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Atlas Hugged posted:All you're really saying is that 6 models should have 6 times their attack stat plus their equipment and other bonuses. That doesn't really mean much though since it doesn't allow for a "visually obvious" comparison between two units of the same size. And we're neglecting to mention that we won't even always have the full unit in melee in AoS since it uses an effective range for close combat. So now your pile of 6 orks might only actually have 3 that can do anything. What's visually obvious about that? Atlas Hugged posted:It's literally not simpler math. Going by attacks per model in effective range requires math. Looking at a static attack value doesn't. The static value also allows for low starting ranges to reduce the overall number of dice rolled. Atlas Hugged posted:Also please stop using words like "satisfaction" since they're meaningless in this context. Atlas Hugged posted:We haven't said there should only be a roll to hit. I think most of us agree that there should be some roll to hit largely determined by the attacker's stats and a roll to damage/wound based on the defender's. You can still weave your narrative exploding dice into those two rolls. You're just now accomplishing the same thing with fewer stages of dice rolling. I think it's poor design to have one player to sit around and just lose models with no way to feel like they're defending. Even if it would has the same effect, there's an important psychological impact of the defender having some perceived agency in the defense of their little dudes. Atlas Hugged posted:You might feel that having multiple steps lowers mental overhead but what it does is literally introduce additional bookkeeping because you now have more steps and each step can have its own floating values affecting it and each step now has potential user error. Less steps, less potential user error. I think that the kind of abstraction that you seem to be suggesting works in games where units are physically attached to a single base - epic, kings of war, warhammer fantasy - but not so much in a game where you have Individual Dudes moving about, even if they're doing so in a cohesive fashion.
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# ? May 2, 2017 07:50 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 02:56 |
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This thread has got loving boring fast. Can't you take it to the death thread. We get it, you don't like GW games, and you don't like it that others like them. Woohoo
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# ? May 2, 2017 07:55 |
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Here's a couple of WIP shots of some models for me and my sons armies .
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# ? May 2, 2017 07:57 |
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Texmo posted:
I think one of the fundamental problems is though that the game is trying to be a mass battle game that is also a skirmish game. I agree that having models move and act individually is better for a skirmish game, but it's not great for a mass battle game where your fundamental unit is a 'fire team' or 'squad' or whatever. I'm not hugely sure if AoS is trying to do. Vanguard games kinda make sense with the smaller table, but a Warhost game is probably not a skirmish game any more. 40k has long had the same problem. Cthulhu Dreams fucked around with this message at 08:00 on May 2, 2017 |
# ? May 2, 2017 07:58 |
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I think one of the fundamental problems is though that the game is trying to be a mass battle game that is also a skirmish game. I agree that having models move and act individually is better for a skirmish game, but it's not great for a mass battle game where your fundamental unit is a 'fire team' or 'squad' or whatever. We've had a lot more fun at Vanguard level than Warhost, but that's as much about reigning in young players attention spans as anything tbf.
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# ? May 2, 2017 08:02 |
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Serotonin posted:We've had a lot more fun at Vanguard level than Warhost, but that's as much about reigning in your players attention spans as anything tbf. Yeah I'd tend to agree that the ruleset as constructed is really a 'skirmish' game, and some of the reason for the attention span issue is that the game doesn't scale efficiently. Part of the charm of multi-basing in something like Sharp Practice is that it lets you resolve things on an abstract level while still have eye pleasing units kicking around. I suspect that they'd be better off making two rulesets one for skirmish (drawing on Shadow War and AoS) and one drawing on the concepts of epic/sharp practice etc for 'Warhost plus' that probably includes multibasing. Cthulhu Dreams fucked around with this message at 08:10 on May 2, 2017 |
# ? May 2, 2017 08:07 |
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Funny you mentioning Sharp Practice, I was intrigued at the introduction in new 40k of command points that can be spent in a variety of ways to influence the game. Seemed quite similar to the command flags in SP.
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# ? May 2, 2017 08:14 |
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Serotonin posted:Funny you mentioning Sharp Practice, I was intrigued at the introduction in new 40k of command points that can be spent in a variety of ways to influence the game. Seemed quite similar to the command flags in SP. Yeah, I hope they move beyond the examples given, re-rolls is not the secret sauce required here but interrupting charging sounds like maybe the start of a positive development?
