Friday 13 June 2014

Micro 1 - A Quick Catch Up



Well well well…
Yet again a big delay opens up between posts.

Life, as someone far wiser (or at the very least more famous) than I once said, can be a biatch (I perhaps paraphrase somewhat).

No, sorry Craig, this isn’t the post you get mentioned in. That one is still a work in progress. Unfortunately an unholy combination of Work (being Machiavellianly brilliant and engineering the departure of a quarter of our staff (in a positive way!) shockingly has resulted in much more work to be done), moving house (and all the fun that entails), playing actual tabletop Warhammer (seriously, who would have thought?!), online Warhammer, breaking my laptop, beautiful sunshine, family stuff, gin and tonic, fummbl (seriously, had forgotten how much I love that site, am seriously addicted), two rabbits, the new Dresden Files on Audible, a wife, a life and the World Cup have all rather cut down on my spare time (though arguably only the first one is all that important, as we all know I write these instead of doing work - remind me never to work somewhere where my boss is a reader of Warhammer blogs).


So… I thought would fill in between bigger posts with some microblogs (something I am relieved to see is an actual thing and not something I have imagined) to pass the time/fill the space. I may have said I would do that before, who knows, I say all sorts of things. Right now I plan of keeping up with it - ideally once or twice a week... we shall see.

In any event, it gives me something to fill in the time now that Ben has decided to be all grown up and have children instead of podcasting (though I worry it is actually because we have lost Gareth to the dark, sweaty world of Magic the Gathering…) so my excuses for listening to stuff instead of writing have diminished somewhat. Seriously though - how cool is that? 500 episodes of the Bad Dice Daily, that's commitment (the evil part of me always enjoyed the ones where Ben was seemingly asleep doing the 'casts  - proof of dedication!)


So, where did we leave things?

After some highly complex charlatan mathematics (apologies to the people who have asked for a copy of the spreadsheet, turns out I didn’t save it. Saying that, it is clearly a bodgejob that anyone could throw up and improve in mere minutes) it was decided that I was doing Bretonnians next (on yet another aside, I am pretty sure that until a couple of months ago I thought there were two ‘t’s in Bretonnian... shows how much I pay attention. I shall claim partial foreignerness as an excuse – heck, our American cousins misspell loads of things, and they are superpower (which either shows it doesn’t matter, or that they can get away with it))…
Ahem.
Bretonnians.

I was happy about this, and promptly went over to Element Games (if you used the Force/eyes you can find a link to them around here somewhere) and ordered some of the Fireforge range to get me going. I have wanted some of these models for a good while now, this seemed like a good excuse. Jak (on the UK and Twitter scene, rumours abound of his straightness) has an army of them, and they look nice on the table too.

I didnt go mad, just the two boxes to get going 







The issue of course was… how to paint them?!
I like the idea of a crusading (uniformed look), but it has been done, and done well, by others. Individual heraldry could be fun – nothing crazy, block colours really, with one colour tying them all in (probably yellow, of course). I started assembling some of the knights. And then I remembered, and put them back in their box (I hope, things are a bit chaotic at home at present).

No… this wasn’t going to happen. This time I was going to do it right. And get someone else to paint them!

Rumours abound that Brets (or possibly Skaven) are out soonish, which also affects some things, but for now I shall playtest the army and look into sources for commission work. Its hard to work out how much I would be willing to pay, which does not make the task easier, so in the meantime I shall do some research into possibilities (handy, as that’s my job anyway).


On the gaming front have been stress testing the Frenchies (in between games with Wood Elves, Ogres and random other things – am bored of playing Lizards in casual play at the moment). The way I like to start new armies is by starting at the extremes and working back towards a happy median point.

Thusly I have tried the GrailStar, the Men At Arms “Real Army” Army, Lance MSU, Pegs (both in a very big unit and in the more common smaller ones), Peg Character Spam and other varieties of fun.

A few things occur to me from the start –

I love Men At Arms. Given the Blessing, a unit of 50 is so cheap and do such a good job, they have performed for me in all but one game. Sure, they are no better, in any real way, than Empire Halbered, but within the army they have done well.
I love Grail Knights. S6 is massive (very unimpressed with knights that have S5 on the charge, that really is pathetic), 2 Attacks as well.
I do not love the MegaLance build – perhaps because I have faced it too often.

Despite my love of peasants and saints, the one thing I have been utterly incapable of dropping from my lists is the Lore of Heavens (could crowbar in a link betweens peasants praying to saints in Heaven, but I won't). So, so good.


The army list remains a work in progress – many thanks for the people who have been helping out on playtesting, especially Mr Internet Celebrity/ETC Comp voice of reason/designer of useful maps (and plenty of other things too, I am sure) himself Furion when we managed to get a series of games in, both of us trying slightly different things.

The journey so far has gotten me to the following list:
 
Old books paying more for the Enchanted Shield is just annoying



Obviously not the finished article, or all that original, and other than in one game, Pegs have never doesn’t much for me as they tend to do against, but it has been decent fun. Be interesting to see what a new book does to them.


Current Heroic Killing Blow count: 
6 Frostheart Phoenixes 
1 Annointed on Flamespyre 
2 Hellcannons






Coming Up (in no particular order):
  • MKGT pre event thoughts and list
  • Warhammer on "Easy Mode" - why Elves are so popular
  • Commission painting
  • Brief look at some other games systems
  • Audible Books I would recommend
  • Noteworthy Warhamemr Background
  • MKGT post event thoughts
  • A post Craig gets mentioned in
  • Funhammer as a concept 
  • Thoughts on random armies
  • Warhammer artwork I love
  • London's first 60+ player two day event
  • And maybe even some pictures of painted models, if any of the many friends I have who can actually paint want to show off


So....

Until next time (hopefully soon)


Raf






No comments:

Post a Comment