Who knew we needed this product
Kallistra, who are more and more becoming a plastic moulding company, have brought out self adhesive flocked paper. What's wacky is what they think you should use it for; stick it to the bottom of the figure bases so that they velcro onto the flock you've used on your terrain and that way your bases don't fall over on slopes. A mere £2.50 for an A4 sheet.
Of course, I'm seeing this in the week when GW think they can get people to pay £8 for a single rocket launcherDeathstrike - what it does to your wallet, so there's obviously some hideous "too much money for stuff you don't need" thing going on.
Thursday 12 July 2007
Tuesday 10 July 2007
A wonderful opportunity to spend way too much real money
Because it's about the lead, folks, is there any way to doubt it?
Those of you forced to listen to my interminable ramblings in real life are more than familiar with me rabbitting on about the way in which Games Workshop actually has a good side. Just as Microsoft has a sideline in making pretty good mice to balance their really godawful software, in the past three or four years GW has been making a lot of its rules available as free downloads on its specialist games site. So you could download all of Blood Bowl (who knew you could get 170 pages of rules out of American Football for Orcs?); all of 3rd generation Epic Space Marine (some surprisingly mature and interesting ideas in those rules) and all of the final version of Battlefleet Gothic (not even on a bet; the QRF for Battlefleet Gothic is enough to make a grown man cry). Because GW was no longer pushing figures for any of these rules, Epic Space Marine in particular was a surprisingly wargamer-friendly set of rules - use whatever figures - and whatever base sizes - you wanted, very few gimmick troops, and generally very little of the gothic encrustation which always sets my teeth on edge.
Well, that's all over now. A fresh generation of suckers has been detected (the bellwether has to be the immense outpouring of cash at ForgeWorld's stand at Salute) and all the rules have been republished - at GW's trademark how-the-hell-much-did-you just-say? prices. I'm thinking that what happened was that enough people downloaded the free versions of the rules that they started to think at GW Mansions (suggestions as to what GW HQ should actually be called are welcome) that the market was big enough to fire up the centri-cast machines again.
Because, with the rules, come the figures. My word, it's breathtaking.
Some of the stuff is pretty, but as always it's shockingly priced. Plastic 6mm (8mm in GW speak) figures at £12 for about 150 figures. Tanks and aircraft in the same scale at about £3 each. And upwards; anything fancy is closer to a tenner. Not necessarily closer on the single digit side either. I had thought Peter Berry's Baccus stuff was a special treat for when I'd been particularly well behaved; I'd have to cure cancer to justify spending this kind of money on micro-armour.
The spaceships are the same ones which came out last time, which means that most of the Imperial ones look like the Hungarian House of Parliament with engines, but made of plastic. Up at the top end of the size register, you're looking at £18 to £25 for about the amount of lead which Brigade or GZG would shuffle their feet and ask for £12. Even the boys at Mongoose might show a little shame looking for this kind of money and they have Babylon 5 licensing fees to cover.
It's good news for the boys at GZG and Brigade, I think, as long as they don't decide to get greedy and push their own prices up; at these small (with starships, purely nominal) scales it's harder for GW to retain the exclusivity that they hold at 28mm. Other people's figure would look just as good and cost a fraction of the money - as long as the fanboys are willing to think more widely and get on the net, there should be business for the smaller guys.
And looking down the road, in two years or so it will be good news for us, as the Bring and Buy stands groan with discarded GW 6mm and BFG stuff at affordable prices. Pity I have to wait that long.
Check out the hardware here Battlefleet Gothic and Epic Armageddon; Try to imagine my Bruce Willis in Die Hard laugh as I read this text
"Bag With Epic Bases (4 Sprues) This includes 4 sprues of Epic bases, giving you 16 bases in total.Price: £7.00"
I should perhaps make the point that Epic bases are bits of plastic 1 cm by 5 cm. 43.75p seems like a lot to pay for one.
Those of you forced to listen to my interminable ramblings in real life are more than familiar with me rabbitting on about the way in which Games Workshop actually has a good side. Just as Microsoft has a sideline in making pretty good mice to balance their really godawful software, in the past three or four years GW has been making a lot of its rules available as free downloads on its specialist games site. So you could download all of Blood Bowl (who knew you could get 170 pages of rules out of American Football for Orcs?); all of 3rd generation Epic Space Marine (some surprisingly mature and interesting ideas in those rules) and all of the final version of Battlefleet Gothic (not even on a bet; the QRF for Battlefleet Gothic is enough to make a grown man cry). Because GW was no longer pushing figures for any of these rules, Epic Space Marine in particular was a surprisingly wargamer-friendly set of rules - use whatever figures - and whatever base sizes - you wanted, very few gimmick troops, and generally very little of the gothic encrustation which always sets my teeth on edge.
