The Elder Diary: #20140418
As my spare time becomes more scarce and I prefer to write fewer blog posts but with more interesting content (at least more focused and containing less offtopic clutter), it's been quite a few months since I posted something about my painting progress or CRPG related entries.
As a summary, that I will probably do again in the future, this is more or less all what I've been doing:
Boardgames
D&D Castle Ravenloft: Not much to say, we played the first missions, it is interesting but hard to win the bad guys!
Our ongoing Risk Legacy campaign: Finished battle 9, really cool how the game develops, and still way to go until the map "becomes fixed".
Descent 2nd edition: I liked it so much I bought the base game. Expansions seem a bit meh, until I get tired of the base game I doubt will buy anything else.
Flash Point: A collaborative game where up to 6 firemen try to save 7 people from a house while fire and smoke spreads and causes explosions.
CRPGs
Braverly Default: I'm loving it. Same as Final Fantasy series are dead (last games being a disgrace), this is a nice spiritual successor, combining Final Fantasy III job system with summonable friend special moves and combat tweaks, plus configurable difficulty setting and encounter %. And lovely graphics. Did I already say I'm enjoying it a lot?
Zelda: A link between worlds: I was reluctant to play this because the 2D Link wasn't appealing, but I tried and I actually like a lot the puzzles, but I agree on the general consensus that it is quite easy. I haven't finished it yet, but due to lack of time.
Project X Zone: More tactical than RPG, it's very similar to Final Fantasy Tactics but with simpler "fighting-like" battles.
Diablo 3 expansion: Now it finally is a roguelike and action house went to hell, so has become what it should have been two years ago.
Warhammer Quest on iOS: Along ALL expansions, and now I'm playing the additional characters, so you can imagine how much I like this game. One of the best purchases for my iPad, it's so great to have a "portable WHQ" even for holidays.
Space Hulk: One of my big dissapointments, and not due to the game itself, because the mechanics are so nicely replicated, but due to the mess of technical issues and bugs that come and go on most game updates. From neverending turns to glitches, sound muting or crappy 3D performance (I recently updated my graphics card, which makes the situation even more absurd), if the game worked tecnhically correct it would be great.
Also the DLC plague made it a "just buy the basic game, and if on sale, better" approach.
Shadowrun Returns: After finishing the main game, how with the Berlin campaign/addon free for being a backer I'm having more netrunning and turn-based combat. I still have my hopes in the fan-made content for the long term, but even without it is a nice old-school like RPG.
Fire Emblem: Awakening: This was a cool strategy-RPG mix, that hooked me to my 3DS for weeks. I pumped 30+ hours to finish the main story and didn't managed to do every side-quest and character sub-plot, so it can become a really long game if you want.
RPGs
Not much, although I'm reading a lot of Warhammer 40,000 codexes for the lore and background (literally skipping the rules). I must have read around a dozen codexes, along with companion books (new Games Workshop way of squeezing more money, put half of the lore in another book), and of course the books which I still do reviews here.
But no pure RPGs since a while...
Painting & Assembling
I'm still assembling all Deadzone minis, plus a cool Imperial Knight and some unexpected things; GW's new website and the exclusive minis touched my collector weak point so I grabbed my wish list and now have a few more things to take care of.
I'm currently painting the Imperial Knight, and had some started minis pending (some old Rogue trader-era MKVI Space Marines and some Necron basic troops) also on the queue for whenever I want to change a bit.
As usual, with my rate of painting It'll take weeks, but I prefer to go slow but leave it in a decent painting level (decent for my skills, not for normal standards which are way higher).
Apart from normal miniatures, I've finally started painting a Star Trek Enterprise model I had from my trip to Australia a few years ago. I expect to finish it soon as I don't want to ad too many details.
Deadzone Kickstarter
Few weeks ago I received my last pledged kickstarter boardgame, Deadzone from Mantic games. I wanted it mainly because of two reasons:
- Necromunda is "deprecated" and forgotten by Games Workshop. Many miniatures are no longer available and those still in stock are expensive, so Deadzone serves as a good source of squads, plus I get to choose if to use Necromunda or Deadzone rules.
