Slow And Steady

I ran a demo game for a new member of our hobby group. This was my first game of Warmachine this year. I had put together two 30 points Unlimited lists in preparation. I ran a silly Strakhov2 list that I could use to show off a little of the jankier things you can do in this game, mostly centered around Alexia and LoLS to demonstrate soul and recursion mechanics. I don't think either of used a command card all game (though I did mention how he could use them a couple of times), but we both had Blessing, Lucky Penny, Old Faithful, Hit & Run, and For The Motherland (which I guess is not legal anymore but w/e).
Strakov2 (proxied by Strakhov1)
-Kodiak
-Elite Kommandos (2)(proxies)
-Reinholdt
Koldun Lord
Alexia 2 (& Thralls)(proxy)
Battle Mechanics
Legion of Lost Souls (Risen conversions)

The list I made for new players was intended to be simple and solid, mostly centered around demonstrating the basics, including the use of straighforwards buff spells. Ruin was a no-brainer. I included Bombardiers as versatile faction models with good overall stats and enough armour for Butcher's Deceleration to be meaningful. The Forgeseer fit with the MOW, was painted, and could help counter Strakhov's cloud/stealth tricks. Mechanics made sense as they are cheap and could repair most of the army.
Butcher1 (buff version)
-Ruin (proxied by Juggernaut)
Greylord Forgeseer (Bombshell conversion)
Man-O-War Bombardiers
-Bombardier Officer
Battle Mechanics


Pre-Game
I placed a simple 12" zone in the center and said any model could score starting from the second player's second turn, with the first to 5 points being the winner. I went firsts so I could demonstrate basics rules first. I gave him the terrain so he could place them as he wished.


Deployment
I put Strakhov and his support near the forest. The Kodiak in the center, with the Mechanics behind him, and Alexia and the Legion to the left. He spread his MOW in a line in front of the rest of his models (I could not remember the rules for deploying units).


Round 1:
Strakhov cast Inviolable Resolve on the Kodiak and Quicken on himself, used the Sneak battle plan and ran into the forest. His support followed. The Legion ran into the zone, clustered up in a shield wall. The Kodiak, excited to get to grips with the enemy, "accidentally" vented steam and killed all three mechanics. Oops. Oh well, accidents happen in war. Alexia respectfully and surreptitiously pocketed their souls - no point in letting good corpses souls go to waste, right? Walking up, she used the souls to craft three Thrall Warriors, who immediately ran forwards.

Butcher's army ran up, with Butcher himself staying behind the wall of Bombardiers, while the Forgeseer alone split off from the force. Butcher cast Deceleration, and put Vengeful on the Bombardier Officer.

Round 2:
I upkept both spells. Strakhov moved forwards just enough to take a shot at the Forgeseer, hitting and rolling just low enough to not do any damage. Alexia walked up and slung a Hellfire at a Bombardier, also somehow rolling just low enough to not do any damage. The Legion walked forwards and shot their pistols, doing some damage. The Thralls charged the Bombardiers, although only one could make the 3" needed for boosting damage. They finished off one Bombardier, but the return swing from Vengeful on the officer killed a Thrall. The Kodiak trampled up and used Vent Steam, the Kommandos then walked forwards and did the same.

Butcher upkept Vengeful and allocated to Ruin. The Bombardiers shuffled up a bit and killed the Thralls, allowing the Officer to lob a shot at the Legion; it missed but a roll of 10 on the blast damage still killed the target. The Mechanics then repaired some of the damage on the Bombardiers. Butcher Feated and cast Deceleration again. Ruin charged the Kodiak, dispelling Inviolable Resolve. I was surprised that even with Butcher's Feat and the free charge from his Bond, he still only just managed to finish off the Kodiak on his final hit (doing only one point of extra damage). The Forgeseer walked in to the zone and cast a Hoarfrost at the closest Legion grunt, killing it and also a second with another roll of 10 on the AOE damage. At least Alexia was close enough to take their souls.