Well, that's all over now. A fresh generation of suckers has been detected (the bellwether has to be the immense outpouring of cash at ForgeWorld's stand at Salute) and all the rules have been republished - at GW's trademark how-the-hell-much-did-you just-say? prices. I'm thinking that what happened was that enough people downloaded the free versions of the rules that they started to think at GW Mansions (suggestions as to what GW HQ should actually be called are welcome) that the market was big enough to fire up the centri-cast machines again.
Because, with the rules, come the figures. My word, it's breathtaking.
Some of the stuff is pretty, but as always it's shockingly priced. Plastic 6mm (8mm in GW speak) figures at £12 for about 150 figures. Tanks and aircraft in the same scale at about £3 each. And upwards; anything fancy is closer to a tenner. Not necessarily closer on the single digit side either. I had thought Peter Berry's Baccus stuff was a special treat for when I'd been particularly well behaved; I'd have to cure cancer to justify spending this kind of money on micro-armour.
The spaceships are the same ones which came out last time, which means that most of the Imperial ones look like the Hungarian House of Parliament with engines, but made of plastic. Up at the top end of the size register, you're looking at £18 to £25 for about the amount of lead which Brigade or GZG would shuffle their feet and ask for £12. Even the boys at Mongoose might show a little shame looking for this kind of money and they have Babylon 5 licensing fees to cover.
It's good news for the boys at GZG and Brigade, I think, as long as they don't decide to get greedy and push their own prices up; at these small (with starships, purely nominal) scales it's harder for GW to retain the exclusivity that they hold at 28mm. Other people's figure would look just as good and cost a fraction of the money - as long as the fanboys are willing to think more widely and get on the net, there should be business for the smaller guys.
And looking down the road, in two years or so it will be good news for us, as the Bring and Buy stands groan with discarded GW 6mm and BFG stuff at affordable prices. Pity I have to wait that long.
Check out the hardware here Battlefleet Gothic and Epic Armageddon; Try to imagine my Bruce Willis in Die Hard laugh as I read this text
"Bag With Epic Bases (4 Sprues) This includes 4 sprues of Epic bases, giving you 16 bases in total.Price: £7.00"
I should perhaps make the point that Epic bases are bits of plastic 1 cm by 5 cm. 43.75p seems like a lot to pay for one.
Sunday 8 July 2007
Looking ahead
It's been a month since there was a post on this blog, largely because we have been doing other things and the campaign itself was thus on hold.
I have been thinking a little in the interim about the future of the campaign.
Let's start with the two big options short of just never going back
1) Maintain it from where it stopped last
2) Restart it from zero
There are two problems with restarting the campaign from where it started last.
The first is simply administrative, and could be sorted out; I'm not sure I've got an accurate record of where everyone was when we paused. But I think it could easily be argued out.
The second is a little harder to tackle; Con has effectively dropped out, through no fault of his own, and Frank has taken his place, though there's been no follow up on that. So a decision has to be made about whether to put Frank into Con's planets, or add a wing to the map or what. And what ought to happen to allow Frank to catch up on the progress everyone else made on capturing local worlds and whatnot. And that's assuming that Frank can actually make the time to get into things.
Restarting the campaign from zero; why am I even suggesting this? It knocks Eddie back to where he started when he's manifestly well ahead of the rest of the players, which is frustrating and unfair. But I'm still throwing the idea out there.
Here's a few of my reasons, which have a bearing on either option and how we go forward.
Firstly, it might be better to redesign the campaign for the actual player environment we have - four reasonably committed players, one of whom is trying to umpire the thing, and a couple more players interested in principle but not able to turn up often or commit much time, and the two or three other players (like James and Sean) who are willing to take part in whatever is going on, but not necessarily into getting deeply into campaign dynamics.
Secondly, it might be that we need to think again about the overall approach of the campaign. As things stand, you've got a certain amount of interaction for the strategic moves, but the tactical games have a tendency to be one on one, which leaves everyone else as spectators to the use of the entire table. This isn't all that great a use of the big table as a resource.
Thirdly, the original thought behind the campaign was to use it as a way of generating battles which would be asymmetrical and more interesting than the battles which we were having. In practice the design behind the repair rules drove everyone towards big ship navies with small numbers of light scouting ships and battles have been between small fleets of very big ships with pretty much even points values. And to be honest, we could have had those battles without the trouble of a campaign system. So I have to say that my campaign ideas were not a huge success in delivering my original objectives.
From this I come to asking, what do we want to get out of Full Thrust type games? And what's the best way of getting that?
Things which are interesting about FT:
It's relatively easy and painless to cook up your own designs for ships, and there are hundreds of designs out there if you want to try something different but haven't the patience to cook up something of your own.