- I loved the modular scenery idea. Not having any Necromunda-like scenery my scenarios would be quite limited, and with Deadzone I have quite some options now. Some of the miniatures are also quite awesome (Enforcers, some Plague models, Orks/Marauders...) so even if I don't enjoy the rules, I still get quite a few cool minis to paint (some day...).
So, while I wait for the second shipment of the kickstarter (zombie miniatures and the Forge Fathers/Squats 5th faction), I've been busy this days assembling all the scenario and some of the miniatures and this are my thoughts.
First of all, I pledged for a Strike Team. For 150$ you get the starter box (see photo below, Enforcer & Plague factions, scenery, rules, etc.), plus Rebs faction, Marauders faction, a fifth faction (I choose Forge Fathers), some zombies, a nice gaming mat and some extra scenario sprues.
All the miniatures and scenario come in hard plastic. No assembly instructions included.
So far, miniatures I've assembled come with some moulds and require a low-to-med amount of cleaning work, but overall are better than Sedition Wars ones. The amount of detail is great, and as expected some of the minis are fantastic. I still have lots of plastic bags to open and assemble but looks near 50 miniatures on the 1st shipment.
Scenario is also hard plastic, in different sprue types containing walls, floor/ceilings, corridors, doors, windowed walls, and accessories like barrels, boxes and ladders. There are also two sprues with the "connectors", small pieces that allow to join walls/bases/barriers either adjancent or with a 90ยบ angle.
This are some photos of most of the buildings I decided to make. The bridges are not glued to any building so I can put them anywhere. I also did some horizontal and U shaped barriers. I used most of the pieces.
Regarding the buildings, while there were a lot of sprues, you must decide if to make lots of small buildings, or fewer but bigger or taller ones. I built 4 1x1 small ones, two 2x1, a 3 stories tall one and a "small landing pad" that allows to place a building over it and acts as an elevated building with cover. Plus three barriers and two bridges.
And my main (and almost only) complaint is about the connectors. While the idea is cool, in practice it has some flaws:
- Sometimes they connect gently, sometimes I needed to push them really hard with a lime. I even broke a long metal lime so imagine the pressure I was applying...
- They are hard-plastic, but because if the previous issue, it is far from easy to detach them once joined. I broke 3 or 4 this way, and ended up planning a lot every connection before making it.
- There are way too few of them. In order to make all my desired buildings, I had to only use one connector per "side" instead of two, so the joints are half as firm as they could be. Red areas in the photo below were left without connectors (green areas).
And despite that optimization, I barely had enough for everything. At least the kickstarter pledge should contain an extra sprue of connectors.
Also this means you must glue all pieces to improve stability and avoid pieces breaking/unjoining.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results. I now have 5 squads (containing the Escher Necromunda one), lots of scenery and two game rules to apply with them, and I'm still pending more minis.
The base game might be a bit pricey when launches (around 14 miniatures and less building sprues) but I think the kickstarter was worth it.
Risk Legacy Battle #9 Log
New playing session today, new battle log.
Things are quite hot lately, so be warned of massive text and visual spoilers.
Just to summarize I'll say that the fourth cover booster was opened and the world capital city has been founded.
We're 6 games from the initial "world winner" but looks some of the missions, scars and resource coins will last more, so planet won't be fully customized until a bit later.
Sedition Wars Kickstarter received
More than a year ago, I decided to put money in the Sedition Wars Kickstarter. It was already going perfectly, with enough funds to be a reality, and starting with the nice and interesting perks, so was a sure bet.
The base game comes with 50 miniatures, cards, scenario board pieces and the rulebook, but the perks ended up adding dozens of new miniatures, plastic markers, cool dice, a painting DVD and additional campaigns in PDF. The minis were both more base soldiers and monsters and some special characters for free.
They looked so cool and I was so happy that I ended up adding to the base perk one additional character ("suspiciously similar" to the main Dead Space videogame character ;) and the "terrain pack", with lots of doors, futuristic furniture, defense towers and similar stuff.
I received the first game and part of the "free perks" a while ago, but only recently I've been finally able to finish assembling the miniatures, so it almost got overlapped with the arrival few weeks ago of the wave two, containing all remaining free stuff plus my additional paid items.
I now have my "workshop table" full of Sedition Wars minis but I'm almost done assembling even the wave 2 ones, so I can now give a review of the general quality of the product.
