Old Stuff Day: Analysis of a Competitive-Casual Player

For Old Stuff Day I'll be taking a look back at a piece that wrote about a year ago. I was in the middle of an Escalation League. I had been infatuated with Valkyries and decided to go Air Cav for the League, but my decision led to me feeling uncomfortable going against the majority of other lists.

I think my opinion on competitive play has changed a bit in the past year, but I still think that making sure that both parties are geared up for the same level of game is important to both parties having fun.

Enjoy the article, and let me know what you think about the competitive/casual debate.

The past couple of weeks have not been terribly good ones for the hobby. My latest round of Escalation Leaguing left me with no need to model anything new and not a whole lot of enjoyment tactically either. It got to the point where I actually began to dread coming to the store as I simply disliked the list that I was stuck with. When this lead to me losing a game simply based on mental fatigue, I knew that a change was in store.

I had been trying to do "competitive" lists based on the most competitive things in my collection- my Valkyries, Chimeras and other tanks. But this MechVets approach didn't work with the things that I find most enjoyable about the game- namely, reserving everything and striking at you from all sides. And the lack of any modeling work to do sucked any impetus that I had built up to sit down with my supplies and create something.

Image used without permission from Wizards of the Coast

This necessitated a bit of self reflection as to why I play games at all. I'm what you might call a "casual-competitive" type of gamer. Back when I played Magic my friends and I actually believed that buying singles (or buying individual cards as opposed to simply buying packs of random cards) was a heinous sin- your collection, like it or not, was filled with all of the random things that you opened. This, combined with a healthy amount of trading, allowed us to have an artificial limitation on how good a deck could be, as we all had the same problem, namely limited selection. You might have a couple of copies of the super broken rare but having four of them (the maximum number of a single card in a deck) was almost unheard of. These powerful cards became legends in their own right, and we would dread the moment that the Super Card would rise to the top of the opponent's deck. And if you did somehow have four of them, you likely traded other equally powerful cards to get them, keeping the balance.

Now while these decks weren't as good as the decks being played in competitive magic, we were still trying our damnedest to beat the competition. The limited card pool forced us to adapt, find cool new synergies between cards of radically different sets and find the one broken combo that would grant us victory... at least until the other players cottoned on and adapted. Much like the trials of Hive Fleet Gorgon we had to adapt regularly to get around opponent's familiarity with our decks and pull out a win.

During college I received four of a kind of a powerful Soldier Lord (a card that benefits other Soldier creatures in my deck) as a birthday present and quickly added it into my Soldier deck. It wasn't the best deck in the world before, but I managed to pull out a regular win with it thanks to the rampant, at times tenuous synergy between the individually underpowered cards. With the addition of the Lords it became unbeatable- I smashed face with it again and again and again. Soon after I retired the Lords and went back to the old deck.

The reason I did that was because I now had an unfair advantage- a significant part of my deck was no longer out of the randomized chaos of packs and that, combined with the power of the Lords with the rest of my soldiers made it too good. Now of course if I had somehow managed to pull these Lords out of packs the same thing could have happened, but it would have felt different. I probably would have had to trade cards of similar power to get all four, ensuring that we all had relatively similar power levels in our card pools. And, because I wasn't having fun with this advantage, I decided to take out the cards that I had been pining over for months to restore balance and tactical enjoyment to the game

As you might have guessed, my feelings about the Air Cav style lists are similar. While I won't say that they were unbeatable super lists (I went 1-4 last round and 2-1-1 the round before) I felt terrible playing them. When I won, I felt like I was beating up on a little kid with all of my lascannons and cheaty super-fast transports. And when I lost, I felt like the dice gods had cheated me out of victory or that I was too wool-headed to see the obvious way that I could have won.

