Last Week's Games: Shogun: Total War, Warhammer 40K, Get Bit, Zombie Dice

Let's see who's standing at the end of this battle!

My new game for this week is Shogun: Total War. The Total War series is one of the ones I’ve been meaning to have a go at for a long time, and while there are a lot of games out there for it now, I have an almost obsessive need to play games in sequence, so I’m playing Shogun first. I played through the tutorials, which was just as well since the interface is unlike any strategy game I’ve ever played. I also had a go through the campaign, but I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I’m supposed to be doing; building up an empire is obvious but I found that battles are not to be entered into lightly! I did, however, have the foresight to set the win conditions up to something other than total domination. I remember playing Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Galactic Conquest mode with my sister years ago, during which I discovered that the problem with potentially endless campaigns is just that – they take ages, and you’ll lose interest in it long before you reach the end. I set up the win to take a certain number of provinces, and to survive for 70 years. But I think I might go back and restart, with a better idea of what I’m supposed to be doing.

I wonder if my need to play video games in sequence hampers my enjoyment of them somewhat. Am I missing some great games because I haven’t played the first ones? Anyone who’s played the Witcher series would probably say that I am; The Witcher 3 looks to be the best game in the series but I haven’t bothered with it because I haven’t played the first two to completion – and I’m unlikely to find time to do so! It shouldn’t matter with Total War because they’re stand-alone campaigns; not sequential storylines, but lately I’ve become interested in finding the core mechanics of the game before jumping in to the arguably-better later versions. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of this; I’ve missed the better games in the series because I wouldn’t touch them until I’d beaten the first. So I’ll see what Shogun: Total War has to offer. It looks really interesting and I have enjoyed it so far, but I want a little more out of it.

I continued playing Eternal Crusade on my laptop, but was pleasantly surprised when on Sunday I managed to go in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and play the real thing! I got to play a game of Warhammer 40,000, using my Salamanders against Chaos Daemons. We played the Ancient Relic mission, which requires you to take and hold one objective for six victory points. I won because the objective way in my deployment zone. It was a good game but we had to it call early, and for my next one I’ll be using a substantially smaller army because I found myself looking at the rules for the new edition of the game far too often; it’s only my second game. Nonetheless, I like how the vast majority of the new rules are working out; especially how the templates have been removed so there is a point to Frag missiles now!



The front cover of the original X-Wing game.

Robots. Swimming away from a freaking shark.

I also had a game of Star Wars: X-Wing against the same guy, and managed to win with my tournament list consisting of 1^st-wave ships and characters. I was pleased that running the Trenchrunners worked, and I also learned not to fire Proton Torpedoes against a ship that has lots of shields and R2-D2, who recharges them!

I played some board games with Kirsty as well. The first was Get Bit, where you have to play cards to have plastic robots with detachable limbs swim away from a shark. There were the beginnings of a really good game in there but I wasn’t familiar enough with it to be able to explain it well enough for Kirsty to really know what she was doing! We also played Zombie Dice, which requires almost no skill other than pushing your luck. It is, ironically, brainless fun, which at the end of a long day is exactly what we needed! 
 

My Thoughts on the New Chaos Space Marines now that I've actually got the codex...

I've got Dave to thank for this 'cause he bought me the book as a belated birthday present, and now I'm all excited about doing Chaos again. I registered my concerns in the previous blog about the changes to the rules that would no doubt come with the book, and now that I've been reading it a little while here's my opinions on some of them:

1) They've got rid of Summoned Daemons

OK let's get the easy one out of the way first: In the old rules I think going back as far as 3rd edition you used to be able to summon a unit of Daemons from one of your Chaos Space Marine units, or summon a Greater Daemon by having it possess one of your characters. I guess it worked at the time, but it wasn't a popular move to make once Chaos Daemons became an army in their own right, and with the new rules for Allies in 6th Edition meaning you can field both armies at the same time, the ability to summon Daemons is pretty much meaningless anyway. The fact that in 4th edition the summoned Daemons would be significantly weaker than their codex couterparts wouldn't have helped. Overall it's not a rule I'm particularly sorry to lose.

