Thursday, December 3, 2009

Summer

Dear Warpstone Flux Readers,

I'm taking my annual break from blogging over the Summer -- the Southern Hemispheric Summer that is. Therefore this will be my last posting until January 2010.

I hope you've all enjoyed the postings that have appeared here over the course of the year -- I've got a great deal of useful feedback from the FtW group. Many thanks!!!

To be clear: I'm not leaving blogging, I'm just going on holiday and taking a break!
See you next year and hope that you all have a happy and safe holiday season. :-)

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Causing TOO MANY wounds?!

Today, I'd like to take a moment to talk about an issue that might affect a number of people's games. That is the issue of causing too many wounds in melee.

What? Causing too many wounds! Are you serious?

Why yes. Here's a situation that has happened to me, not once, but twice over this past year. Your opponent is fielding space marines or chaos space marines -- all with a 3+ save. On the other hand, you and I are fielding chaos daemons (example army list here). To be more precise, I'm going to talk about a squad daemonettes in particular, as this is the context that it happened in. Although I've talked about the relative merits of daemonettes before, the key to this particular situation is to note that daemonettes have the rending special ability and can therefore by-pass the marine's 3+ save with some fortuitous die rolling.

After having a lot (well ... a round or two, at any rate) of hand-to-hand combat, there are only a few miniatures left on both sides. Let's suppose that the opponent has two marines left, and the daemon player has several daemonettes remaining.

If our daemonettes manage to hit the marines a few times and then go on to cause 2 rending wounds, then there is assuredly only 1 possible result: 2 marine casualties.

But consider this. If our daemonettes cause an additional "normal" wound, then the two marines can allocate the wounds how they like. Unless my opponents and I have completely mis-read the hand-to-hand combat rules, the sensible opponent should allocate 2 rending wounds to one model (meaning 1 automatically dead marine) and the "normal" wound to the second marine. Chances are that the second marine will then make his ordinary 3+ save and survive. Hence by causing more wounds, we have placed ourselves in a worse situation than would have happened if we had only caused 2 full rending wounds....!

So as a chaos daemons player, I now tend to take daemonettes in slighter larger squads than I have been doing. If I'm going to cause more wounds than required, then I want to make sure that I cause many, many, many more wounds than are required rather than just a pesky extra wound or two. Perhaps a longer term solution would be for the next core rules re-write to explicitly talk of allocating "no-save" wounds before other wounds? (Although I'd be totally impressed if a GW staff writer was reading this and took notice!)

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Shadow Sword: Part V. The Main Weapons

Having decided that I wanted to be able to field both the Shadow Sword and Storm Lord variants of this tank, I needed to be able to readily swap the main weapons around.With the Storm Lord, this is easy. The Vulcan Mega Bolter is able to slip in and out of the weapon housing with relative ease. For the Shadow Sword, however, the Volcano Cannon is not able to do so.

This is because the bit where the Volcano Cannon connects to the main weapon housing is supplied as a lock-in-place bit. To get around this, I have cut out a slot at the rear of the volcano cannon so that it can slide over the nub contained in the main weapon housing (visible just behind the magnet that holds the reversible hull bit in place). This should suffice to enable me to swap the main weapons over as required. However, I am considering further magnetizing the rear of the volcano cannon so that it doesn't sag due to gravity.
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