Now, I don't want to turn this into a listhammer rant or a decrying of the competitive sphere- I fully appreciate what those guys are doing and I can definitely see myself gearing up for something like that in the next couple of years. After all, I didn't have anything against netdeckers when I played Magic or against the tourney scene- that's just another arena with fewer unspoken rules. I just know that for me the joy in playing this or any other game is to take a step off the beaten path and play in a style that has me coming from an unexpected corner... which in the case of my Al'Rahem list is rather literal half the time :) I think that I kind of have the feel that the stalwart Silent Requiem over on B&C has for his Grey Knights- it's not the "best" list but it plays to what I know and love to do.

That's my idea of "competitive casual"- willing to throw plenty of tactical acumen into the field while still holding to the unspoken gentlemen's agreement of a fair chance at victory. Now, this is not to say that I will intentionally make bad lists- I'll just try to stay away from dark avenues of unfun power. I'm sure there will be a time when I head off to tourneys and have to tool up to do so, but for now I am fine with my friendly local metagame.

So, for round 3, it's back to my roots with a slight new twist thanks to some new toys that I have. There'll be a fair bit of conversion work for this round, but thankfully they've extended it to a third week, meaning that I'll hopefully have time to finish it all.

Until next time, take a look at your recent games and think about what makes it fun for you.

Thanks for reading, and check out the other old posts today!

40k Thought: Counts As

It seems that this particular debate has been making its rounds about the blogosphere of late, with Old Shatter Hands throwing out some particularly good insights on the matter. Still, my ire has been roused by what I perceive to be people being wrong on the Internet, so I thought that I'd throw my hat into the ring. Whether it changes anyone's mind, I don't know, but at least I'll feel better for having spoken my part.

To start us off on an argumentative note I am in favor of counts-as armies. I believe that they add three things to the hobbyist's arsenal: amazing creative opportunities for army construction, a longer lifespan for a given army and much more varied lists to choose from. However in order to tap in to these benefits there need to be some rules in place.

1. Counts As Adds Creativity to the Hobby

Image stolen from Musings of a Metal Mind

Doing something crazy like Tyracrons, Dark Mechanicus or Skaven Dark Eldar is awesome. The imagination and skill that these gentlemen have used to pull off their model designs is simply amazing and something that I aspire to approach with my future armies. Sure, they might not exactly have the correct weapons shapes but their design leaves nothing to the imagination as to what they are standing for.

Image stolen from Path of the Outcast

That rat over there with the crossbow, drug pumps and dagger? It has a pistol and CCW so it must be a Wych! That floating processor unit in the opposite corner? It's got the spine and macroencepholapy so it must be a Zoanthrope! That menacing dude with a glowing staff surrounded by warped creatures of the abyss? Must be a chaos sorceror! Could they do this without counts-as? No. This alone should validate it.

2. Counts-As Enables Older Collections to Still Be Competitive

My second point should also be easy to grasp. Given GW's notoriously slow codex release cycle it may be years or even a decade or more before a given army is updated. Ask any player whether an older codex is more powerful than a 5th edition one and they'll just laugh in your face. The combination of this fact, plus the amount of money and time that one must put in to crafting an army will lead the typical gamer to look for alternative, more competitive ways to field their forces.  I know some people will cry out that "you need to stand by your colors" or some such but let's face it- do you LIKE giving yourself a handicap? I know that there are certain players who do, and more power to them, but for the rest of us who just want a fair chance at victory the opportunity to use their old models and still compete can be a godsend. You can still play your Dark Angels like Dark Angels, but except for a few excellent builds C:SM plays it better.

3. Counts-As Lets Players Add Variety to Their Gaming Without Adding Cost

As long as they are modeled appropriately I see nothing wrong with switching up the codex every so often. "But wait!", you might cry, "how can you use Dark Angels/Chaos Marines/Rainbow Warriors to represent Blood Angels?" Easy. It's just a paint scheme.

Image stolen from DakkaDakka

Let's say I create my own chapter. We'll call it the Angels Excelsior (motto: "We're better than you"). I'll paint them white, black and gold with all of the standard squad markings. If I brought this army to the table and had appropriately modeled figures and said that they were Blood Angels, would you believe me? Look, I even have Baal Preds and Sanguinary Guard.

