Review: Age of Sigmar

At the request of a reader, here's my thoughts on Age of Sigmar. It's kinda long, so I've labeled sections in case you want to skip to specific parts.

Disclaimer:
First, let me say that I had played 1 game of 8th edition (which I can't say I was particularly fond of), and prior to that, had only played maybe 1 or 2 games of Warhammer Fantasy from some long ago edition around 20 years ago. I used to play a fair amount of 40k back those 20 years ago, but beyond that, my GW gaming experience is limited to all the fringe games like Space Hulk and Warhammer Quest. Thus my review here is more based on me primarily being a Warmachine player, so take it all with that context.

Actual Gameplay
For the 1 game I played, I played Skaven, only because I have a bunch of Skaven models. We actually played a starter scenario right before this as well just to get a grasp of the rules. But for the main event I rolled out a huge mountain of Skaven models. As you probably know though, there's no point amount for it. I think it amounted to something like 12 war scrolls worth of stuff deployed. My opponent (the fun and gracious Henry) played Orcs. During deployment Henry eventually stopped putting stuff down and chose the Sudden Death option where if he wiped out my Skavenslave horde of some 70 models, then he instantly wins.
The game was brutal, with a few ranged attacks before melee happened. Honestly, I was really impressed with the ratio of casualties due to melee vs ranged. So called "gun-line" armies might work in this game, but from what I can tell it's the grand melee that really gets things done.
During the course of the game it became obvious that if I left my mob of slaves in combat that they were going to easily get wiped out, so I executed a careful removal of casualties from the front to get them disengaged. Then I executed a tactical retreat with them and closed in the gap with my Rat Ogres and Clanrats. Eventually the tide of battle turned and I had the Orcs severely on the run by the time the game ended. I was victorious!

What I Didn't Like:
* Pointless Warscrolls - Skaven slaves as an example. The lack of a point system does make things weird. I'd NEVER take slaves again if I played. There are a number of war scrolls for units that are essentially useless in the game as far as I can tell.
* Warscroll options - It's still a bit too complicated in terms of options on a warscroll. Things like "do these rats have 1 reach weapon or 2 short weapons" or whatever configuration. I get the whole "model accurate" thing, but there's also options that are not represented by models. Lots of notes needed and it's complicated. And again, no points, so why wouldn't I just load up every option?
* Ambiguity - There's definitely some ambiguity in the rules when resolving certain things like wound assignment to multi-wound models, or having multiple different types of banners. Maybe this will all get tightened up later.
* Measuring - Yeah, not using bases to measure is just dumb. I'm sorry, but it just made the game more complicated rather than easier.
* Initiative - I'm still not sure whether I like the way you roll each round for initiative. It can cause a pretty hard sway. In generally this is a bit of a preference thing for me though and I just haven't played as many you-go-i-go type games.

What I liked:
* Placement - The whole taking turns putting additional stuff on the board is an amusing dynamic. I could literally write a whole article about why I think this is a brilliant system. It becomes a combination of list building and deployment all at once. It gives you the option to adapt to what your opponent is placing to thus have a more balanced game. You have to make hard decisions quickly. It steers the game away from "playbook list building" and more towards an adapt-on-the-fly strategy game which I really love. This is hands down my favorite thing about this game. Or perhaps tied for my favorite thing...
* Hellpit Abomination - Straight up, totally fun on the board. It wrecks the shit out of things. The big models like that really shine as fun in this game format.
* Rat Ogres - Cause like, they are crazy amusing. They have lots of features and flexibility. It was fun crashing them into Orcs and watching massive chaos ensue.
* Clanrats - Cause nothing says amusing like a massive mob of 50 Clanrats all together getting big bonuses. Seriously though, I do really enjoy the whole "it's a huge mob of models moving in something resembling a formation" thing. This is one of the pieces of Warhammer that always appealed to me. I can totally see people continuing to use movement trays for big units and just house-ruling their usage in this new game system.
* Moar dice - Rolling tons of dice is pretty amusing. This game is great for it when you get to melee.
* Close combat - The game really gets epic when you're piling in huge amounts of stuff and the close combat trade offs turn into a game of chicken. This actually becomes a pretty important aspect of the game in that choosing when to activate something can make or break your whole army if you aren't careful.
* Strategy - There's definitely some tactical aspects to the game in knowing when to withdraw/feint and when to commit or reposition. More on that below, but I think this is easily overlooked.

