techsoldaten

Thank you for the kind comments. My army's disposition is Take and Hold. Played another game last night, this time against a Custodes list. He had a Shield Captain with a squad of 3 jetbikes, 2 squads of 3 jetbikes, 3 squads of 6 Alarus Terminators, and a Sisters of Battle squad. He went first, kept his Terminators in reserve and moved up with his jetbikes. We had a ruin in the middle of the table, he had 2 squads of bikes coming on the left and one on the right. The bikes on the left were able to shoot, he advanced with the ones on the right. They took out the Daemon Prince and did 4 wounds on a Predator first turn before failing a charge into the cultists. In my half of the first, lascannons destroyed 1 of the bike squads and 1 bike from another before he used a strategem to move his bikes behind the building. But he was still close enough to my cultists that I was able to use the Grenades strategem to deal another 4 mortal wounds and take out another bike. I did not try for a charge because I wanted to keep the screens intact - there was really no where for his Terminators to land on my side of the board. The next turn, he brought his bikes around the right side and had his terminators arrive from reserve. He moved up with his shield captain and the bikes, managed to kill a Predator and put some wounds on another before charging cultists. Wiped out a 10 man unit and consolidated into another. The Terminators shot up another 10 man cultist squad then one of the units made a charge into a 10 man squad. Then he used a strategem to split one of the Terminator squads into 6 separate targets, which was going to make it hard for my lascannons to target each one. Fell back with the cultists who were in combat and shot up the bikes. Managed to destroy the Shield Captain's unit and take out 3 Terminators with lascannons. Did the Grenades strategem again, which took out another 2 Terminators (1 was on 1 wound). Charged with a 20 man cultist squad, who did nothing against the remaining Terminator. At this point, he had like 11 Terminators and a bike on the board. The bike moved into my lines. took failed shots at the Helbrute, then charged the cultists. He moved up with his mass of Terminators then used his Strategem again to make his other squad of Terminators into individual units. He took some shots at Predators without killing anything, then everybody started charging cultists. I think I lost about 30 cultists that turn. On my half, killed the Jetbike with lascannons, fell back with cultists again, killed 4 Terminators with lascannons, did the Grenades strategem again to kill 1 more Terminator, took a wound off 1 Terminator with cultist autopistols, took another wound off with my Terminators, then charged the remainder with more cultists. He was down to 5 models with his sisters in the backfield and then he called the game. I still had like 40 cultists, most of my lascannons, the Helbrute, plus Abaddon and his Terminator bodyguard, the most likely outcome was him getting tabled. We talked after the game, said he was counting on getting more cultists off the board but could not ignore the lascannons (which appear to be the only things that can really hurt Custodes reliably.) He was making all these 4++ saves throughout the game, just not often enough for it to matter. He said he thought going after the Daemon Prince right away was a mistake, he would have done better thinning the screens or taking a turn to set up. I told him that Strategem where he can split his Terminators into individual units was really annoying and made things a lot harder, his response was I know. He said he doesn't like the Grenades strategem allowing meatshields to do mortal wounds, and I said I know. My take was Custodes are always awful, part of the reason this worked was he could mostly not get into range to shoot the main threats to his list. Anything range 24" or less is going to have a hard time firing past the Cultists, and large obstacles forcing opponents into firing lanes is a huge advantage for this gunline. While it's too early to draw conclusions, this was my second game against a really aggressive, fast opponent. Feels like they are the ideal matchup for the Black Legion gunline.