I haven't yet read the rules nor played any game so I don't know how deep shallow or great or crappy it is. At least they did a second run of unit cards and sent them for free, so while it might look it didn't took enough testing at least they tried to fix it.
Well, let's go with the minis themselves.
The minis are great 25mm sculpts. I instantly fell in love with the design and poses of them, both the human soldiers and alien monsters. Some of them are more bizarre, others more "organic", others almost like an alien robot... but all look quite cool and have dynamic poses.
Instead of getting lots of same-pose minis just with different weapons, there are male and female soldier variants, helmet or no helmet, raised or lowered weapon... Looks really cool to see just two or three repetitions of some marines.
And of course the special characters are cool, both in their human form and mutated/infected alien counterpart. They are going to be hard to paint with so much detail on 25mm but definetly cool sculpts.
Then, we go into the materials... and then everything gets grim. Except a single wave 2 miniature (which comes in resin), everything comes in hard plastic. And while hard plastic can have really good level of detail, and it indeed has here with the miniatures has sometimes an amazing level of detail... oh my the moulding lines.
The f***ing moulding lines. The terror of miniature assembly and painting. Piece joint holes can be covered with green stuff, but moulding lines can only be "fixed" by trying to remove them as best as you can. And Sedition Wars is a disaster regarding plastic injection.
By far the worst moulding lines I've seen in years assembling boardgames and miniatures, it gets even worse due to being smaller 25mm minis. I've spent countless hours removing mould lines, and in some places I directly gave up. hairs, armour pieces, helmets, faces, arms... I've seen variants of any human and alien body piece with big ugly crossing moulding line :(
Some piece joints are also not perfectly molded and require cutting or softening + green stuff, but as I said before that's easier to tackle with.
Miniatures are great, game looks cool, it was worth the (kickstarter) price due to the amount of components and extras, but if the centerpiece, the minis, come far from perfect, overall image suffers a lot. And I suffer as I bought the game first for the miniatures, second for the gameplay.
I'll probably do another round of smoothing the day I paint the minis, but what could have been perfect ended up being just "good" for a basic flaw.
6th edition game box and more kickstarters!
Well well, looks like this week is getting really interesting.
After releasing the big rulebook short ago, now comes the boxed 6th edition Warhammer 40,000 game.
Now in preorder (according to the warp internet sources, to be available the 1st of september), apart from a smaller rulebook (with only the rules) and some basic dice and markers, the game features Dark Angels vs Chaos Space Marines.
The best of the box are without doubt the new miniatures: Chaos cultists, new chaos space marines with lot of details, and the awesome hell brute (kinda chaos dreadnought), the chaos captain, and the Dark Angel special characters.
The tactical squad is ok (I've got tons of them), ravenwing bikes are cool (but I already have a few ones) and the Deathwing terminators are ok but I already have at least 40 of them! (things that happenswhen you start young and have multiple Space Hulk editions + an existing Dark Angels army).
UPDATE: There is a great official video of close-ups of all miniatures included.
Right now iti s the limited edition only, which features an interrogator chaplain for the Dark Angels (cool looking), so I'm in. Normal edition will be around 8$ less so I can pay the extra.
I also finished reading all the non-rulebook part of the 6th Edition book and my advice is the following:
If you want to just play, ignore the big book and grab the game box;
If you like to read a lot about setting, history, lore and battle examples, plus tons of great images of armies, grab also the big book. It is clumbersome for playing, but for all the Warhammer 40k lore is really cool.
And the second surprise is another kickstarter, this time about Mantic and their futuristic Blood Bowl Dreadball game.
The game needs little explanation: it simply is a futuristic version of Blood Bowl, with hex tiles (so slight movement changes) and the referee as its own miniature.
The game reminds me of Speedball 2 videogame, and while looks cool, the truth is I prefer the "fantasy" BB setting instead of this futuristinc one. Also Blood Bowl rules have been tested for many years (the living rulebook is free and up to date).
It also starts the kickstarter with 80$ for the boxed game containing two teams of 8 minis each + the ref, a bit high counting an additional 15$ for international shipping. As there are still 36 days left I will personally wait until they hit some stretches and add more basic contents before deciding.
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