Now let's say I take my same chapter, switch around a few assault squads for tacticals and take out the Baals and Guard and say they are Codex Space Marines and show up to play. Would this convincingly look like a C:SM army?

Next week I throw down with a bunch of terminators led by a terminator captain. Same scheme, and let's even say that I used the same land speeders in each game. I say they are Dark Angels and roll up against another player. Would they believe me?

I believe that the answer to each of these things is "yes." Even if I went to go so far as say Space Wolves I'm sure that, if I had appropriately modeled everything, my opponent would believe me. So, if I can do this with a generic chapter (which, as OSH mentioned, has been condoned by GW), what's to stop me from doing it with, say, Dark Angels? In the end even with all of their monkish habits (which have been stolen by plenty of legitimately intentioned C:SM and Blood Angels successors because they look frikkin' awesome) they are still just a paint scheme. A paint scheme with history no doubt, but still just a paint scheme.

Being able to play as different codexes doesn't just bump power levels but also lets you switch tactics completely without spending huge amounts of money on models. Want to play Jumpers? BA! Want to go all shooty? C:SM or Space Wolves! Terminators galore? Space Wolves or Dark Angels! All in the same paint scheme? Sweet!

4. Form Must Follow Function

But of course, there must be rules to govern this madness. We fortunately already have this widely followed rule in the form of WYSIWYG. Does your model have power armor, a bolter and bolt pistol? Congratulations tactical marine! Does it have armored plates and a lasgun? Looks like a Grenadier or Stormtrooper to me. Does it have a thunder hammer, storm shield and TDA? Assault termy FTW! Vehicles are a bit tougher, but if it has the same profile and the same weapons a Rhino is a Rhino by any other name.

EQUALS

Now, as mentioned in my first point, there can be a bit of leeway for some more exotic conversions. I certainly don't know what all of the different Tyranid/DEldar special weapons look like but if you make something that looks convincing (i.e. splinter rifle shoots darts, venom cannons are big guns built into the body, etc.) I'm cool with it. Some might not be, in which case the actual gun should be used, and I can understand that too. But as long as it conveys exactly what it's going for there should be no problem. That thin open topped boarding skimmer? Raider. The Guardsman on a Segway on a cavalry base? Rough Rider.

But ESPECIALLY for Marines (and to some extent the other Imperial armies) the code of WYSIWYG should be followed. This is because the weapons are so well known and nigh universal that to get them wrong is just to invite confusion and resentment. A Meltagun MUST be a Meltagun and ONLY a meltagun, a lascannon MUST be a lascannon and ONLY a lascannon.

5. Wolf Pelts Do Not Grant You Counter-Attack

Now, of all of the Marines, Space Wolves are the ones earning the most ire. Maybe it's because their book is awesome and has that "power gamer" aura, but every time Counts As comes up Space Wolves take the hit. To an extent, this is fair. They have a lot of visual cues that are built into their army that tend to set them apart like the spikes on Chaos Marines. But, in the end, does this go against the rules? No. Nowhere in the BRB or codex does it say that Space Wolves, Chaos Marines or Space Marines have to look a particular way. Nowhere does it say that their wolfy trappings give them any kind of rules benefits. There are certain upgrades that deserve special attention (Mark of the Wulfen, Wolf Tail Talisman, etc.) but beyond that there's maybe a CCW (and, to be honest, how many of the ACTUAL Space Wolves or Chaos Marines models are actually equipped with the correct wargear... not to mention grenades and the like, particularly on Guardsmen) to set them apart.

In the end, your army is your army is your army. Paint it red, green, blue or grey, but at the end of the day if it has power armor and the correct load out a Space Marine can earn his right as a 7 foot tall god of war to be whatever color he damn well wants.

Finally, some closing remarks to answer some challenges that I have heard all to often:

"Why do marines get to do it but not my [insert army here]?"
Because GW loves marines and gave them the gift of six army books while sharing the majority of their wargear. If another group of books could pull off that feat I'm sure that we would be swimming in them as well, and if you want to make sure that happens go check out the Codex Project. If you model your conversions appropriately you can also do crazy things like Necron/Tyranid or Dark Eldar/Tyranid armies. It just takes imagination.