Barriers to Playing:
So let's talk about this. Switching from Warhammer 8th ed to this has a barrier in that it's a clearly different game requiring a whole new mindset. Also because the war scrolls aren't balanced on a point system it's a whole new way of approaching what to include in your army. Previously you'd build (assemble/convert/paint/etc) your models with a plan of building a specific list. Now when you show up for a game, you likely need to bring your entire model collection to be well prepared. Yes, that's my opinion here: To play "competitively" you need to bring every model you have so that you can have appropriate things to counter what your opponent puts on the table.
What are my personally barriers to playing this? There's a few and I'll admit that lots of these are just cause I'm stuck in my own little bias.
1) I'm heavily financially invested in Warmachine/Hordes already.
2) I prefer games with really tight rule sets. This game is not nearly as tight as I prefer.
3) There's no way I'm painting hundreds more models for this game. I can't even catch up on the other games I play.

Why All The Hate??
Honestly I don't get all the hate for this new game. Let's review a few points:
* The rules are free, and there's an app. They've made it accessible.
* It plays relatively smooth and quick, in my opinion.
* Every model that existed before is still playable.
* Nothing is preventing players from playing the existing 8th ed game also!
Seriously though, I think when you step back and look at it, this is actually a pretty good game for what it is. I personally think this game is better than 8th edition was, admittedly based on 1 playing of each. But in the end, AoS is it's own game, and should be treated that way.

Overall Summary
Do I like AoS? Yes.
Will I play it again? Maybe, but rarely.
This game could fill a miniatures gaming niche for me of large scale strategy battles which I don't have a game for today. I honestly felt like there's a good opportunity for proper strategy in this game after pulling off a feint with my slaves. Games that enable more proper strategy rather than just "I rolled a 6 on this spell and your unit blows up" are good in my book. I like strategy and planning in my games. In any case, I had fun and it was definitely worth trying out.

Neptunes

3 of my 6 Neptunes are finished now!

Dropzone Update

Last night I played yet another game of DZC and had a good time. I lost the game (against Shaltari) but it was somewhat by design since I wanted my opponent (a bigger noob than me) to have a positive experience so I was helping him a bit along the way. Plus it helped me get a better understanding of how Shaltari work. That actually makes 5 games played at the starter box level now. I'm really looking forward to playing a 1000pt game to get the feel of using a commander and the command deck.

I've got more painted stuff finished but it needs photos still so I'll try to get those up in the next couple days. In the mean time, my 1000pt paint goal is as follows:
4 Neptunes, 2 Zeus, 2 Odins, 2 Juno A1s, 4 Immortals, 2 Triton A2s, 4 Janis.
At present I'm over halfway on that. My extended goal is to also have 2 Ares and 2 Phobos painted as well since that will fill out a fully painted starter box.

One last note about the game last night is that I got several compliments on my paint scheme and how cool the airbrush masking looked, especially on the finished Neptunes which are fairly large. It gets me excited to paint more!

Oh and a resource link is the web-based army builder for DZC located here which was built by the local Talon. I can't say how stoked I am to have a mobile device friendly army builder for this game.

Triton A2

Quick post before I pass out for the evening. Here's my finished Triton A2 dropships. I really like these models and had fun painting them despite the challenge of how to hold them. Also, here's a picture of them carrying the 4 Janis walkers (via magnets). I have to say that having them magnetized and all painted does please me quite a bit. I'm looking forward to finishing up some Neptunes for this very same reason.

Immortals

This is actually a quadruple pack of Immortals that I painted all at once. Gets them done quicker this way. Nothing really special to say here though. They are tiny! So silly to paint!

Juno

Next up from my DZC is 2 Juno A1 tanks. These I feel worked better for the patterning by virtue of sheer size for surfaces. I also really liked doing a bunch of pigment application to the treads to dirty it up. These, like the Janis, are magnet-ready. I'll share a picture of that once I finish the Neptune that's going to be carrying them.

