Knights and Flyers

So I decided it was time to upgrade my flier situation for my Minotaur Space Marines.

I bought this:

So far this is as far as I've gotten:

I want to magnetize some of the weapons options.  I do have the magnets I just haven't gotten to it yet.

But the other day I ordered this:

I pre-ordered the Imperial Knight.  So I got a sticker in the box as a bonus.  Its the sticker seen above on the outside of the box.

You can see over to the right the sticker is sitting on the table.

At this point its fully assembled, but I didn't glue a lot of it.  I decided to leave it separate to make it easier to paint.

I sprayed it all black just the other day and today I have begun actually painting it.

I haven't decided which house I want the knight from or what paint scheme.  It will be an Imperial Knight not an Ad Mech aligned or a Free Blade.

I think I will make up my own house with a red paint job.

I will post more here when I have more done.

Big Game 2014 Report Part 3

So my thoughts on what failed and what went right.

Things that failed (with solutions):

1 - Having a cohesive battle that spanned the whole board.  We should have used what we as a group have dubbed the "World Clock"  This is where separate parts of the game run on their own time.

Solution: We could have had the Beach running on their own time, so they could be on turn two while other areas were on turn 3. If we also put the Forest on its own time that would have been perfect. We could have had three different time zones essentially.  This would have allowed everyone to get in more turns.

2 - The Re-using and Redrawing of Strategic Assets.  This took way too long at the beginning and at the first break.

Solution:  We could have only done it once.  And had them only usable once throughout the entire game.

3 - Strategic Reserves are crummy.  I don't know how many people have used Strategic Reserves when most of their army is in reserve to start the game but it is not very good for a game on this scale and when everyone is limited to starting with only a small amount of points on the board.  I brought 16,000 points and still had at least 6,000 in reserve when the game ended.

Solution:  Allow people to bring in whatever units they wanted each turn.  Maybe only limit it to a certain amount of points or units each turn if you want a slow build up.

4 - The points system I created was not super useful.  Having points coming into the game allowed people to increase the size of their army's deployment or allowed them to deepstrike a unit or various other things.
I didn't make it clear that this could be used at each break.  I also didn't decide how these points would be tallied until the day of.  They were pooled after deployment into one pool per team. People were confused as to whether these points were used for paying for reserves to show up or just for deployment.  No one really used them after deployment.

Solution:  Either everyone has their own pool which they can draw from to add things like deepstrike to units or eliminate the ability to spend them or only be able to spend them on things listed in the Apoc rulebook.

5 - The board was so big it took a long time for people to move around it.

Solution: either play on the floor or design a different layout.  Or just go with it.


Things that worked:

1 - The deployment zones.  These actually turned out just fine.  People had to fight more than one enemy and that is always an issue in big games is how to get a game that is not just a one on one.

2 - The warzone Idea. Having different areas look different and have their own set of rules worked well.  I like the idea of doing this again in the future.

3 - The Hotel.  The space was great; it had great lighting, a door to the parking lot, it was right next to the bar and restaurant and the price was right.

4 - Al of my friends who showed up, some from very far away to play in this game!  I always look forward to this game to get to play against a bunch of my friends I haven't seen in a long while.

5 - Prize Support was good and bad.  We had plenty of it, and I thank joe for that.  But we didn't have a good way of doling it out.
We need to figure out how to do it in the future to make it make sense more.

Well these are my thoughts for now.




Here are some more pics:

Next time get ready for my works in progress.

Until Then......

Big Game 2014 Report Part 2

On Friday morning we had breakfast at a local greasy spoon restaurant on the way to the hotel for the big game.  This is the ketchup bottle on our table.  

A portent perhaps?

The previous post had pics of the deployment of the armies.  I want this post to delve into some of the rules I had come up with along with more pics from the event.  We used the Apocalypse rules with a number of modifications.

One thing I did was use the idea of 'Warzones' which is something that GW did when they released the Pandorax and Damnos Apocalypse supplements.  They are both labeled "Warzones' by GW.

The Warzones for this big game were essentially different sections of the board, each with their own additional rules.  We had 4 different Warzones; The Beachhead, The City, The Space Port, and The Forest.

I think this worked out just fine, each Warzone had unique rules and terrain to help define its feel.

The Beachhead

The Forest

The City

The SpacePort

The Overall Map

We used Strategic Assets as well.  We changed how they work with each side alternating taking one card each until we got to 10 cards per side, because there were 10 people on the Imperial side which was the side with the most people.  

During each break we would put them back in the deck and pick 5 each.  So we would contasntly have Strategic Assets to use.

Each Warzone had rules as to how many points each player could deploy to start the game.  The Beachhead allowed the Orks to deploy everything and the Imperials could only deploy half their points.

The City had people deploying either 1000 or 1500 points.  The Spaceport was 1000.  The Iron Warriors had to deploy 2000.  The Forest was 1000 each.

You could increase this number by spending strategic points which were earned either Friday or before by playing games. Winners got 2 points losers got 1 point.  For every 2 points spent you could deploy another 500 points on the table.

We then used the Strategic Reserve Table from the Apoc book to determine when the rest of the people's armies could come in from reserve.  The sizes of people's armies were generally 6000 points.

Here are some more pics from the day:

Stay tuned for the next post where I show even more pictures and go into detail about where I thought this big game failed.  And I list my thoughts on how to do it better.

Until then........