Hive Fleet Indy Escalation League (@G2D4)

Here's some basic information regarding an escalation league I will be running starting in January. The information is still early, so some of the dates mentioned are tentative. If you are interested let me know. Official signups won't start for a while, but I would like to get a rough estimate of interested players.

The escalation league will meet on the last Saturday of every month from January to August at G2D4. The league will cost 5 dollars a month.

There will be an initial meeting on 1/8/2011 to build lists and schedule purchases.

The goal of the league is to complete a new 2000 pt army. The first purchase will consists of an HQ and 1-2 troops costing up to 500 points. Every month you will add up to 250 points to your army total. Your monthly purchases don't have to conform to these point costs, but should try to match them as close as possible. The point cost represents the maximum amount of points that can be used in the companion campaign and how much of your army is expected to be painted.

Given that some armies cost more, and people probably are looking for something to do between now and January, you can enter the League with up to 500 points of your army already purchased. The rest of the army must be purchased through the escalation league.

All purchases for the league will be scheduled before hand and be available at the store on the day the league meets. Everyone's league fee's will be pooled together and there will be a drawing. All players in the league are eligible, and if their name is drawn the fees will be applied toward their purchase for the round. Any extra fee's will be carried dover to the next round. Any player can only win the drawing once, until all players have won the drawing at least once. You are required to make a purchase every month.

There is a two strike policy on missing league purchases. If you miss a purchase you have until next league match to buy it. If you haven't purchased it by then, your next purchase is not ordered. If you still haven't made the purchase by the second league day then you forfeit the order, and you will be ejected from the league. (I know this seams harsh, but we don't want the store to buy $500 of stock and not have $300 of it sell.)

The goal for the league is not just to buy a new army, but to also paint it. As a result, painted models in the league campaign gain the Art Snob special rule. Any model with the rule counts as having Favored Enemy: Unpainted Models. If the model already has favored enemy for the target unit type, then you also get to re-roll wounds. Models with Art Snob also count as having twin linked weapons when shooting at unpainted models. If a weapon is already twin linked, then you may also re-roll to wound.

To qualify as a painted model, it must be painted to a three color minimum and have a finished base.

More Details for the campaign league will follow. It will be a story/map based team campaign pitting the forces of order versus the forces of chaos.

Display Board: A Few Days Late

Inspired by the tournament I built a display board for my Eldar.

Efforts in Futility

The new starter for Fantasy has me tempted. I might start a high-elf army. I've been playing 40k for 10 years, and have never once played fantasy. I'm not a big fan of high-fantasy settings, but the game does look interesting.

Anyone else looking to get into fantasy. I'd be interested in swapping the Skaven from the starter with someone else's high elves.

More Play Testing

I want to do some more play testing this Saturday at G2D4 if anyone is interested. I want to see how the flyer rules work in action.

Aircraft Rules Spotted

The aircraft rules are now complete.

I also used my ship creator to re-calculate all the ships and add a few more. I Added the Tribal Class Destroyer, Hood, Renown, and Ark Royal for the Brits. US got the Fletcher and the Yorktown. I added the the Japanese; they have the Kagero class destroyer, the Agano class light cruiser, the Mogami and Tone class heavy cruisers, the Akagi, and the all powerful Yamato.

Based on my methods for stat generation, the Yamato and the South Dakota look like they could go toe-to-toe. The Dakotas quality construction, protection scheme, and fire control balancing out Yamato's brute force. As a bonus the Dakota has almost 3 times the AA output as the Yamato.

Always in a Rush

Our 40k club at G2D4 has another tournament coming up on Aug 7 (Yes, they know that's during GENCON). No particular information is available yet, but the TO should be making that available soon. I'm pretty sure it will be 1750 with three games.

A friend of mine I haven't seen in a few years was going to be at Gencon, so I'm torn about going to this tournament. I would probably have more fun for less cash at the tournament, so I'll probably skip the con on Saturday. I might take Friday off work and go then.

I am faced with having to get more stuff painted for my Eldar. It's my prettiest army, so I want to use it over just running my marines. I have a few options for filling in the last 250 points. I kind of want to convert a seer council on bikes, but I'll be lucky to get that done in a month. I'll probably add two or three Vipers. I'm also thinking about upgrading my Autaurch to a counts as Yriel. He's not the greatest special character, but his b-bomb attack would have been very useful in my last tournament. Converting up some Fire Dragon Exarchs is also a possibility.

I still plan on trying to write up my DV aircraft rules tonight. I won't be able to do any play testing on Saturday as I had hoped. I'm scheduled to play some other games, and it's board game night at work.

Ship Creator Almost Done...

I still have to work out calculations for the ship's point value, but other than that it's pretty much done. It was an interesting challenge to figure out the algorithms to translate my historical knowledge about a ship into the stat values needed for my game. Things like speed and gun strength where easy, but armor was a particular challenge.

The app spits out both text and html source, so I can paste the ships created directly into the pages here on the blog.

The aircraft rules are still coming together in my head. Tentatively I'll have rules and stats updated by next Thursday night and ready for play-testing on Saturday.

Lets see if I can make this DV related deadline I've set for myself.