Janis

These are my first finished DZC (Dropzone Commander) models I've finished! Painting the 10mm scale is a real challenge I have to say. I really wanted to paint these to a higher quality but honestly it's pretty tricky to work with them for a number of reasons. Since I haven't done one of these in a long time, I'm going to take the time to do a proper painting analysis.

What worked well:
* Having a plan - If I learned one thing from my Cygnar army, it's that having a plan before starting an army is a massive help. I spent a fair amount of time before starting to have a plan, and especially experimenting on test models.
* Using the airbrush - I'm getting more and more comfortable with it, and especially at diagnosing problems along the way. Using it here to create the boxed pattern was both fun and fairly unique.
* Not going too crazy - I wanted to try using techniques I don't normally do and this definitely worked out well, but I didn't push too far out beyond what I already know.
* Using custom printed decals - Again, something new for me, and it went pretty well. I'm glad I used them to do the designations on them. The medium has certain limitations due to how they work so using black lettering sort of aimed my paint scheme towards a lighter base tone.

What could have been better:
* Spending more time - I could have easily spent way more time painting these, but honestly, painting at this scale is just really challenging for me still.
* No base - Seriously! No base?? You've got to be kidding me. I rubbed so much paint off while handling them during the painting process.
* Gloss but no matte - I sealed with only gloss and no additional matte coat. It makes them shiny which I'm not super happy with, but I sort of had to keep it that way to preserve the armored look.

Summary:
There's more coming. My goal is to get most of my army painted in short order and then get back to WM/H. I've got a wide variety of types and sizes of models for DZC to paint so this will definitely be a learning experience. It's a refreshing break though.

From the Desk: Weekend Roundup #92

Late update. Very late.

My desk is a total train-wreck. I'm going to do a whirlwind roundup here. I've been really slacking on blog posts and I'll make no apology for it. Perhaps one day I'll explain why I blog, but that's another story.

Lately I've been painting stuff for Dropzone Commander a lot. I'm currently working on painting up a 1000pt force for it, which necessarily means I'm taking a bit of a break from painting Warmachine. Just temporary. I'll post some finished stuff from DZC in the next few days.

On the Warmachine front, it suddenly struck me how many tier 4 lists I've painted for Cygnar so far. In fact, the lists built so far include: Nemo1, Nemo2, Nemo3, Darius, Siege, Haley2. So why is painting to tier lists is a good option? I end up with models that I may not otherwise have added. Generally it isn't that far out of stuff I would have painted, but it does force me a ways out. My next paint target for Cygnar is going to be a pCaine tier list I think.

What else has been going on? Well I've obviously been playing a bit (3 games so far) of Dropzone Commander. I'll try to post thoughts on that in the near future.
I also played a test game of Age of Sigmar, which shockingly didn't completely suck. If anyone out there wants my modest perspective on it I'll share it. It's not amazing, but I also don't get what all the hate is about. There's some interesting differences between it and other games I've played before. Plus never having played much of previous editions of Warhammer, I was fairly untainted. I also am not burdened with a huge mountain of Warmhammer army painting time invested in the game, so I was just looking at it from a mechanical way. But again, if no one cares, I won't waste the internet bits on it.

Review: Shipping containers

Just a quick review on the Knight Models shipping containers "kit". I got 3 sets of these on a whim and have to say I'm very pleased with them. They look nice, are perfect scale to use with Warmachine, and go together really easily. The doors even open and close if you assemble them properly. Sure, they aren't painted and say Wayne on them, but honestly, for 10 minutes effort to assemble 2, it's a pretty sweet terrain option.

Lost Among Bananas and Insidiousness

This is just a quick post to note that I am currently taking a bit of a break from Warmachine. Not a serious one. Just temporary. My life was completely upside-down for the last 6 weeks and is finally returning to something resembling normalcy. Health issues with my son, challenges with my job, injury to my back, and other random small things sort of smothered my hobby activities. I've decided to take this time as a bit of a break from Warmachine and play some other things for a bit. I'll post those activities here as time allows and eventually will circle back on Warmachine once I feel properly rejuvenated for it.