Q&A with Mr Walrus (for the benefit of a warmahordes newb)

Heya

Mr Walrus:howdy

So, as a newbie I think it’d be handy to know what I should look out for, what I should avoid, and how I should approach the different factions in the game. Ive barely read the fluff, and I have one fluke win. Lets save the best of last and you can give up the anti-khador secrets at the end, but what’s your advice? How should I think when I sit down and see ‘x’ across from me?

Mr Walrus do you mean like, how to approach each faction? or do you mean how to approach different types of armies in general?

Warmachine Starter!

Heya all, Dave again (You can go ahead an expect that I'm going to pop my head in here only in very random intervals) this time I wanted to talk about my First impressions with Warmachine!

Initially I was a little hesitant to pickup the game. The models were a bit on the 'cartoony' side for me and if I'm going to be honest, I had a bit of a stiff upper lip as a war-hammer player; Why would I play that when I already play the 'better' game? That changed outright when the newest faction was announced and echoed in the war gaming blogs. 

Convergence of cyriss eschews the steam-punk air captain aesthetic in favor of an art-deco science fiction fanaticism. For those of you that don't have experience with art-deco scifi, take a look...

All Hail the Red Queen !

So I just got my hands on the Mala Tempora data pack and 3 cards easily came to mind; Xanadu, Rook and the Red Queen, Reina Roja.
 I wanted to build something based around making it hard for the Corp to rez ice and would suck his economy dry in the process.
No, I didn't spend all my influence on account Syphon; my strategy is to make it costy for the corp to rez, period. Very costy I mean.

FSA: Stealth Systems Engaged, My Directorate Fleet

''Shields are back online'', the robotic voice coming his adjutant always made Rob wonder how much of it was still human.
''Commander?'' Should we prepare the fold space engines for another jump?
''Yes, prepare for these coordinates and transmit them to the rest of the fleet.''.
 As he clicked on his holoscreen, the lights flickered in the ship and an alarm erupted: ''Warning: Cyber attack detected.''

Android Netrunner: Rielle 'Kit' Peddler ''Copycat''

''Copycat'', a criminal card, is quite the interesting program. Allowing you to pass a piece of Ice in any server and continue your run from there...if you broke a piece of Ice sharing the same name during your run.
Somehow, I think this card is a card that fits Rielle more than any other runner due to her ability to break any first piece of ice.

I wanted to build a deck around ''Copycat'', but my first attempt proved disastrous. Now I built a deck based on the runner's strength: making any ''one ice'' server a liability for the corp.
If the corps puts more Ice in the servers, it increases the chances ''Copycat'' will be useful. Sadly the deck is not fully built around Copycat.

Android Netrunner: Jinteki Fast Advance

Considering that Netrunner Season 2 ended a few weeks ago, and Season 3 probably won’t be here until the first quarter of the new year, I figured now would be the perfect time to test new deck ideas! I will go through my metagame-analyzing deck-building process step-by-step.

Archetype Choice

The deck that we’re building should counter the strongest runner decks.

Android Netrunner: NBN ''Invasion of Privacy''

With cards like ''Helion Alpha Test'' and ''Invasion of Privacy'', the corporations are starting to get more and more pro-active about screwing their opponent's gameplay.
These two cards gave me the idea to build a fun deck to try them out and play a more ''control'' NBN deck.

Now I know that this deck will be less competitive than other decks you could find on the internet, but I'm more about trying to discover new playstiles and new decks than simply netdecking. The idea behind my Netrunner deck articles is that if you are intrigued by a concept, you probably have to work a little (or a lot) around it to make it work...

Back to the Storm Sector

I was wasting time on Facebook when I saw a post by The D6 Generation, a picture of a 3-way Firestorm Armada with comments about the new changes in the rules and the 2.0 rules.

It was this picture: Looks awesome, click click!

Alright everyone, G asked me to contribute to this blog since I'm a bit more involved with 40k than he and the other bloggers are so that's what I'm gonna do. I figured a good way to start would be to talk about the tournament I ran last weekend.

One of the big problems I have with 40k is how static the game can be when the goals are always fixed. In 5th, kill points made up the vast majority of the games, and as a result, strong lists depended on a few high output high survivability units (Draigowing and bike-nobs were very good for this). With the shift to 6th, the idea is to have low cost, high volume scoring units to sit on the myriad objectives that rule the board. When you take troops that have a high damage output, they tend to also be costly, and you've made the choice for the other person with regards to target priority. What rules now is low cost, numerous scoring units that are minimal threats on the table. Either kill the scary things and let the troops score, or shoot the troops down and eat the return fire from the scary stuff; Damned if you do, damned it you don't.

Neither of these types of game are bad by any stretch, but they certainly lend priority to a certain type of list. In 5th, bikers and paladins brought the toughness and killyness to win. In 6th, kroot, warriors and cultists are ideal in that they are super cheap, and aren't so scary that your opponent prioritizes killing them. What I wanted for my event was a game that does not force that choice, and while I'm not completely there yet, I feel like I've gotten close.

My tournaments run 6 objectives (to avoid having a player at the advantage of placing one more than the other person), with no mysterious objectives, secondaries and a special modification to each game. At setup, each table has a deck of cards; each table has the same deck, and each card has a small effect on the game. Some cards will activate kill-points, others will turn off secondary objectives. Some of them will modify the way objectives are scored (biasing the points in favor of one player or the other) and others still have no effect on scoring, but allow for modified rules (one allows a single unit to assault coming in from reserves, and another allows the warlord and his unit to fire into Close combat). Before the start of the game, each player draws five cards, elects to keep two, and passes one to their opponent. This way, you have to consider that the other person may modify your own pre-game position rather than just trying to gain the maximum advantage you can.

The idea is that a player can bring whatever list they enjoy playing (be it a strong death star, numerous small units, minimal troops, etc) and be able to shift the games objective slightly so that they stand a chance of winning. No one is forced to bring massed scoring units if they prefer a mechanized force, because they can before the game starts, sway the objective slightly away from scoring on objectives. Because of this, a resident Nid player who isn't very known for being hard won the event and took home a nice big gift certificate.

Before I run my next one, I will be sure to share the cardset on here so that other people can give it a shot. :)


`Dave

Android Netrunner: Whizzard ''Rook''

For today's Netrunner deck, I'm going to show my Whizzard ''Rook'', an anarchs economic-warfare deck that wants to put some early aggression and win the game quickly while making sure the corp can't defend itself properly.

If you're the type of guy that like their games to end quickly or to watch defenseless opponents, then this deck could interest you.