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For The Emperor, Part II - Red Scorpions

October 9, 2018, 3:33 am
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Both my regular Kings of War opponents fell through last Sunday, and as a consequence I found myself playing Warhammer 40K for the second time ever at Nerima on the weekend. Two weeks, two games. The Emperor would be pleased. Less pleasing to his mummified Majesty would be the result, as once again the Dark Angels were smashed by their foes. This time they fought a chapter of the Space Marines called the Red Scorpions in an internecine clash of loyalists. Perhaps the Emperor was pleased, because he was punishing the Dark Angels for being a bunch of traitors during the Horus Heresy...? I'll leave that to the fluff purists to hash out.

Izumiya-San's Red Scorpions.

This time out I played a Japanese gent named Izumiya-San. All my fears about playing Japanese players at the Nerima club were completely unfounded. We communicated through a combination of English and Japanese, and everything went smoothly and without any problems. Izumiya-San showed an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, and even went through iterations of rules when explaining details. He would often state the rule as written in the original rulebook, then cite (and then show me!) a FAQ reference which amended the rule and give an explanation as to the rationale behind the amendment. One such occasion was the use of the Dark Angel Warlord trait which allowed me to regain Command Points on a roll of 5+ when using Stratagems, and how the latest FAQ limited such regained Command Points to one per turn. He then defined what a turn was so that I understood that it meant my turn and his turn. Finally, he gave me the option as to what rule to use. All of this was mostly off the top of his head, which made the game fly by. He was also super clear with the terrain and terrain effects which made movement and cover on the board hassle free and easy to understand.

Awesome stuff.

He did, however, smash me with his list, which was super-optimized. It was some kind of Forge World list - whatever that is - and he warned me that it was very tough. He apologized but said that he had been working on the Super Dreadnought (or whatever it was) the whole week, and really wanted to field it on the table top. I told him the same thing I told Steve - I don't mind getting my ass whooped, and I could absolutely relate to the compulsion to get stuff on the table top. Miniatures are meant to be either played, or displayed, and getting them to table top (at least for me) completes them. Bring it, I said.

My Dark Angels, in their second outing.

And bring it he did. I got absolutely smashed. The Red Scorpions had some kind of hit and wound re-roll per unit, and his main shooting was buffed by the presence of a Captain and a Lieutenant which allowed him to re-roll hits and re-roll wounds as well. This meant that whenever he shot he did damage, and my poor Dark Angels didn't know what hit them. He had dedicated transports to carry his troops to their objectives, and he used them as screens after disgorging his tactical squads. But the most terrifying thing in his list were a pair of buffed dreadnoughts that just mowed through my guys. Adding insult to injury my shooting in the first two turns was terribly ineffective due to a spate of bad rolls. I was rolling so bad that Izumiya-San began rooting for me to kill his guys. I established a fire base using the Predator and the Devastator squad with Azrael within 6" to re-roll all misses, and I couldn't kill anything. In the end we were both laughing our asses off as Azrael surveyed his men's ineptitude in total disbelief. I did get to play with Assault Marines for the first time, and learned the mechanics of deep striking and assault. The highlight for me was my Assault Marine Sergeant sticking a Melta-Bomb on a tank and getting our team's first kill. Everything else was just grim. I threw Ezekiel and Azariel into close combat near the end, and in a replay of last week's slaughter, they keeled over and died.

I took the same list as I fielded against Steve the weekend before, with the only difference being that my Assault Marines and Scout squad were included as this was a 1500 point game (last week's was 1250). This was my Battle-Forged list:

Azrael
Ezekiel
10 Tac Marines with H. Bolter and Plasma Gun
10 Tac Marines with H. Bolter and Plasma Gun
10 Tac Marines with H. Bolter and Plasma Gun
10 Devastator Marines with 4 Lascannons
10 Assault Marines
6 Scouts with H. Bolter and Sniper Rifles
1 Predator

If that list looks naive, newbie-ish and un-optimized, it's because it probably is. I know maybe 1% of the meta (if I'm lucky!), and in asymmetrical games replete with special rules, exceptions and regular amendments, knowledge of the metagame is only the first step to mastery when it comes to tournament play. I don't have the time or inclination to learn the whole 40K metagame - I've done this process many times in my life, with Warhammer 6th ed, with World of Warcraft PvP, with Hearthstone, with StarCraft 2 - I'm just content to learn the pieces of it as it pertains to the regular opponents I face. To become good at games you have to study it and put time in, and it's great once your hard work starts to pay off and you start getting results. But at the end of it all you come out of the process and wonder what it was all for, and whether it was worth the time you put into it. My goals nowadays are more modest - I want to give my opponent's competitive matches, and field my miniatures on the table top.

My Assault Marine Sergeant takes out a tank!

Another unwanted side effect of playing 40K was the sudden purchase of several 40K models on E-Bay. One of my many faults is poor impulse control, and it has been manifesting quite a lot since I started playing miniature games again. I keep telling myself that I don't need any more miniatures, and time and time again I keep buying more. Shopping on E-Bay has become an analogue to my time as a kid browsing my local Games Workshop store. I stopped buying stuff when I stopped playing, and I proved to myself that I don't need any of this shite for over a decade. Hopefully I can find a happy medium, where I can still play games but not buy any more miniatures. At least, not buy any more unnecessary miniatures. There are projects I want to complete, but 40K was never one of them. Neither was The Walking Dead. Nor was Mars Attacks, or Rising Sun. Yet somehow I keep getting caught up in digressions. I need to make a list of the stuff I really want, and stick to it. Simple avarice for cool looking miniatures is not enough. Shopping therapy is not real. Acquiring more stuff will not make you happier. I keep trying to tell myself this whenever I turn into Gollum, and start croaking, "My precious..." while browsing through E-Bay.

For good or ill, however, I have bought a bunch of 40K miniatures, each with the rationale behind it following:

6 more Bikes (to complete one full Bike squad)
10 Terminators (to complete one full squad of Termies)
5 Scouts (to complete one full squad of Scouts)
5 Veterans (to represent Sergeants in my regular squads, or Command models such as Ancients, Lieutenants and the like  - I like the robes, they're monastic and very Dark Angel in theme)
10 Helblaster Primaris Marines (simply put, to buff the army - need more plasma)

To finish the list, I intend to buy the following next week, when the Triple Helix auctions on E-Bay come to a close:

1 Attack Bike (to complete the Bike squad)
5  Veterans (to complete a unit of 10, or to represent Sergeants in my regular squads)

The lads at Nerima, playing Flames of War.

That's it. After that there will be no more purchases for this army. Two weeks ago I hadn't played a single game with the Dark Angels and now I'm dropping money to optimize the army. It's a pernicious trap, and one that Games Workshop has utilized for years as their sales model. No more. At least I can comfort myself with the fact that I am buying second-hand models, and not generating new revenue for GW. Yes, I am still salty over Age of Sigmar. But now it's more a principled resolution on my part rather than actual visceral hate. I'll still buy their paints and accessories, but not their miniatures - at least, not directly. In fact, I'm liking 40K so much that maybe I'll build another army. It just won't be with GW models.

My irrational dislike of GW doesn't take away from the fact that my game with Izumiya-San was a lot of fun. The core rules of 40K are wonderfully simple and easy to understand, but I can see now that it is a completely different beast to Fantasy. If Fantasy is all about arcs (shooting, charging or otherwise) then 40K is about bubbles - buff bubbles, deep strike denial bubbles, and 360 degree charge bubbles. The first turn in 40K is sooo pivotal in comparison to Fantasy. By virtue of that one roll Izumiya-San wiped out two squads of my army, and put me behind the eight ball from the very beginning. In Fantasy you get moments where you feel like the game is being decided during maneuver. 40K, by contrast, feels more like a duel between a pair of gunslingers, with the person shooting first gaining a decisive advantage. Army composition also feels vitally important, and that kind of knowledge will take time and effort to acquire.

These are my initial impressions, and to be fair, I am only going from a sample of two. I like 40K nonetheless, and find it fun. I will play it again. But I'm not going to buy any more things for the Dark Angels, apart from the things I've already listed above. They are complete, for all intents and purposes. We'll see how long this resolution lasts, but given that 40K is not my main game, I have a better than even chance of keeping it compared to some of my other collections. What I can't promise myself is that I won't start another 40K army using existing models from my Deadzone collection. Or from Doom.

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A Tale Of Three Warbands, Part II - Lizardmen Blues

October 29, 2018, 5:45 am
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Warhammer 5th Edition

On 14 October I went to Kashiwa to play a game of Warhammer 5th edition with the lads from the Oldhammer Facebook group. I was somewhat disorganized that day but managed to get to the venue at around 12.30 pm, where I found Rodion and Joshua already setting up for their Grudge of Drong campaign games. I was pleasantly surprised at the space, as it was quite large and roomy, with plenty of tables available. There was also free coffee I believe, and the shop itself was well stocked with the accoutrements of miniature gaming. There were a few other Japanese folk playing games of 40K, which opened up some avenues for networking. Kashiwa is a bit of a hike for me, though, so I can only see myself coming there if we have a gathering on the calendar. For now it was good to put some faces on the texts from the Messenger app, and to see some other armies on the table. Joshua's Dwarves in particular were painted to an exceptional standard, and gave me ample motivation to work on my little guys beyond a simple three colour job.

Our table in Kashiwa.

Jonjo was my opponent that day, and he brought a Lizardmen army to the tabletop. Jonjo was a budding sculptor, and he showed me two Kroxigors in progress he had scratch built himself. We had previously agreed on a limit of 2400 points. I fielded the Empire that day, and brought a gunline army composed of handgunners, more handgunners, supplemented by crossbows and archers, and backed by a full complement of Empire artillery. This included a steam tank, two hellblaster volley guns, a cannon and a halfling hot pot! I also brought three wizards to the table, including one mounted on a pegasus. Clearly I had been playing too much 40K in recent weeks, as my aim was to blow my enemy away with superior firepower.

My Empire! Some unpainted models in there.

But alas, as it was in 40K, my gunline was overrun, smashed to pieces, and sent running for the hills. The hellblasters were characteristically vicious, almost wiping out two separate regiments each. The cannons were a non-event, overshooting every time. The hot pot killed one Saurus before exploding in a cataclysmic catastrophe of culinary proportions. The handgunners were very poor - in 5th edition they can only fire once and then have to spend one turn reloading which meant I was shooting my units of 10 in five shot volleys (handgunners in two ranks can fire each rank every turn). Their damage output during the game was nothing to write home about. The highlight of my magic phase was blasting a flying skink with a cloak that made him impervious to mundane weapons, which gave the little bastard enough gumption to land right in front of my handgunner line and do the haka. He was interrupted mid-dance by a ball of flame slung by my Wizard Lord on a pegasus which turned him into a smoking pile of ash.

I also remember now why I never fielded an Empire lord on a griffon before. The Empire's leadership sucks dog's bollocks, and given that Panic rules are so powerful in 5th edition you really need the general to be in among troops, soothing them and giving them his Leadership bonus. In 5th edition any troops within 12" of a unit breaking in combat has to take a Panic test. This is a MASSIVE distance (12" inches on each side is two feet, or one-third of the game board). This was toned down in subsequent editions to 6", but in my game it send my entire right flank running off the board after one combat. I knew I shouldn't have taken the combat - I should have just run away - but I'd just blown Jonjo's Lizardmen cavalry to smithereens with the hellblaster. The decision to hold cost me my right flank, as the resulting Panic tests sent my Ogres, and most of my missile troops running for the hills. This also means in future games I cannot take any combats that I know I will lose, because the resultant Panic tests can decimate my army.

Jonjo's battle line.

I also failed on using my general on several levels. I tried to induce some Terror tests by placing him within 8" of two to three units, but completely failed to crunch the numbers on the probability of this actually happening. The Lizardmen's Cold-Blooded rule (roll three dice for Leadership tests and discard the highest) is actually amazing when you run the numbers. On Leadership 9 the chance of failure for a Lizardman is 5.09% (just a shade over 1 in 20). The chance of failure for all other races on Leadership 9 is 16.7% (1 in 6 exactly). This means that Lizardmen are three times more likely to pass Leadership 9 tests than any other race in the game. It gets even better with Leadership 10. A Slann with Leadership 10 will fail a test 1.85% of the time (less than 1 in 50). Dwarves with Leadership 10, by contrast, will fail 8.3% of the time (1 in 12), which is four times more likely. Add a Battle Standard Bearer for re-rolls in combat, and the statistical probability tapers off to almost zero on the higher bands of Leadership. Forget using Psychology against the Lizardmen. They will never run away except on very, very rare occasions.

Me being the idiot I am, of course, tried to do just that. Nothing happened of course - the skinks might have blinked a litttle - a saurus might have eaten a fly off his snout - the slann might have released a disdainful fart - but they watched the griffon's landing with casual disinterest. He might as well been a giant chicken, for all they cared. In Jonjo's subsequent turns he made me pay for my folly by killing my general with magic and skink bowfire. To add insult to injury, 5th edition also has the rule which states that the whole army must take a Panic test if the general is slain. This rule was removed in later editions, but this being 5th edition I dutifully rolled for every Leadership 7 unit I had on the board. Which meant all of them, with exception of the steam tank. Half of my lads panicked and ran. I ended up conceding on turn four. Back to the drawing board!

Front rank fire! Rear rank, advance! Front rank, fire!

That was my first game of 5th edition in over two decades, and like 40K, it represents another metagame to learn. The magic metagame is particularly important in HeroHammer - combinations of magic items and character loadouts play a massive role. There were many lessons to be gleaned in our first game. For example, the scroll caddies which were so ubiquitous in 6th edition tournament play in Australia were completely useless. I brought three wizards, each with a Dispel Scroll, in order to counteract magic, but found that the Forbidden Rod just overrides it because of the Total Power rule. The Forbidden Rod is one example of a magic item which is so powerful that it renders one of the phases of the game moot. If you ever needed to cast a clutch spell just use the Forbidden Rod - boom, Total Power, there is nothing your opponent can do about it. There is no reason not to take it, and in fact both Jonjo and I included it in our lists. In my next game, if I play Empire, I'm taking a Wizard Lord with a Forbidden Rod and a Healing Potion, and completely circumvent all the nonsense with the Winds of Magic cards. The Forbidden Rod removes all tactical elements from that phase because you don't have to worry about Winds of Magic cards, Dispel Scrolls or any magical protection your opponent might bring. The only downside is the 50% chance of losing a Wound every time you use it, which is easily mitigated by a Healing Potion and judicious use of the Forbidden Rod. You don't need to cast all your spells with it - just the ones that can swing the game in your favor. In fact I can remember tournament organizers in Australia at CanCon and MOAB specifically banning the item in their tournament packs for this reason.

The Crown of Command (grants Leadership 10) is another example of a "compulsory" magic item. If you have a low Leadership army like Empire or Orcs, why would you not take it? Its value makes it a compulsory choice for Leadership 7 armies, especially after watching my troops take multiple Panic tests all over the board. There are many nasty magic items in 5th edition, and I've barely plumbed the possibilities available. The Orcs have the Banner of Mork which auto-kills wizards if they come into base contact with them. While thinking about what lists to bring on Sunday, I was considering putting that in a wolf rider unit or something that flies, and kamikaze-ing it into Jonjo's Slann unit. Poof, 1000 points of Slann dead. In the end I went with the Empire gunline instead, which I also thought might be OP, but didn't turn out to be the case at all as Jonjo ran over the army without too much fuss. What I consider OP might not actually be OP in the scary world of 5th edition.

The Lizards advance!

I'm not sure how good Empire is in this edition. All the things that made my Empire army great in 6th edition - parent companies being immune to Panic from detachments, cheap cavalry, full plate armor, improved handgunners, rule sets which give outnumbering bonuses in combat, toned down magic, etc. - don't exist yet. Hellblasters are still ridiculous, and they got powered down in 6th, but I would happily dump them for Stubborn great swords, better handgunners, detachment rules and cheap full plate armored cavalry. One knight in 5th edition is 39 points, which is one point cheaper than 10 infantry. They're not worth it. But overall it's too early to tell after a sample of one game, so I can try again with another build, or field one of my other armies instead. Besides, if I'm giving up on an edition just because my army feels underpowered then it means I am actually playing to win and that makes me a sad git, especially in a country with a total pool of six (?) players. 5th edition is not without its charms. But I like rank and file games which prioritize the troops, which is why Kings of War is my favorite fantasy battle game at the moment. All the rules, spells, magic items and army lists in Kings of War are condensed into two books which on aggregate are smaller than the Warhammer rulebook. Rules bloat is a real thing with Warhammer, and this is compounded by the edition switching between 5th, 7th and T9A.

