomorrow. I'll try and post some updates during the day! Wish us luck!

On the viability of combat characters

Now that the OK army book has been out for a while and the dust is starting to settle, we can see that Ogre Kingdoms really is a well-designed army. The defining trait of any well-designed army is, to me, that you have a good number of units to choose from when look at each and every slot in the army. And by slots I mean Lords, Heroes, Core, Special, and Rare choices. Ogre Kingdoms has this almost everywhere.

You can go with all Bulls or Ironguts in Core, mix it up, and add Gnoblars to taste. Taking just Gnoblars as Core is something I haven't seen an effective list with, but having one weaker choice out of three isn't that bad.

Most Rare choices are also viable at least, and deciding which to pick (and which to leave at home) can be a nightmare. Sure, some choices are better than others, but on a whole there's three, arguably four, very solid choices in the Rare section of the book.

Special choices are the same. Three very solid choices vying for points, with the other three also useful-to-very useful in various builds. Very nicely designed and probably the best section in the book.

Btw, don't think of this as my version of an OK review. I'll do a more in depth one later, this is just superficially what's good.

If we move to characters, Heroes specifically, we see the same thing. Both wizard and fighter characters are useful, although the Hunter and the Firebelly are probably more situational than the Bruiser and the Butcher. Still, you can get pretty tight on Heroes points if you don't watch out!

Where am I going with this, you ask? And how on earth does this all tie in with the post's title?

Exciting News!

After a busy weekend and some time to 'recover' I'm back to post more stuff! Have a few things planned for this week, including updates on my painting, campaign news, and some reviews for an Ogre unit or two (much like my Leadbelchers one). Plenty of stuff for those interested!

But I wanted to start with something really cool. Those who know me can tell you that I always get excited when new armies are released for either Fantasy or 40k. No matter which one it is, my initial reaction will always be: "Cool! I want it! Let's see what kinds of lists I can build with the new book!"
This always leads to me buying the new book and very often also to me buying one (or more) of the new kits.

So it won't come as a surprise that the following news got me really excited!

Apparently, GW is planning on releasing small army lists for (mostly) previously unreleased factions in the Warhammer World, including several kits and characters for each of them!

So far rumour has it they're planning to release no less than 5(!) factions over an as-of-yet undetermined period of time, but supposedly the first one will be released sooner than expexted (6 monts?).

The factions as they are known by the interwebz now are: Kislev, Araby, some kind of Insectoids, and something with pikes (Tilea?).

Kislev will unsurprisingly be the first one released. I say unsurprising because they have been released as a side faction before, and supposedly many of the older models will be re-released, although there's mention of new horses and a new ice sorceress!

Overall, I am very thrilled to hear this. Normally I wouldn't just repeat rumours on here, but I think that this, if true, is an absolutely wonderful idea by GW to explore the factions on the fringe of the Warhammer World and simultaneously release cool new stuff!

Can't wait for these releases!

Oh yes, almost forgot to mention the most important thing: these releases will not affect the release/updates of any of the established armies. So no need to worry!

Btw, all info comes from warseer. There's more info than what I posted here, but just check the link and you can see for yourself! The first post should be updated with new info as it becomes available, so keep an eye on that. I know I will!