"It makes it hard to remember what is/does what."
If the weapons/wargear are a bit more exotic, I can understand this. But if a meltagun is a meltagun where's the confusion in holding the single fact that your opponent is playing Blood Angels, not Chaos Marines? If you're doing your job as a player you know the rules and at least know your book's rules. The argument that the counts-as will make remember their rules more difficult just doesn't cut the mustard. Think of it in the context of playing an army that you've never faced before. If I haven't faced off against Blood Angels (and... actually, I haven't. Huh.) I certainly might be expected to not know their particular rules. Just go through each unit with the opponent and learn what they can do. It will be the same level of misapprehension as if I had been playing against C:SM the entire time and blamed not remembering that the appropriately modeled Sanguinary Priest gives FNP and FC to his buddies for losing the game- unacceptable.

"They're all modeling for advantage!"
If this is happening they are breaking the game. Tiny mk. 1 Rhinos are one thing but purposefully modeling your counts-as to be dramatically larger/smaller can have a very large impact in TLoS games, especially where vehicles are concerned. While to some extent this can't be stopped (legal crouching armies can easily be made with smart bitz shopping) except by local policy/fist to the face feel free to explain to your opponent that a certain model seems to be taking advantage of the rules through construction. Most of us are nice guys and if we aren't feel free to not play.

I think that's most of them. Hope you enjoyed the article, and I'll be back here tomorrow. Some apologies are in order for the lack of posting this past week and a half. Work and family matters have been stressful of late and I haven't had much opportunity to sit down and do a post or do any modeling in some time. Add in the fact that my computer has decided that it will no longer upload to YouTube and you have one unhappy Max. We may see a drop in posting to three days a week, but we'll see how I can string this out. Again, thanks for reading and comments are always appreciated.

40k Thought: Getting Back Into the Game

So as my posts might suggest I haven't been playing a lot of 40k recently. Pretty much my only game in the last three or four months was at a tourney where I unsurprisingly performed miserably. Work, plus the Ogres, have been taking up a lot of my time.

It's just difficult getting back into the game after a break, especially if you move to a new place like I did. I was no longer sure about what was expected on the table top, tried to make lists that wouldn't fold but weren't crazy competitive, and tried to make sure that I was up on the rules so that I wouldn't make mistakes. Plus there's the modeling, as I'd hate to show up to a new club with non-table top ready models. I hope I'm not the only one who dreads actually starting that next project, especially when you already have several others in the works. And even then actually finding a place to game can be a challenge- the first place I tried had NO 40k players on their scheduled Warhammer nights two weeks in a row, after which I stopped trying.

Fortunately I got wind of a game store called The Last Square that's near to my work and decided to head down there last Wednesday for a game. By the time I got there there were already six games going on and a demo game was being set up. Since there wasn't anyone else open to play with I volunteered for the demo game and quickly drew up a 500 pt list. My opponent, who goes on the Madison 40k forums as DarkAngel, was an older gentleman who hadn't played in some time. To give you a frame of reference, he referenced his newly bought copy of the Dark Angels codex as "the new DA codex."

Still, he had done his homework and had a very nicely painted 500-ish pt force of all metal Dark Angels (including the commander pictured above!). We decided to let a few things slide, such as allowing his scouts to be troops, and then we rolled up 4 objectives Dawn of War and got to it.

Turns out it was one of the most fun games of 40k that I've ever played. I've always loved teaching people things- in fact for the last two years that's about all that I did for work. And if I get to teach something fun like 40k? Awesome. We joked around, I explained the new parts of 5th edition to him when they came up, either as suggestions to him or reference for why I was doing a particular action, and all around had a blast.

The game wasn't about winning or losing though no punches were pulled, and plenty of cinematic moments occurred (such as the lone sergeant angrily cutting down outflanking Scouts turn after turn as his squad died around him or the DA captain bravely charging alone up the field to slaughter my infantry) that we had lots of fun describing. And really, that's what made the game so fun for me- not playing worried about winning but just kicking back and throwing some dice on a table with a similarly minded gent.