Warhammer 7th Edition Warbands

After I capitulated in our Warhammer game Jonjo and I played one game of 7th edition Warbands. Jonjo also took this one, completing my round of Lizardmen blues.  Jonjo used terrain effectively to screen his Saurus infantry and cavalry from my shooters, while I ineptly maneuvered my halberdiers into getting double-teamed by both those units. My poor warband was wiped out to a man - woman? - with my Warrior-Priest fighting valiantly to the bitter end and almost pulling out a win. She went on a run of highly improbable armor saves thanks to the Armor of Meteoric Iron, and I could see Jonjo getting crankier and crankier as I somehow managed not to roll a single 1-2 after about 20 armor saves. Alas, she succumbed to the sheer weight of probability in the end, and my warband suffered a massacre loss. I gave the MVP award to Jonjo's chameleon skinks, whose -2 modifier to shooting made them pretty much invulnerable to my handguns and crossbows, and provoked me into making some bad mistakes as I chased them around with my infantry. In the end Jonjo scored 110 points (100 for the massacre, plus 10 points as an underdog bonus) but lost 2 skinks and 3 sauruses. I got 25 points as the loser, but lost 3 handgunners and 2 crossbowmen so I was down 15 points after replenishing my troops. Luckily I had 28 points stashed, but after replacing my losses my reserve was down to 13 points, with no new troops or veteran levels added. My Warrior-Priest survived, but her Toughness was reduced by one. I should also add that my greenskin warband has been disqualified after I reviewed the list and found it was illegal. Not enough core units. This means my sole Warband is my Empire one, and its record stands currently at 1-1.

Overall the day was a good one. Although the trek out took over an hour it wasn't significantly longer than my trips to Setagaya or Koganei. I was able to field my Karl Franz and Balthasar Gelt models for the first time on the table, and had the opportunity to use some retro units like halflings, ogres and the hot pot (all of which were removed from the Empire list in 6th edition). It was good to meet Jonjo and Joshua at long last after exchanging back and forth on Facebook, and the venue itself was excellent. I might conduct all my purchases whenever I go to Kashiwa since the shop was so well-stocked. In the future I might even be able to find 40K opponents in Kashiwa given the few games I saw running there. There was an older Japanese dude there that expressed an interest in playing Fantasy, but alas I failed to exchange contact details, and the opportunity of adding another player to the network was lost. I hope I can get one more game for the greenskins before 2018 comes to a close, just to put a capstone on the Orcs & Goblins project before I start something else for the new year.

Next: TBC

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Kings of War/Warhammer - Orcs and Goblins, Part VI

November 10, 2018, 5:51 pm
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On 4 November I played another game of The Ninth Age (T9A) with Rodion. It was a rematch between my Orcs and Goblins versus his High Elves, and once again we were playing 4000 points. I planned for this to be my greenskins' swansong before I put them on the shelf as a priority painting project. This game reflected two different composition styles, with Rodion once again investing lots of points into characters and magic and me putting my faith in the rank and file and not taking a single magic item or spellcaster. It's a credit to T9A that in the three games I've done this I haven't been completely wiped off the board by uncontested magic phases. This is not to say that I didn't pay the price - I would lose over 70 Goblins from Rodion's spells in the coming game. But it was a price I was willing to pay to get more troops on the field, and it seems to be viable under T9A rules. Of course I was playing a horde-style army, which meant that I could soak up some casualties and remain relatively combat effective. If I bring a smaller force I will definitely need some magic protection.

Deployment.

My army composition was as follows (all units have been named under Warhammer, not T9A nomenclature):

1 Orc General on foot
1 Orc Battle Standard Bearer on foot
45 Night Goblins with 3 Fanatics
45 Night Goblins with 3 Fanatics
20 Orc Crossbows (yes, this is a thing in T9A, but I just used regular bowmen as proxies)
20 Orc Crossbows
5 Goblin Wolf Riders with bows
5 Goblin Wolf Riders with bows
2 Orc Boar Chariots
2 Goblin Wolf Chariots
2 Bolt Throwers
1 Catapult
2 Giants

There were no spellcasters or magic items of any kind in my army. Rodion's army, by contrast, was had two expensive characters kitted out with lots of shiny stuff:

1 Prince on foot
1 Elven Mage on a Dragon
15 Lothern Sea Guard
20 Phoenix Guard
18 Swordmasters
10 Sisters of Averlorn
5 Ellyrian Reavers with bows
5 Ellyrian Reavers with bows
5 Ellyrian Reavers with bows

The Dragon mage was worth about 1000 points, and his general about 600 (?). By contrast my Orc general was a paltry 240 points, and my battle standard bearer 210. All they had was heavy armour and a hand weapon, but I had no intention of getting either of them into combat. They were there to give Leadership bonuses and the ability to re-roll Break tests to my big units, and that was it. Re-roll plus Steadfast (Break tests are on unmodified Leadership if your unit has more ranks) really gives infantry a lot of staying power in T9A. Even Goblins. Hopefully while his elite units were tied up in combat my Boar Chariots and Giants could rumble into the flanks.

It didn't play out that way, but that was the plan. This became a game of two flanks, with one flank devolving into a stand-off between missile troops unwilling to engage until the very last turn, and another where Fanatics, Giants and Goblins swarmed into a wall of grim-faced elves wielding halberds and greatswords. The board was characterized by a central wood which blocked all line of sight, and which also bisected the game into two halves. On the right my crossbow armed Orcs faced off against the bulk of Rodion's three units of fast cavalry, Sisters of Averlorn and Lothern Sea Guard. My crossbows were supported by our own fast cavalry in the form of the Wolf Riders, as well two Wolf Chariots and a Boar Chariot to discourage any advances by the fast cavalry.

On the left flank I deployed the Giants on the extreme left away from Rodion's shooting. I had vivid memories of them getting shot to bits in our last game, and I was determined to get them into combat this time. My two massive Goblin units were on the inside of the Giants supported by a Boar Chariot. I was lucky enough to win the roll to pick board sides (the board was generated randomly), and I took the only hill in the game which was smack bang in the middle of my deployment zone. I placed one unit of crossbows on the hill, and dispersed my war machines all over my line to keep them firing as long as possible. Facing my left were the Phoenix Guard and the Swordmasters, with Rodion's mage riding dragon sitting behind the Sisters. Rodion had tried to get some Phoenix Guard from Harajuku earlier that day but was unable to, and so we had to proxy a movement tray to represent them. I was cool with this until Rodion started giving me shit about my round based giants (I'd forgotten the square bases which I clip my giants into), and so in response I started giving him shit about his invisible Phoenix Guard.

Turn One

This was all done in good fun, of course, and soon the game was underway. Rodion had first turn because I had so many units. In T9A once you finish deployment every extra deployment made by your opponent gives you +1 to the first turn roll. Since I had six more units to deploy after Rodion had finished it guaranteed him the first turn of the game. Rodion's first turn began with a vicious magic phase which killed 20 goblins in one hit. He cast some kind of spell which caused Strength 3 hits on every model of the unit, and of course the big goblin units were the logical target. Luckily for me the Orc general was nearby, and he kept the gobbos from running. He followed the magic phase by peppering my fast cavalry and crossbows with arrows. One unit of Wolf Riders turned and fled, but another held fast by some miracle, rolling a 6 for their Panic test.

The boyz advance!

Alarmed by the Spell of Doom both my Goblin units marched forward as quickly as possible in order to release their Fanatic payload. The chariots pushed out aggressively on the right while the remainder remained back to keep the fast cavalry from threatening my Bolt Thrower. My artillery let fly and Rodion's Dragon was hit by both a Bolt Thrower and a Catapult. Artillery is astonishingly accurate in T9A. There is no scatter dice anymore, just a d6 roll to hit. If you miss with your first roll (and not roll a 1, which is a misfire), you roll to hit again to see if you get partial hits. The Dragon was reduced to three Wounds from our first artillery volley, greatly compromising it. In T9A there is no randomization of hits between rider and mount. All hits go on to the mount, and if it dies, the whole model is taken off the board. The same applies for chariots and war machines.

The right flank.

Turn Two

Rodion realized that his Dragon had a massive bullseye on it, and tried to get stuck in by charging the Goblins. This released the Fanatics, and while none of them hit, it did stop the charge dead in its tracks. In hindsight this shouldn't have happened - T9A has an obscure Clipped Wing rule referenced in the artillery army list entry, and I took it to mean the same thing as it does in Kings of War - that is, fliers lose their ability to fly when they take damage. This was incorrect - in T9A Clipped Wings add +1 to damage done by artillery pieces, but does not restrict flight like it does in KoW. I couldn't find the rule in the Special Rules section was because it does not have an entry of its own, but was buried under Multiple Wounds.

As it stood, Rodion stopped his charge, and the Fanatics kept whirling closer and closer, with one stopping one inch away from the big winged lizard. The Swordmasters and the Phoenix Guard also pushed forward. His shooting ripped apart one of my Goblin Chariots, much to the amusement of the boyz on the hill. Some arrows landed on my Orcs, but their Toughness of 4, heavy armour and the long range gave them good survivability in this long range duel.

The Fanatics are released!

In my second turn the Giants charged the Phoenix Guard, and confident of their 4+ Ward save, the invisible mute guardians of the Flame of Asuryan held their ground. They paid for it dearly, however, as both Giants rolled Sweep attacks, and killed 10 of them. They didn't break, however, displaying great courage in the face of death. Again, this was another misplayed rule - looking through the book after the game I found nothing to indicate that chargers attacked first, something we both assumed to be the case from previous editions of Warhammer.  Combat is done strictly in Initiative order. All charges do now is give +1 to combat resolution (+2 if coming down from a hill). Elves are now badass beyond doubt because they will always strike first, even when charged! The battle between the Phoenix Guard and the Giants would have been totally different if the Phoenix Guard had been able to kill off one Giant before they double Sweeped the unit.

The Fanatics continued on their merry run, with one Fanatic spinning into Rodion's Dragon, smashing the creature down to one Wound. The cheers of the greenskins turned into shrieks of panic as another Fanatic went careening back through its parent Goblin unit, mowing down five of them. It kept travelling back, heading ominously towards the Orc Crossbows standing on the hilltop. My shooting was fairly ineffective, but again here was another misplayed rule - shooting is done in two ranks, and during the entire game only the front rank of my two crossbow units were firing. I'm glad that we had a misplay that went against me, because I was starting to look like a cheating git! However, our shooting was good enough to whittle down one unit of Reavers to one, and another to take a Panic test. Alas, the Elves were made of strong stuff, and they held their ground.

Turn Three

The Dragon and the Swordmasters declared charges on my badly decimated Goblin unit, and in true gobbo fashion they turned and fled. The High Elves were forced to pull up short. In a fit of pique Rodion's Dragon used his Breath Weapon to incinerate one Fanatic spinning madly between the two armies, and the Orc boyz on the hill guffawed as they watched the Fanatic burn out like a spent firework. Rodion's fast cavalry and Sea Guard retreated to his side of the board, unwilling to run the gauntlet of Orc shooting. Luckily for me Rodion's magic phase was like a damp squib, as he rolled a three for the Magic Flux. All he could do was cast a Ward save on his Dragon, a spell which I failed to dispel and would cost me. In combat the Phoenix Guard fought back gamely, but were unable to bring down a Giant. The Giant rolled a Bellow for its special attack, and the Guard lost the combat by two. They held however, steeled by the presence of their general nearby.

Do you see the invisible Phoenix Guard on the left flank? Me neither.

The Orcs let out derisive jeers as the Elven right flank retreated, but soon fell into grumbles of discontent as their general bellowed at them to fall back as well. Neither side wanted to commit to an advance on the right flank, and it became a shooting duel. One Fanatic kept spinning closer and closer to the Orcs on the hill, and some of the boyz began debating whether to shoot it. I tried to induce some Panic tests by killing the sole surviving Reaver in his line. The rules state that units within 6" of a destroyed unit must take a Panic test. Unfortunately our shooting was not up to par, and the Reaver survived. Two Wolf Riders stuck in the middle of the battlefield in between the two armies carefully weighed their options, looked at the pin cushioned remains of the Wolf Chariot on their left, and decided to stay where they were, and shoot their bows. The Giants could not finish off the Phoenix Guard, although the elves were slowly getting decimated. Bolts from my war machines hit the Dragon, but couldn't kill it due to the Ward save I'd failed to dispel. That blasted Dragon would survive three more turns of shooting.

Turn Four

In turn four Rodion decided to stop his advance on my left flank, and turned his Swordmasters around to help the Phoenix Guard. His Dragon, now barely alive with just one Wound remaining, retreated and tried to hide behind a cottage near the back of the Elves' line, but could only conceal himself from the Catapult. He would eat bolt after bolt for the remainder of the game, but somehow stay alive. Rodion's magic phase incinerated another 20 goblins, but again, the general was doing his job and keeping them in the fight. On the right flank Rodion moved the lone Reaver out from his line to avoid him causing any Panic tests. He faced off against two of my surviving Wolf Riders in a duel which would be remembered in the annals of elven and orcish history for its ineptitude and incompetence. The Reaver shot at the Wolf Riders, but missed.

A duel for the ages - not.

The Wolf Riders returned fire and missed. This was like a replay of the famous scene in Troy, where Achilles challenges the Trojan champion in full view of both armies in single combat, only much, much shitter. By unspoken agreement both armies stopped firing on the combatants, and only indulged in long range volleys against the opposite lines. The wayward Fanatic went up the hill and tore through my crossbows. Again, the general was doing a fine job, keeping the boyz in order as the crazed Goblin smashed down some Orcs.The Bolt Throwers kept firing at the Dragon, but thanks to Rodion's Ward save it somehow stayed alive. That was bad news for me, because that mage was literally BBQing my Goblin units. But retribution was at hand. The Orc general declared Waaagh! (+1 movement to all greenskins and Swiftstride) and the Goblin unit marched forward as far as it could towards the rear of the Swordmasters. In previous editions of Warhammer Fanatics were usually released immediately once they got within 8" of an enemy unit. In T9A the same thing happens except it occurs at the start of the Shooting phase, which means a Goblin unit can march as close they can before the Fanatics come out. This is what the sneaky little gits did, getting within 4" of the elite Swordmasters. In the shooting phase the Fanatics came whirling out, and all three of them went through the unit, causing terrible damage. By the time the smoke cleared only two of the Swordmasters remained, along with Rodion's general. 

Turn Five

The elves refused to buckle, however, and the remaining Swordmasters charged into the rear of the Giants who were now just fighting one lonely Phoenix Guard champion. The four elves displayed amazing martial skills, finishing off the wounded Giant and direly wounding the second. In return the Giant ate the last elf of the Phoenix Guard, slobbering, "It tastes like chicken!" The Giant lost the combat badly, but since it was Stubborn, I would only need to roll 10 or less on 2d6 to keep it in the fight. I rolled an 11, however, and the Giant, preoccupied with sucking the bones of his latest meal, got stabbed in the crotch by Rodion's irate general. It panicked and ran, but tripped over its feet and was cut down by the vengeful elves. Meanwhile on the right flank the Reaver and the Wolf Riders continued their face off, with the elf once again whiffing with his bow shots from the saddle. Other elven shooting continued to whittle away the Orcs, and the crossbows on the low ground panicked from the casualties they were taking. Rodion's Magic phase was terrible yet again, as he rolled a double 1 for the Magic Flux. He was still able to Ward his Dragon again, though...

The crossbows immediately rallied in my turn, and they reformed their line, claiming that they were just "re-deploying" in response to the furious glares of the Orc general. The two Wolf Riders, not believing in the adage of a fair fight, charged the sole Reaver, and lost. The crossbows on the hill picked off what they could, but were smashed again as the Fanatic that had run through them a turn earlier decided to double back and do it again. Shooting could not bring down the Dragon, and by this point I was banging my head in frustration. That stupid lizard had been on one Wound since turn two, but obstinately refused to die.

Turn Six

On Rodion's last turn the Ellyrian Reavers finally advanced down the right flank. Rodion's general and sole remaining Swordmaster made for the rear on the double, while the mage continued praying to the Elven gods to be spared from the Bolt Throwers. He had one more spell in him, and that damned Spell of Doom panicked the sad remnants of one of my Goblin units after it torched a few more of the poor sods. Rodion's fighting units were all dead or retreating, but by the same token so were most of mine. Our shooters were still firing, and I still had three chariots in play, but good luck trying to catch fast cavalry with those.

On my very last turn both of my expensive Goblin units were fleeing, and both of us believed that they could not rally as both of them were below 25% starting strength. This was wrong - a post-mortem look at the rules showed that they had an opportunity to rally at half Leadership. As it stood, the Goblins ran through my command group. The battle standard bearer held, but wouldn't you know it, the general panicked and ran, on the last turn of the game.

Fuck me in the ass. Sideways.

The one bright spot in that dismal turn was that the Bolt Throwers finally managed to finish off the Dragon, and that last shot earned me 1000 points and turned the game into a draw.

