redmanphill
I am now working as a Product Manager for a games company in Germany but still keeping an eye on the pulse of the irish gaming community.
Homepage: http://subjecttostupidity.blogspot.com/
Posts by redmanphill
Blogs I like
Dec 25th
There are quite a few blogs on Warhammer finally beginning to pop up. I thought I would provide you with some of the links so that you can enjoy them yourself!
Hobby Horse This is a great blog for inspiration. The guy who runs it is called Old Fogey and you should be familiar with his work from the Glass Cabinet on the Warhammer forum. I usually just go here to see what he has done recently and to copy his techniques. He really does come up with some nicely painted miniatures with some wonderful time saving techniques. You can generally pester him a little to reveal his secrets. Sadly he doesn’t update very regularly!
Geek Tactica I just found this blog recently and wow it is great! This guy updates really often and while it is rarely about Warhammer he does play some really interesting games. Currently his group seems to be playing Chaos in Carpathia and he has created some really fantastic terrain for it.
Rolls Dice This site mainly deals with 40k. I am still awaiting this guy finishing his wonderful 40k city… however he seems to get easily distracted! However he updates pretty often with some really nice stuff. He seems to paint like a machine despite complaing that he has no time at all!
Massive Voodoo This site is generally pretty weird but the guy is one of the best painters I have seen. He has a great number of articles and guides. It really is a great place to research something new. The recent tutorial on how to make lenses is great.
From the Warp This is a pretty popular site for 40k. The best thing about the site is the links they provide to others. I regularly find a lot of different places via this sites blog roll. The posts are generally interesting but 40k just isn’t my thing at the moment.
Anyway I hope you enjoy the sites and get some good hobby inspiration from them!
Warhammer… what has happened?
Dec 3rd
Its been a good few months now since eighth has been released and well whats been happening with Warhammer? Seemingly nothing much! No new books have been released at which I am suprised, especially considering that there has been a huge amount of High Elves models relased. It would have in my opinion been a perfect time to release a High Elf book. I was quite suprised not to see it. With an expected release of Skaven models in January there won’t be a book to accompany them. GW’s laissez-faire attitude is strange as after the release of the new edition you would have thought the euphoria of the changes would have made for a buying frenzy. If this is a deliberate scheme it could be a good thing. For one GW may have let the initial changes sink in and then looked at the feedback. Having done this is should be easier to create army books that the players actually want. This would involve a rather large overhaul of the current books with a lot of options being adjusted. It would also allow for a faster release schedule in 2011 maybe with four books being released rather than just two. In essence the rules would be in an open beta now if this was the case and in my opinion its good. While the core rules won’t change the application of them easily could with points being adjusted heavily against magic armies. For instance adding fifty points to a level three wizard and having the fourth level cost another fifty would soon make magic heavy armies harder to field. The same could be true of warmachines with the more effect template weapons getting a higher cost. A few small adjustments like these over the next few army books would quickly balance out a lot of the complaints that have been levelled at the game.
Orcs and Goblins are rumoured to be next book released as are the Tomb Kings. The Tomb Kings really do need to get an update as they are almost imcompatible with the current edition though if you continue along this line of thinking Wood Elves, Brettonians and Ogres would be due for an update soon. The Orcs while not a powerhouse have benefitted immensly from the new rule changes. The other armies mentioned really need radical changes to compete. The problem being that the more powerful armies currently are the ones that need changing the most. Taking the current Orcs and Goblins as a bench mark it would be nice if all armies were levelled out at their power level. I can’t ever see this happening but I would like it to. The most likely course of action is continuing as before with a slow power creep in the army books. At the beginning this wouldn’t be such a problem in general as this would bring the armies being released on a par with the current powerhouses of Lizards, Deamons and Undead. However as before another book would quickly be released that unbalances all that came before.
Fortitude and why we should use it!