Round 3:
I dropped Quicken. The Legion charged the Bombardiers, killing one and bringing back a member of the unit. One attack hit the Bombardier Officer, triggering Vengeful. The Officer's attack did no damage, but it was a Crit allowing him to use Shred to attack again (it was only later that it occured to me that Crit Shred is only during the model's combat action), unfortunately he rolled low again, leaving the Legion trooper untouched.

Alexia charged Ruin, using souls to buy attacks and boost damage rolls. She did some damage, not that much. One Kommando charged Ruin, the other I feared would block Strakhov's charge so I charged the Forgeseer instead, leaving her on one health. Reinholdt gave Strahkov a Lucky Charm (which came in handy as I think I rolled three 1's on a damage roll at one point). Strakhov then cast Last Stand on himself and charged Ruin. After buying all his attacks Ruin still had around 10 health boxes left; pow 11 is just sad really. The Koldun Lord managed to land a Brittle Frost on Ruin but did no damage.

With all my activations done Last Stand kicked in and Strakhov keeled over; karmic retribution for killing his own Mechanics no doubt.


Post-Mortem
It was a fun game that flowed fairly smoothly. I did end it somewhat prematurely using Last Stand, but I felt there wasn't much point in drawing it out too long. Still, in retrospect I probably should have let him take down Strakhov himself using Ruin. But this was actually my first game with Strakhov2 and I thought it would be funny for Strakhov to basically kill himself. I do think only have one jack per side is a bit of a problem, because losing that jack is hard to recover from; having a couple of jacks just sort of "buffers" the impact of losing one, or at least creates more of a back-and-forth. But I wanted to have a bit of everything without having too much of the power in the battlegroup as that might make the rest of the army feel redundant; I feel that gives a more accurate impression of the actual game. I think the Butcher list did what I wanted it to quite well, but I might re-write the Strakhov list.

A Prototype Deck Vault With Accessory Compartment

This design actually predates the gaming accessory box I posted earlier. It was intended for card games that use dice and tokens, like MtG. It would in theory work for games like Warmachine, but I think the accessory compartment is a little small as Warmachine requires rather a lot of tokens.

It is of course a double-topped design. I engraved a hand of cards on one lid and a dice on the other, to mark the different compartments. The accessory compartment is designed to be large enough for 16mm dice.

This was a prototype; you can see that I used dogbones for the box joints. For a "production" piece I would manually cut the pockets square so there won't be any holes. You can see that the resin inlays in the engravings did not come out very well; I've improved my technique since then, although I still need more practice.

I was using metal powder in two-part epoxy resin; despite my efforts to seal the wood first, some of the resin still seeped into the wood and dropped below the surface. Funnily enough those are the parts that look better; I mixed GSW metal powder into the resin, and it looks pretty good most places where the surface was not disturbed, but not where I sanded the resin flush with the wood, even after polishing with a dremel polishing bit and compound. I also tried to mix alcohol ink into the resin on the card deck symbol, to try to progressively change the colours of the cards, but that didn't quite turn out the way I had hoped. Since then I have obtained some coloured mica powders that seem to give better results.

One issue I'm having is splintering around the lid grooves. This might be partly caused by the quality of the plywood, but it is a bit of a delicate area. For this box I applied superglue to the tongues and grooves of the lids to try to strengthen them and prevent splintering (followed by some sanding to adjust the fit), and you can see where some of that glue got away from me and spread out across the surface. The box was not varnished; hopefully varnish will work to strengthen the tongues and grooves, removing the need for superglue.

I've been planning to take these to the local gaming spot and see if people are interested in having their own boxes customized with their own engraving etc, however I really want to make the final boxes from nice wood, not plywood, and that's surprisingly hard to get around here in appropriately sized sheets - at least with my current budget.