So what did I learn from this? That getting back in is only as hard as you make it. I was worried about making mistakes and stepping on people's toes in a new club, but it turns out that there are plenty of great people out there who enjoy our strange little hobby, and a whole lot of them are nice to boot. Also that I'm no longer the n00b- I have fairly well painted minis and a pretty firm grasp of the rules and tactics, and people seem to respect that. And of course that no matter how long you've been out there's always someone else who is either just starting the game or coming back after a much longer break. But even if you are ridiculously out of shape, not to worry- there's plenty of helpful people out there to give you a hand.

This next week I hope to get a larger game in and continue to refine my army, but I'm glad I had that demo game last week as it was exactly what I needed. So thanks DarkAngel, and I hope to play you again some time.

40k THOUGHT: Analysis of a Competitive-Casual Gamer

The past couple of weeks have not been terribly good ones for the hobby. My latest round of Escalation Leaguing left me with no need to model anything new and not a whole lot of enjoyment tactically either. It got to the point where I actually began to dread coming to the store as I simply disliked the list that I was stuck with. When this lead to me losing a game simply based on mental fatigue, I knew that a change was in store.

I had been trying to do "competitive" lists based on the most competitive things in my collection- my Valkyries, Chimeras and other tanks. But this MechVets approach didn't work with the things that I find most enjoyable about the game- namely, reserving everything and striking at you from all sides. And the lack of any modeling work to do sucked any impetus that I had built up to sit down with my supplies and create something.

Image used without permission from Wizards of the Coast

This necessitated a bit of self reflection as to why I play games at all. I'm what you might call a "casual-competitive" type of gamer. Back when I played Magic my friends and I actually believed that buying singles (or buying individual cards as opposed to simply buying packs of random cards) was a heinous sin- your collection, like it or not, was filled with all of the random things that you opened. This, combined with a healthy amount of trading, allowed us to have an artificial limitation on how good a deck could be, as we all had the same problem, namely limited selection. You might have a couple of copies of the super broken rare but having four of them (the maximum number of a single card in a deck) was almost unheard of. These powerful cards became legends in their own right, and we would dread the moment that the Super Card would rise to the top of the opponent's deck. And if you did somehow have four of them, you likely traded other equally powerful cards to get them, keeping the balance.

Now while these decks weren't as good as the decks being played in competitive magic, we were still trying our damnedest to beat the competition. The limited card pool forced us to adapt, find cool new synergies between cards of radically different sets and find the one broken combo that would grant us victory... at least until the other players cottoned on and adapted. Much like the trials of Hive Fleet Gorgon we had to adapt regularly to get around opponent's familiarity with our decks and pull out a win.

During college I received four of a kind of a powerful Soldier Lord (a card that benefits other Soldier creatures in my deck) as a birthday present and quickly added it into my Soldier deck. It wasn't the best deck in the world before, but I managed to pull out a regular win with it thanks to the rampant, at times tenuous synergy between the individually underpowered cards. With the addition of the Lords it became unbeatable- I smashed face with it again and again and again. Soon after I retired the Lords and went back to the old deck.

The reason I did that was because I now had an unfair advantage- a significant part of my deck was no longer out of the randomized chaos of packs and that, combined with the power of the Lords with the rest of my soldiers made it too good. Now of course if I had somehow managed to pull these Lords out of packs the same thing could have happened, but it would have felt different. I probably would have had to trade cards of similar power to get all four, ensuring that we all had relatively similar power levels in our card pools. And, because I wasn't having fun with this advantage, I decided to take out the cards that I had been pining over for months to restore balance and tactical enjoyment to the game

As you might have guessed, my feelings about the Air Cav style lists are similar. While I won't say that they were unbeatable super lists (I went 1-4 last round and 2-1-1 the round before) I felt terrible playing them. When I won, I felt like I was beating up on a little kid with all of my lascannons and cheaty super-fast transports. And when I lost, I felt like the dice gods had cheated me out of victory or that I was too wool-headed to see the obvious way that I could have won.