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# ? May 2, 2017 08:21 |
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Texmo posted:Each ork has a total of, say, four attacks each due to their wargear and circumstances. Three orks are in range, so it is Visually Obvious that it's three orks times four attacks per. You can also see which orks are doing the fighting, and congratulate them for doing well (or scold them for doing poorly) - and, if you felt like circumstances called for it, you have the option of rolling for them individually, because maybe you want to put some decorative warpaint on the one who lands the killing blow on the stormfront eternal leader guy. It's not visually obvious which ones are in fighting range. You have a blob of guys. Are we measuring from the bases? Are we measuring from the models? My eyes are not rulers. Either way I'm going to have to measure the effective range. Then I'm going to have check my warscroll and conditions for bespoke rules and other buffs that might change the number of attacks I have at that moment. There is nothing visually obvious or visually useful about looking at the number of figures present. It is all contingent on the stats of the unit and specific circumstances for that particular melee. And it's not a useful indicator for comparing units from different armies. The point I'm making is that just looking at a unit of 6 doesn't tell me I have 6x and I'm going to have to reference my warscroll anyway, so there's no benefit in not abstracting, not at the size of the game we're playing. quote:I hadn't considered that you were suggesting ignoring model positioning, and so i figured maybe there'd be some abstracted calculation applied to figure out how to represent the three orks that were in range as a single-die percentage, instead of the aforementioned 'damage per model times models in range' which I think is simple math and can be connected visually with exactly what's on the table. When you abstract the unit, you ignore positioning. When you don't abstract the unit, positioning is very important. The point is that miniatures themselves are an abstraction. If it were a battle they would not literally stop where they are standing. Abstraction just says, "Yes, the unit is fighting at full effectiveness regardless of where the models are." There's no need for math. Age of Sigmar has effective ranges. But it also allows for some very large units where "visually" it doesn't make sense for the 20th model in a unit to be involved in the melee several inches away. Age of Sigmar could also fix this problem by having smaller units and no effective melee ranges. Again, it seems we're running into a design philosophy conflict. Is it a skirmish game about individuals or one about squads of fighters? You're also ignoring the main advantage: we can reduce dice pools. quote:We've been discussing game design, in which context 'player satisfaction' is absolutely meaningful. My angle when using words like this, and like 'tactile', is that there's more to good design than whether combats are resolved quickly using few dice, and that the context of "playing a game using individual models and rolling physical dice to represent them fighting" is actually a very important factor to consider in the design of a tabletop wargame. I dunno man, if you can't appreciate the satisfying look of terror in your opponent's eyes when you pick up A Shitload Of Dice to attack them with, or the comedy of having nearly all of them fail to do anything, then I'm probably not going to change your opinions here. It's not that I can't "appreciate" those things. It's that you can't measure them so they're not worth discussing in the context of game design. quote:You're focusing only on the outcome of 'damage done', where i'm saying the little story told by 'hits, wounds, saves' has value in itself as a player aid for making up dumb stories about what's happening as your dudes fight, and is a valuable aspect of the game's design. Then you didn't read what I wrote. In Kings of War there are units that do extra damage based either on hits or wounds. And you have your narrative built into the mechanics of the game. "My mighty warriors with their perfect technique landed blows so vicious it was like landing ten blows." Or, "Our weapons were so much more powerful than your armor and hides that it was like wounding every man thrice!" The narrative element is there since there is more than one roll. The difference is that the two rolls are meaningful. quote:The only potential bookkeeping error that having more dice rolling steps introduces is failing to remove an unsuccessful dice from the pool which I don't really think is an issue. I do think that it's more likely to make mistakes with calculations involving more and larger numbers, however. D20+6-2+3 > 12-3+4-1 is a considerably more difficult calculation to make than D6+2-1 > 4-1+2, and is what I was trying to get at with my 'simpler math' comment earlier. We're not talking about more or less dice. We're talking about buffs on three stages of rolling that need to be recorded across multiple units. "This unit has a +1 to hit modifier, and is doing an extra -2 against saving throws this turn while that unit is getting a +2 to hit, but a debuff gave it a -1 to wound, and then this unit..." etc etc. The potential for error is higher than if we reduce it to two rolls per unit. quote:I think that the kind of abstraction that you seem to be suggesting works in games where units are physically attached to a single base - epic, kings of war, warhammer fantasy - but not so much in a game where you have Individual Dudes moving about, even if they're doing so in a cohesive fashion. Dragon Rampant uses abstraction and there's zero issue with it (there are other issues with the game, but the abstraction is a huge advantage). Kings of War can be multibased or individual. Same with Warpath. The point is that there are groups moving together and there are mechanical advantages to treating those groups as single entities, especially when you have several such groupings on the board.