Aftermath

This was a fun game, evenly contested all the way. So many ifs, but also so many instances of rules being misplayed by both of us. If only the Giant hadn't broken on stubborn Leadership 10. If only my general hadn't panicked on the last turn of the game. If Rodion had rolled better for his magic vortexes I would have eaten more magic to the face. But if my Bolt Throwers had killed the Dragon earlier, I would have been spared those phases. That's the way it goes though. Being old Warhammer players we assumed a lot of things which were not necessarily true under T9A rules. We were both baffled by the lack of Terror rules for both his Dragon and my Giants in our respective army books, and it wasn't until a few days later that Rodion found the relevant section in the rulebook. Yes, these beasties still cause Terror, but for some silly reason it is not noted in the army book, but buried under the minutiae describing unit types. We forgot a plethora of rules, such as Vanguard and Volley, and misplayed several of the fundamentals, the chief of this being Initiative based combat, rather than chargers strike first combat.

I'm starting to get a picture of the kind of game T9A is. Again, these are early impressions - three games is nothing - but what seems to be emerging is a game that prioritizes rank and file over monsters, characters and cavalry. Big blocks of infantry can hold for a long time against elite units because of Steadfast, especially more so if you have a battle standard bearer nearby. Initiative is king in combat, and chargers do not get the benefit of attacking first (just a +1 bonus to combat resolution). This de-powers fast charging units like cavalry and monsters (unless they possess a high Initiative), and gives blocks of infantry more chances to fight. I like it. I am eager for my next game, and am now planning all sorts of shenanigans with my other armies. 


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Kings of War/The Ninth Age/Warhammer - Dark Elves, Part I

December 3, 2018, 12:21 am
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On 25 November I played a 4000 point game of Warhammer 5th edition with Steve. I brought my Dark Elves while he fielded a Chaos army composed of Marauders and Chaos Warriors. We played in Sugamo, after the initial plan of getting together with Josh, Rodion and Andy at Kashiwa fell through. Sugamo was holding a Japanese International Gamer's Guild (JIGG) event, and so I thought we could crash the event and claim a table where we could play. Things panned out as I hoped, but we were lucky that it wasn't well attended because the event was held in probably the smallest room in the history of JIGG, with a grand total of three tables available. Fortunately there was never more than 7-9 people in the room at any time, which meant there was never any need to pack up our game early.

The Chaos and Dark Elf armies on display.

The game itself was fun and well-contested, and ended in a draw, with Steve edging me out 24-23 in victory points (VP). It was played mostly in good spirit, except for one instance where I spat the dummy over a rules dispute over auto-breaking because of being outnumbered by fear-causing foes. Steve said that because he had passed the Fear test when his Chaos Warriors were charged by my Cold One Knights, his unit no longer Feared the enemy, and hence would not auto-break. I disputed this initially, but eventually yielded and let him take the Break test, which he failed anyway. I'm afraid I was overly adamant at first, however, because this particular rule is ingrained in me as a Tomb Kings player. It didn't help that there was a random Spanish dude there from JIGG who chimed in with his 2 cents and sided with Steve, even though he confessed that he'd never played Fantasy Battle before. I got over it, though, and we were able to play amicably from that point. We also exchanged apologies later, so it's all good. I felt like a dipshit for getting angry over something so trivial, and will strive to avoid similar situations like that in the future.

Deployment.

There were a few other minor hiccups. The table was a foot too narrow, which meant we were deploying right on the table edge. This was bad for me as my army had a preponderance of fast cavalry who were counting on fleeing and rallying. Narrower tables meant that they were more likely to flee off the table and never come back. Once again I failed to bring a green tablecloth to cover the stark table top. We also forgot to bring Winds of Magic cards or a suitable substitute, and so I just cut my mages from my list and removed magic from the game. This meant I was down about 600 points against Steve, but since it was just an introductory game I didn't care. I also didn't use any of the nasty tricks I had planned for his Bloodthirster. My list included the Storm Banner, which prevents all flight but I never ended up using it. Steve didn't actually know his Daemon could fly. I had to tell him he could fly 20 inches per turn, but forgot to mention that he could also fly high, which is an ability that fliers have in 5th edition (this was later removed in 6th). The fact that he never flew high meant I never needed to use the Storm Banner. It would have dumped his Daemon back onto the middle of the table, and prevented flight until the effect wore off. I also had an Assassin with the Black Gem of Gnar to entrap his Greater Daemon, but rather than springing that on Steve and leaving a sour taste in his first Fantasy game I told him about it, and used it on his Sorcerer instead to show him how that particular magic item worked. My Sorceress, who I ended up cutting from the list, also had the Forbidden Rod and Healing Potion combination. I didn't end up using her in the game, but I also told Steve about how the Forbidden Rod worked so that it would not come as a nasty surprise in future games. Half the bad feelings that come from games with lots of rules is being surprised by a combination that you never knew existed. By putting out the most egregious combinations out in the open it lessens the "gotcha" element. People can handle losing within the framework of the rules, but less so when they get surprised by a rule or a special ability or magic item they didn't know existed.

Benched due to not having Winds of Magic cards.

I initially thought that the Dark Elves had a weak list, but after the game I changed my mind. The Dark Elves are very competitive in 5th edition. They have armour-ignoring rank-piercing bolt throwers, both in single shot and multiple shot mode, which made them very deadly against knights or other similarly heavily-armoured troops. In 6th edition and beyond bolt throwers would be nerfed, losing their ability to ignore armour when firing multiple shots, but in 5th they were still vicious anti-armour weapons in either mode. In our game Steve's two units of Chaos Knights were cut to pieces by my artillery before they saw any combat.

The Dark Elves also have the best fast cavalry in 5th edition. Dark Elf light cavalry can skirmish, perform a vanguard move after deployment, and do not get penalized for moving and shooting. They are excellent for denying march moves, harassing the enemy with bow fire, and even performing flank and rear charges once behind the enemy line. Dark Elf Scouts are also very good troops. With their BS of 5 they can afford to shoot twice each turn with their repeater crossbows. Dark Elf Scouts hit on 5+ when firing twice, at long range, and after having moved. The most devastating thing both these troop types can do is to remove rank bonuses or get bonuses for charging the enemy in the flank or rear. In 6th edition skirmishers lost the ability to negate rank bonuses. In 5th they can still do it as long as they have five models alive at the end of combat.

The Bloodthirster!

What the Dark Elves lacked was the ability to take on high Toughness opponents. Bolt throwers have a maximum Strength of 5 so it's useless against something like the Bloodthirster or a Dragon. The highest Strength troops I can field are Dark Elves with great weapons like Executioners, but for me they're too fragile because they always strike last. One way to deal with high Toughness troops is to either kit out a Lord character and go mano e mano, but that is a risky gamble. The better way is to simply ignore them, and cut apart the rest of the army while feeding the big nasty some cheap disposable troops to waste its time. There are also options like the Black Gem of Gnar and Van Hortsmann's Speculum, both of which can be utilized well by Dark Elves through the use of Assassins. In 5th edition players can deliberately avoid contacting certain enemy models when they charge, as the rule for maximizing models in contact doesn't appear until 6th edition. This meant you could deliberately avoid nasty characters by charging the edge of the enemy unit away from them. This tactic doesn't work against Assassins though, as Assassins can displace any models when they appear. One of these days I'm going to use the Heart of Woe and Strength Potion combination and create my own Assassin suicide bomber.

Dark Riders flee from the Greater Daemon.

In terms of their rank and file Dark Elves have good solid troops in the form of the Dark Elf Corsairs. The Sea Dragon Cloak provides a flat 5+ armour save which can't be reduced by the Strength of enemy attacks, making them extremely durable against cavalry charges or monsters. I think the Executioners and the Black Guard are too expensive in 5th edition, so I won't be using them. Witch Elves are decent on paper, but they fluffed badly against Steve and cost me the game. They charged Steve's Lord on a Juggernaut in the flank and completely failed to cause any wounds at all. In return Steve's frenzied Lord caused seven casualties, and the Witch Elves ended up losing by two. They broke from combat, were chased down, and allowed the Lord to overrun into a Bolt Thrower. All told that cost me 5 VP - 3 VP for the unit, 1 VP for losing their standard, and another 1 VP for losing the Bolt Thrower. That's after charging his Lord in the flank, with a fully ranked unit. Herohammer at its finest. It's all good, though, as Frenzy is something that the Dark Elves can exploit as we have access to Witch Elf heroes. I found a rule for characters with Frenzy in 5th edition, which is a test they have to take after attacking. They have to roll less than their total number of attacks on 2d6, or lose 1 attack permanently. It's not a big downside, as usually the first fight is the most pivotal one. But Chaos Lords, with 8 attacks plus 2 from their mounts, are quite capable of taking on units by themselves.

We steamrolled the left flank and ran riot with fast cavalry and scouts on the right. But his characters whipped my ass in the middle.

A final note on scoring. The scoring was based on my assumption that every 100 points or part thereof equated to 1 VP. I thought this meant that a destroyed, fleeing or fled unit costing 250 points equals 3 VP. This is incorrect. As Steve pointed out, a unit is worth 1 VP for every full 100 points, with units less than 100 points being worth 1 VP. A 250 point unit would therefore be worth 2 VP instead of 3. I don't know how much of a difference it would have made in the end, but it's worth noting for the next game. Amazingly, despite the hurdle of learning three disparate rank and file fantasy wargaming systems - Kings of War, Warhammer 5th edition and The Ninth Age - I'm actually starting to get a handle on things. More importantly, I'm enjoying each system more and more as I become familiar with the rules and conventions. This is good, because I don't see us ever agreeing on one edition ever as the base game for Fantasy battles.


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Kings of War/Warhammer - Orcs and Goblins, Part VII

December 3, 2018, 12:34 am
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On 2 December I played a game of Kings of War (KoW) and Deadzone (DZ) at Nerima against my perennial opponent and all-round good guy Takatori-San. I won the KoW game, but lost the DZ one, with the latter being one of the most closely fought and competitive games of DZ I've ever played. As is my custom at Nerima, I ended up chowing down on KFC. I'm afraid that I've been eating too much of the Colonel's secret recipe, having had it three times this week. I justified eating this greasy, cholesterol-ridden but oh so tasty junk food as a reward for participating in a boxing match two weeks earlier, my first bout after two years of training. Prior to the match I'd eaten cleanly, trained on a daily basis, and judiciously watched my weight for two months. After losing the bout on points and getting my face punched about twenty to thirty times I'm starting to rethink my hobby while indulging in all forms of crap food. I thought it important to step in the ring at least once though, even if I was scared shitless in the days leading up to the fight. I'm a big boxing and MMA fan, and I don't know, I thought it would be a good idea to experience fighting first hand. That idea is well and truly out of my system. Maybe. I'm more pissed at being so shit in my first fight than being intimidated about doing it again. I didn't do anything I normally do in training and sparring in the actual match. I learned that being scared of getting hit doesn't stop you getting hit, so it's better to just get on with the game plan rather than being a bloody punching bag.

My beloved greenskins. So green.

That's for another post, however. The salient point here is that I'm getting back on the horse and returning to training and dieting today, and that means KFC will become a once a month treat every time I go to Nerima. I'm kinda embarrassed about going back to the gym and watching the footage of myself getting beaten up, but I guess I'll just have to suck it up. But for now my attention is back on my greenskins, and miniature gaming. For our KoW game we played the Bounty scenario, in which both armies were awarded Victory Points for destroying the enemy's two most expensive units, and controlling the center of the board. We played a small 1000 point game, and once we were underway I was reminded of how much I liked KoW's clean mechanics. We finished the game in less than two hours. Takatori-San had a Dwarf army composed of three regiments of Dwarves, one troop of Berserkers, a troop of handgunners and a pair of war machines supported by a Dwarven engineer. My Orc army had a Godspeaker, a battle standard bearer, a war drum for the +2 Nerve bonus and two Hordes of Orcs. They were supported by trolls, snotlings and two units of Orc archers. My plan for the game was to screen my Hordes with the expendable troops and get them into combat as soon as possible. The archers would not shoot, but advance as a mobile shield with the Hordes behind. The Hordes would be supported in turn by my command element, who would provide Nerve re-rolls and bonuses along with Heal spells cast by the Godspeaker.

Takatori-San's Dwarves.

The plan worked a treat. My archers got pounded into oblivion by Dwarven firepower, but their sacrifice allowed my Hordes to close the distance without being badly compromised by shooting. Once they got stuck in they smashed regiment after regiment of Dwarves, who thanks to the annoying snotlings could not conduct a combined charge which may have threatened the unit. On the right my Trolls broke a unit of Dwarves by their lonesome, and on the left one of my Hordes marched into the path of some Berserkers who gamely tried to break the multitudes in front of them. The Orcs steamrolled them eventually, and by turn four all the Dwarven melee units were destroyed. Takatori-San conceded after a final shooting phase, and my greenskins closed out 2018 with a win. Not bad for an army that was all mostly grey plastic one year ago.

The archers act as screen against the artillery as the Horde advances.

Takatori-San got his revenge in our next game of DZ, however, when his 150 point Enforcer strike force took down my all-girl Rebels. We played the Scour scenario, in which both teams had to acquire items and carry them off the board. It was a grim battle of attrition, with both teams being left down to two models apiece by the end of the game. When the smoke cleared, however, it was Takatori-San who got the victory. I was impressed by the Peacekeeper, whose durability made him almost immune to Rebel shooting. I was less impressed by my Walker, who couldn't seem to do anything of note against the armored Enforcers. She tried shooting, then jumping into melee, then shooting again, and failed to inflict a single casualty. The Enforcers ended up ignoring her and just walking out of melee every time she initiated it, relying on their armor and high Survive value to tank her non-AP melee hits. It might have been poor dice, but I might rejig her load out to specialize in melee for the next game. I might also try the flame thrower just for laughs.

The Hordes get into combat and steamroll Takatori-San's regiments.

Most of the damage inflicted by the Rebels were courtesy of their snipers, whose Sniper Scope +2 dice bonus made them deadly threats. Rebel sniper rifles aren't Heavy or Armor Piercing, but the fact that they're mobile means they can pop out of hiding and fire rather than having to spend a turn setting up or use Command dice to shoot. Everything in the Rebel army is horribly vulnerable though, and in the first turn of the game I lost four models from shooting despite keeping them in cover. 6+ Survive is not good.

Deadzone!

All in all, it was another good day of gaming. It might be the last one for 2018, but we'll see. I have both Doom and Star Saga still sitting unplayed and unpainted in my cupboard, so I might bring one of those to a JIGG meet rather than playing miniatures. I don't know what my painting project for 2019 is, but at the close of 2018 I can say that I transformed a mass of unpainted miniatures into something that kind of looks like an army, and played a total of five games - three games of KoW and two of The Ninth Age (T9A) - with them. As goals go I don't know what that means in the grand scheme of things, but it was a goal set, and mostly achieved. Kind of like boxing, but less painful.

It's time for new goals!

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Kings of War/The Ninth Age/Warhammer - Dark Elves, Part II

February 19, 2019, 5:37 am
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On 13 January I played my first game of rank and file fantasy battle for 2019. My opponent was Rodion, my army were my Dark Elves, and the system we used was The Ninth Age (T9A). We gatecrashed another JIGG event to use as a venue, and we were lucky that we came early as the place was quite small but packed with people. I felt a little guilty appropriating a table for just the two of us, but since most tables averaged four we were only putting out two people. That's how I rationalized it to myself, anyway.

Diagonal deployment.

I would like to regale the reader with an epic tale of a closely fought encounter, but that's not how it panned out. I got my ass well and truly handed to me. On his very first turn Rodion incited panic tests all along my cluttered right flank by destroying a unit of fast cavalry, and all my units passed their Leadership tests of 10 or under with the sole exception of my general's unit. The unit promptly fled, taking my general and wizard lord with it. To add insult to injury we were playing with truncated tables and thus there was no room for my general to rally. All I could do was watch glumly as 1000 points of my army ran off.

After the initial dismay wore off I thought I'd try to play for a draw but that idea was nixed as the game developed and Rodion methodically picked my army apart. Rodion always takes magic heavy armies, but this time he supplemented it with more shooting in the form of skirmishers. He did a great job destroying my army in detail before smashing the remnants with his shock troops. Without magic protection I ate spell after spell, and this time around I did not have the luxury of cheap troops and/or bad magic phases from Rodion as I did in our previous game when I used Orcs and Goblins.

My Cauldron of Blood debuts on the tabletop.

Even if my general and sorceress lord had not fled I am quite certain that I would have still lost. I should not have gone mano e mano with his light troops, and instead denied him easy targets on his first turn by pulling everything all the way back. We were playing with diagonal deployment zones, and I was unfortunate (or foolish) in putting my general's unit near the edge of the table. I also stacked all my characters in one unit as apparently I'd forgotten the old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket. There was plenty of space deeper in the corners where I could have waited for him to come to me. Instead I thought I would take his first turn shooting, which is always a bad idea if you have expensive troops, and come back with my own. Unfortunately for me his first turn of shooting paid massive dividends, and I was playing catch-up from the start.

