A few spoilers

It's been a while since my last post. a rough deadline at work, assassins' creed 3, and a painting kick have kept me from having much time to spend on blogging or even thinking about articles to write. It's also been a slow couple of months for Skorne, with no new releases, and very few spoilers about the upcoming book. To top it all off, my last big event for the year was a bit of a bust. I only won 2 games all weekend at clash for a cure, which was a pretty disappointing end to a year that was generally pretty good.

With the holidays coming up, it's likely that I won't be writing a whole lot. Schedules tend to be a little crazy this time of year, with work end of year deadlines, family visiting, etc. I'm hoping to get a few articles done just to keep from totally losing interest in writing my blog, which would be a shame considering how well I've done keeping it going so far.

Skorne Tiers - eHexeris

Let's talk about Tier forces. When I started playing Warmachine, tier forces sounded really neat. As you know if you've followed my blog at all, I used to be a 40K player. "Fluffy" armies always had a strange appeal to me. They might not be as powerful as a spammy netlist, but they were unique and interesting. Other than personal satisfaction, though, 40K didn't offer any benefits to playing fluffy armies. Warmachine, on the other hand has these neat theme forces that reward you for taking things that fit well with a certain caster.

I've always wanted to play a theme force. Unfortunately, most theme forces are really difficult to make, or they just don't do much. Some armies have some really strong tiers (butcher + doom reavers, Jake's eVayl T4, eKreoss infantry swarm, Mortenebra with tons of jacks) or theme forces that open up some cool options (reznik with steelheads, eSkarre with a ton of Satyxis, etc). Unfortunately, I've been pretty discouraged by Skorne's tier lists.

It's not that we don't have any good tiers, they're just hard to build. I'm not commited enough to playing tier forces that I'm going to get multiple units of karax or bloodrunners or swordsmen. I could do Rasheth, but I just don't like his sculpt. I could do Mordikaar, but I would need 2 more void spirits and 2 feralgeists, and not use paingivers. Surely there has to be a theme force I can run when I feel like playing something different, but won't require buying a ton of models that will only be played in that theme force.

My answer (along with answers to a lot of Skorne's problems) came with Domination. Probably the second best thing to come from that book is eHexeris (I pretty firmly believe that eVayl was the single best thing in Domination). Recently I started playing with his theme force, Practical Magic, and have been loving it. It's a bit of a strange theme, but it's deceptively good. And easy to build, which is great for me. Let's take a look at the requirements and my Tier 4 list.

Retribution Project

 I haven't exactly been updating my blog a whole lot lately. Between a trip to Africa and then moving to a new house as soon as we got back, I haven't had a whole lot of time for hobby stuff. This week I finally got my new painting desk set up and started working on my next project.

I've gotten a handful of games in with my new Retribution army, I think I've had 2 games each with Rahn, Ravyn, Ossyan and Kaelyssa plus a speedmachine tournament with a mean little Ossyan list. Now that this year's leagues are finished I'll be focusing more on my Ret. I'm not completely shelving my Skorne of course, but I want to spend the time to really learn my new faction. We have one more major event this year with Clash for the Cure coming up in 2 weeks, which will probably be my last outing with Skorne for the year.

Dark Secrets Cave Terrain

This week is week 2 of the Dark Secrets league at our FLGS. The leagues this year have been a ton of fun so far. the alliances and season models have been really interesting on the whole (except when you can't find the right ally to play with...), and the patches this year look really sweet on a battlefoam bag. This month, the only badge that is difficult to get is the Hobby badge. To get the hobby badge, you have to create and paint a piece of cave-themed terrain. I have honsetly never made terrain before. I have some bits and pieces in my closet that I have been wanting to use, but just haven't gotten around to it.

This challenge got me to finally go and create some terrain. I really like how it turned out, and want to share how I made it with others, since it was super quick and easy, and perfect for people like me who don't want to spend a lot of time on making terrain just for a patch.

Mammoth Spoilers!

UPDATE: Now that the Mammoth is more completely spoiled, some of the information below is incorrect. The post below was based on stats that were spoiled incompletely, and includes some guesses made by me and others in the Skorne community. Now that the full spoilers are out I am seeing a ton of hits to this page (somehow my page is in the top 5 on google for "skorne mammoth"), and getting comments about how the stats are incomplete. 

Here are the currently spoiled stats:

SPD:4 STR:15 MAT:6 RAT:3 DEF:?? ARM:20 FURY:5
2 P+S 19 fists, 1 P+S 18 Tusks, crit pitch
gun is Pow 15, RoF 3, AOE 4
Animus is Counterblast (see gun boar)
Bulldoze and Assault

That's the meat of the rumor. The stats should be out in the NQ later this month, at which point I'm sure no one will be coming here for their stats. I appologize for the out-dated stats, I really had no idea people would still be running into this page so long after I posted it originally! 

In Privateer's latest video update, the studio design team talks about the upcoming Gargantuans book. There are a number of spoilers (some have already been spoiled, but other than some concept art from lock and load, this is the first official leak for the new book). Most of the gargantuans themselves have already been spoiled to some degree. The cards for the mountain king and wold wrath have been out for a little while, and are available in War Room, so no surprises there. We already knew that the Archangel would have ride by attacks and consume, so there was very little new info there. The big one was the Mammoth preview!

A mammoth plowing through everblight lines

Skorne: Picking Your Team

Character Restrictions in tournaments look to be here to stay. Let's break down Skorne's characters and where they fit.

Steamroller 2012 introduced Character Restrictions across the board. There was of course some whining and moaning when the rules were first released, but I think on the whole these changes have been very well received. I would be very surprised if these restrictions didn't carry on into steamroller 2013. I for one have really enjoyed the new character restrictions. It means I see a whole lot less of certain solos (though I still seem to fight armies with Gorman, Eiryss, Janessa, etc), and it also challenges me to use some new models.

Hordes generally got hit less with character restrictions than Warmachine. we really don't have as many characters to start with, and without access to merc solos we don't have those tempting options like Rhupert and Gorman (yes, I am going to drop Gorman's name a lot. I really hate that guy). When I was starting out with Skorne, I often built lists with zero character models (aside from the warlock of course). We just don't need them in every list.

War Room - What Happened?

Oh War Room. I want so badly to like you. I remember how excited I was when PP first announced the upcoming app, and all the cool things it would do. Then the release got pushed (in increments) from April to yesterday (August). During that time, PP lost a lot of steam with the product. All the hype they built up petered off well before the app came out. The first few weeks after the initial announcement, there were numerous threads full of people talking about how awesome it was going to be, and how they would buy the full $60 bundle as soon as possible. Today, the forum is full of threads complaining about errors, poor functionality (or no functionality), and disappointments. Seems like very few people are actually going to shell out for the big bundle.

So what happened?