Terrain, terrain, terrain, all over my apartment

I've been working at some terrain lately. I host some games at the cellar of my building, so I was suddenly hit with a need for four tables. I'm almost finished with three forests and here is picture of them!

I will add some more flock to the trees, but otherwise these are ready. I'm not 100 % satisfied of how they look, but considering how quick they were to make, I'm happy! When I get rest of the terrain and boards ready, this blog will see some better pictures of them, so prepare for that! ;)

Also got a package from mail. It contained a lot of terrain from Games Workshop.

Now I have the Chapel, Temple of Skulls, Walls and Fences and Garden of Morr boxes. I finished putting them together and now they are waiting for a black primer. It's really nice terrain, but the garden and chapel have just ridiculous amount of skulls in them. I know it's a cemetery, but come on! :)

Overall, I'm really pleased with the Citadel terrain. I definitely will buy some more when a suitable sale becomes available. :)

The minor negative side is that there is some fiddling to get those buildings together without gaps. I'll might have to get my green stuff out, but I have a feeling that laziness will win. :P

Oh yeah, it's only a week before next round of the league! We will have timed turns next time and I'll have to finish the scenario list next week. I'm really excited to try out my pFeora list!

Video review of the Grand Scrutator!

So, i've been trying out some simple video editing lately and decided to do my next piece of Thoughts about Protectorate as a video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHi5mqAJOw

So it's a review of our favourite old man, Grand Scrutator Severius. I go through his stats, abilites and so forth, to give a feel of what he is like. It's not about how "tournament effective" he is, it's about what he is like, what he can do and basic tips about how to use him.

Although I think he is good caster for a tournament. :)

Memory list for Menoth (+ WM in general)

I played couple games today. First one I won and second I lost. Both were great games, but I learned more from the loss than from the win. That's how it is usually. Few of my mistakes were forgetting and not thinking through some things, but I lost because of my tactical choices, not forgetfulness. Still I thought it would be a good thing to write down a memory list for the future. ;)

1. For Menoths sake, remember his eye! That +1 can be critical!
2. Remember to plan your activation order so that your support pieces can be utilised. Activating 'jacks before choir sings battle hymn is a bad mistake, but easy one to happen in the heat of battle.
3. Wrecked 'Jacks leave wreck markers! Those ARE going to hamper your movement in the future, so include that in your plans! /Edit: They also provide cover! (Thanks Pseudok!)
4. You can still shoot with destroyed arm systems. You just roll one dice to hit and damage.
5. Remember that you have an array of power attacks for your 'Jacks, especially those with open fists. This brings a lot of versatility.
6. Never forget the scenario objectives!
7. Remember damage types and models immunities, both yours and the opponents.

Those are the ones that I can think up with this sitting, if you have something to add, post a comment! I'm going to update this list when new things come up. It might just help me to remember these better.

I feel that my game is getting better and steadier all the time, but I still have so much to learn about this game. That's what makes it interesting. :)

First round of SteamLeague!

Text translated to English: "SteamLeague of Oulu"

So first round is over! It was a really nice gaming night. My board projects are unfinished, so I borrowed a board and some terrain from Hannu and Seraphi. Thanks guys! I plan to finish four boards next month and that should be enough for our gaming nights. I did not remember to take pictures this month, but I'll have to take some next time!

I learned few things. First, we need some kind of time limit for our rounds. Some of us took way too long time for our rounds. A lot of jokes about that were directed towards one player. He admittedly took a long time, but so took almost every one of us. So let's face it guys, we were all to blame for the fact that our two 10 point games took all day! :D

So for my personal gaming experiences, here is the list I played with:

pSeverius -6
Crusader 6
Revenger 6
Repenter 4

It is quite basic and worked quite nice. I won both games, but felt that both of those caster kills would have been much more reliable with just one or two more focus. I desperately need wracks and hierophant for future. Lack of choir was also a bummer, but I really could not fit them here. Feat of Severius is awesome. In both games it let me take a superior position without the fear of his caster and jacks retaliating effectively. Neither of those victories came easily, but the feat was a big part of both victories.

Like I said before, I need some caster support pieces to my next list. I tend to run Severius with quite many jacks and always feel like I have one or two focus too little. It also makes those crazy assassination runs with Revenger so much more likely to pull through. I've never felt so starved for focus with Kreoss or Feora

Here are the results for the first round:

(Games, Wins, Losses, Draws, Win Percentage)

Fitim:     G2, W2, L0, D0, WP 100%
Walz:      G2, W2, L0, D0, WP 100%
Hannu:    G2, W0, L0, D2, WP 50%
Tanan:    G1, W0, L0, D1, WP 50%
Antti:      G2, W0, L1, D1, WP 25%
Seraphi:  G2, W0, L2, D0, WP 0%
Niko:      G1, W0, L1, D0, WP 0%


First draw was because a player made an honest mistake with his list and took few too many points. We changed his close victory to a draw because of that. He was really honest with it and told me immediately when he noticed. Second draw was because we ran out of time and they agreed for a draw. Like I said, we need some kind of timed turns. :P

There are two players who have only one game, Tanan played on the first round but had to leave before the second. Niko took his place with borrowed Cygnar from Seraphi.

It was a great night, but I'm looking forward to playing with bigger lists. 10 points is very small, it's hard to fit anything. :) Next month is 15 points, I better start to paint figures!

Scenario: Arcane Ruins

I had an idea for a scenario and decided to post it. It's likely not a final version, but you get the idea. It's a relaxed and pretty random scenario, so it might not be a best fit for competitive play.

Scenario: Arcane Ruins

When making scenery, place three arcane ruins within 4 inches of the center line of the board and with at least 12 inches between the ruins. You can also deploy woods or buildings instead of ruins.