Clash of skirmishers and fast cavalry.

I initially thought that my army selection was quite poor, as it straddled the line between being a shooty army and a melee army without committing to either paradigm. After further thought however, I believe that the army was fine - I just deployed it poorly. Elves do combined arms well, as Rodion would demonstrate in the coming turns. He had the initiative from the start, and never let go. He made the point that I was being too reactive, and I agree with him. I also struggled with the Ambush rule the High Elves have, which allow them to come in on the flanks or rear. It really played havoc with my plans, and even though this time around I assigned a unit to deal with the ambushing unit, it still fractured my line badly. There were many things I could have done which had nothing to do with bad RNG, and so these are the things I will focus on for next time.

Speaking of next time T9A has just released the second edition of their game, and it signals a shift from the Warhammer model, particularly in the stat lines used to differentiate units. Many statistics, such as Wounds and Toughness, have been renamed. Others have been split further such as Weapon Skill which has been divided into Offensive and Defensive Skill, and Movement, which has been split further into Advance and March Rates. While late as last year I would have resisted such a move, nowadays I am more open to alternatives. I already play Kings of War (KoW) which is a completely different beast to Warhammer, so why the hell not. The rules committee of T9A have claimed that 2.0 is the definitive version of their particular brand of fantasy wargaming, and while I'm skeptical about that, I'm more amenable to learning a living system which still has support from players around the world rather than investing time in a game whose player base continues to shrink year by year. We all have to move on, I suppose, and if fantasy wargaming has a future beyond old diehards like myself, it will be in the hands of KoW and T9A. The only annoying thing is that I'm going to have to learn a new system. Again.

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The Deadzone Proxy Project, Part II

February 19, 2019, 5:52 am
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In terms of gaming and miniature painting my goal for 2019 is to make substantial inroads into the so-called Deadzone Proxy Project, a two year undertaking I set for myself back in May 2017 in which I collect and paint playable squads for each faction of Deadzone (DZ). I bought my first Raging Heroes miniatures in October 2017, more than a year after discovering them on the Internet and pondering upon whether or not I should buy the little dudes (dudettes?). I suppose that was the seminal moment marks the true beginning of the Project, and as the name suggests I will be using Raging Heroes miniatures to proxy for some of the factions. This is not an absolute restriction. I will also pull from other lines, manufacturers and board games as I see fit.

The GCPS, being represented by the Kurganova range by Raging Heroes. This picture, and all the subsequent ones in this post are 150 point forces.

It is now February 2019, and there is no way that I will be able to complete this project in any substantive fashion by May. I have had many digressions along the way, most notably my foray into painting up my greenskins for Kings of War/The Ninth Age/Warhammer. I've painted almost all my Mansions of Madness miniatures. I've somehow ended up with a mostly painted The Walking Dead collection, and buried deep within my gaming cupboard is a set of US marines taking on aliens in Mars Attacks! The Board Game. I've based and flocked my Dark Angels, and played my first ever games of Warhammer 40K. I've acquired Doom and Rising Sun, with half-baked plans of one day converting the miniatures within into DZ and Kings of War forces respectively. More troubling is that in recent months I've acquired more High Elves, and the nucleus of a brand new Fantasy army, the Skaven.

The Rebels, proxied by the Jailbirds, also from Raging Heroes.

Skaven. WTF.

Mantic's Forge Fathers.

This has got to stop. It's ridiculous. In 2016 Games Workshop killed Warhammer, and I thought they were doing me a favor at the time by putting the final nail in a long dormant hobby of mine. Instead it's galvanized me into digging up my miniatures and getting them shipped to Japan, working on them and painting them up, and scrounging Japan for networks of similarly minded players. It's worse than ever. I even bought a display case for my miniatures. Insanity, I tell you. E-Bay has been the worst discovery for me, because rarely a day goes by when I don't scour its electronic pages for bargains and cool looking miniatures. I'm on the hunt for jezzails and ratling gun teams, as well as warp fire throwers and the like. I want the weird and wacky Skaven models, and this is one obsession that is going to be really hard to shake, especially now that I have a nucleus of an army. I know I won't be happy until I can field a Skaven army one day in one of the Fantasy systems I currently play. The fact that Warhammer is out of print makes it tricky, because listings on E-Bay come and go, and sometimes I feel obliged to snap up a listing because I'm afraid I'll never see it again. My latest purchase has been the 8th edition Warhammer starter set, and I fear that I've undone all the hard work I put into the hobby this year by acquiring MORE SHIT. I was proud of the work I did on the greenskins because I transformed a mass of grey plastic I ALREADY owned into something that looked like an army from a distance. Now I have even more grey plastic, which means my net inroad into my collection is back to what it was at the start of 2017.

The Plague.

Nonetheless in 2019 I am going to TRY to work solely on the Proxy Project and on my sci-fi range. That means working primarily on miniatures, DZ scenery, and plastic furniture for Star Saga. Playing Takatori-San on the weekend reminded me how good DZ can be, and we have an established DZ community in Nerima, as well as a new one in Nishi-Tokorozawa which is just a short bicycle ride away. I don't know what kind of serendipitous event has blessed me with the opening of a gaming store which plays an obscure English game I happen to like in Japan of all places just 20 minutes by bike from my house, but I will take it. This coming Sunday Tsuneda-San is holding a DZ meet at the venue, and I will be there with bells on.

The Enforcers.

My Fantasy armies are going to get a touch up here and there before scheduled meets, but starting today I'm going to stash all my armies in their carry cases and put them on the shelf. Last year I wanted to create a miniature universe in the Warpath world, but I somehow lost sight of that when I found Fantasy again. It's time for a course correction. I will still play Fantasy as I have a life long love for it, but I will spend my painting time working on my sci-fi stuff. It might also mean that I acquire more miniatures to round out my DZ collection, but it won't be on the same scale as a fully fledged Fantasy army. This might seem like more self-delusion on my part, but the distinction is important in my own head. I started the sci-fi project, and I intend to finish it.

Next: The Deadzone Proxy Project, Part III

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The Deadzone Proxy Project, Part III

March 31, 2019, 7:15 pm
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On 24 February I rolled down to my FLGS and played two games of Deadzone. The first was with the store manager, a friendly chap named Tsuneda-San, and we ended up using my Rebs and GCPS forces in a 150 point battle. I lost that one, but followed it up with a fun four way battle between the Rebs, the GCPS, the Plague and the Forge Fathers. That game was also 150 points per side, and all the players present were newcomers to the game. We used forces provided by yours truly, as well as army lists I had designed as well. I played the role of games master and taught them to the rules as best as I was able, a job that was supposed to have been done by Koizumi-San, the Japanese Mantic distributor. Koizumi-San had called in sick and no-showed on the day, pleading bad health. Let's hope that it was really the case, because that's the second time I've heard that excuse from him. Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but lately Sin (his Twitter handle) has been less than friendly in his dealings with me, forgetting orders and replying late to my messages. Maybe I've pissed him off somehow or perhaps he is crazy busy, but I hope that he realizes that I'm his ally and we share the same goals - namely, spreading the word about Mantic games, and increasing the player pool in Japan. I have Sin to thank for introducing Deadzone at the Nishi-Tokorozawa store and providing me many of the Mantic products littering my shelves, so I hope things work out for the best. On this day, however, Sin's no-show put Tsuneda-San in an awkward position as he had to apologize to customer after customer for not being able to explain the rules and showcase Deadzone as advertised.

Four way battle between the Rebs, the Plague, the Forge Fathers and the Enforcers.

Despite forgetting a raft of rules much fun seemed to have been had by all in the introductory game. The new store at Nishi-Tokorozawa seems to be getting more traction and traffic, despite being located in the middle of nowhere. I've been able to expand my circle of gaming contacts, and am happy to include Hitoshi, Mio and Tsuyoshi in that orbit. The fact that I can call them by their first names is good. Mio also represents a watershed in Japanese miniature gaming for me. She is the first Japanese female gamer I have encountered over here in the Land of the Rising Sun who plays miniature games. I have met other female gamers in the Japanese International Gamer's Guild (where the male to female ratio is perhaps 3:1), but Mio is the first who actually plays miniatures games per se. She seems to be an avid role-player as well, judging by her tweets. Role-playing in Japanese is out of my ambit for the moment, but I might DM an English session in April or May with Tokyo Role-Playing games. I even bought a digital copy of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing Game (4th edition). Why I did that was simple. I've never done it before, they are looking for GMs, and I want to meet new people. Since the demise of the tabletop battle version the role-playing version and the computer game version are now keepers and repositories of the Warhammer lore, so I felt it was incumbent on me to support it.

My Deadzone collection to date. I have quite a few models in reserve, but the ones on display here are complete 150 point squads. Starting from the top left and spiraling clockwise into the center (as well ignoring the clump of models in the bottom right) the factions are as follows - Nameless (Doom), Mazon Labs (Mantic), GCPS (Raging Heroes), Forge Fathers (Mantic), Marauders (Raging Heroes), Enforcers (Mantic), Rebels (Raging Heroes), Plague (Mantic) and Rebels again (Raging Heroes).


On 16 March I went Craft Lab again (the name of the Nishi-Tokorozawa store) and demonstrated The Walking Dead. Once again I was introducing the game to a bunch of newcomers (Hitoshi, Tsuyoshi, and a young chap named Yamaguchi-San) and they seemed to enjoy it. What warmed my heart more was the talk between Hitoshi and Tsuyoshi about their budding Deadzone squads. Hitoshi seemed to have started a Veer-Myn squad, while Tsuyoshi was building an Enforcers squad. Mio seems to have bought the Forge Fathers, so my trip and introductory game in February was not for nothing. Yay! And I don't even sell these damned things. I just want people I can play with, and so I will take active steps to promote Mantic games and make them enjoyable for people to play. I was also happy to hear that on 24 March an impromptu Deadzone tournament had been organized at Craft Lab by Sin and Tsuneda-San. I was unable to attend as I was acting as tour guide for my sister and family who had come to visit Japan, but it bodes well for the future of Deadzone as a gaming system.

Next: TBC

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Search

Kings of War/The Ninth Age/Warhammer - High Elves, Part I

April 11, 2019, 11:26 pm
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On 10 March I played my first game of the second edition of The Ninth Age (T9A). I played a doubles game with Steve, Jonjo and Gareth, and each of us fielded a force of approximately 4000 points. Steve (Warriors of the Dark Gods) and Gareth (Empire of Sonnstahl) squared off against myself (Highborn Elves) and Jonjo (Saurian Ancients). I initially thought that I should pair off with Gareth, who was a Fantasy neophyte, but both Jonjo and Steve pointed out that the Lizardmen, ancient defenders of the Old Ones and a bastion of Order, would never ally with the forces of entropy represented by Chaos. We ended up with more logical (fluff-wise anyway) teams with the High Elves standing shoulder to shoulder with the Lizardmen, and the men of the Empire being corrupted by Chaos and falling under their sway.

My High Elves in 2018, before I bought Warhammer 8th edition of E-Bay, and added more Sea Guard, Swordmasters and a Prince on a Griffon.

We played a standard pitched battle, and immediately Jonjo advised me to deploy all my units as quickly as possible to ensure that we get first turn. In T9A the person who finishes deployment first gets +1 to their roll to get first turn for every non-deployed unit the opponent has. Deployment is taken in turns like old Warhammer, but you can deploy as many units as you want on your turn. You could dump down your whole army, which is what I eventually ended up doing as per Jonjo's advice.

It was a good thing we got first turn, because the Empire army I was facing had three artillery pieces, two units of pistoliers, and sixty handgunners. I knew the list well because I wrote it for Gareth for his first Fantasy game. I wanted to give him an army that was easy to use, didn't require too much manoeuvre and was tough as nails. I just didn't know I would be marching my High Elves into my own damned gun line. Most of my High Elves were deployed on the left flank staring into the teeth of the Empire's shooting. Jonjo's infantry was on the right, squaring off against Steve's Chaos army. A titanic combat was in the offing on Jonjo's flank, as two of the Warhammer world's best close combat factions stared each other down. My High Elves, on the other hand, were about to walk into the Valley of Death and shitting themselves. I knew my Swordmasters and White Lions could chop up the Imperial infantry. The question would be whether they could make it into combat.

High Elves in prep for the March 10 game. Just tried to splash three colors on - undercoat white, green base, and another random color.

Luckily for us we had our own shooting. My High Elves had a unit of Seaguard, two bolt throwers, and a pair of fast cavalry units. Jonjo supplemented this with his skink skirmishers, who performed awesomely in the game, taking the buildings in the center and using them as fire bases to rain down short bow and javelin fire. He also had a pair of Salamanders, one of which incinerated a goodly amount of Imperial Greatswords, and another which survived multiple charges by Chaos Warriors and White Wolf knights. The damned thing would get beaten in combat, flee, and somehow outrun its pursuers again and again. It couldn't shoot for shit, however, compared to its counterpart in the middle. Its sole attempt to belch fire at the knights resulted in a giant reptilian hairball which wounded itself.

High Elves/Lizardmen Turn 1

My High Elves started off well enough. Having secured first turn, we advanced down the field as fast as we could. Our bolt throwers started pinging off pistoliers, panicking one unit, and leaving one at half strength. Jonjo's lizards advanced towards the center, while my Seaguard stationed behind them killed a few Marauders. Jonjo's aforementioned skinks took out one cannon in a stunning display of shooting. War machines in T9A are now one model with a combined profile, which makes them easier to kill. Older editions of Warhammer had you randomising hits between the crew and the machine, which gave them great survivability as hits on the war machine were effectively misses (the chassis usually had Toughness 7). In T9A the cannons have 5 Wounds (HP) and Toughness (Resilience) 4. Sturdy, but killable, especially to skinks with poison attacks. Artillery have no armor saves.

Deployment.

Chaos/Empire Turn 1

The Empire responded in kind. Handgun and pistolier fire wiped out my fast cavalry, but the surviving cannon whiffed badly. Steve charged his Chaos Knights into my Elven Chariots and they both fled. He redirected his charge into my White Lions, initiating the first combat of the game. I was quietly confident. I play against Rodion all the time, and this edition of the game makes elves with great weapons formidable foes thanks to the Lightning Reflexes rule, which removes the great weapon penalty of striking last. Besides I would much rather be in combat than be shot by the volley gun, which trained its sights on my Swordmasters instead. One volley later and half my Swordmasters were dead. The rest of Gareth's shooting was directed at the skinks occupying the buildings in the centre, but it was largely ineffective thanks to cover and the skirmishing nature of the skinks. On the right flank the Chaos line advanced forward to meet the oncoming lizards. In the middle another unit of Chaos Knights ploughed into a unit of Saurus. It was declared a draw, but the Saurus should have actually lost by 1 as I failed to mention that T9A gives a +1 combat resolution modifier to charging units. This omission became even more embarrassing when I remembered the rule when it came time to resolve my own combat one turn later. In my defence I was concentrating on my side of the table when I was asked the first time, but I feel bad about it. When Steve called me out I didn't add the modifier in my combat either to square things up, which made that combat a draw, too, rather than a win by me. Sorry, guys! It won't happen again.

The generals.

High Elves/Lizardmen Turn 2

On my second turn I was able to rally one of my fleeing chariots, but the other ran off the table. Putting them within charge range of Steve's knights was a really massive blunder by me, because I was counting on the pair of them either absorbing some shooting or doing some counter-battery work. They did nothing the whole game. My White Lions broke the Chaos Knights but were now stuck in the middle awaiting execution by firing squad. My Swordmasters, sadly diminished, managed to pull off a long range charge against Steve's chariot and got into combat. They were unable to break the unit, as its Toughness of 5 and 3+ save gave it good survivability. The warriors on them with 2 attacks each at Strength 5 were smashing my frail Toughness 3 elves and negating my combat bonuses.

Jonjo and Steve in deep thought.

On the right flank Jonjo decided to wait for the Chaos hordes, and so the reptilian masses held the line impassively and waited. Jonjo's skinks and salamanders continued to peck away at the Chaos hordes. I found that my Seaguard's shooting was largely ineffective against Chaos armour, so I had to be content with killing a model here and there hoping to negate a rank bonus. The big fight would be coming in the next turn.

Chaos/Empire Turn 2

The ground shook as the Chaos hordes crashed into the lizardmen line on the east flank. Bloodthirster, Chaos Knights and Chaos Marauders all hit the lizards in unison, but the cold-blooded minions of the Old Ones showed no fear, and held their ground. The Chaos Marauders attacking the Temple Guard fared the poorest, and were driven back, opening up the Chaos Knights' flank for a counter-charge next turn. The White Wolves smashed into a salamander, still choking on a hairball, and broke it. The salamander ran away with surprising speed and outdistanced the startled knights. Chaos Warriors in the wood in the center of the battlefield charged skinks hiding there, and the skinks, startled and ill-prepared, were run down.