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# ? May 2, 2017 08:40 |
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A Dark Future: In the year 20XX, Games Workshop releases the True General's Handbook, an Epic-level ruleset for Age of Sigmar that combines unit abstractions and multibasing assumptions allowing players to play 5k+ point games without it taking six hours and involving the rolls of hundreds of dice, and fans around the world laud the mechanical elegance and staggering tactical depth hiding behind the apparent sterility of the simple rules. Proclaimed to be a revival of Warhammer Fantasy Battle for a new age, AoS players declare this to be the one, true way to play Age of Sigmar, and are able to play entire battles in the time it takes for 40k players to play a couple of turns. But in the first printing of the TGHB, a typographical error slipped past GW's editors. Atlas Shrugged always had his suspicions, but when a sidebar example accidentally refers to a Lord-Celestant on a Dracoth as a Basilean High Paladin on a Dragon, he starts reading further only to realize the entire book was a find-and-replace wordswap of the latest Kings of War rulebook. When he attempts to reveal the truth, nobody can verify his assertions because Mantic accidentally shipped all of their KoW rulebook hardcopy orders to a glacier in Greenland. A Darker Future: In the year 20XX, Games Workshop releases Age of Sigmar Apocalypse
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# ? May 2, 2017 09:19 |
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Atlas Hugged posted:Again, it seems we're running into a design philosophy conflict. Nobody should be playing a game with 500 skeletons at 28mm scale. Atlas Hugged posted:You're also ignoring the main advantage: we can reduce dice pools. Atlas Hugged posted:It's not that I can't "appreciate" those things. It's that you can't measure them so they're not worth discussing in the context of game design. Atlas Hugged posted:Then you didn't read what I wrote. In Kings of War there are units that do extra damage based either on hits or wounds. And you have your narrative built into the mechanics of the game. "My mighty warriors with their perfect technique landed blows so vicious it was like landing ten blows." Or, "Our weapons were so much more powerful than your armor and hides that it was like wounding every man thrice!" The narrative element is there since there is more than one roll. The difference is that the two rolls are meaningful. Atlas Hugged posted:We're talking about buffs on three stages of rolling that need to be recorded across multiple units. "This unit has a +1 to hit modifier, and is doing an extra -2 against saving throws this turn while that unit is getting a +2 to hit, but a debuff gave it a -1 to wound, and then this unit..." etc etc. The potential for error is higher than if we reduce it to two rolls per unit. No difference in 'remembering the modifiers', but there is difference in 'more complicated math' Atlas Hugged posted:Dragon Rampant uses abstraction and there's zero issue with it (there are other issues with the game, but the abstraction is a huge advantage). Kings of War can be multibased or individual. Same with Warpath. The point is that there are groups moving together and there are mechanical advantages to treating those groups as single entities, especially when you have several such groupings on the board.