Now, I don't want to turn this into a listhammer rant or a decrying of the competitive sphere- I fully appreciate what those guys are doing and I can definitely see myself gearing up for something like that in the next couple of years. After all, I didn't have anything against netdeckers when I played Magic or against the tourney scene- that's just another arena with fewer unspoken rules. I just know that for me the joy in playing this or any other game is to take a step off the beaten path and play in a style that has me coming from an unexpected corner... which in the case of my Al'Rahem list is rather literal half the time :) I think that I kind of have the feel that the stalwart Silent Requiem over on B&C has for his Grey Knights- it's not the "best" list but it plays to what I know and love to do.

That's my idea of "competitive casual"- willing to throw plenty of tactical acumen into the field while still holding to the unspoken gentlemen's agreement of a fair chance at victory. Now, this is not to say that I will intentionally make bad lists- I'll just try to stay away from dark avenues of unfun power. I'm sure there will be a time when I head off to tourneys and have to tool up to do so, but for now I am fine with my friendly local metagame.

So, for round 3, it's back to my roots with a slight new twist thanks to some new toys that I have. There'll be a fair bit of conversion work for this round, but thankfully they've extended it to a third week, meaning that I'll hopefully have time to finish it all.

Next time, a look at the work that I have set before me. Until then, take a look at your recent games and think about what makes it fun for you.

Reserves Interference: A New Trend?

While I think about what to put in my 1k list for the tournament, my brain has been grabbed by all of the hooplah surrounding the Blood Angels rumors. Like many people I downloaded the now apparently fake 'dex that was hanging out on Scribd and read through it with a discerning eye. Some things looked really cool for weird reasons (devastators with Astartes Grenade Launchers? Yes please!) but some other things spoke to interesting new trends that I can see GW furthering in each new codex. In particular, Reserves Interference.

Having not played before 5th ed, I hear that in earlier editions of the game reserves were not a core part of the battlefield. Many missions did not include reserves as an option, so building your force to take advantage of reserves could be a dicey proposition depending on which mission you rolled up. But now in 5th ed, reserving all of one's forces has become a common tactic. I use this liberally, especially with my "I come at you from ALL sides!" IG lists featuring deep striking Stormtroopers, Outflanking infantry squads and Lumbering Behemoth'd Battle Tanks rumbling out from reserves, all thanks to the Astropath's chicanery. Even back when I was playing Eldar and still learning the system I played a lot with the reserves games, especially for a brutal series of introductory games at 2k vs Daemons (note: do NOT have new players play game after game against a Daemons player, especially when neither of you know the rules very well. Ow.)

But something from the "leaked" BA dex caught my eye- Dante's "Seen It All" ability. For those without the 'dex, it basically allows him to roll a d6 plus leadership against the enemy commander for each enemy unit held in reserve. For each one that Dante wins, the formerly reserved unit is forced to deploy on the field with the rest of the army. For armies that are built on reserving everything, this ability can be devastating... especially if your commander has a low Ld. stat.

But then I got to thinking about the other 5th ed codexes and realized that this was merely the latest part in a growing trend- ALL of the 5th ed 'dexes (except Space Marines, as always with these trends) have some form of reserves interference available to them. IG have the Master of the Fleet which adds 1 to the number needed to get enemy reserves onto the table, Wolves have (to some extent) the Rune Priest with Chooser of the Slain and Tempest's Wrath, and the Tyranids have the Parasite of Mortrex which impregnates outflanking models with Rippers.

I think that this is a good trend for the game, as as a user of the All Reserves tactic I can say that it can lead to degenerate situations. It also helps add some more "realistic" influence to the game, as the battlefield in 40k is supposed to be a skirmish rather than the full extent of the war. It only makes sense that armies would have some way of influencing the outcomes of battles this small. It also helps firmly plant armies in a 5th edition mind set- if reserves and Outflanking are part of the game, then by God everyone should have a hand in affecting them. An army that doesn't make use of every way to harry the enemy just doesn't make sense.