First game was against an Ork Squighog list. This was my first time playing 11th and first time facing Ork Squighogs in any form. Forgive me for getting some of the names wrong. The opponent's' list had Ghazgull Thrakka, a squad of Lootas, a mob of 20 Boys, several squads of Gretchin, the new walker from the boxed set, and 3 units of Squighogs - looked like 2 units of 8 and a unit of 4 plus at least 3 bosses mixed in. We deployed using Dawn of War. He placed most of his stuff 12 inches from the table edge. I kept most of mine as close as possible to the table edge, Predators were behind Abaddon and the Helbrute. There was a large ruin in the middle of the board which affected my deployment of the Cultists, they were split to the right and left with the Daemon Prince in between. He went first and ran up with his hogs. Was surprised to learn they advance and move about 20 inches. I did nothing my first turn, just adjusted screens to make it hard for him to consolidate. The second turn, he charged the Cultists with 3 units of Hogs, wiping out 2 of the 10x squads and reducing a 20x squad by about 12 models. His boys moved up with Ghaz to where they could get around the ruin in the next turn. While I wasn't following objectives very closely, he had gretchen covering them and a unit of Lootas positioned around the middle objective. For my second turn, had my Cultists fall back, then the lascannons gunned down all of the Hogs. There were 2 bosses on Squigosuaruses left with a few wounds each after the shooting, the remaining cultists and the Daemon Prince were able to finish them off. It went by quickly. For his third turn, he was able to charge the Daemon Prince with Ghazghul and his Boyz mob. They killed the Daemon Prince and consolidated into a Cultist squad. The Lootas and Gretchin stayed put. For my part, it made sense to break up the gunline. I moved the Predators off to the left, had the Havocs stay put and moved up Abaddon and the Helbrute for a charge. Shooting from Lascannons and autopistols wiped out the Boys and did a couple wounds to Ghaz. He shrugged off a lot with his a 4+ save. Abaddon took him out on the charge. The Predators were able to shoot up the Ork walker which had been making it's way up the left side. The rest of the game was my Predators shooting up Lootas and Gretchin while the rest of the army moved up the board. He had a squad of gretchen on the board at the end of the game. So... interesting test against an army I had no experience with. Pretty much everything went wrong. My list was designed to abuse range, all the fighting happened close in. Deployment was not favorable to me, the opponent was incredibly fast, and I had to go a turn without shooting (which is a big deal for a gunline.) It was my first game with 11th edition, did not take advantage of any stratagems / special rules interactions that might have given me a bonus. There was a moment during the second turn where I genuinely wondered if I was about to get tabled, and it's very possible that would have happened if he'd been able to get his walker into position. Basically, the theme of this initial test was "the screens held and he had no answers for the rest of the army."

Have not yet played 11th, still learning the new rules. I have all the models, used to run this in 8th. Will let you know how it turns out. For detachments, thinking Veterans of the Long War and Devotees of Destruction. WRT the hidden rule and LOS, nothing says the army can't move. 3 Predators and 3 squads of Havocs aren't exactly a huge footprint, I used to do this with Legionnaires instead of Havocs and could mostly handle terrain. Trick is to outrange / outgun in each exchange while keeping screens. As long as I get 3 or 4 good turns of shooting, games will be interesting.

Taking a look at 11th edition rules, thinking about resurrecting the Black Legion gunline I ran in 8th. Abaddon - 285 pts Daemon Prince with Wings - 180 pts Chaos Terminator Squad - 180 pts 5 Terminators Abaddon's bodyguard Power fists / chainfist / heavy weapon as desired Helbrute - 130 pts Twin lascannon Missile launcher Cultists - 90 pts 20 Cultists Cultists - 90 pts 20 Cultists Cultists - 90 pts 20 Cultists Cultists - 50 pts 10 Cultists Cultists - 50 pts 10 Cultists Cultists - 50 pts 10 Cultists Havocs x 3 - 125 pts each 4× Lascannon Chaos Predator x 3 - 135 pts each Predator twin lascannon 2× Lascannon Havoc launcher Total: 1,995 pts What I liked about this list is I could mostly line it up on my own table edge and shoot up opponents from range. While lascannons are no longer 60", I can deploy at 6" and still limit opponents to their own table edge / obscuring terrain if they want to keep them protected. The Havocs and Preds would get lethal and sustained hits from Abaddon and the Helbrute while the cultists screen everything out. Deployment would span about a 22" wide region in my deployment zone, covering a couple objectives. This would make it hard for anything to deep strike in my deployment zone. The Daemon Prince and the Terminators are there to act as beatsticks for anything that gets past the screens. The point of this list is to abuse range with high target saturation, allowing me to take out the biggest threats at range and force opponents to deal with a mass of bodies contesting the objectives I don't already control. While the performance of the list would likely drop in situations where I don't go first, it's not a terrible situation - as long as I have a few clear firing lanes, I pretty much don't need to move the army to do damage. Have been considering hard counters. Dark Eldar Scourges with Dark Lances come to mind, along with mass Wardog spam. Am not really concerned about Orks the way I once was, the better part of a mob can be taken out if thing go wrong. Not really worried about Custodes the way I once was, low model counts with incredible saves are still not invulnerable to focus fire. Big difference fielding 90 cultists versus 60. Looking at current tournament lists, I don't see so many hard counters as stiff challenges. The Necron list with 4 C'Tan seems like a bad matchup but not a steamroller. The worst Tau list I could find was Five Crisis suits with 2 Sunforge and 2 Starscythe and 2×2 rail Broadsides, which would mean a lot of shooting at different angles to contend with. Not saying the other tournament winners are easy to handle, but not seeing the lists that would automatically break my core mechanics. Even if Abaddon and the Helbrute go down, there's still enough ways to get sustained and lethal through dark pacts / VotLW / various stratagems that the gunline remains lethal. Thoughts?