Epic clash in the center as Chaos and Lizardmen throw down.

On the left flank Gareth blasted my White Lions with the volley gun and killed half of them. Ouch. The rest of his shooting was directed at the remaining skinks lurking in the buildings, but once again they proved elusive targets. In combat my Swordmasters once again failed to break the chariot. Gareth elected not to charge his halberdiers into the combat which would have routed my Swordmasters. He wanted to shoot them instead.

High Elves/Lizardmen Turn 3

On what would be my final turn I charged my White Lions into Steve's lone surviving Chaos Knight and killed him. In our overrun move we finally made it into combat with Gareth's Greatswords unit containing his general. My Swordsmasters finally killed the Chaos chariot, but it left us standing in the open much like the White Lions had been in the previous turn. We had some support from the skinks and the salamander in the center, who softened up the Greatswords in the previous turn by removing two rank bonuses. This would prove crucial in the coming melee.

The Temple Guard flank the Chaos Knights.

On the right flank Jonjo's Temple Guard took advantage of the hole left open by the flight of the Marauders and charged into the flank of Steve's Chaos Warriors. The pressure was too much for even these elite warriors, and they collapsed as well, leaving the Bloodthirster as the only Chaos unit holding up the right flank. The White Wolves were pursuing a salamander, and the Chaos Warriors on the extreme right were only now getting into position to get into combat. The Bloodthirster would have to hold for at least another turn before reinforcements could be brought to bear. Unfortunately for the Greater Daemon, the damned salamander rallied right in front of the White Wolves and the Chaos Warriors, serendipitously protecting the Saurus' right flank.

Chaos/Empire Turn 3

The forces of entropy still had forces to spare on the right flank, but they were being blocked by a single hairball eating salamander. The White Wolves and the Chaos Warriors wanted to reinforce the Greater Daemon who was at this point surrounded on all sides by angry lizards, but first they would have to kill the pesky reptile. The salamander was double charged by the White Wolves and the Chaos Warriors, and was broken – only to get away again, and no doubt rally if the game had gone on to turn four (cold-blooded...!).

The Elves finally get into combat.

On the left flank the Swordmasters were cut down to an elf as the volley gun barked again and shattered what was left of the formation. Only my mage was left alive, standing there alone, blinking, amidst the bodies of his comrades. My White Lions were in combat, however, and they sought vengeance for their fallen kin. The Imperial Greatswords were Stubborn at Leadership 10 as long as the general was alive, so I directed my general's attacks as well as my champion's on Gareth's general in a desperate bid to kill him. Thanks to some great RNG six attacks converted into three Wounds which was enough to kill the Empire general. Without him the Empire line crumbled. The Greatswords broke, and all three supporting units within Panic range failed their tests and bailed. It was a bloody miracle. Against all odds the High Elves had broken the Imperial left flank.

My mage is the sole survivor of a once proud Swordmaster unit. On the far right you can see the White Lions running down the Imperial Greatswords, along with Gareth's general.

Back on the right flank the Greater Daemon looked like it was doomed, but this combat it unleashed its Breath Weapon and torched a bunch of Saurus. I don't know what the final resolution of that giant combat was, but neither side budged and that was how the game ended. We called the game a draw, and it seemed like a fair result. My White Lions had broken through on the left but only had six models left plus my general. The Empire, albeit leaderless, still had lots of chaff it could throw at me. The human wizard could probably destroy me on her own with a direct damage spell. On the right the Greater Daemon looked like it was in trouble, but it had two full strength units nearby, and if it held reinforcements could come in and turn the tide of the combat. The result was not clear cut by any means.

Afterthoughts

The end of the battle after three turns. Hardly an Elf left in sight on the left flank, while on the right the Lizardmen swarm the Bloodthirster.

We only played three turns, which is staggering given that we got there at 1 pm, and called it after 7 pm. We had six hours of play time and we couldn't finish the game. Granted, it was 8000 points per side, and it was the first time for all of us, but damn, that was slow. Hopefully we can speed things up significantly next time, because at that pace we would have to spend 12 hours to finish a game. What struck me while playing was how essentially Warhammer the game was. Sure, there are a lot of new rules, but the central essence of the game seems to have been preserved. Most of the changes seem to be cosmetic in nature, and a lot of the verbose explanations given in the rule book seem to have been put there to cover edge cases where disputes may arise. One of the stated aims of the rule set is to completely eliminate the “roll off when in doubt” rule, and the rules reflect that, being extremely finicky, requiring constant cross-referencing, and trying to cover every situation. But despite all that the game is still very much the Warhammer that I played back in high school and university, and I'm very happy for that. Of course we had a lot of misplayed rules which I only realised when I got home (i.e. war machines don't flee, but become Shaken instead when they panic, Cover Volley only works with units who have Martial Discipline, etc.), but the four of us now have a working base to expand in future games. I now have a decent grasp of combat mechanics and the magic phase (the cards really helped, much to my surprise), but pursuits, overruns and post-combat reforms are still a little hazy for me. Whenever in doubt I revert to my 6th edition knowledge, which is not always right for T9A. There are still a lot of special rules that require me to break out the rulebook, but hopefully by the end of this year we will all be playing like seasoned veterans. Let's hope that the T9A rules committee are true to their word and that this is their definitive rule set for years to come, because I'm tired of learning new rules.

Next: TBA

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Kings of War/The Ninth Age/Warhammer - Tomb Kings, Part I

April 26, 2019, 10:25 am
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The weekend of April 20-21 was a Kings of War weekend for me, having played an introductory game for Pumimin on Saturday, and having another tussle with my regular sparring partner Takatori-San on Sunday. On Saturday I brought my Kingdoms of Men all mounted army and steamrolled Pumimin's Abyssal Horde in about three turns. I'm a bloody idiot. Way to ease someone into the hobby. Just in case you're wondering what kind of name is Pumimin, it's actually Fujimi-San's Twitter handle, which is the platform through which otaku of all stripes keep in contact in Japan. I hope he persists with Kings of War, my idiocy notwithstanding. He didn't appear to take it badly, but I can never really tell with Japanese folk, with all their years of tatemae practice.

Pumimin's Abyssal Horde. Otherwise known as Daemons of Chaos in GW speak.

For Sunday I took an Empire of Dust army to Koganei where they had a good scrap with Takatori-San's vanilla Undead. I lost that one after my right flank finally collapsed and his werewolves came loping around my line. Prior to that the skeleton and zombie hordes just pushed and pulled each other somewhat ineffectively, causing a little bit of damage here and there which was offset by the Lifeleech rule. Even in horde formations they're only really useful as tarpits, as they lack the Defense penetration brought by units with Crushing Strength. 30 attacks looks good on paper, but once probability kicks in it gets reduced to an average of 5 damage against a 4+ Defense foe. The Scorpion on the other hand was worth its weight in gold. Crushing Strength for the win.

The Empire square off against the horrors of the Abyss.

I also played my first ever game of Kings of War: Vanguard, which is Mantic's skirmish level game akin to something like Mordheim or Age of Sigmar. It was pretty fun once I got to grip with the rules, and much like Deadzone or Kings of War Mantic have once again come up with a simple ruleset which belies the tactical depth of their games. I'll play it again, but at the moment my mind is thankfully off the ruthless acquisition of miniatures, and more on playing the board games I brought back from Australia in early April. I've been learning the rules for Nemesis, a new boardgame which was funded on Kickstarter in 2017-2018, and will hopefully pop its cherry during Golden Week. I also have Relic, Supremacy, Doom and Star Saga all waiting to be cracked open and validated. I hate not playing board games I acquire, because it confirms that I have wasted my money on a material acquisition which in the words of Marie Kondo, never "sparked joy" for me. What is the point of collecting these bits of cardboard or plastic? When I buy them I think they will enrich my life, but in reality they just encumber it. They only gain value when played or shared with other people, which drives me to actually go out and meet people to play with. In that sense I guess they're good, as they provide an impetus for socialization...? 




Empire of Dust versus Undead.

Speaking of playing either my Empire or Tomb Kings will be pulled out for another game on April 29th for a game of The Ninth Age. Much like Takatori-San is my KoW sparring partner, Rodion is my T9A nemesis. In fact, much of Golden Week will be spent gaming all over Tokyo. I have no plans to travel this holiday, having expended much of my money in showing my sister and her family around Tokyo, going snowboarding, and finally returning to Australia to celebrate a wedding. I'm broke. One of the good things about miniatures is that once you have them you can paint them, so if you're too poor to go sliding down a mountainside or jetting off to another country you can always shut yourself in and either prepare for games, or try to tee up some games. I have to say that I've been feeling dissatisfied with my hobby recently, and wondering what to do with myself. I should go back to boxing. A few punches to the head and I'm positive that all the ennui will get shaken off quick smart, and the simple joys of watching a project grow and take shape will snap back with crystal clarity.

The center is falling apart.

Next: TBC

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A Golden Week of Gaming

June 19, 2019, 11:23 pm
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Golden Week is a week in the Japanese calendar sandwiched between the end of April and the beginning of May. A confluence of national holidays - Children's Day, Greenery Day, Showa Day (Emperor Hirohito's birthday) and Constitution Day - come together at this point resulting in a week long break for most people. Much of my Golden Week was spent on games and gaming. Here is a brief summary of the analog gaming that went on during the extended holiday:

Saturday 27 April

Started off Golden Week by watching Avengers: Endgame in the afternoon by myself. I promised to see it with Hiromi, but I couldn't wait, so I sneaked off after my morning classes and went to Iruma to watch the movie. A part of me thought that there was no reason to see the movie with her, but promises are promises, fair weather or not. Technically I'm breaking it, but I'm still going to see it with her later in the week, so I guess I'm only partially breaking my word?

Sunday 28 April

My Aberration turns on its handlers.

Deadzone at Craft Lab in Nishi-Tokorozawa. I had a choice of going to the game day at JIGG Akihabara or playing Deadzone, and I went and played Deadzone instead. I instantly regretted my decision, because there was no one there at Craft Lab when I arrived, and so I ended up playing a game with the store manager. I played Mazon Labs versus Tsuneda-San's Marauders and wiped the floor with him. The Mazon Labs list I brought was very strong - the two Aberrations just ROFLstomped their way through the map. Tsuneda-San was also new to the game, and made rookie mistakes which ended up costing him any chance of winning.

Setting up for the second game.

After our game wrapped up Miopin and Tsuyoshi rolled up and I was able to tee up a three way match between my Mazon Labs list, Tsuyoshi's Enforcers and my Forge Fathers which I lent to Miopin. Once again my stupidly strong Aberrations rolled their way across the map and got me the win. One of them was shot down by Forge Father fire and the other was nearly killed by the Enforcers, but Tsuyoshi was deployed so close to me that I was able to get into combat quickly. I realized that multi-player matches in Deadzone require more than one mat, because it's unfair to shooting factions to be placed so close to close combat factions, which is what happened to Tsuyoshi. It was also funny to see my Aberration get caged in by the terrain because it was too big to fit through the gaps. It ended up having to take a long, circuitous route to get into combat, all the while getting peppered by Forge Father and Enforcer fire. It didn't matter - its toughness and resilience allowed it to soak up a tremendous amount of firepower, and once it got into combat it was game over for the other factions.

Monday 29 April

The Empire squares off against their Elven nemesis.

Played my second game of The Ninth Age 2nd edition with Rodion in Sangenjaya. I played Empire versus his High Elves, and once again lost to my Finnish nemesis, although it was much, much closer this time. If we had a do over I would play the same army list, as a couple of lucky rolls my way would have dramatically turned the game in my favor. Rodion loves his dragons, and if one of the cannons had actually connected it the game would have been different. Next time, Rodion, next time...

Rodion and his blasted dragons.

I was very happy with how powerful the Empire list is in the 2nd edition. I thought the High Elves were ridiculously OP until I saw what I could take in my army. High Elves will always shred me in combat, but our missile weapons and artillery options are no joke, and can do some damage to the expensive elves. I look forward to more games in the future.

Tuesday 30 April

Went to Swaroop's apartment for what I thought would be a board gaming session, but which turned out to be a day of console gaming. Swaroop is one of Stevie's mates, and he had extended an invite to me after drinking a couple of weeks ago with the lads. Spent the afternoon with Swaroop, his girlfriend Jade, Anthony, Alex, Steve, and his new girlfriend Mayumi. We played a whole bunch of games on console, including Bomberman, Smash Brothers and some really funny trivia based games which required us to use our smartphones to answer. Ate some excellent biryani made by Swaroop himself. I'd forgotten how fun console games can be.

Wednesday 1 May

Was planning to go to Minami-Tama to play some The Walking Dead with a new group I found via Twitter, but decided against it. I chose to rest instead, and take the day off. This group will definitely remain on my radar, however, as they seem to be a group that plays TWD on a regular basis.

Thursday 2 May

Gareth came over to play some De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA). I played the Swiss, he played the French, and the French got steamrolled, no thanks to anything I did. I just moved the troops up in a line and the cavalry kept bouncing off my pikes. It felt like I was just rolling dice. I'm not impressed with DBA, to be honest, despite its solid reputation among historical wargamers. Afterwards we watched episodes one to three of Game of Thrones. Gareth has some major drama going on in his life, and while I'll keep details to a minimum here, it just shows that marriage, kids and the domestic life are not always the keys to happiness that some people believe they are. I worked as a divorce solicitor for a few years straight out of college, so I already knew the kind of nasty shit people do to each other when they fall "out" of love. It's hard to remember that when you are enamored with someone, though, or when you are lonely and looking for a partner to validate yourself. Or clinging onto something that is clearly over.

Friday 3 May

I went out on my final "date" with Hiromi. We watched Avengers: Endgame together as "promised" so many months ago, and ate yakiniku afterwards. I felt some regret at breaking my promise earlier in the week, but in the final analysis it makes no difference - it only affects me, and my perception of myself. I was glad to see that I was genuinely happy to see her. It's funny how both of us are going out of our way to avoid touching each other now, but the end hug when saying goodbye was genuine, at least on my part. I wish her well, and harbor no more fantasies for our shared future.

Saturday 4 May

Kings of War at Nishi-Tokorozawa.

Kings of War at Craft Lab in Nishi-Tokorozawa. This was quite a large gathering, as Biriwara, Narumi, Sakura, Pumimin (all Twitter handles) and a random Japanese dude whose name I never got all converged on the venue to play the game. After a round of explanations we played a doubles game, with my Varangur teaming up with Sakura's Forces of Nature to take on Biriwara's Undead and Pumimin's Abyssal Horde. My Varangur ended up getting wiped out to man, but Sakura's work on the right flank salvaged a draw for our team. I'm glad Pumimin had fun. He was able to absolutely smoke me in his second game of KoW. I was afraid that I had turned him off for good after steamrolling him two weeks prior. Afterwards Gareth turned up and I was able to get a few games of Condottierre going by roping in Tsuneda-San. Ended the day by riding home in a torrential monsoon, and burning a hole in my ass thanks to eating way too much spicy food from our local Indian kebab stall.

Sunday 5 May

JIGG Game Day at Akihabara. Played two scenarios of Gloomhaven, and two games of Nemesis. Two more games off the bucket list. Nemesis was surprisingly fun, and the three dudes I ended up playing with the majority of the day were pleasant to play with. English Michael, Indonesian Ignatius and American (Canadian) VJ, I hope to meet you guys again next time I drop into Akihabara. There was a fourth player whose name I never got, and he was starting to annoy me with his snarky attitude during a game of Nemesis. He came good in the end, though, and by the end of the game I had warmed to him and his blunt and somewhat abrasive disposition. I don't know what that says about me and my own attitudes, but I suppose the universe is just telling me to be more patient and not rely so much on first impressions.

English Michael, mystery dude, Ignatius and VJ all playing Nemesis.

Monday 6 May

I cannot tell you how much it used to shit me that Gareth counts on me to be his shoulder to bitch on whenever his life takes a turn for the worse, but he is never receptive whenever I need to get something off my chest. That dude doesn't listen to anyone - all he does is wait for his turn to talk. That was then, though, and nowadays I've accepted the fact that he will never be a confidant. If I tell him a sad story about myself his response will be to try and top it with a sadder story of his own, and it turns the whole conversation into a twisted game of one-upmanship about who has had the more tragic life. He reminds me many ways of my stepfather, and that is not a good thing.

I would still count him as a mate, however. He is one of the boys I can hang with, talk history and politics with, and play wargames with. He was back at my house today, and we played a game of Horde of the Things, a fantasy wargame based on the DBA system. I think he still thinks I might convert to DBA one day, but I'm afraid that door is well and truly closed. We like different things, it's as simple as that, and we should stop trying to change each other. He is a bad spot right now though, and so I humor him as best I can by letting him play the games he wants to play.