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# ? May 2, 2017 09:20 |
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Xarbala posted:When he attempts to reveal the truth, nobody can verify his assertions because Mantic accidentally shipped all of their KoW rulebook hardcopy orders to a glacier in Greenland. I could see Mantic doing that, lord knows I've had to travel across a city to find my lost shipment before. But honestly I don't need Age of Sigmar to just be a clone of Kings of War. It's a skirmish game so it really shouldn't be. I've thrown out a lot of ideas that aren't related to that game. Texmo posted:honestly, this seems to be the meat of it, and that's what systems like Epic and Warmaster are for IMO. I think probably a big issue is that I see the rules for Age of Sigmar, where they work, working best with heroes and monsters and individuals, but the game uses groups of models as its basic unit and to me the mechanics and the design are at odds. A miss is a miss right? If my range is 4+ on a D10, then missing on a 3 is the same as missing on a 1. So though I'm statistically less likely to roll a 1 on a D10 or a D8 or whatever, it doesn't really matter since there's nothing special about it. When we play Deadzone and a guy rolls a bunch of 2s when he needs 3+ to hit we don't celebrate less than if he had rolled a bunch of 1s. For the record though, Kings of War is on a D6 so it's exactly as you described as far as the emergent narrative and the mechanically driven narrative are concerned. It also has big piles of dice that I find can be annoying and slow play at points so you'll never hear me say it's a perfect game. As for modifiers, if you reduced the number of rolls you had to make, you would shift around and combine and rework buffs. You wouldn't be doing more math per stage, you'd probably be doing exactly the same. I think one of the things I feel like I'm having a hard time getting across is that you don't just implement one thing and walk away. It's a domino effect. You change one mechanic and then have to rework the related mechanics. The idea isn't to just have less rolls, it's to streamline the process.
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# ? May 2, 2017 10:35 |
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Serotonin posted:Here's a couple of WIP shots of some models for me and my sons armies . gently caress yeah! Dinosaurs!
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# ? May 2, 2017 12:20 |
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Serotonin posted:Here's a couple of WIP shots of some models for me and my sons armies . Nice paint jobs on them there killer monsters.
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# ? May 2, 2017 14:29 |
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Serotonin posted:Here's a couple of WIP shots of some models for me and my sons armies . That dragon looks awesome.
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# ? May 2, 2017 15:57 |
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Serotonin posted:Here's a couple of WIP shots of some models for me and my sons armies . These are super cool.
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# ? May 2, 2017 15:59 |
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Serotonin posted:This thread has got loving boring fast. Can't you take it to the death thread. We get it, you don't like GW games, and you don't like it that others like them. Woohoo an interesting mechanics discussion is fine, no one is attacking anyone and it means theres actual posts being made in the thread those are some real nice monsters youve painted btw. love the terrorgeist in particular
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# ? May 2, 2017 17:46 |
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Serotonin posted:Here's a couple of WIP shots of some models for me and my sons armies . Those are really awesome.
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# ? May 2, 2017 17:49 |
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So I joined a Campaign at my store. It's territory based, slight escalation mechanic as all games are minimum 500pts but starts capped at 500 and the ceiling increases each round but you don't have to play higher points if you and your opponent want to stay small. My current 500pt list is Arch-Warlock (General for the Campaign) Warlock Engineer 20 Clanrats Poison Wind Mortar Warpfire Thrower Once we bump up to 1k, Ripsnik's raiders + Arch-Warlock is 960. I want options though. Aside from the Spire of Dawn box I've got Slambo and a unit of Chaos Warriors I'm itching to include so I can run a 40 Clanrat unit. Thematically I want to include more Skryre and phase out the other rats. I'm playing mostly to speed bump with Clanrats while I barrage with spells and ranged. Am I best off just slowly adding Rating Guns and Jezzails or should I jump straight to Stormfiends? I'd also like help to pick which Chaos command ability and artifact to run with for this strategy.
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# ? May 2, 2017 18:27 |
mango sentinel posted:So I joined a Campaign at my store. It's territory based, slight escalation mechanic as all games are minimum 500pts but starts capped at 500 and the ceiling increases each round but you don't have to play higher points if you and your opponent want to stay small. I think thematically it would be dope to slowly add the Rating guns and Jezzails before moving up to the big bad rats. Your arch-warlock steadily getting more and more advanced weaponry from the leaders of the clan as he proved his worth.