Oct 16th
Speaking about composition and all such matter recently I have been thinking about ways of implementing a system of composition for tournament play simply dealing with the meta game. I really think that the Fortitude mechanism is quite an elegant fix as it combines a number of factors and gives a nice risk versus reward mechanism. Fortitude if I remember correctly is basically a score taken from the number of banners within your army. It is only used in one of the scenarios and I propose extending it to all tournament battles. I think this could be trialed by a few players even in just designing lists rather than having to fight actual battles. There will obviously be a few holes here and there but I don’t currently see any that are glaringly obvious.
Firstly there should be a basic Fortitude number each army should have, lets take seven as an example. An army therefore has to have seven banners within it to count as a tournament legal army. This causes a number of things to happen. Essentially characters, warmachines and monsters can’t contribute to this number. There are exceptions but at the moment this doesn’t pose a problem. So infantry and cavalry are the main contributors to this number therefore a certain section of the army has to be dedicated to fulfilling the requirement. This can come from any section and not just core so the restriction is not too severe. This will eat into the points available for the more exotic selections and characters, hopefully reducing the spend on magic and warmachines or at least forcing more of a choice between the two.
Secondly victory conditions should be set on reducing your opponents Fortitude number below a set level. Using seven as above the level should be four. Reducing the number below this first means your opponent loses. Reducing both below this in the same turn results in a draw. A margin of victory can be established by comparing what one player has left versus the losing player. These victory conditions can replace victory points and still provide as accurate a system.
The result of this could be good. It isn’t tested but it might be worth doing. The player takes a risk by not investing in more Fortitude. If they invest more heavily in Fortitude they are unable to invest in game breaking elements as easily. It is easier to win and lose by not investing in Fortitude is essence. The player needs to balance the risk versus the reward. It is also not as easy to score a massive margin of victory as the player doesn’t have enough Fortitude to create a big difference. Against this the player that invests in Fortitude has an easier time in holding their points and staying above the level needed for a loss. They also have a better chance of scoring a high margin of victory as they have more points and so can create a bigger margin.
This should balance across the armies easily. Expensive armies have regiments that are harder to defeat and hold their fortitude more easily. Cheap armies are the opposite and can more easily invest in Fortitude but would expect to lose it more quickly. If they invest in banners on poor units they are more quickly lost. On shooting regiments while effective are more likely to give up their banners and as such also present a risk in taking them in large numbers.
With this system gunlines should be reduced or at least if not reduced more easily defeated. The same goes for very magic heavy armies. The less spent on Fortitude the more likely you will lose. Also the gunlines won’t be able to score a big margin of victory as their Fortitude will have been too low to start! So any thoughts?
Terrain – we need more!
Sep 7th
Its not so long ago since I was sitting in Dublin complaining about the poxy sandwiches. That wasn’t the only complaint of the day however. I remember being annoyed with the terrain selection we had as a club then. This has been improved at least in quantity via stuff being prepared for the tournament scene. However Eighth Edition seems to have rendered a lot of this useless. Well useless isn’t quite correct. Its a lot less effective in the game and in a certain way that is great. However what we are left with is a strong need to update our terrain collections around the country with more stuff that pertains to eight edition. Looking in my local game shop in Hamburg at the weekend there were both games of 40k and fantasy going on. The 40k I was really shocked by. There seemed to be four pieces of terrain on the board in total. With fantasy there were five. In my opinion it is generally terrain that makes the battle tactical. While armies are somewhat evenly matched the difference often comes then in what effect the board has upon you, your deploymetn and similarly to your opponent. Sadly there have been a fair few games I have lost by attempting to swing one flank around a forest meaning they never got to the battle at all. This won’t be as much of a factor now as forests and the general terrain we have in our collection is almost ignored by infantry. There should be an effort to start creating impassible terrain to make the battle a little more tactical again. Buildings would also be a benefit. I know one of the games I enjoyed most was where we had a small settlement cobbled together from the collections of a few players in Portlaoise in the centre of the board. This was back in the very early days of fourth edition. However now the rules would support a battle like this much more.