Were it not for the equally obscene laws around copyright and intellectual property, I would share the sculpts I did in Blender. The test prints for Vheren Ashurhaddon and Little Horus are very faithful to the originals, but sculpting faces is not my strong suit and shields are hard to get right. Ongoing effort...

While my first instinct would be TN, the cost of freight is a concern they'd be considering. The cheapest way of moving stock through the US is by water. Putting a factory near the Mississippi means they could move stock north to regional distribution hubs much cheaper than they could by land. Dayton, OH is experiencing a renaissance as a distribution hub, in part, because there are overland routes that can reach anywhere in the Continental US in under 24 hours. There are other towns that enjoy just about the same accessibility that are even less expensive to operate from. Just speculating based on what I know about the company's real estate strategy and labor costs in Southern states, they would want to remain east of the Mississippi and close enough to a major waterway that they don't need to leverage rail for shipments. Picking a distribution hub where they can warehouse product separate from production likely involves a rustbelt state.

Glen Burnie MD is lacking in many ways. There's not an appropriate venue for handling a large event, transportation is solely by car, and there are not nearly enough hotels for this to work. There's nothing old school or OG about it, the first GW stores in the DMV were in College Park and Laurel. The NOVA Open takes place at a hotel in Crystal City, VA which would be more than sufficient to handle Warhammer World. But the place that might be the best option is the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor, MD. Ample space in the convention halls, it's on the water, room rates are reasonable for the area, plenty of nearby restaurants, there's even a casino with all kinds of other attractions. If they want to keep it a little more intimate, there's a convention center in Rockville that would be appropriate (but people would have to do a lot of walking.) There's also a ton of other hotels which would be happy to host the event, there's always something going on in DC. The Convention Center in DC is probably too expensive for this event and, while Baltimore is an option, the convention center there is oversized for the size of Warhammer World. It would be hard to cover 10% of the space. There are a lot of FLGSs in the DMV along with competitive players who don't necessarily participate in tournaments but might show up for this. Amongst the local community, there's a weariness of the drama the comes with competitive environments. Most of the people I know just want to play the game, see friends and enjoy the lore. Maybe this could be what reactivates some of the old timers and rekindles an interest amongst the youth in competitive play. Regarding the talk about Americanizing Warhammer - made me chuckle, the game always seemed to be lampooning the US military's focus on high technology. The setting has become more serious in a lot of ways, but it's never completely broken from those roots. With regards to the talk of factories - I know about the one in Tennessee but think it's more of a distribution center. From what I understand, the impact of tariffs is a marginal cost for GW and probably not sufficient to move manufacturing over here. If they do, it would probably be because of the cost of energy and access to inputs. Polystyrene is a lot less expensive in the US than it is in Europe and there are many, many other material options available. I would be surprised if a production factory was actually set up in the US. The USMCA means printing the sprues in Mexico and boxing them in the US would count as Made in America.

I get the economics of it. 40k is going to outsell HH by some double digit multiplier. GW really wants to support the game, but it's niche, therefore there must be higher prices. Feels like it might benefit them to encourage heavy conversion work to create your own Force Master, Medicae, Tank Commander, etc. Anyone who's not a named character, they might go farther by encouraging a little creativity. The reason I say this - I have all these HH boxes and more marines than I could use in a single army. There are some characters where I would pay for the official model, but I want to do something else for the others so I'm not spending $1k for HQs.

AUS and NZ - it does seem like everything costs twice as much in these places. After careful consideration, decided this is a no win situation. Even eBay auctions for the models cost as much / more than buying direct from GW (new and used.) Going the Blender route. I've done MkII / MkIV / Mk VI / Terminator proxies in the past and already have armatures for posing them. It will take some work to create suitable stand-ins, but I'm not paying that kind of money for single models on principle. Regarding GW stores and tournaments - I avoid tournaments and have never had any issue with proxies at any of the local GW stores (there are 4 near where I live.) HH seems to mostly be played at hobby shops if at all.

Malgohurst and maybe Little Horus I could see paying for because they are iconic characters. The rest I would rather convert myself from existing characters. I could also do them up in Blender and print them in resin. There's probably bits floating around that would let me do conversions at a tenth of the cost. I don't usually get sticker shock looking at anything GW, but this really hit me the wrong way. That's a huge gate keeping people out of the hobby.

