Bring on 2014!

the holidays are over and the new years is ramping up! Time to jump back into blogging after not really doing much at all with the blog or warmachine in the past couple months. I have finally hit 100 posts on this blog! I couldn't really think of anything cool to do for the 100th post that would be different or exciting, so instead I'm just going to look at how things went last year and what's coming up in 2014.

For those that don't know, 2014 is going to be a big year for my wife and I. This fall we will be packing our bags and leaving the great USA and moving overseas for an indefinite amount of time. That means this year is likely going to be the last year in quite some time that I will be playing Warmachine face-to-face or on a regular basis. I am going to be figuring out Vassal in the next few months and will keep playing with friends back home via the internet, but my tournament hopping days may be over. So that means this year is going to be something of a final lap through the great Texas 'cons that I've enjoyed over the last few years.

Looking Ahead: Despoiler

I don't know if I'm just not looking in the right places or what, but I have not seen a whole lot of hype or discussion on Despoiler. I myself have not looked at him a whole lot since his rules were released, mostly because there were just so many things to look at in that book, and all of them came out way before Despoiler. There wasn't much urgency to test him when we didn't even have a sculpt for him yet, just the art in the book and one pencil sketch from PP online.

We still don't have a release date for him, but he has finally been spotted! like the Incindiarii last year, one of the PP staffers snuck in a painted Despoiler into Warmachine Weekend where some pictures were snapped of him. the complete thread I am stealing this from can be found here

Journeyman League Upcoming

Starting this week my local club is going to be starting a new Journeyman league. I think we've had one at some point in the past, but I'm pretty sure i missed some or all of it. In any case, I am actually really looking forward to playing in it this time around. I think the concept of the Journeyman league is really good. we have done slow-grow leagues for just about every game I know of at our local store, and they're a great way to get people playing. having a standard ruleset for slow grow leagues makes things so much better.

Our league is going to be starting this Wednesday and going for 6 weeks. I'm hoping that this time i will be able to come every week during the course of the league. Not that I am really planning on trying to win the league, but it would be nice to get the max participation points. I don't have the time or motivation at this point in the year to try hard enough to get the points to win either in games or painting, and certainly not for overall. I can only focus on so many things at once, and right now I'm on a video game kick (Assassin's Creed: Black Flag is awesome, BTW) which always limits my painting time.

The Top Ten - Highlights from Clash for a Cure

Clash for the Cure was a blast! Four of us from Austin (me, my wife and two of our friends from our local club) made the trek up to Waco last weekend for the last big event of the year (for those of us too poor or too strapped for vacation time to make it out to Warmachine Weekend this year). We weren't the only ones from Austin up there, but the showing from our club was definitely less than it has been in other years.

I ended up playing in a ton of games. it was a whole lot of fun, and unlike my back-to-back L&L/Wargamescon adventure this one didn't leave me totally burned out on playing the game. Between the 4 events I played in, I ended with a total 12-2 record. Not bad for the caliber of opponents in the pool this year! While it's tempting to write up some battle reports for the games I played, I don't think it's going to happen this time. I have zero pictures from the event, and don't have all the details in my mind on some of my games. there were also a few games that would make for some pretty boring/short battle reports.

So, I decided instead I would go for a top 10. My top 10 favorite moments from Clash for a Cure.

Clash for the Cure, Third Time's a Charm

This weekend is one of my favorite Texas events, Clash for a Cure. This is their third annual event, and will be the third time I attend. It's pretty cool to see how much the event has been growing in just 3 attempts. The first year was a single-caster event on an afternoon in a local gaming store. it was a very fun event,even though I lost quite badly. I was trying out Naaresh for the very first time (he had been out for a bout 2 weeks), and had not really dipped my head into the Texas competitive scene. The event has now grown into a full con-length event with 3 days of gaming!

High Command First Impressions

I was unfortunately not one of those lucky enough to get High Command pre-release, so I've only had it in hand for about a week now. Still, now that the game has been out for a little while, the forums are starting to pick up some noise about the game, and BoLS just released a first impression article that made me want to talk a bit about what I've liked about the game so far.

I'm not going to go deep into "how to play the game", as that is one thing that is very well covered elsewhere if you want to read more about it. Privateer Press published the entire rulebook as a free pdf, so if you haven't read that yet you'll get more out of going to the High Command downloads page on their site instead of me trying to explain the game. No disrespect to my fellow BoLS writer Relasine, but with such accessible rules it feels like a waste of space to give a game-play/rules overview as part of a first impressions article.

Self-Inflicted pain - thinking about tiers

Tier lists (or theme forces if you want to use the correct term...) are an interesting thing in Warmachine. The vast majority of tier lists are not exactly game-changing. Most tier lists give you a few small buffs to your force if you take a restricted subset of models for your chosen caster. some of these benefits are pretty worthless, like letting a warbeast cast its animus for free on turn 1. lots of theme forces give +1 to the starting roll, free focus to jacks, extra deployment space or point discounts on specific models.

The price of getting these nice little buffs is that you have to forgo some of the models you may normally have to choose from, and to get to the higher tiers you have to bring specific models or units. Some theme forces are never even considered because of some of these restrictions. For example, what Menoth player would willingly restrict him or herself to not bringing the Choir? Or who wants to bring multiple light artillery models in a single list? On the other hand there are a few theme lists that are quite popular because they let you take all the models you normally would want with a given caster and then add some benefits. the best example of this is eVayl. You almost never see eVayl (even at low point levels) without a tier 4 list. there are a few other popular theme lists like eHaley, pDoomshaper, Borka, eKreoss, eVyros, etc.