The fleet organisations are completely loose - you can field whatever you choose in whatever mix you like
The battles themselves are quick and easy - you can teach someone the basics of FT in an hour or less, and it's pretty easy to suss out the trade-offs between the weapons systems and so on.
Things which are limited about FT
It really only works well with small numbers of ships (less to keep track of) and with two sides (because the game is written in a way which makes more than two sides very difficult to administer fairly).
So short of rewriting the rules to change these things, it seems to me that what we really want to see - for club games - is something which will allow us to have a game with two defined sides, each with more than one player, with each player having the opportunity to fine tune a force to his own preferences, and with the game playing out - for preference - in two nights or less.
This suggests to me that what we might need is a change to a sort of meta-campaign, played out in the background, which would be used to generate scenarios from time to time which would allow for interesting battles either of SG II, Dirtside or Full Thrust as the case might be. These individual actions would be played out against the context of a campaign so large that the players themselves would be merely local commanders doing small battles in theatre with tailored forces drawn from much larger contingents. The larger conflict would trundle along in the background, dealt with at an abstract political level and whenever we wanted a game, we would look at the abstract, pick a point of friction which suited the people available and then play out the game.
At which point, I welcome comments - maybe there's a better, simpler idea I've overlooked.
I have been thinking a little in the interim about the future of the campaign.
Let's start with the two big options short of just never going back
1) Maintain it from where it stopped last
2) Restart it from zero
There are two problems with restarting the campaign from where it started last.
The first is simply administrative, and could be sorted out; I'm not sure I've got an accurate record of where everyone was when we paused. But I think it could easily be argued out.
The second is a little harder to tackle; Con has effectively dropped out, through no fault of his own, and Frank has taken his place, though there's been no follow up on that. So a decision has to be made about whether to put Frank into Con's planets, or add a wing to the map or what. And what ought to happen to allow Frank to catch up on the progress everyone else made on capturing local worlds and whatnot. And that's assuming that Frank can actually make the time to get into things.
Restarting the campaign from zero; why am I even suggesting this? It knocks Eddie back to where he started when he's manifestly well ahead of the rest of the players, which is frustrating and unfair. But I'm still throwing the idea out there.
Here's a few of my reasons, which have a bearing on either option and how we go forward.
Firstly, it might be better to redesign the campaign for the actual player environment we have - four reasonably committed players, one of whom is trying to umpire the thing, and a couple more players interested in principle but not able to turn up often or commit much time, and the two or three other players (like James and Sean) who are willing to take part in whatever is going on, but not necessarily into getting deeply into campaign dynamics.
Secondly, it might be that we need to think again about the overall approach of the campaign. As things stand, you've got a certain amount of interaction for the strategic moves, but the tactical games have a tendency to be one on one, which leaves everyone else as spectators to the use of the entire table. This isn't all that great a use of the big table as a resource.
Thirdly, the original thought behind the campaign was to use it as a way of generating battles which would be asymmetrical and more interesting than the battles which we were having. In practice the design behind the repair rules drove everyone towards big ship navies with small numbers of light scouting ships and battles have been between small fleets of very big ships with pretty much even points values. And to be honest, we could have had those battles without the trouble of a campaign system. So I have to say that my campaign ideas were not a huge success in delivering my original objectives.
From this I come to asking, what do we want to get out of Full Thrust type games? And what's the best way of getting that?
Things which are interesting about FT:
It's relatively easy and painless to cook up your own designs for ships, and there are hundreds of designs out there if you want to try something different but haven't the patience to cook up something of your own.
The fleet organisations are completely loose - you can field whatever you choose in whatever mix you like
The battles themselves are quick and easy - you can teach someone the basics of FT in an hour or less, and it's pretty easy to suss out the trade-offs between the weapons systems and so on.
Things which are limited about FT
It really only works well with small numbers of ships (less to keep track of) and with two sides (because the game is written in a way which makes more than two sides very difficult to administer fairly).
So short of rewriting the rules to change these things, it seems to me that what we really want to see - for club games - is something which will allow us to have a game with two defined sides, each with more than one player, with each player having the opportunity to fine tune a force to his own preferences, and with the game playing out - for preference - in two nights or less.
This suggests to me that what we might need is a change to a sort of meta-campaign, played out in the background, which would be used to generate scenarios from time to time which would allow for interesting battles either of SG II, Dirtside or Full Thrust as the case might be. These individual actions would be played out against the context of a campaign so large that the players themselves would be merely local commanders doing small battles in theatre with tailored forces drawn from much larger contingents. The larger conflict would trundle along in the background, dealt with at an abstract political level and whenever we wanted a game, we would look at the abstract, pick a point of friction which suited the people available and then play out the game.
At which point, I welcome comments - maybe there's a better, simpler idea I've overlooked.
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