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# ? May 2, 2017 18:39 |
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Texmo posted:but it's way funnier when say, 5 dice all come up 1's and you can yell 'you useless bastards what are you doing' at your pile of dipshits, whereas you can't exactly represent that 0.01% chance on even a D100 Actually this reminds me of another weird issue Age of Sigmar's "roll a d6, and then roll another d6 for successes on the first" which only became clear to me when I made that table yesterday. The easiest roll is of course the 1+ 1+ sequence, which wounds 100% of the time. But the next easiest roll is 1+ 2+ or 2+ 1+, which wounds about 83.3% of the time. And the next easiest after that is 2+ 2+, which wounds about 69.4% of the time. This is some surprisingly huge gaps. By comparison, Age of Sigmar provides very tightly arranged options for really difficult attacks at the opposite end of the scale. The hardest roll is 6+ 6+, which wounds about 2.8% of the time. The next hardest is 6+ 5+ or 5+ 6+, which wounds about 5.6% of the time, and then the 5+ 5+ roll, which wounds about 11.1% of the time. Notice how much more closely packed these unlikely probability options are, compared to the "good" ones? Age of Sigmar's attack roll sequence gave the game designers no basic ability to provide for several increasingly good options at the top of the scale. It's either a certain hit, or you're down to the 83 and 70 percent options. There's no combo of two dice that lets them give a model anything close to a 90% chance to hit, or a 75% chance. I wouldn't have guessed it before doing the math and it strikes me as weird. Of course you can give models higher but non-certain ability to deal wounds by giving them multiple attacks, but that also increases the maximum number of wounds they can cause: so even if you give them (say) three attacks of 3+ 4+, which works out to averaging 1 wound per combat round, they now have the potential to cause 2 or 3 wounds that combat round. So you can't really give any model in Age of Sigmar like a 90% chance of causing 1 wound but no chance of causing 2. ...well, you can. But you'd have to make it a special rule, like "when this model attacks, roll for all three of its attacks, but it can never cause more than one wound." which trumps the dice but is kind of an ugly hack. I don't know if that's really a requirement for a game to do, I just found it an odd gap in the design space. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:05 on May 2, 2017 |
# ? May 2, 2017 19:01 |
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Horace-Noah posted:I think thematically it would be dope to slowly add the Rating guns and Jezzails before moving up to the big bad rats. Your arch-warlock steadily getting more and more advanced weaponry from the leaders of the clan as he proved his worth. Thanks! The campaign involves everyone occupying districts in a city evacuated due to a magic poison mist. My Arch Warlock Veeka Swiftpaw's backstory is she's leading a research expedition into the city to science up some new weaponry so I figured the build up makes most sense. My first battle was against a different group of Skaven where I faced a Ratling Gun so it makes sense she could copy the design. Stormfiends are an amalgamation of lots of different skryre technologies so I will slow roll getting those. As justification for Slambo, before setting off, a Grey Seer advised Veeka a mysterious champion of the gods would appear and lend aid.
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# ? May 2, 2017 20:43 |
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Leperflesh posted:The easiest roll is of course the 1+ 1+ sequence, which wounds 100% of the time. But the next easiest roll is 1+ 2+ or 2+ 1+, which wounds about 83.3% of the time. And the next easiest after that is 2+ 2+, which wounds about 69.4% of the time. Don't forget rerolls. 'Reroll 1s' is a fairly common mechanic in AOS. Not saying it makes it any better but it does give a little more control over the propability gaps.
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# ? May 2, 2017 23:30 |
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I remembered it, and then remembered that "reroll 1s" on a 1+ 2+ or 2+ 2+ roll would be pretty crazy poo poo. (Also I couldn't immediately remember how to add that to a probability formula. I think you first find the odds of success, and then add to it the odds of failure times the odds of success on the reroll. So, on a 2+ 2+ where you can reroll 1s on the first roll but not the second roll, you'd have: ((5/6)*(5/6))+((1/6)*(5/6)) = .6944 + .1389 = .8333 Which hey, is exactly the same as a 1+ 2+ roll. So did I do this right?) e.2 no I didn't do this right, because you have to find the odds of success of the first roll that gets the reroll before you move on to the second roll. So, to simulate getting to reroll 1s on the first roll but not the second: (5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6))*(5/6) = .810. So it's nearly but not quite identical to a 1+ 2+ roll. By a difference of about 2.3 percent less likely. How about if you do a 2+ 2+ roll where you get to reroll 1s on the second roll only? That's 5/6 * (5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6)) uhhh that has to be exactly the same, because A*B = B*A and here A=(5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6)) and B=(5/6) and all we did was reverse them. How about if you get to reroll ones on either roll? (5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6))*(5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6)) = .945 so there's your ~95% chance, which you could also have simulated with a single 2+ roll on a 1d20. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:14 on May 3, 2017 |
# ? May 3, 2017 00:03 |
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how many points if i just field these two in AoS!!?