My Sons of Horus army has not had any major additions since adding Horus, Abbadon and Garro several years back. Recently received the Saturnine boxed set, was considering adding characters. Maloghurst the Twisted, the Warmaster's Equerry $61 'Little' Horus Aximand – Captain of the 5th Company $61 Vheren Ashurhaddon – Master of the True Sons - $61 Tybalt Marr – Captain of the 18th Company - $61 Sons of Horus Legion Command - $61 Legion Champion and Master of the Signal $56 Sons of Horus - Legion Cataphractii Praetor $55 That's $416 dollars total for 8 models. It cost more than the Betrayal at Calth and Burning of Propsero boxed sets I originally paid for, which had like 80 models total. Maybe I'm just an old man shouting about the high prices, but this seems excessive.

These are aimed at people looking to get started with cult armies, not for anyone with an existing collection. Not that that's a bad thing, it just doesn't add anything beyond what most collectors already have. The Thousand Sons box might be more impressive were it not for the Mutalith Vortex Beast. Most people are going to look at that and think they'd rather have Rubrics.

Something that occurred to me: it might not be possible for B&C to comply with the law. Read this page very carefully: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/consultation A manual verification process might not comply with that provision. It's specifying technological approaches, which are going to cost money. Notice they do not specify the age assurance technology, or the frequency with which it should be applied. Currently, the cost to spoof an identity is negligible / zero. It takes maybe 5 minutes to create a realistic image of an identity card for any country using Stable Diffusion, there are models tuned specifically for this purpose which include all nations. As stated before, VPNs can disguise the country of origin for any user. Possible to go much further than that with automated OPSEC and INFOSEC tools that interact with identity providers to track down real world names, addresses, etc. It's not safe to assume a verification system based on identity cards is reliable. There are multiple platforms for providing age assurances. Uniformly, they tie an otherwise anonymous online identity to a real world person, and most of them check every online interaction. Most of them are multiparty tenants, meaning they don't just check the identity of the user, they check who the identity of the person the user is interacting with. Some of them also monitor the nature of the interaction, using NLP for sentiment analysis. You can find a detailed explanation of the nature of these platforms and the methods of verification currently being used here: https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/age-verification-the-complicated-effort-to-protect-youth-online/age-assurance-and-age-verification/ Don't consider that link comprehensive. It leaves out / obfuscates some of the most important features (active monitoring is referred to as social graph age estimation, for example.) Any time the frequency is not mentioned, consider it to be constant and not a gateway through which verification is passed. It does not discuss behavioral, contextual inference models, steganographic age verification methods which are also being considered, which would be used to address account hand offs and would require constant monitoring. In all likelihood, complying with this law means subjecting all users to some form of de-anonymization and ongoing monitoring. If not today, in the near future. I have not seen model legislation that puts the costs anywhere but on the website operator. Identomat, Sumsub, Veriff, Yoti, AgeCheck, and some of the custom AWS / Azure / Google Cloud solutions I've seen are all metered services. These are just the ones that come to mind, there are others that are popular in India / Pacific nations that are more encompassing (will alert authorities when content triggers are passed.) Just things to consider.

Seems like a massive overreach with long-tail consequences. With regard to impact, I prefer my time spent talking about painted army men to be anonymous. I would probably not submit proof of age, thus I would no longer be able to post here. Pretty sure this law is designed to curb online interaction, or at least to de-sensitize people to having interaction extremely curtailed. You might want to consider the direction this is headed and whether it's actually the best move for the site.

GW's claims about Unfair Competition are sinister manipulations. Article 2598 was meant to protect against companies labelling counterfeits as authentic. It's for the Louis Vuitton's of the world to have a means of going after knock offs labelling themselves as the real thing. The statue was not supposed to be used to avoid copyright lawsuits. GW could absolutely claim the models are making use of their intellectual property. Instead, they're claiming the product could be mistaken as genuine, which is hard to see. Looking at the models in the first few posts, the differences are not hard to spot - angles are different, key details like helmets are different, etc. The standard is if something is 25% different from the original, it's a novel design. I think Ghamak models meet that threshold. Were GW to prevail, they could easily monopolize the entire 28mm sci-fi miniature market - anytime someone sells a model, just say it looks like something they did in the 1980s and could be confused with their product. While I suspect this case will go away because Ghamak does not ship a physical product, the legal interpretation has to be challenged.