A Partitioned Gaming Box

The card box that I was using to hold my Warmachine cards couldn't hold any more, and I couldn't make it any deeper as it wouldn't fit into the accessory tray in my Warmachine transport case if I did. So I designed a partitioned box to hold two stacks of cards instead. I also added a third partion that was wide enough to hold dice and just long enough to hold my marker pen, with enough space left over for some tokens. The lid was also recessed slightly to serve as a tray; the idea was that I would hold the cards in place with my hand and dump all the tokens and dice onto the lid-tray.

I tried a new varnish and varnishing techniques; the varnish was brushed onto the body normally but airbrushed heavily onto the lid. It kinda looked quite green, so I sanded the body and lid lightly to reduce the tinting. The result wasn't what I was going for but it's kind of an interesting "aged" look. The box itself is fine, but that narrow rear compartment is awkward and doesn't have enough room for all the tokens and accessories I like to bring with me for Warmachine. I've decided that I have enough room to extend the rear compartment, so I might make another one in the future with more room. We'll see.

A Demo Game For Old Times' Sake

I ended up holding a demo game of Monsterpocalypse. I didn't play myself, instead walking both sides through the game phases and explaining the rules as we went along. For the most part I tried to leave both players to make their own decisions, but I did push them to use power attacks (which I walked them through) for several turns after the monsters got close enough, and gave suggestions on good plays when they asked towards the end of the game as the monsters' health started to get really low.

It was pure G.U.A.R.D. versus pure Empire of the Apes. We played using only base rules and models stats, with none of the rules on the models' cards (except High Mobility ofc, and sometimes Flight). The game was close, with King Kondo managing to pull off a rare win against Defender X. I believe both players knew a little about 40K but had no actual wargaming experience, and both seemed to enjoy the game. They seemed perfectly happy to not bother with the card rules; I think for their very first game just the core rules were enough for them to worry about. There was a bit of a discussion about the game's availablity, and it was nice to be able to say that there are digital models available.

Spriggan: The Untold Story

"When Queen Ayn Vanar ordered the Mechaniks Assembly to give her a warjack that would turn the tide of the Motherland's ongoing border wars, they provided her with the Spriggan." - Forces of Warmachine: Khador

MECHANIK:	"Your royal highness, for years the Khadoran military has relied on the iconic Juggernaut, with its powerful MAT7 POW19 axe, and the humble yet beloved Destroyer, with its simple yet effect RNG14 POW14 AOE3 bombard cannon. Well, I am proud to present to you our latest and greatest creation, the mighty Spriggan!" "With its MAT6 POW18 lance it is less accurate and not as hard hitting as the Juggernaut. But it has two guns; not giant cannons that take advantage of the size and weight of the platform, but tiny little RNG10 POW10 AOE2 guns that could easily be carried by infantrymen. Also at ARM19 it has less armour than the ARM20 Juggernaut chassis - but we gave it a shield. Of course it's a POW14 shield that is much worse than the POW16 shield the Devastator chassis the Spriggan was built on is already equiped with. Oh, and the whole thing costs 50% more to manufacture than the Juggernaut." "As I'm sure you've realised by now, I am a Cygnaran agent who has infiltrated the Mechaniks Assembly in order to sabotage your production of war materials. I'm sure you will execute me now for wasting so much time and money on this nonsensical design, but I proudly sacrifice my life for my..."
QUEEN VANAR:	"IT'S AMAZING! PUT IT INTO MASS PRODUCTION RIGHT NOW!"
MECHANIK:	"Wait, wat?"

Fin.

---

I believe that a model's rules should be consistent with the model's story. A knight in shining armour should have a higher ARM value than a peasant in rags, and a sniper with a scoped rifle should have more range than a guy with a bandolier of throwing knives. So for me the Spriggan's strangely compromised stats are at odds with the fluff that served as its introduction.