120 pieces would be the average needed in a thirty player tournament now. Thats an average of two extra pieces per table. Thats a lot of wiggle room where new terrain types can be introduced. I suspect that there will be a slow evolution of terrain in this edition. Tournaments will have to embrace this and the sooner the better. Comp is effected very strongly by factors such as terrain. Certain army builds favozur a certain type of battlefield and having a good variance in the terrain set ensures that certain builds don’t get an advantage. As an example the massive forests of the Grand Tournament colletion in Ireland have been the bane of my tournament career. I don’t know how many times I have had to play Wood Elves there and have them move two or three of those giant forests around until the entire centre of the board is suddenly a forest extending 36″ across. At least that won’t have such an annoying effect now… hopefully. I suggest at least on building per table with a decent foot print at least 5″ x 5″. I hate the little shacks with twenty warriors somehow squeezed inside. Ido hope that GW will follow along the same lines as they have with 40k and provide some really good terrain for fantasy in the form of buildings. The cities of death and the few buildings that followed after were really great. Another good move in my opinion is making hills a lot larger. By making them larger it is a lot easier to make them higher and keep a slope on them that doesn’t force troops to be balanced on dice towers. Most hills are about 10″ x 5″ now but it should be possible to easily double this. That immediately gives you an extra inch in height at least meaning in most cases that warmachines andarhers won’t be able to fire indiscriminately over the hill except at the largest of targets. Styrofoam isn’t that expensive either so tournament organisers should be able to manage this. Plonking a hill like that in the centre of the battle field will really ruin a gunlines day and having a few like that within a boards of a tournament should really help balance out the people who take the gunlines from those that don’t. Of course putting a hill like that in a deployment zone is a different story…
The fantasic terrain types I think are also pretty important in balancing things out. These would have been played with while the game was play tested and hence would have an effect on game balance. AT least you would hope that they were played with though it is GW… Adding a little risk or benefit for such thigs makes them much more of an objective during the game. A wood that can heal some of your characters really would be something in the late game o try to get a character or two into. A burning barricade is quite evocative and there are many cool possibilities for such things on the battlefield. I think these should be brought into tournaments also. Ofc ourse they have to be looked at in depth as it is possible that they favour certain armies a little too much. Having the variability on the table can only be a good thing and add to the games rather than subtract.
Quae caret ora cruore nostro?
Sep 4th
So we are heading into another tournament season. I have my list made out and a booking made to fly home for Gorey. I just need my holidays confirmed now and I am off. This whole travelling home for a tournament though isn’t ideal. While it gets me home for a few days which is always appreciated its expensive. The local tournaments are slowly becoming more and more attractive! There are quite a few around Germany thankfully the only problem is getting a seat in a car as the train is pretty pricey… more than a ryanair flight at the moment! I shouldn’t really talk about Aer Lingus at all as their prices are amazing.
So I was wondering why we are not offering some other international tournaments as ranking events? I know it is done by our Northern Neighbours. We have the Giant Fanatic coming up in Denmark which I am itching to go to but I don’t know if I will have a useable army by that stage. There are a bucket load of tournaments in England that would be fun to attend. However rather than just suiting me I think this could only be a good thing. I know it is difficult to sell to our significant others as they believe we are just heading off for a weekend of debauchery rather than the gaming. However I think that this would be the amazing for our preformance as a team in the ETC. You know it is easy to be a big fish in a small pond. If we can get some serious gaming in against the top players in Europe on a more regular basis it can only be good. The weekends at home that are outside Dublin are pretty expensive and it wouldn’t be really that more more to jet off somewhere. This should hone the team and maybe enable us to once again improve our preformance. One other thing to consider is inviting a team from another country to come over. It would be nice to have four or five of the english guys over for one of our two day tournaments. We could easily subsidise their tickets. Better yet we should just let them in for free. The invites could be extended to a few of the other European Nations that our ETC team have befriended. I am not sure how this ranking HQ thing works. It may be that if the tournaments are in different countries they will automatically combine the results? If not it can’t be too hard to have that implemented.