So, generals- what do you think of this trend, and how do you think it would be best extended to the non-5th ed armies in their inevitable updates?

Image on top taken without permission from zazzle.com

*EDIT* Switched from Reserves Denial to Reserves Interference- thanks sonsoftaurus!

Escalation League, Round 2: Thoughts on Air Cav

The second round of our Escalation League at Universe Games in Minneapolis has started, so here's my 750 list:

Psyker Primaris
Veteran Squad, 3 Grenade Launchers
Veteran Squad, 3 Flamers
Veteran Squad, 3 Meltaguns
Vendetta with Heavy Bolters, 3 twin linked lascannons
Vendetta with Heavy Bolters, 3 twin linked lascannons
Valkyrie with Multiple Rocket Pods and Multilaser

This list is very killy. If the Vendettas are not dealt with early in the game they will take down every vehicle within sight and then turn their fury on the poor bloody infantry. The Valkyrie hasn't really knocked my socks off quite yet but can serve as a fast, expendable transport for meltagunners to get close to their target, as well as give me much needed insurance against hordes.

I played a couple of games today, but neglected to do battle reports of them. Just a brief overview of each of them may give you a glimpse as to the reasons why I didn't record them:

Game 1 against Dark Eldar, Annihilation. He has mostly raider spam with two taloses stuck in there. He deploys, I reserve. My Vendettas come on early, destroy two raiders while my grenade launcher squad with Psyker annihilate his grotesques. His shooting knocks a lascannon off of one of my Vendettas. My Valkyrie comes on, and my shooting kills two more raiders, a Talos, a squad of Warriors and all but eliminates another squad of warriors. He concedes at 6-0 on turn 3.

Game 2 was against Space Wolves. Annihilation. Still mostly foot, with 1 rhino and 1 dreadnought with twin linked lascannon. He goes first, I reserve everything. His rhino comes on turn 2. My Vendettas come on turn 2 but fail to kill the rhino (as I was stupidly trying to hide one of them from missile launcher fire). His dread comes on, blows up a Vendetta and kills the squad inside. Valkyrie comes on, I immobilize the dread, he blows up another Vendetta and the squad inside (with the Psyker!) breaks, failing 3 consecutive leadership tests to rally before running off the board. I eventually kill the Dread, but concede at 5-1.

Game 3 was against Eldar. Annihilation. Dawn of War. He goes second and we both reserve everything. My Valkyrie and Vendetta turboboost on. His falcon, guardian squad and double EML war walker come on but some how fail to scratch my birds. My planes return fire and explode the Falcon and War Walker. His Serpent comes on, yet still I hang untouched in the sky. Second Vendetta comes on, wrecks the Serpent. I spend the rest of the game calmly shooting up the Guardians.

I really hope that these games are not harbingers of what's to come, but I think they will be. Everything comes down to just a few dice rolls- if someone can manage to break my birds, I lose. If I can get even a few shots off before that happens I win. If my shots don't connect, I lose. If they fail to scratch my modest armor, I win.

There's no real need for extensive tactics in this list- if I go first, I deploy, scout up and kill everything. If I go second and there's no where to hide, I reserve, come on and attempt to kill everything.

Maybe it will be different in an objective game, but at least right now the Air Cav list just doesn't seem fun. It's all about how much damage I can cause before return fire strikes me, and praying to God that if they do break my armor they don't roll a 4+.

There is no back up plan if things go south and I don't have to adapt to the opponent's strategy- the Valkyrie is too limited to target anything but infantry and the odd light tank while the Vendettas simply target whatever is a threat to them and are good enough that I don't have to worry for long. It's either too late or time for a victory dance at that point.

I realize I've probably said the same thing over and over again, but I wanted to make sure that my point got across. It's a good list and has tons of killy power against all lists, but just isn't fun.

Hopefully next round will be a bit more fun, but for now I have some very anticlimactic and swingy battle to fight. If anyone has some advice as to how to make the Air Cav more entertaining, I would love to hear the advice. The strains of "Ride of the Valkyries" are fun, but simply flipping a coin to see if I dominate or am crushed just isn't my style.