Friday 17 May

Not technically part of Golden Week, but lumped together because it made a logical bookend to this blog post. My other mate Steve had his birthday party and he celebrated it by gathering a bunch of guys and gals to a karaoke bash in downtown Shinjuku. I tripped the light fantastic for the first time in about a decade, and the evening was spent in a mellow haze listening to all sorts of music I had listened to as a younger man. This was the first time I'd hung out with Steve's friends outside of gaming, and they were a great bunch of folk, very relaxed and easy to talk to. It's funny that all of the boys there were spoken for except for myself, leaving myself and another one of the girls there as the nominal pair. Sadly I was in no mood to flirt or be sociable, preferring to zone out to Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here. Sometime during the night I realized that while some people go on to get married and have kids and live lives of domestic bliss I was not going to be one of those people. If life is a three tiered existence where the top tier is domestic bliss and the bottom tier is a vicious power struggle masquerading as marital relations then I am squarely in the center. Life could be infinitely better, but it could also be much worse. Looking at the ruins of Gareth's and Rosa's respective marriages as well as the wreck of my parents' own, coupled with my time mediating between squabbling partners in my first professional job has taught me this. And yet the sadness that comes with this blows through my soul, rising to the heavens and whistling forlornly through the silent void between the stars. Tonight was a requiem for the dreams of a young university student who once listened to the same music in a different time and place and dreamed of a brighter, warmer future.

In Retrospect

That was a truly eventful two weeks, filled with hellos, goodbyes and everything in between. It's funny that I can move in and out of so many social circles - gaming, music and martial arts - with apparent ease, and yet I feel so alone these days. There is so much to be said, and unpacked and ruminated on, but in the end writing about it changes nothing, so I'll just leave it at that.
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The Deadzone Proxy Project, Part IV

June 19, 2019, 11:55 pm
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On 12 May I played a pair of games of Deadzone with Takatori-San. Takatori-San brought his trusty Marauders for both games, but fell short against my Forge Fathers first, and then my Enforcers second. Both games were played at 150 points. In the first game my missile launcher carrying Forge Guard took out his Hulk, and we were then able to dominate the objectives in the middle. Without his Hulk the rest of his Marauders had no answer for Forge Father armor, and we were able to push up to the objective and drive the Marauders back. The Forge Guard performed very well, soaking up a lot of enemy fire and showing tremendous resilience. The fact that they can only sustain one wound before dying is a bit of a worry, however, making them vulnerable to big damage spikes that can kill them before their life-support systems kick in.

My Forge Fathers swing into action.

In the second game I swapped to my Enforcers while Takatori-San swapped out the Hulk for a Marauder Rainmaker. The second game was closer because we both played cagily, taking whole turns to stay out of sight and waiting for the other to make a mistake. Takatori-San made big power plays at the start of the game trying to kill my squad leader and sniper and throwing everything he had - all of his command dice and all his ammo counters - to achieve that objective. Luckily for me the dice fell my way, and both my squad leader and sniper survived. If Takatori-San had pulled that off he would have raced off to a massive early lead. As it happened, though, I was able to tuck my wounded soldiers safely out of sight, and began methodically cycling through his sniper, his suicide dog bomber, and his grunts in that order. The Rainmaker was able to destroy my commander in hiding via an indirect missile strike, reducing my command dice. His commander also proved to be a real nuisance with his command ability to steal my command dice. I found myself choosing poor command dice to deny him any useful abilities to steal. My Enforcers kept up the pressure, though, and we were able to whittle his forces down. Soon all that was left was the Rainmaker and his commander, and they were unable to keep my guys from seizing the objectives and securing the win.

Takatori-San's Marauders.

I was pleased at the performance of both my strike teams. The only amendment I'm considering is changing my Forge Father commander. While the healing ability is insanely good, it is a retroactive ability which will not help my Forge Guard if they get killed in one shot. I'm also still concerned with the lack of armor penetration in my Enforcer squad, but at least it makes me play more tactically and go for objectives rather than defaulting to a "kill everything" mindset. I've finally completed painting my Forge Father force, and will hopefully complete a couple more strike teams by the time the next update rolls around.

Tsuyoshi-San's Enforcers, in action here on 28 April.

I enjoy playing against Takatori-San because I don't have to worry about being nice. We've played each other enough times that we can go at each other as hard as possible with the toughest lists we can both muster. I don't know if Deadzone has much of a future here in Japan, however. Despite the promotional pushes in Nishi-Tokorozawa by Koizumi-San and Tsuneda-San the only new players to the game are Miopin, Hitoshi-San and Tsuyoshi-San, and their support is pretty much a blanket one not tied specifically to the game itself, but rather to the shop in general. I would like to support the game more by generating campaigns and special events in JIGG circles, but I think I might have overdone analog gaming in May and burnt myself out. If the game dies, it dies. My attention is turning to other things for now, and while I'm wise enough now to know that these goodbyes are never forever, I am content to let the hobby go for the short term.

Next: TBC

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Roleplaying Adventures

November 18, 2019, 7:09 pm
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I'm now officially a roleplayer. My journey to the geek side is complete. I can now claim to be a video gamer, a board gamer, a miniature war gamer and a roleplayer. The only thing missing from this resume of geekdom is to collect plastic dolls of scantily clad women, and to my eternal shame I can also claim this, having bought a Lara Croft doll as a teenager because of puberty. While I never had a problem arraying my Warhammer miniatures in rank and file in public, I was too embarrassed to ever display the doll (is there a technical term for these things?) on my display shelves. Good old Lara only came to light when I was going through my childhood storage boxes, and I had to endure the ribbing from my family when she emerged in all her plastic glory. She wasn't as embarrassing as she could have been - she was basically a large action figure wielding her twin pistols set standing atop some ruins, but she was still ridiculously proportioned, and let's face it, that's why my younger self bought her. Boobies.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game. 4th edition.

I digress, however. On September 28 this year I GMed my first ever game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game (WHFRPG) 4th edition at a craft beer bar in Otsuka in Tokyo. I chose WHFRPG as my role-playing game because of my Warhammer roots, and my current line of thinking at the moment is that I chose one of the most complicated systems out there to learn and play. Nonetheless I've invested two gaming sessions into the game now, and a swap into another system would render those first two moot. Classical sunk cost thinking, but the lore remains a powerful hook so I am intending to persevere.

I wasn't very happy with how my first session went because I realized that I was under prepared rules wise. I was fortunate that the players chose the negotiation routes in the scenario I made, because combat would have been messy, long and rife with errors. I wasn't impressed with the organizer of Tokyo Roleplaying Games because he was texting all the time during the game while the other players were paying attention. It seemed rude to me, but to be fair, I had already made a terrible impression as a first-time GM. I had been 10 minutes late, and also failed to bring pre-generated characters which meant we spent an hour faffing about making new characters. Character creation in WHFRPG is a complicated business, and coupled with my shaky grasp on the rules it made for slow going. It did not help that I had the digital copy of the rulebook on my iPad, which took 3-4 seconds to load each page. It was a miracle that the scenario flowed along as it did. That was more me improvising and bluffing rather than knowing what the exact rule was for each situation.

The second session went much better because I created pre-generated characters, had done a bit more rules acquisition, and printed out the important parts of the rulebook to circumvent the loading problem on the iPad. More importantly, however, I used a variety of props for the gaming session to help flesh it out. I played Warhammer Quest back in the day (released in 1995!) and I used my Warhammer miniatures along with the WHQ board tiles to create a 3D depiction of the dungeon on the table. I also used HeroQuest (released in 1989!) furniture to decorate the dungeon. In a way I had gone back full circle to my childhood. Funnily enough the scenario wasn't as fully fleshed out as my first one, but it ran much, much better, simply because of the props and the better prep on the rules this time around. I'd learned a great deal from the sessions at Tokyo Roleplaying Games which I'd attended as a player in the time between scenarios. In an ideal world I should have done that first to see what was expected of me as a GM, but as per usual I did everything the wrong way around and hoped for the best, with the predictably calamitous results.

I'm really enjoying my foray into roleplaying, both as a GM and player. I don't know if the sessions I attended as a player were typical, but contrary to my expectations these games were not made up exclusively of fat neckbeards with poor personal hygiene wearing heavy metal T-shirts (although that demographic was represented). My first ever game of Mutant Year Zero had a petite little French girl playing a four armed mutant freak, and my first game of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition was hosted by a conscientious and well-prepared American female GM accompanied by her ridiculously good looking Swedish friend, who looked completely out of place in her nice clothes. They were joined by another Indian girl at the table (I felt like I was playing in the UN), and the banter they brought to the game was great, with the Swedish girl playing a blatant gold digger fighting for the favor of Bob the Nobleman (played by the Indian girl) and his riches. Soon all of us were in on it, and the game turned less about rescuing the kidnapped knight, which was the scenario, and more about who could impress Bob the most. This led to all sorts of shennanigans, with people performing subtle acts of sabotage to make the others look bad in the eyes of Bob. The Swedish girl showed an amazing commitment to character, ultimately abandoning Bob after a dogged pursuit once she found out the knight we ended up rescuing was wealthier. It was hilarious.

As a GM I'll probably be playing most of the time with the lads, which is my generic term for my wargaming buddies who are all exclusively male, but it is nice to see the roleplaying demographic expanding beyond what I knew as a young kid. I also like how that in roleplaying you could come in with a preconceived idea of what your character is going to be like, only to have it sabotaged by the vagaries of the dice. I wanted my dwarf cleric to be tough, pious and stoic - all typical masculine representations - but he ended up being more of a clown as he kept whiffing with his hand axe and failing his perception tests and letting goblins sneak by undetected. That's one of the best reasons to play games with an RNG element, because it forces you to relinquish control. You can either resist and try to maintain the image you have in your head, or go with it and improvise. In theater it's bad form to block - that is, if you are improvising and one of the actors holds an imaginary umbrella in his hand and pretends it is raining, you shouldn't then come into the scene and then pretend that it is not. Doing so completely negates the scene building work put in by the previous actor. The ideal is to build the scene, to acknowledge what was there and add to it. Maybe you come in and share the umbrella. Or start shaking because it's cold, because that way, you acknowledge the fact that it is raining, and add the fact that this particular rain is cold and miserable. I think roleplaying games should work the same way. It's a cooperative group storytelling endeavor, and if the dice wanted my character to be a short sighted well-meaning old geezer, then so be it. I never had the looks or talent to be able to do anything but dabble in theater as an undergraduate in university, but in roleplaying I can still play and let others into a world built in my mind's eye. There is a large gap between where I am now and the kind of game I would like to be able to host, but hopefully with time and experience I can get better at GMing and share my love of the Old World with similarly inclined people.

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Kings of War/The Ninth Age/Warhammer - Empire, Part I

December 29, 2019, 4:47 pm
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The Empire is my most beloved Warhammer Fantasy Battle army, as evidenced by my collection at home, the amount of times I've played with them in friendly games and tournaments, and the fan fiction I wrote about them on this blog while playing the computer version of the game. I love their look, their background fluff, and what they represent in the world of Warhammer - fallible beings trying to hold the line against the encroachment of darkness. As the dwarves try to hold onto past glories and the elves slowly diminish, it is up to the humans to uphold civilization and resist the tide of entropy in a world populated by dragons, daemons and magic despite their inherent shortcomings as a species. Much like the world now is faced by the onset of human wrought climate change, the Empire and the other mortal nations of the Old World must band together and take collective action to prevent the onset of disaster. Can humans put aside their petty quarrels and unite in the face of a common foe?

First battle of the campaign.

Of course not. We're all doomed.

So is the Empire, if we follow the GW mandated fluff which destroyed the Warhammer world and brought about the Age of Sigmar. Luckily denial is a powerful tool, and old die-hards like myself can use it to veto the direction GW chose to take with their fantasy IP. We have staunch allies in the folk who play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which is now in its 4th edition and remains rooted in the Old World. We have the Herohammer crew in Kashiwa playing older versions of the game, cheerfully using Winds of Magic cards scrounged from the Internet and ancient army lists published more than 20 years ago. We have the excellent Total War: Warhammer and Vermintide franchises keeping the flame alive in the digital realm. Finally, if the rumours are to be believed, Games Workshop will be returning the Old World to their shelves in three years time. The Old World is alive and kicking, contrary to rumors about its demise.

My last outing with the Empire was in Kashiwa on 9 June and 21 July this year. I have to confess to having burnt myself out somewhat, having played a ton of miniature games across a vast variety of systems over the first half of the year, at the cost of neglecting my health. This led to me taking a break from wargaming since July. I recognize that the waxing and waning of interest is a cyclical thing with me. I just have to resist doing anything stupid, like throwing out or selling my miniatures. They just have to retreat back to the display cabinet for the meantime. But as a kind of last hurrah I went to Kashiwa on 9 June to play the Idol of Gork campaign with Joshua, a stalwart of the Oldhammer community here in Japan. Joshua is a fellow Aussie and an amazing painter, having worked at GW in the UK back in the day. His miniatures are painted to an exceptional standard, and are ample motivation for me to lift my game. He is also a big fan of campaigns. This particular campaign was released during the days of 5th edition, and pitted my beloved Empire against Joshua's greenskins in a battle for a border province. We played a total of three out of the four scenarios on that day. The scenarios are linked, meaning that success in one influences the troop composition of the final battle.

Halberdiers get absolutely smashed by a bunch of fanatics.

The first scenario pitted a swarm of night goblins in a dawn raid on an Empire encampment. Their goal was to acquire some kind of magic crown, and doing so would immediately end the game in a sudden victory for the greenskins. The crown was positioned smack bang in the middle of the battlefield, and my only defense was a sole unit of halberdiers, with the rest of the Empire line having to deploy back on their table edge. The game became a race for the rest of my Imperials to get up and support the halberdiers before they were overwhelmed by the goblin horde. This never happened. The halberdiers were hit by a total of five fanatics which absolutely decimated them, and then they were charged by a large unit of goblins with the Bad Moon Banner which allowed them to strike first despite having great weapons. The halberdiers were cut down to a man, and the goblins scuttled off with the crown. If I were to play this scenario again I would take a massive unit of halberdiers to soak up casualties. 30 was nowhere near enough. I think I would at least have 40 and even more to give the rest of the Imperials time to engage. The halberdiers got hit on turn one of the game and had no chance to manoeuvre. Their only option was to take whatever damage that was coming, and hope they pass their Panic or Break tests. This did not happen, so Joshua's greenskins were able to add the night goblin shaman and his magical items to his army list for the final battle.

Second battle of the campaign, in which orcs ambush an Imperial column.

The second scenario was another greenskin ambush on a column of Imperial troops. This time we had a turn or two to react. The greenskins' instant victory goal was to destroy all our war machines and kill our wizard, so I shielded my single hellblaster volley gun behind a unit of unbreakable flagellants, and kept my mounted wizard moving to keep him out of harm's way. My wizard had a spell which created an impassable pillar of fire, and he used that a couple of times to pin the orc infantry advance. The volley gun was either going to be a dud or an unstoppable engine of destruction, and this time out it proved to be the latter. It wiped out Joshua's boar riders along with his general. This victory secured the use of the wizard and war machines for the Empire in the final battle of the campaign.

The final battle of the campaign.

The final scenario we played on the day was an Imperial raid on an orc encampment. Our sudden victory goal was to set fire to four orc huts, and for this purpose we were allowed to take as many archers we could muster. I eventually fielded over 60 archers, the most I've ever done for any game of Warhammer I've ever played. I had to use Bretonnian archers as proxies, and luckily for me I had a ton of unpainted ones I could use. They didn't help me in the end, however, as the archers units were flimsy in combat, and were taken apart by the orcs before I could accomplish my objective. Joshua used the Hand of Gork spell in cunning orky fashion, teleporting his units all over the battlefield to engage my archers faster. The orc victory meant that Joshua would be bringing heavy duty magic to bear on my Empire in the final battle. The only consolation I could take from the battle was that my captain survived, and could hence be used in the last scenario.

The orcs are at the walls, captain!

Joshua and I played the final battle of the campaign a month later on 21 July. The Empire was tasked with defending a castle on their side of the board against a marauding horde of greenskins. At first the Imperial defense appeared rock solid, with the state troops holding their own thanks to the defended obstacle rule (attackers must roll 6s to hit until they win a round of combat). The Imperial archers were able to draw out Joshua's fanatics, and they splattered harmlessly against the walls of the keep and caused no damage. Things took a bad turn for the defenders, however, when wolf riders surged down the Imperial left, and a bunch of enraged squig riders started hopping madly all over the battlefield. Things became worse when the orc marauders at the walls finally won a combat, and soon the human defenders were being overrun by a green tide. We had a backup plan, however, which involved holding a second line in the keep's interior, where our fleeing troops would hopefully rally, and link up with my cavalry waiting in reserve. We also had a ton of artillery waiting to give the greenskins a whiff of grapeshot as they came over the walls. Sadly for me the hellblaster volley gun, so lethal in the second scenario, was a dud in the final battle, exploding in its first attempt to fire. The knights didn't fare any better, with my White Wolves running into Joshua's previously hitherto mentioned Bad Moon Banner unit. I can't remember what happened to my Knights Panther - the game was over four months ago now - but the White Wolves were eventually ground down, and the battle ended with the orcs swarming the keep and chanting, "'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go..." while the shattered remnants of the Empire force fled the castle.