2) Bezerkers et al back to Elite

What's happened here is that the Khorne Bezerkers, Noise Marines, Plague Marines and Thousand Sons are now Elite choices. Now if I remember rightly this was the case in 3rd edition as well, though if your commander had the mark of the relevant God, you would get one of them as troops choices. So, for example, if you had a Chaos Lord with the Mark of Slaanesh, you would be able to take Noise Marines - but not the others - as troops choices. In 4th edition they cut out the middle man and allowed you to take all 4 as Troops Choices, no matter what your commander was doing, and this lead to some pretty nasty tournament combos, so for balancing issues and also to remind us that there are actually Chaos Space Marines in the Chaos Space Marine Army, they've been put back up to Elite. They've also still got the option of taking the leader with the mark of the relevant god to put them back down to Troops Choices, plus the same rule applies if you take the relevant special character. Kharn the Betrayer, for example, would bring Khorne Bezerkers back to Troops choices.

For some reason, you can't do that with the Daemon Prince. Even though you HAVE to take a Daemon Prince of one of the Chaos Gods, which confers its own benefits, you can't take the relevant units as troops choices. I guess that would represent the idea that if a Champion of Chaos has made it as far as being a Daemon Prince, he'd have to be a lot less near-sighted than refusing to take anything but the units of your own Gods. And also, the Daemon Prince is a LOT more powerful in this new edition. Armies would be horribly unbalanced if they were then allowed to take, say, Bezerkers as Troops choices...

3) Wargear

There have been quite a few changes to the equipment that are going to affect my army lists quite a bit. Here's a selection of them:

• Daemon Weapons: Not sure what's happening with these at the moment. They work in pretty much the same way as they did in 4th edition, though there is no option to take it as a Daemon Weapon with the mark of the Chaos Gods in order to increase its potency and inherent risks. My problem is that there seems to be no way to give a Daemon Weapon to anybody other than Abbadon the Despoiler. They don't appear in the Wargear section as an option; am I missing something here? This means I'm going to have to change the weapon I've given one of my Chaos Lords, although a viable alternative is not far away, which brings me on to my next point:
• Chaos Artefacts: Unique magic items for Chaos? Yes please, we'll have some of that! Might seem a bit cheesy to do this in the new edition of 40K but it's not going to be bad. Some of them are actually Daemon Weapons, and all of them confer particularly nasty consequences for those that find themselves on their business end - but most of them are not without their risks, meaning that they're unlikely to find themselves on the tournament circuit that counts on dependability.
• Vehicle Upgrades: I wasn't particularly happy with the fact that they've weakened Daemonic Possession by having to roll a 2+ for its benefit - ignoring Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned results - to take effect, AND given the chance that a dedicated transport might start eating its own crew on a roll of a 1 as they embark or start the game. Granted if this happens it gets a hull point back, but losing a Chaos Space Marine of any kind is going to hurt. The benefit it is supposed to confer doesn't help all that much in 6th edition anyway since there are no Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned results off a glancing hit anymore. Thankfully they have at least had the presence of mind to reduce the points cost, but I can see myself taking Destroyer Blades instead, which for what I intend for Rhinos at any rate look a lot more useful. And Havoc Launchers are now twin-linked, which may help a little.

4) Psychic Powers

The psychic powers in the new codex, and in 40K in general, is a lot more, how can I put this? Comprehensive. There's a lot more going on now with the different disciplines so it was never going to be the same, but most of the old spells are gone. This will upset a lot of the tournament players who liked to bum-rape units by grouping them together with Lash of Submission, then take a massive 5" template-sized shit on the unit. Gift of Chaos is gone as well, though I'm not particularly sorry about this because I never used it. Instead we've got several of the disciplines in the rulebook at our disposal, plus some tasty-looking spells in the Codex. I'm not going to go too deeply into specifics here because I'll be here all day but it looks like they've got an eclectic mix of functional powers and kick-ass lightning-bolt style spells.

One spell that was probably overpowered but I will nonetheless miss is Warptime. My Chaos Sorcerer has only participated in 1 battle so far, but being able to re-roll all my hits and misses pretty much won that battle for me.

Well that's it for me so far, I'll come back maybe later with more changes to the rules, perhapes when I've played a couple of games and had a chance to try them.

I'll see you next time...