You control a arcane ruin if your model ends it activation within the scenery piece or within 2 inches of a building or a ruin that cannot be moved into. Model that flees, has lower cmd than 3, inert warjacks, wild beasts and incorporeal models cannot hold objectives. Model contests an objective, if it is within a forest or within 2 inches of a building or a ruin that cannot be moved into. If there is a enemy model contesting the objective, neither of you gain control. You remain in control of the point even if you move out of the scenery piece, until your opponent contests or captures it.

In the maintenance phase, after allocating focus, roll d3 for each objective you control. This is the amount of Arcane Rage tokens you can then allocate to units, warjacks/warbeasts, warcasters/warlocks or solos. No unit/model can have more than three arcane tokens. In the next turn, before allocating focus, remove every arcane rage token you allocated last turn. Unit gets a bonus depending of the number of tokens it has. Note that these are not cumulative. For example, if you allocate three tokens to a unit, it gets only the third bonus, not all of them.

1 token: 1+ str, mat, rat and ranged damage rolls. -1 def
2 tokens: 2+ str, mat, rat and ranged damage rolls. -1 def and -1 arm
3 tokens: 2+ str, mat, rat and ranged damage rolls, +1 spd, -2 def and -1 arm. Warjacks may charge for free and units get fearless. Warcasters get +2 rng for spells and may once in turn cast one spell for one less focus.

You can win this scenario by caster kill. Starting from the first players third turn, player can also win by controlling all of the objectives in the end of his turn.

Few games and damn those cleansers!

Today me and my friend visited few Wargamers to talk about Warmachine and to borrow armies for them to play with. Demoing part was kind of easy, because they have already played a few games so they had pretty good grasp of the rules. As a hindsight, maybe I should have paid more attention to their game, but luckily Seraphi was there to explain some rules while I was busy talking about videogames. ;)

They seemed quite interested and it's a really welcome thing to have more players!

I also played one game with Seraphi. He played Retribution with Vyros and I had Menoth with pFeora. It was a close win for me, but I'll have to say that he played a better game than I did. He got more out his feat than I did of mine and forced me to try a sloppy assassination as my army was getting it's butt kicked. After a few failed attack rolls, my attempt failed. To be honest, I would have needed better than average rolls to succeed. Not crazy rolls, but slightly better than average. It just happened that he rolled really bad on his most important damage roll against feora and she was left with one damage box when my turn started. Vyros was slaughtered by Feora after that.

It seems that it's easy to build Warcaster kill opportunities that have a decent rate of success, but it takes real skill to pull off reliable assassinations. Lot, I mean LOT of our games have ended to retaliation after a failed caster kill attempt.

After quite a few games with Cleanser, I'll have to say that I still like them, but they are not very good. One guy at the PP forums described their main issue well, they are anti-infantry unit that has big problems hitting infantry. I've had most success with them when I play pKreoss as my caster. His feat turns them to monsters for one turn. +1 to hit that pSeverius offers does not seem to be quite enough... Their combined ranged attack is decent, but not great. It's cloud effect is also decent, but because it's a ranged attack with rng 8, placing it to gain most out of the cloud is not that easy. You could get quite powerful combined ranged attack from them if you play a full unit, but for 8 pts and rng 8... Nah. Also, their spd and defensive stats suck ass. But their gun is awesome. This makes up a lot. Pow is great, spray is great and continuous fire is both cool and effective. ;)

They are not horrible, but it seems to me that Repenter is a better deal for less points. I will keep playing them as flame throwers are pretty much the coolest thing ever and hopefully I will learn more about using them effectively.

It's weird how they seem to end up shooting the opposing caster. It's often not my goal at the start of the game, as with their range warcasters are hard to reach, but somehow they just end up getting that combined ranged attack to opponents caster. pSorscha met a painful end this way a while back. :)

League will start soon! (+ random thoughts)

Our slow grow league now has whopping FIVE participants! Plan is to play first round 28th day! Because we now have uneven number of players, I had to change the scenario system a little. Old system was that every players first game would be predetermined scenario and second would be thrown from the book. New system is that I make a new table of scenarios for each round and the players roll from it for both games. This way we can have uneven number of players without problems and we don't have to always play scenarios from the book. SteamRoller 2011 rules has some good scenarios and I'm going to search the internet for more.

When I started playing Warmachine, there were two local players and one that lives a small drive farther. Me and few friends then started some serious marketing. ;) I build a board and terrain to play on and we posted about Warmachine to out citys section on Finnish forum. We have grown to six players so far and this sunday we will have a demo game with two (or was it three?) interested players. I also will demo Warmachine to one player next week, so the local player base seems to grow fast! I talked with the people who manage our building (I don't know what they are called in english) and they promised that we can play on the cellar of the building I live in. There is a hobby room, which has some exercising equipment, tables and table tennis in it. It's perfect for us. I will borrow another board from my friend until I build two more boards. Then six people can play at once (eight if we borrow my friends board too), which will be enough most of the time. Warmachine games don't take forever, so even if we have more players, everyone gets to play! Yay! :)

It would be awesome to reach 10 players!

Currently I have painted pSeverius, Repenter, Revenger, Crusader and min unit of cleansers for the league. I'm currently working my way through choir. Everything seemed to go wrong when painting Severius and I'm not happy with him. I'm probably going to strip his paint later and paint him again, but for a while, current paint has to do. It's table top worthy, but not what I would want it to be. :P

I tried taking pictures, but they were pretty terrible. I'm not a good photographer and a decent camera can't fix that...

So, I will post pictures and rambles when the league starts and maybe I'll finally start writing next part of the "Thoughts about Protectorate" series. Until then, happy gaming!