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Kiss of War, Part I - Virtual Vixens of World War 2

May 2, 2020, 10:53 pm
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Thanks to the global pandemic sweeping the world I have had the opportunity to waste several hours on a new free to play game called Kiss of War. Social distancing had only recently swung into effect in Japan, and even then my workplace continues to have us come into work and share rooms with large numbers of people. Trains still run, workplaces are carrying on as normal, and toilet paper – after a brief one week period – is once again readily available. Only masks remain elusive, and that's partly because the corona epidemic hit at the same time as hayfever season in Japan. Every February to April perhaps a quarter of the population don on masks as invisible clouds of cedar pollen (“sugi”) descend out of the mountains and hyperstimulate the immune system response of a significant fraction of the population. Japan has the highest allergy rate in the world, something I found out to my chagrin as I began manifesting hayfever symptoms in my third year in Japan. Since that time I have hated Valentine's Day with a passion disconnected from the commercial or romantic aspects of that holiday. Valentine's Day marks the day when my eyes start itching, my nose starts dribbling uncontrollably, and my throat gets sore UNLESS I ingest copious amounts of anti-histamines beforehand. Ugh. The Japanese government planted swathes of cedar trees to replace the burned out forests ignited during World War 2, and the trees repaid that by giving hayfever to one in every four Japanese. Good work, scientists. Australia made a similar fuck up by introducing cane toads to control the problem of cane beetles back in 1935. Not only did the cane toads refuse to eat the beetles, they promptly decided to breed uncontrollably and spread their vile, disgusting spawn all over the eastern seaboard and kill off our indigenous species by being fat, easy to catch and poisonous.

Anyway back to Kiss of War. If you thought that it sounded like a free to play game with odious play to win mechanics and advertising characterized by voluptuous women wearing revealing clothing, then you are absolutely right. I can feel the silent judgement searing into my flesh as I chip away at this blog post, but I will persevere. I found the game while browsing Instagram for pictures of voluptuous women wearing revealing clothing, and was “compelled” to download it for a free trial. I've played one game like this before, exactly a decade ago. It was called Evony, and it too, sought to draw lonely incels into their web by advertising their game by displaying voluptuous women wearing revealing clothing. What worked for those companies 10 years ago worked again in the present, and here I am again playing exactly the same type of game. The only difference is that the term incels – shorthand for involuntary celibates – did not exist back then. Incel, social justice warrior, Gamergate, mansplaining, white knight, gaslighting, virtue signalling and a dozen more new additions to the English lexicon were spawned, redefined and deployed as weapons in the Internet culture wars of the last five years, and yet despite all the hubbub and clamour the fact remains that sex still sells as well as ever.

Marjorie, Katherine and Linda.

If voluptuous women wearing revealing clothing is how these companies get their target audience in, it's not what keeps them there. Let's face it, if you're there to jack off there are far better options out there. Pornhub, Xvideos and even YouTube itself has pretty much put the porn industry out of business by making “content” free and accessible. What keeps people in these games are the same things that keep people in other games, but it's the girls that get them to give the game a try. Games being a self-determined activity (i.e. we do it voluntarily) it falls under the ambit of psychology known as self-determination theory. According to headshrinkers Deci and Ryan, people who game are driven by intrinsic drives roughly classified into the categories of competence, relatedness and autonomy. Competence roughly correlates to the mastering the game and achieving a “flow” state, relatedness is our need for social bonds, and autonomy is the sense of being master of one's own fate. How much weight you give this typology depends on you, but the good thing about scientific papers is that they use much larger sample sizes than your average bloggers like myself, who more often than not base our pontifications on our anecdotal experiences. Doesn't mean it's true for everyone, or that it's even true at all. You can even wave it all away with the mantra of “fake news” if it offends your world view. That's the bankruptcy of moral relativism in a nutshell. But at least scientific experiments are honest attempts to probe the truth behind the veil, even if the conclusions are incomplete, unsatisfactory, or refuse to conform to your pre-conceived notions of what the world should be like. If you don't think science is a valid methodology for seeking truth then you should throw away your cell phone, stop flying in planes or driving cars, and turn off all the electrical appliances in your home, because all those things are powered by magic and it's bad jujuto use them.

I started my KoW journey outside the city of Prokhorovka, somewhere on steppes of the Soviet Union. Protected by a newbie shield which lasts for several days I took a cautious gander at the new world before me. The game boasts real world locations which only have a very rough correlation to their counterparts in real life. The map of KoW is what Europe would look like if you removed all the large bodies of water and squished everything together into a square map. There is also a superficial connection to World War 2 in that the units used to play the game represent American, German or Russian forces from that period. Forces are divided into tanks, infantry or anti-tank guns, and there is a triangular power relationship between the three types, with tanks being stronger against infantry, infantry being stronger than anti-tank guns, and anti-tank guns being stronger than tanks. The fourth force type is artillery, which is inferior to all the other types, but serves as load carriers and general cannon fodder. Each player has control of a single city which you can gradually upgrade by gathering resources. Resources are gathered from nodes which spawn periodically on the map, grown internally within the base, won from participating in various events, or plundered from other players.

I was immediately struck by the resemblance to Evony. The only real difference is the theme – Evonyis set in a pseudo-feudal setting with castles and knights instead of bases and WW2 units, but for all intents and purposes it is almost the exact same game. KoW has doubled down on the use of girls, though, by integrating them into gameplay. In Evony the girls in the advertisements are nowhere to be found in the game except in the tutorial. In KoW the girls are the commanders of your forces, and developing them is an integral part of optimizing your army. Each girl has three different talent trees as well as skills. You want a tank commander – Linda and Katherine are the girls for you. You want powerful garrison commanders? Then Maria and Grace fit the bill. Want fast resource harvesters? Then you'll need to send Marjorie and Evelyn to do your gathering for you.

This picture is not representative of gameplay at all.

There is a small mini-game which allows you to improve your relationship with each of your commanders. Before you get too excited, however, I am sad to report that, no, you can't have sex with them, nor do they strip off their clothes for your viewing pleasure. You can “touch” them by clicking on them, and they respond according to where they are touched and the level of your relationship with them. They grow more “familiar” the higher your affection rating becomes, but that really just equates to some light innuendo even at the highest levels. This isn't Bioware's Dragon Age or Mass Effect, where you can have PG-rated romantic relationships with your party members, and it's a far cry from Japanese hentai games, which feature hard core graphic cartoon sex, usually with another family member or some kind of slobbering tentacle monster. There is a slightly disturbing element with the youngest girl, Jeanne, but fortunately even at maximum affection she never becomes the Lolita that she is clearly marketed to be. There is also a nun appropriately named Angel who you cannot interact with at all, much to the dismay of the religious fetishists within the crowd. The game designers kept the game sad and perverted without crossing the line into pornography and hentai. Instead of a hardcore sex magazine you have a men's magazine with a model wearing a bikini on the cover and a four page photo shoot on the inside. At least in my eyes. I'm sure some would disagree. At the risk of virtue signalling I must confess that it is a game I would be embarrassed to admit to playing, except for the fact that I am now playing it, and blogging about it. Is there such a thing as vice signalling? Regardless, the girls had done their job. I was in the game, and now the only thing that remained was to see if the game could keep me.

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Kiss of War, Part II - Welcome to the EGGs

May 10, 2020, 5:31 pm
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Previous: Kiss of War, Part I - Virtual Vixens of World War 2

It is ironic that despite playing a game that is targeted at a specific male demographic I find myself in a guild led by a woman. My new guild is called Deviled, our guild tag is EGG, and our guild leader is a Dutch lady named PPT. The guild was a relatively new one and was advertising on zone chat, which prompted me to leave the guild which the game had automatically slotted me in, and join this seemingly more active one. The difference between my first guild and EGG was immediately clear to me, as EGG was far more active, setting up rallies at frequent intervals and joining ones which I set up myself. For the uninitiated, rallies are group efforts to take down a single target, which can either be an NPC or a human player. So if you were not strong to take on an Iron Behemoth, for example, which is a kind of mini-boss on the map, you would set up a rally, others would join it, and together you would take down the target and receive rewards based on the percentage of damage you inflicted in the battle.

I mentioned in my previous post that I was embarrassed at playing such an overtly sexualized game, but for the women in my guild it seemed to be a complete non-issue. I've been playing now for over a month and a half, and the blatant objectification of the commanders has never been raised once in guild chat by any of the female guildies. Since it seemed to be unimportant I stopped caring about it, and just went about the business of playing the game. The only times I balk is when I have to show the game to people in real life, and have to explain that despite the girls in miniskirts and garters, it is actually not a bad game. The response is invariably the same - “sure, mate, I bet it is” followed by an eye roll and a head shake. I have to admit that it's pretty funny, and just take the ribbing in good humor.

Anyway, I continue playing, and again and again I am struck by the game's resemblance to Evony. I am immediately at home gathering resources and upgrading my tech as fast as possible, because I know that the strong eat the weak in these type of games. EGG seems to be filled with cheerful, happy folk who address each other with an easy familiarity, and I soon find out why – most of them have played a similar game before, something called Game of Survival, and they are guildies from that game. In Evony I eventually became the one of the leaders of my guild, and in that game, too, my guild leader was a woman, a Kiwi girl named Aotearea which incidentally is the Maori word for New Zealand. I miss Aotearea – when I left that game I left all the other players behind, not realizing that the bonds that you make online are as real as the ones you make in meat space. People are not disposable, and this is a thing that I as an introvert wish I had learned much earlier in life.

My experience in these types of games is that if I put my head down, learn the game mechanics, and become competent in them I will eventually become a valuable guild member and ascend to a position of responsibility. For now I am content to learn about the new world I am in, and watch the interactions of my new guild. PPT is a cheerful presence, always active on chat and posting regular notices for the guild. Hush is PPT's second, and he lurks in the background, interjecting every now and then with a pithy comment. Kreature seems determined to be the alpha in the guild, and that is fine because he knows what he is doing, as far as I can tell. Banjo and Ace are Canadian pals, Peacewalker is a soldier in real life from Malaysia who just lost a friend in a motorcycle accident, and Tinash hails from India, judging from his city flag and the portrait he uses in Discord. V is the aunt of the guild, and she is a Belgian mother with two kids who drinks excessive amounts of wine.

The first test of this fledgling association occurred when a player named Five Star marched into our guild hive and torched a number of our bases. Each player controls a base, and these bases often congregate into a cluster called a hive in order to lend each other mutual support in PvE and PvP activities. EGG was a new guild filled with low power players, but the raider Five Star was rated over a million in power. Each player has a power number associated with them which reflects the size of their army and the tech level of their cities, and this guy far outstripped any of us. There was not much we could do, and to be honest, I didn't know what the fuck was happening. I had only just learnt how to read the map, and all I could see was a red army marching around our territory, a bunch of cities on fire, and guild chat all abuzz. I scouted Five Star from my starting position, and received no information at all, not realizing that my tech level was too low. All I did was tip off Five Star of my location, and he promptly sent armies my way. Unlike Evony you can see scouts and armies marching on the map in this game (in Evony we just had timers), and I was in a panic as I saw three armies marching towards my little city. Luckily I had a teleport on hand, and I was familiar with their use. Evony utilized the same system, and I was able to teleport to a location north of the EGG hive before Five Star could plunder my city.

That little episode reminded me of my first encounter with a far more powerful player during my Evony days. Dragre was the bane of my first guild, and he was responsible for uniting us, and making me want to become stronger so that I could fight back. I can recall these people because I have a notebook containing the names of my allies and enemies during the time I played Evony, as well as maps and coordinates, all painstakingly written by hand. Kiss of War allows you to do it within the game, which I suppose is a logical evolution for this sub-genre. I had numerous accounts, diplomatic contacts, allies and spies in other guilds. I was heavily invested, but I walked away eventually because it was consuming my life. The coronavirus epidermic is the only thing that made this return possible, but I had no idea that I was coming back to almost the same kind of game I left a decade ago. 10 years ago I wanted to check out some virtual chicks, and instead found a family of like-minded individuals who would prove friendly, loyal and fun to hang around with. We shared common goals, experienced highs and lows together, and developed bonds that were no less real for having been forged in a virtual space.



Evony is still going strong as a game, and in fact advertised itself during the 2017 Super Bowl in a long commercial starring Aaron Eckhart, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Fan Bingbing. It has come a long way from its initial roots as a game which used big breasted maidens to lure players into playing a pay to win Civilization-like MMO clone. Kiss of War is not there yet, but it looks like the developers are trying to follow in its footsteps. Whether it succeeds or not remains to be seen.

TBC

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Kiss of War, Part III - The World According to Hobbes

May 10, 2020, 10:43 pm
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I've been trying to learn the game by quietly taking on cities smaller than me. I scout them out, check to see if they are affiliated to a powerful guild, and observe them over a period of time to see when they are active. I probe them to see if I can get a response before attacking, and if they're not online, I pounce.

If this sounds cowardly and unsporting I have two answers for that. Firstly, this is not a symmetrical PvP game where players begin with identical resources and abilities. In such games the starting conditions are as equal as possible in order to maximize a skill-based result. The reasoning goes that all things being equal it will be skill that decides the outcome. Real world examples include combat sports like boxing or judo, or any other sport that groups participants into weight classes. My favorite boxer is Roberto Duran, a lightweight like myself. Unlike myself Duran is regarded as perhaps the greatest lightweight of all time, and he even made a name for himself by enjoying success in higher weight classes against welterweight and middleweight champions like Sugar Ray Leonard, Carlos Palomino, Davey Moore and Iran Barkley. Despite his greatness Duran would get annihilated by a top 20 heavyweight of any era, however, simply because he is too small. The purpose of weight classes is to remove the advantage of weight so that the result is primarily determined by skill, grit and tenacity, not by size. KoW is not that kind of game. While you can argue that skill exists in optimizing the various builds and logistical aspects of the game such a skill set would do nothing against a player who has paid thousands of dollars in building up their army and city. I would bet that a 300,000 player who knew all the ins and outs of the game would get rolled by a 2,000,000 newbie. The best thing the 300,000 player could do would be just to pop a shield, teleport away, or attempt to negotiate. Fighting would be suicidal.

Two of the greatest of all time - Roberto Duran, the greatest lightweight of all time, versus Sugar Ray Leonard, one of the greatest welterweights of all time.

My second point is an adjunct to the first. Games like these are fundamentally asymmetrical, with the biggest factors being time and money. Cities develop at a cost of time and resources, but can be sped up through the injection of real life money. Pay to win proponents argue that such mechanics are justified because money simply offsets the advantage of players who have a lot of time. Players are either money-rich or time-rich, so the argument goes, and both confer an advantage in the game. Paying money offsets the time differential and allows time-poor players, or those who started late, a way to quickly bring themselves up to parity. The problem with this is that players who are neither money-rich or time-rich start at a major disadvantage. Theoretically the end point is the same – everyone will upgrade their town hall to level 25 and have access to T5 troops eventually. This is the biggest argument used by pay to win developers – roughly paraphrased it states that everyone has access to the highest tiers of the game, and paying only speeds up the journey. Money confers no advantages, only speed of access.

This is horseshit of course. If you stretch out the power curve long enough the money-rich players (meaning people who are willing to pay real money, not necessarily rich people in real life) will enjoy huge advantages during the march to the top, even if everyone gets to the summit eventually. If the rise to maximum tier takes six months, and whales can get there in a day by paying money, then those whales can enjoy six months of beating on other people and feeling awesome about themselves. Persistent worlds, by their very nature, automatically create asymmetry and inequality. Symmetrical games like chess, boxing or StarCraft are equal and finite. Matches have a fixed period, the players start with identical resources, and the game is over once time has elapsed. Persistent worlds, however, are ongoing. They are finite in the sense that the company that runs this game will one day pack up and shutter its doors, but in terms of gameplay it is a single, ongoing match of indeterminable duration in which players can drop in and out at any time. Even if pay to win didn't exist, the player who started on Day 1 would still have a qualitative and quantitative advantage over a player who started on Day 60. Add to that the other inequalities imposed by time zones, levels of readiness, guild sizes and individual skill disparity between individuals, and there is no way you can argue that this game is fair, at least in the way “balanced” games are.

Thomas Hobbes. He would definitely teabag you if he could.