It also has the benefit that we can concentrate on providing fewer better tournaments at home. One thing I noticed is a two tier tournament system developping. Well it has been there for a while but it seemed to become more stark last year. We have the better (in my opinion) tournaments that are organised by the dedicated gamers from a club with the clubs support behind them. The tournaments I particularly enjoyed were Resurgence and Battlecry. The organisers were dedicated to providing a good fun day out. They knew they would get numbers though and so that provides a safety zone. The second tier seems to be shoddily organised, thrown together at an after thought and then applying for ranking status to get a few more numbers in. As I saw when travelling home to play in one of these events… three people turned up. Well that was a bit of a let down. It would be cool if we could (I could!) really have four premium events organised well in advance, organised well in advance and then we can look further afield to supplement these.
A New Hope
Aug 30th
So last night I finally got to sit down with the eight edition book! It is a massive tome. Its really great that Games Workshop have finally followed Privateer Press and produced full colour rulebooks. My girlfriend did look at the cover and wonder why there was a rocket on it… They really could have done something better with the cover. Having heard that I can’t see it in the same light again. The layout is fantastic. Its clear and concise. I could quickly find what I needed. I love the ribbon for marking the page. It saves me sticking pens in there in the middle of a game. It is a nice touch. Though why was the magic stuck at the very end? It seems almost tacked on. I can imagine its there as it is easier to find but I don’t really think they design the lay out with that in mind. The battle described at the back, whose names escapes me now is really what I want to see! Forgeworld have produced the wonderful Imperial Armour books. This battle really reminds me of them. I would love to see more like this. The description of the regiments and the brief history are exactly what got me enthusiastic about warhammer when I began. I remember having a little history made up and written down somewhere for each regiment in my army. If they produced books like that a little more often I would snap them up. The miniatures pages and army descriptions are good if a little over indulgent. They could have saved a few pages here! Most of them are direct reprints form the army book.
Still I am missing campaign rules. For a games design company they seem very reticent to bring out proper campaign rules. The last decent set seem to have been the old Mighty Empires game. They can’t be that hard to design and they would be boosting their sales of the new plastic Mighty Empires set. While it isn’t that hard for a group of gameers to get together and do this we are hardly professionals and all groups would benefit from a strong set of rules. They have even skipped the Siege rules completely in this book. With a defined set of terrain available to buy you would think that they could manage this. They have pretty decent rules to build from in the last three editions. Though I suspect we can expect to see these as a supplement in the same style as City Fight and Planetfall for 40k.
The game rules are great. I haven’t played an eight game so I can’t really judge. I am impressed at a few small changes to the rules that have benefited infantry so much. I love skirmishers now. They really act as I think they should. Okay there should almost be another form of skirmishers, lets call the super skirmishers that act like the old ones. Though the rules were pretty poor before. I can see the Wood Elves becoming an all skirmishing army once more with this edition! I can also see a few stalwarts from other books being assigned to this role. The White Lions for instance from the High Elf book, Slayers from the Dwarf book and possibly Savage Orcs? As they are different from what came before I think that a lot more armies could field these without it feeling wrong. The Horde rules is cool. I do hope to see a few regiments of this size on the board at tournaments. I won’t yet be pushing the Chaos Warriors in that direction. You realistically need fifty models in the regiment to make it viable and sixty to make it safe. Marauders while cheap are a little too expensive for that. Coming in at about three hundred points for fifty is a bit much. It would also mean a lot of painting for me… thats one of the pains of the new edition. You do seem to need to bulk the army up. The blocks could get unwieldy and as the edition moves along I imagine they will become a rarer sight. Seeing a real horde of zombies on the board would be cool though and hiopefully I get to face off against it soon.