Thoughts on SW, part I: The 5th Edition Codex

Theme of the month/season seems to be Space Wolves, either calling pepper jack (extra spicy!), bashing people who want to switch over, cursing GW for wanting money or (very rarely) not running around with your head cut off. So I thought that I'd like to jump on this particular bandwagon and share my own thoughts and experiences.

Let's start this thought exercize with a discussion of what GW has been doing with 5th ed codices. There are four basic themes: mobility, flexibility, price fixing and special characters. All of these play into standard wants and needs of gamers, but some are more warranted than others.

Mobility is the GW push for more mech. Now there is of course the economic angle for this, as it doesn't take a genius to see that a couple hundred $35 tanks will help any company look towards the black, but that isn't the only angle as far as I'm concerned. Mech plays into the basic gamer desire to not have your precious army obliterated before they get to do their 'thing'. This theme is compounded in the 5th edition push for ubiquitous 4+ cover saves, yet another nod toward the basic survival instinct that most players (and especially new players) appreciate. Tanks offer a solid barrier between your soldiers and enemy firepower, as well as offering them a quick way to get to the front lines.

Flexibility is the tendency of the new codices to allow many different viable strategies. I'm not 100% certain on this, but from looking at the various army books it seems like more units in 5th edition codices are viable than in older books. By viable I mean that they aren't relegated instantly to the role of the 'fluffy' unit that you only took to give your army character- they can hold their own and you won't be laughed off the table when you field them. Once again, this plays into popular gamer mindsets. If I see a cool unit in the army book, I want to be able to play it and for it to be useful, or at least not a hindrance. Increasing viability across the board also (hopefully) leads to a greater variety of army lists, as the number of working combinations increases dramatically.

Flexibility also ties into new units. Since they are new these are the units that garner the most attention and are the 'shiniest' GW also often prices them into the viable range and/or gives them ridiculously splashy abilities. Here's where flexibility runs into the BoLS idea of spectacle, which I personally am all for. If you want to play a serious wargame, picking the one with the gothic space knights and undead robots was probably the wrong call.

Price fixing is the changing of different units' prices, most often in the downwards direction. This is the area that most people call codex creep on, and in some sense they are right. It is completely logical that if a unit retains the same functionality or receives increased abilities at a lower price the new version of the unit will be more powerful than the old unit. While it is unfortunate for older codices that still retain archaic pricing it has become necessary to grant all new codices the same pricing schema. In some cases this fixing goes too far, especially when extra functionality has been added to a unit- the new and improved Chimera being a sterling example. This plays into the gamer mindset again with the theory that more cool stuff = better.

And finally there are the special characters- each book has plenty of them, and they help play into the flexibility element as well, allowing you to switch you army's theme by spending a few points. The characters are uniformly ridiculous in nature (as befits the setting) and offer either unit or army-wide changes in composition. The part of the gamer mindset that this plays into is the hero- here is the big badass who is going to ruin your opponents day. Why does he have an instant death power sword? Who cares? He's awesome!1!!!1!

This is probably the part of the 5th ed codices that I like the least as it takes away from the 'ownership' of armies. You make up your own chapter/regiment/hive fleet but in order to have it operate other than a bog standard army you need to take a special character who belongs to another force. For instance, for my (mostly) light infantry Guard force there are three special characters that add the requisite sneakiness necessary for them to be light infantry: Al'Rahem, Harker and Marbo. These are legitimate choices in my codex that add a fun little bit of tactical flexibility, yet every time I take them outside of their specific regiments I feel like I am committing a grevious sin. And even if I greenstuff up a character I will still refer to him/her by the codex name just to have people understand what I am using.

These four things- mobility, flexibility, price fixing and special characters- are the reality of the 5th edition codex, so judging a new codex must be based on these principles. Next time I'll take a look at the Wolf codex and see how it stacks up to this (exceedingly unofficial) rubric.