If you accept the game is fundamentally asymmetric then you should try to maximize every advantage you have, and minimize your weaknesses. Therefore you should not pick fights with anyone bigger than you until you are ready. Or unless you can bring friends. In asymmetrical PvP the words fair and equal don't matter. Only winning does. Or living to fight another day. Diplomacy trumps fighting, because it can circumvent conflict, or bring in allies that can help you win. It's a world where big guilds prey on little ones, and you need friends. No one survives alone in this Hobbesian world made manifest. In his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes laid down on paper his vision of a world without a strong central authority to govern it. He posited that such a world would be in a constant state of "war of all against all" - bellum omnium contra omnes, because humans by their very nature are selfish, greedy and brutish creatures. Perhaps you object to this dim view of human nature, but I point to the moral wasteland that is the Internet as a compelling piece of evidence to support this. If that is not convincing enough there are numerous examples throughout history of how the social contract breaks down in periods of scarcity. There is a saying by Vladimir Lenin, roughly paraphrased, that every society is three meals away from anarchy.

Why would people play such a game? I can only answer for myself of course, but for me there are two reasons. One is the vicarious thrill of living in such a perilous world without the hefty consequences. If things go really bad I can just quit and uninstall. The second is the road to power offered in such games. If you play KoW you will have to accept that you are starting as a nobody, and will have to navigate your way to the top of the server by being in turns clever, strategic and diplomatic. You will have to make friends, fight enemies, face good times or bad times. You will be forced to surrender, or flee on occasion. You will have to lie, bluff, beg, bluster and trust. You will have to find a guild of like-minded individuals and share in their story. Going back to self-determination theory, I satisfy my need for competence by becoming better at the game and learning how to play it well. I satisfy my need for relatedness by finding a guild of good people, and sharing in their highs and lows as we try to advance our status on the server. Finally, I satisfy my need for autonomy by feeling like I am the hero of my story within the game – I believe that despite the obstacles and all the inequalities in front of us, my guild and I will carve out a little place of our own in this virtual world. Real life has more in common with asymmetrical, persistent games like these than in controlled, balanced and finite matches that characterize balanced games. Perhaps that's the attraction for me. We all know that life is unfair. But maybe, just like in life, if we are clever, stubborn and tenacious enough, we can get the things we want.

TBC

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Kiss of War, Part IV - The Sack of Tula

May 25, 2020, 10:25 pm
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So as stated in my previous post, I had been quietly fighting bases near mine in order to learn the game mechanics. The server was relatively young, and so it was populated by a great deal of new accounts which meant I was in a target rich environment surrounded by people at about my level. My best opponent in my KoW formative years was a Brazilian played named Capelbaro. He was the first person I tried to zero, a term which denotes either i) the reduction of the enemy's army to zero, or ii) reducing the opponent's base health to zero and triggering a random teleport. The first part was easily achievable if you have a stronger army, but the second takes far more time. Bases begin with 24k health, and burn at a rate of 1 health per second (without guild modifiers). That's 3600 points of damage per hour, and it means that a base will take SIX TO SEVEN hours to reduce to zero. That also doesn't factor in additional attacks, which cause a negligible amount of damage each time, nor does it factor in repairs done by the defender, who can repair at a rate of 500 points every 30 minutes.

Still, I stuck doggedly to my task, and of course Capelbaro logged on and saw my armies swinging by to keep his city ablaze every 30 minutes. He couldn't do anything, though, as his army had been destroyed earlier. He did repair what he could and sent out a counter, but it was weak and easily repelled. At this point I asked him to join our guild, and thus began a series of chat conversations where I would ask him to come and join us, and he would reply with a monosyllabic "No." I later found out that he had been hit by the guild earlier, and yet rather than teleporting to a safe spot or shielding, he doggedly refused to give ground. There was nothing he could do however, and eventually his base health reached zero and he was randomly teleported away from our guild territory.

Karma has a way of being a vengeful bitch, however, and our assault on Capelbaro was revisited on us tenfold. It began with a woman named SayCheese, a Russian guild called Ruu, and an event called Ghost Rebels. Our guild was founded south of a city called Tula, and it was in the shadow of an enormous Russian guild which dominated the entire eastern map. Hush had somehow made an arrangement with this Russian guild to share the city of Tula, and they allowed us to occupy the city for a time and enjoy the buffs. All seemed fine and dandy, until DeathNote, a guild officer, inadvertently started the Ghost Rebels event. This event triggered wave after wave of NPC enemy troops, and those of us online scrambled madly to protect our bases and each other. When it was over we were pleasantly surprised to see that the rewards for the event for quite significant, even for those bases who were unable to hold off all 25 waves. The shit really hit the fan, however, when SayCheese logged on and found that she had missed out on the event and the attendant rewards. There was a vicious spat in guild chat which ended with DeathNote ragequitting the guild, and with SayCheese momentarily silenced after she vowed never to speak on guild chat again. 

Little did we know of the revenge she was planning. I logged on in the morning to find myself in the midst of a full scale Ruu assault. SayCheese had apparently attacked a number of Ruu cities in a fit of apocalyptic rage, and this, coupled with a misunderstanding over the transfer of Tula back into Ruu hands, had led Ruu to decide that this little guild at the edge of their territory need not remain there any longer. This was my first experience of a large battle, and it was not a pretty sight, as most of Ruu were much more powerful than us and soon our hive was ablaze. Only Kreature could offer any resistance, and he was grossly outnumbered - the rest of us were too small, inexperienced and disorganized to do anything except shield or teleport away. The EGG leadership had already decided that our position here was untenable and had begun an evacuation to a peninsula northwest of Krakow. The Ruu offensive began moments after the evacuation began, and it was pandemonium. Some of us were trying to defend Tula, some were teleporting to the new hive location, and others were trying to defend their own bases. I was playing a game with the multiple Ruu bases scouting me by pulling my armies out and trying to bait a weak attack. This failed completely, as two Ruu bases simply teleported next to my base while my main army was outside, and began pillaging my base at point blank range. I lost a great deal of resources as my army hustled back as quickly as it could, and once the soldiers were inside we teleported and fled.

TBC

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Kiss of War, Part V - Diaspora

June 3, 2020, 7:49 pm
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Like the Jews of antiquity, our guild was forced into exile, but instead of the Egyptians of Exodus we were pursued by the Russians of Ruu. Our flight into exile was a frantic one, with many of our guildies who were offline or too slow being sacked and burned. We didn't have a Moses, but we had a Kreature, and he teleported into the heart of the Ruu hive and started burning Ruu bases left and right. None of the larger Ruu seemed to want to take him head on, preferring to plunder the weaker EGGs at our burning hive, and so he faced no organized opposition. Soon the Ruu hive was also on fire, and Kreature was soon joined by Hush, PPT's second. Inspired by this frenzied assault into the heart of enemy territory I also teleported into the fray, and started attacking the weakest of the Ruu with my meager forces. PPT had made several peace overtures to Ruu which were ignored, but soon word came that Killden, leader of Ruu, would allow us to leave in peace. Thanks to Kreature's reckless charge, we had bought ourselves a ceasefire. By that time many of the EGGs had been looted and plundered, and quite a few (LuxuriaCat, I'm looking at you) decided discretion was the better part of valor and joined their vanquisher's guild. The instigator of the incident, SayCheese, was gone and had joined another guild far, far to the west. For those in the vanguard there was no immediate relief - our goal was to set up a new base as quickly as possible, and that meant ejecting the smaller guild that lived in the peninsula we wanted to claim for our own. I can't remember the name of this guild, but the carnage Ruu inflicted on us was paid forward to them. They only numbered four or five bases, and they had no chance. Such is the nature of this game. The weak get taken, and there is always a bigger fish. Hobbes would have been vindicated in his dim view of human nature.

Exodus, and the beginning of the Jewish diaspora.

Ruu is now my official enemy in this game, even though I bear them no real animosity. We now inhabit a small peninsula northwest of the Polish city of Krakow. I went to Krakow in real life in August 2019, not actually realizing that my first European trip could be the last one for years thanks to this pandemic. The virtual Krakow doesn't have nice weather, lovely people or bustling markets. In fact, I don't actually know what benefits city ownership confers. It must be significant, because guilds fight over them all over the map. Our new home is cold, windswept and bereft of resources. We are pretty much the Starks of Winterfell if this was the Game of Thrones. I now have two accounts - my main is Guderian, and my alt is Manstein. Any student of history will immediately recognize the names I used as the preeminent German generals of WW2. Guderian is credited (largely by himself!) as the father of blitzkrieg, while Manstein is considered to be one of Wehrmacht's very best generals. Manstein drew up the successful plan to invade France, captured the fortress city of Sevastopol, and defeated a Russian force that outnumbered him 6 to 1 in the second battle of Kharkov. I named my generals after their historical counterparts because I'm a history nut, and my forces in-game were nominally German. Would it be virtue signalling if I said I'm not a fucking Nazi? Just so I don't get misquoted in the future. Guderian and Manstein are great generals, but they took great pains to help create the myth of a clean Wehrmacht, and their subordinates have testified to the contrary. At best they were passive bystanders, fully aware of the atrocities perpetrated in the eastern territories. But in the clean, sanitized, sexed-up version of World War 2 emulated in the mobile game we can pretend that they are honorable, upstanding and free of sin, apart from those I commit under their names.

The layout of our new home is a defensive masterwork, and I attribute all credit to Kreature for it. Ruu's attack on our original homeland near Tula taught me how warfare is waged in this game. Players use their cities much like aircraft carriers, and teleport close to their targets to minimize the march time between their cities and their targets. Teleports do not work in enemy territory, however, which means the closest enemies can teleport to are on the borders of guild territory. Raiders will have to cover the remaining distance by marching. What makes our peninsula so defensively sound is that we have covered every mile of it in guild territory through careful placement of guild towers. This means the entire peninsula is safe from marauding teleporters – the closest they can get are the borders, which are quite some distance from where most of the juvenile EGGs are placed. Any attack can be seen coming from a mile away, and can be subjected to numerous counterattacks. Lightning raids are out of the question – at least that's the theory anyway.

This is assuming, of course, that you are planning to stay within the confines of guild territory. Our new hive is poor in resources, and so I have to send my farmers on long trips to secure food, steel, oil and energy. I ended up placing Guderian outside our territory on the other side of the peninsula just so he could get access to more resources. Parking Guderian far from guild turf is not as risky as it sounds, because every night I parked Manstein's forces in Guderian's city to act as a garrison. Manstein, on the other hand, is located at the very back of the peninsula, and the significance of that is any would be attacker would need to travel through miles of guild territory to reach him. This means Manstein doesn't require a garrison at all, and so I sent his biggest army to reinforce Guderian while I slept. It didn't make him safe from attack, but the number of troops present would have exacted a high toll on anyone willing to have a go.

Another reason for parking myself out of guild territory is that it would give me freedom of action to attack the small bases around me. I still needed to learn the ins and outs of combat, and I couldn't do that tucked away in the safety of our territory. So while my guild settled into our new home I was out in the steppes committing bloody murder in the night. Again, this was not personal - it's a war game and I needed to learn the rules if we were ever going to rise again and get our revenge against Ruu. I zeroed a couple more bases, making sure that my victims were not affiliated with powerful guilds and being careful to pick on bases less powerful than I was. Most of these guys were inactive and didn't put up a fight - more than likely they were trial accounts that lapsed, but they gave me a great opportunity to learn combat mechanics against a passive opponent. One base fought back, but he or she contented themselves with just one attack that set my base on fire while my troops were out, and then they teleported out of the area of their own volition.

One funny anecdote I have is that the first guy I ever zeroed, Capelbarbaro, found me again and began spam scouting as revenge. After having his base defense reduced to zero and being randomly teleported away he had apparently scoured the map for my new location, found our new hive, and started spam scouting me. Whenever your base or troops are being scouted or attacked your UI begins to flash red, and it can be used to distract or annoy people. I really admired Capelbarbaro's stubborn tenacity, and told him so in a private message. That prompted the end of scouting, and I hope that if I ever get zeroed in this game I will conduct myself with the same tenacity and grace that this Brazilian player had after I zeroed him.

Next: TBC

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Kiss of War, Part VI - Kill Event

June 10, 2020, 11:12 pm
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Kill Event is the colloquial name for the tail end of a larger event known as Mightiest Commanders, and it involves all players trying to amass as many kills as possible during a 48 hour period. Clearly it is an event that is common among games of this genre, as the EGG leadership posted about it well in advance and warned everyone about the possible ramifications, the most dire being the possibility of being zeroed. Being zeroed entails the theft of all your base's resources and the death of your entire army, and this occurs when you can't defend yourself adequately against a raider, or a group of raiders.

There are five things of value in this game:

(1) Officer level, talents, and skills.
(2) Army quality and size
(3) Base tech level
(4) Resources
(5) Guild tech level

Your technical goal in this game is to steadily increase all of these items. Out of these five items only (2) and (4) can be affected by enemy players. Armies can be killed, and resources can be stolen - tech and officer levels, on the other hand, are forever. Once researched the effects apply for good. Your base defense can be reduced to zero, but never destroyed - all it means is that you are randomly teleported to another location on the map.

This means that the only thing that you can really lose in the game are resources and your army. Most people will not bother zeroing a base down to zero defense, because it is a time consuming process (between 6-7 hours, believe me I know how painful this is) that doesn't really achieve anything. The more common meaning of being zeroed entails losing all of your army and all of your resources at your base. Therefore the aim of weaker players during KE is to preserve these things at the lowest possible cost to yourself. Garages mitigate against army loss by saving a certain number of troops from death, allowing them to be brought back later at the cost of resources. Storehouses mitigate against resource loss by keeping a certain number of resources safe from plunder. Neither garages or storehouses can ever be big enough to protect all but a fraction of your army or your resources, so the solution to this is to hide your army as reinforcements in shielded bases, or to consume as many resources as possible before KE begins to deny their loss to a potential raider. Another way of preserving your army is to hide them in guild towers, fortresses or cities. These buildings are protected by the game's special rules, which make these structures ineligible for attack unless the attacker has adjoining guild territory. Our guild leader PPT created a special thread on Discord which displayed shield timers in order to allow guild members to hide their troops in shielded bases and keep themselves safe from harm.

At this point of my KoW life I didn't see myself as potential prey, foolishly believing that I would be one of the predators. I spent my first KE in naive anticipation, gleefully rubbing my hands together at the thought of the carnage I would wreak. Kreature kicked things off by teleporting to the hive of MNE, a Mexican guild located far to the south of our new hive in France. Kreature went there by himself, but not before advertising the fact to the rest of the guild. Kreature is an alpha personality of the old school, conspicuously helpful and courteous to all the females of the guild, but needing to assert dominance when it comes to interactions with males he doesn't know well. He has a good relationship with FeistyBanjo, but Hush and Kreature had a brief run in which led to Kreature quitting temporarily, and he was only coaxed back by PPT later on.

His foray into MNE territory was met with initial success, as he was able to torch a few of the smaller bases without any resistance. The MNE guild leader, ggnoob99, marched out to meet him, however, and by virtue of sheer numbers was able to keep Kreature somewhat at bay. Kreature could have taken his armies, but at a significant loss to himself, and so he was at somewhat of a deadlock. I took this opportunity to ingratiate myself further with the EGG leadership by teleporting to MNE territory and attacking MNE bases as well. Faced with two active players ggnoob99 backed down and turtled in his base, leaving the rest of MNE at our mercy.

It was at this point that our old nemesis, SayCheese, resurfaced. After triggering the war with Ruu she had joined a much larger guild called HWS. MNE responded to our depredations by posting our coordinates on zone chat, in the hopes of attracting bigger fish to the fray. SayCheese saw Kreature, and began spam scouting him from her location in the HWS hive. I have to say that Kreature's response surprised the hell out of me. He immediately teleported to the HWS hive and began attacking SayCheese, triggering a defensive response from HWS.

Kreature was one of our server's early whales (a player who spends significant real life currency), and so he was certainly in the top 10% of the server in terms of raw power. But he was attacking a much bigger guild, and they had whales of their own. Their guild leader (?) Reaper came out to meet Kreature, and there was a massive battle on the fringes of HWS territory. Hush saw the battle and teleported in to help Kreature. As for me, I stood on the outskirts of MNE territory with my jaw on the floor. I am ashamed to say that I did not join the fray. My desire for solidarity was outweighed by the instinct for self-preservation. There was no way we could beat a guild of that size, and Hush and Kreature were soon very hard-pressed, being hit by rallies organized by Reaper and his team. The person who did port in was a player we didn't know, a German living in the Black Forest who would become our guild's most formidable fighter in the future. Tom Mirror's appearance on Hush's right surprised the crap out of everyone, but his appearance bought the EGGs some time. He was already one of the biggest players in our guild, but he rarely spoke. Actions speak louder than words, however, and his appearance pulled Kreature out of his blind rage and made him think beyond his hatred for SayCheese (who had changed her name to EarthWind by this stage). A ceasefire was reached, and the three EGGs returned home to safety.

Next: TBC

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