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# ? May 4, 2017 03:01 |
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20 grots is 100 points so bringing 1 grot requires you to pay that full unit cost. 10 orruks is 100 points also. So 200 points to field just those two models.
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# ? May 4, 2017 03:51 |
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They're worth 200 points in my heart.
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# ? May 4, 2017 04:07 |
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GreenMarine posted:20 grots is 100 points so bringing 1 grot requires you to pay that full unit cost. I will never call them Orruks or Grots. They are Orcs and goblins and will be so forever to me.
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# ? May 4, 2017 04:34 |
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those are some sweet greenskins. love the metal and stonework especially
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# ? May 4, 2017 05:13 |
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GreenMarine posted:20 grots is 100 points so bringing 1 grot requires you to pay that full unit cost. the gently caress is an orruk?
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# ? May 6, 2017 02:39 |
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It's not quite a rock and it's not quite a truck, but man... To answer your question I don't know.
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# ? May 6, 2017 02:47 |
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It is a trademarked spelling of Orc. Just like they changed Imperial Guard to whatever the gently caress they are now.
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# ? May 6, 2017 03:19 |
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BIG MEATY SHITS posted:the gently caress is an orruk? Uruk and Uruk-hai were reserved for the Uruks themselves, a special breed or breeds of Orc; they called smaller, weaker Orcs snaga, "slave". The Grey Elves also referred to the Orcs as a whole as the Glamhoth, "noisy horde".[5] The word "goblin" is used to represent the original Hobbit Orc. In The History of Middle-earth Tolkien writes about an Orc captain named Boldog[6] but later specifies that Boldog may have been either a term or a title for another special kind of Orc instead of a personal name.[7] but spelled differently because someone noticed that tolkien called elves eldar and they didn't want to get caught out again
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# ? May 6, 2017 12:02 |
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Howdy, I figured I'd ask this here. I'm using some Stormcasts for 40k, and I grabbed the Storm of Sigmar box because it was cheap for the amount of minis in it. However, I was wondering if there's a way to go about putting the Stormcast upgrade bits on the snapfit models. Any tips or links would be appreciated.
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# ? May 6, 2017 19:12 |
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Munchables posted:Howdy, I figured I'd ask this here. I'm using some Stormcasts for 40k, and I grabbed the Storm of Sigmar box because it was cheap for the amount of minis in it. However, I was wondering if there's a way to go about putting the Stormcast upgrade bits on the snapfit models. Any tips or links would be appreciated. You can, but it's gonna take a lot of heavy cutting and filing. Not worth the effort imo.
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# ? May 6, 2017 19:23 |
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dexefiend posted:It is a trademarked spelling of Orc. Except that it isn't. According to https://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmtext/ a trademark search for the exact word "orruk" returns zero results. E.g., Games Workshop has not bothered to trademark it. Which makes sense, because trademarks are not free, and they made up a shitload of dumb "unique" words. They could trademark them, but until they do, anyone can use them.
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# ? May 6, 2017 20:57 |
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Huh. I stand corrected. I figured it was all a big play to control brand identity.
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# ? May 6, 2017 21:12 |
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It still is. GW can bully the small producers who would do it but who would do that in the first place? Much easier to just call your guys generic Orcs so they can be found and used for any system.
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# ? May 6, 2017 21:34 |
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Don't try to understand what Games Workshop does. For that way lies madness.
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# ? May 6, 2017 21:58 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 02:56 |
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Who in their right mind would knowingly name things "orruk," "ogor," or "bloodsecrator?" Exactly. Brand secure.
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# ? May 6, 2017 22:48 |