So do Games Workshop honestly believe a twelve year old would buy this book? I am assuming that they haven’t changed their target group and that entry level into the hobby is still early teenagers. The book is too big for many reasons. If I had been handed that book when I started I would never have read it. I can’t imagine a kid being enthusiastic about getting that, especially at the price it is set. Maybe offering a rules only version and a collectors version would have been better. I would have been okay with a slightly more expensive collectors version to offset the number of sales. Secondly I would hate to have to lug this around with me. As I travel a lot for games, even internationally, I really need something smaller. Its a quarter of my weight allowance for carry on luggage! It is equal to an entire tray of miniatures in my pack. I assume that they will of course bring out a smaller version of the rulebook in the boxed set. Having to buy that just for the rulebook will most likely mean I will have to collect the armies in the boxed set. The new Griffon that comes out in that box is fantastic. They really have created a unique monster there.Its distictive from the other Griffons and suits the high elf style. Hopefully I can get my hands on two as I think it could make a nice Slaanesh Manticore.
Viele Gruße
Who let that idiot in here?
Aug 13th
Some of you should remember me… hopefully in a good light! For those of you that don’t my name is Phil and I am one of the founding members of the Underground Gamers. I have been playing Warhammer since very late 3rd edition and 40k since the Rogue Trader days. I have pretty much played everything GW has put out and a few more games beside. Nowadays I am living in Germany working as a Product Manager for an online games company. The works fun and I have finally gotten to dip my toe into the field of Games Design. Currently on my desk are a set of seven gods for our latest game that I need to check and approve; a short summary of a huge list monsters we are planning to have pop up in the game and the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. I rescued the book this morning from the postman. I was walking up the stairs in work and glanced out the window. The postman was carrying what looked like the right size of box so I turned around and headed down to him. To my horror we started trying to lever the book into the postbox. I covered the three flights of stairs down in seconds and despite my lack of german language skills I gave him an earful… Thankfully the book hasn’t been damaged unlike my warmachine rulebook. It actually had its hardback cover split halfway along the binding and across the front cover. I still have no idea how that could have possibly happened.
Really Warhammer has been the game I have spent most time with. The last edition though finally defeated me and I just wasn’t able to play anymore. Seventh eventually became a game I didn’t enjoy. I am pretty nervous at the moment as I believe that eight will make or break Warhammer for me. If the edition is good, and remains good despite the tournament players and the compers, I will be delighted. My first real army was night goblins. The ones that came in the 4th edition boxed set. They were fantastic though if you put your hand in the wrong place you would end up with half the regiments spear tips embedded in your palm. Back then the game for us was all about big regiments and massive monsters. We did back them up with the most terrible characters however. The old magic system really let you cheese the army up. Victory often came due to some combination of items rather than skill. The Crown of Command (ld10) and Standard of Battle (+d6 Combat Resolution) generally won me my games. By sixth edition I was very much a hardcore warhammer fan. As my spending power increased so did my number of armies. I still think I have about ten. Anyway Empire was my first army of choice and I went with an all mounted empire army. The thing was I had just gotten a decent job, as an archaeologist if that can be called decent, and I had some money. One evening chatting with Heff, whom some of you will know, I decided I would try to collect an army for under €100. It only needed to be one thousand points. From that money I bought three regiment boxes of knights and a wizard. It got expanded a lot and eventually abandoned. My main opponents of the time were Beastmen and I was fairly able to roll over the top of them. By seventh I had gone through Ogres, Undead and Dwarves. However the game changed. It was almost back to a point where I was with the fourth edition. It was the combinations of items/characters that was winning the games not the regiments.
I am currently working on my Warriors of Chaos army. The increase in regiment size has really knocked my plan to pieces. Almost everything I had painted in the army has doubled in size meaning I really have to get my painting going. The first project to ease myself in has been Chaos Hounds. I don’t know why but I want a big enough regiment of these. I am going for twelve in tournament style lists though I think I will go even larger in friendly lists. I don’t know how them being beasts works in the new rules but it would look pretty cool! Anyway the shots here show what I have already done. Despite the final arrival of the rulesbook I can hopefully get the last ones done this week. I will keep most of my painting on my other blog Subject to Stupidity. Anyway I look forward to posting my thoughts here for you! Please feel free to comment and ask questions.
