Partial Post Purge

Ah, sweet alliteration. Om nom nom. Moving along...

I've had this blog for about 4 years now. Over time (and especially since I've stepped up content creation), I've gathered a few draft posts that just didn't make the cut.

I'm pulling back the curtain a bit today to show you guys what kinds of 'other' stuff I think about and attempt to write about. Most of these article stubs were actually quite long, but just not interesting enough. Here are the condensed versions of four of them.

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1) My Top 10 Sneaky Painting Tricks
It turns out that I don't have 10. At least not ones that haven't already been discovered and shared by other sites. My draft had exactly zero things listed. It also turns out that I hate top 10 lists. Good to know.

2) Loud and Proud Scrubs and the WAAC attitude.
One of many abortive forays into game play theory. I had intended this particular post to be a bit of a rant, but for a rant to be good, you have to be pretty pumped to do it. I was not that angry, as it turned out.

Summary: there exists a subset of gamers in any popular game that are extremely proud of being scrubby. Often this means they're too broke or short sighted to do anything about it. Other times they simply have a different idea of what fun and success in the game look like. A complete lack of skill is also common.

What unites the loud and proud scrubs is their shared hatred for anybody doing anything that they perceive as 'competitive' and being very vocal about their way being the 'right' way. Basically, if you follow proven methods of success and demand that the rules be followed, you are a bad person.

Very frustrating. Plus, I'm not entirely sure how fair or true this is.

3) Pet Peeves - Realism in Wargaming.

Another rant that just wasn't 'ranty' enough. A major factor was the fact that I had already ranted about this in the past. I had also since stopped going to forums for game advice and stopped running into the phenomenon. Ran out of anger.

Summary: There are always people who feel the need to justify a rules complaint with an example of how things work in real life. Often times they have no idea how things work in real life. Even more often, their example has nothing to do with magical ogres or hover tanks since these things don't exist. Its a game, so there are a ton of abstractions that have to be made to keep things fun, interesting, moving and (hopefully) fair.


4) Apocalypse Tactica
I've had a lot of fun with the Apocalypse games I've played. At one point I felt that I needed to to a detailed analysis of the rules. I binned it. It was getting extremely long, was extremely tedious to write (and read) and ultimately didn't offer enough insight to make it worth the time.
Plus, I'm sure somebody would have tear me a new asshole on my perspectives.

Summary: there are four relevant things you need to know about 'power-gaming' the Apocalypse rules. Here they are:

1) Str D weapons are awesome. You should probably try to include some in your army. Anything that automatically kills anything and auto-penetrates tanks is a bit overpowered. Apocalypse doesn't seem to care. Get as many as you can.

2) Large templates are awesome. There's a lot of shit on the table in Apocalypse. Big templates hit lots of stuff. 10 inch templates kill a lot of infantry dead. Get as many as you can. For extra fun, try and get weapons that combine 'large template' with 'str D'.

3) Anti-tank weaponry is even more important in Apocalypse. Super heavy vehicles are extremely hard to kill. be prepared to pump a lot of fire into one to destroy it. You're also more likely to run into scads of regular tanks as well.

4) Assets are important as fuck. Almost every one of them can be game breaking in some way. But choose carefully, because many of them probably wont work. My preference is for things that will work ALL the time rather than things that might work. I also prefer assets that affect the most number of models possible. This is because that the things that might work are actually pretty unlikely of doing anything relevant. And things that affect one unit are a drop in the bucket in a 10,000 point game.

Flank march is the most busted of all. it always works, you get to pick when, what and where things come on and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Not much you can do when an entire Emperor's fist tank company comes on from behind you. People tend to forget about the 'can come on from any table edge' part. You can stick a lot of fire power in someone's ass.

You should also be on the look out for formations that give free assets. If one asset is game breaking, 2+ assets is ridiculous. You space marine players should be taking the dreadnought formation that gives you free outflank.

Anybody who takes 'jammers' is a fucking prick (forbids the generals on the opposing team from talking to each other). Worst rule GW has ever written.

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There you have it. 4 articles condensed down into one. Hope you enjoyed my rejects.