Back in Mk2 it had the same MAT as a Juggernaut, and I could accept the lower POW on the lance as a tradeoff for the lance's longer range - even though other armies had warjacks that did not make this tradeoff, with expensive elite warjacks having straight-up better melee stats than the cheap beaters (for example the Mk2 Ironclad with its MAT7 RNG0.5 P+S18 hammer compared to the Stormclad with its MAT7 RNG2 P+S19 sword), and Khador even had an elite warjack with the weapon range of the Spriggan and the power of the Juggernaut in Beast09.

But I never understood the lower base ARM; why build a new Khador warjack (that according to the fluff was like 50% heavier than the existing chassis) with less armour, just to give it a shield? A shield which, despite being described in the fluff as being "heavy enough to deliver a crushing counterattack", is less powerful than an empty fist? I get that, rules-wise, an ARM22 warjack can be seen as a problem. But remember we had ARM25 Devastators at this point, and unlike other factions Khador had no ARM buffs at the time. I'm just saying it doesn't make much sense fluff-wise.

Then in Mk3 the Juggernaut chassis received a MAT upgrade to 7, while the Spriggan stayed at MAT 6 despite being an expensive melee jack (it also received a nerf to the guns, which unlike before - and contrary to the fluff - could now be crippled). Supposedly this was to keep it in line with the Devastator chassis, which also remained at MAT6 and now had a base ARM of 19 (the Spriggan was also buffed with the Devastator chassis' Steady rule, but for some reason not its Sturdy rule).

But why would it need to have the same MAT when it was built for different purposes? According the fluff the Devastator was build to use lower-grade cortices due to Khador's difficulty making high quality cortices, while the Spriggan was specifically designed as an elite warjack to present to Ayn Vanar herself! Also, partway through Mk3 the Berserker chassis, which in the fluff is described as a REALLY old, practically obsolete design that still used ancient cortices that had degraded with time, got upgraded to MAT6. Surely at this point the MUCH newer and more expensive Spriggan should have a MAT7 cortex, if not the entire Devastator chassis (that, remember, had previously had the same MAT as the Juggernaut)?

Then in Mk4 they dropped the base ARM on the Devastator and Demolisher to 18, so the Spriggan is no longer consistent with the chassis anyway! So why not bump it up to MAT7 now? At the same time, PP introduced the new Mk4 Khador warjacks that were ARM20 with access to shields, so ARM20+2 became normal. Yet the poor Spriggan is still stuck at the perplexing ARM19+2 statline that just doesn't make sense fluff-wise. Bear in mind Khador's new Great Bear is ARM20+2 at MAT7 with access to a RNG2 POW19 melee weapon alongside a POW 14 cannon with the pistol rule for the same price or cheaper than the Spriggan, leaving the sad old Spriggan completely outclassed. Hell, the new Avalanche, which is the same cost as the Spriggan and also has a RNG2 lance and a shield, has the Great Bear's MAT7 ARM20+2 statline, but at SPD5!

Yes, the Spriggan has some nice rules on it, but so do the Great Bear and Avalanche. For a while I continued to argue for the Spriggan needing at least a little bit of help; a single extra point of MAT would go a long way. But SGF just released their annual balance update, and it became clear that SFG/PP don't give a damn about classic Khador anymore. So yeah, even I have to admit there isn't even the tiniest grain of hope anymore for the Spriggan's rules making sense in the context of its fluff.

I still love the look of the jack, being one of my personal favourite models in the game, and I still think it's capable on the tabletop with all the utility if brings - if a little expensive and outclassed in several important ways by other options. I just hate that it just always seems to have been short-changed for no apparent reason. Well, that's the way it goes sometimes; some stuff is great, some stuff just does not work on the table the way it's supposed to. Still makes me sad when I think about it though.


--EDIT--
I forgot to mention that the original text seen above specifically says:

"... an impenetrable shield in addition to its tremendous underlying chassis armor".

This is Khador, ARM20 is standard. Yet somehow "tremendous chassis armor" is only ARM19. Like I said, the stats DO NOT match the fluff. Sigh.