Now, i know that I'm a couple of days behind this announcement (OK, its actually over a week!) but i wanted to wade in with my thoughts on some of it. The original announcement was made on the Warhammer Community site a few days ago, HERE if your interested in the original.
While there are several different items mentioned on the post, including Shadespire, Sigmar and Blood Bowl, there were only two items that i really wanted to talk about, which if you haven't guess from the title, were Kill Team and Necromunda.
I'll start with Necromunda, as i have less to say about this and surprisingly i got less excited about this announcement. The news from the under hive was the release of the 4th faction (I'm not including Gene Cults here) in the form of the Van Saar gang. Now i have been looking forward to the release for quite some time and have said to various people in my local club that i was not getting in to Necromunda until the Van Saar gang was released. However, i have mixed feeling about the new models, and in some respects i am leaning towards the Orlocks gang, which to be honest have always been a close second on my list. I remember the Van Saars from the days of old, when they looked like this;
Now, don't get me wrong, i do feel that GW have really got the new Van Saar gang right, i love the look of the weapons, the high tech look to them, i especially love they guy with the shield (below), a proper force field looking thing as opposed to the traditional slab style shields.
The video on the Warhammer Community site (HERE) also does a really good job of showing off the models. There are also some good shots of some of the models at this site (HERE). However, there is two minor issues, one that i think will easily solved, the other may prove a bit harder to solve.
The first issue, that i think will be solved easily, is the ponytails. I mean, really? Ponytails? I'm hoping that these are really some sort of data cable/tether, but i have a feeling that they really are just ponytails. I really think that they look very odd and i don't really like them. If they are data tethers then i can live with it, but if they really are just ponytails, then they are coming off. So that's the simple one. The other issue, which i think maybe a bit more complex to sort is the masks. Yes, these masks go with the high tech look and feel that the Van Saars should have, as that is what they are all about, but i just think that the bug eye look is odd. Now it maybe the colour scheme that GW have chosen and by the time that i get around to getting a gang of Van Saar, there should be lots of different paint schemes out there that other people have made up, so i should be able to get an idea of what looks better.
I haven't seen anything about the rules for these boys yet, so that may change what i think, but I'm expecting lots of fun and exotic weapons, and they should be a very shooty army and not very good in close combat. I plan on loading these guys up with lots of long range weaponry and no much in the way of pistols, and just sit back and wait for the enemy to come to me, which will hopefully mean i will have lots of turns to gun them down, before sprinting forward to do what ever i need to do for the mission. I'm sure that there will be times i will have to move forward, but i will deal with that as and when i need to.
In other necromunda mews, which i touched on above, was the release of rules for Gene Cults. This was really good and fits right in with the setting of Necromunda and i am hoping that this will be the start of several sets of White Dwarf rule sets for Necromunda that will include Chaos Cults and also Adeptus Arbites or even Imperial Guard forces. I don't think there should be any rules for things like marines or full Tyranids, but something like a Guard based PDF force would be good, although i suspect that we will only get some form of rules for Chaos Cults and nothing else. I hope that Adeptus Arbites become a fully fledged faction in there own right, as this would be very cool, and will probably make me wish that i had not sold the few models that i had, although they will look tiny next to the new models! The main reason i want Chaos Cults is that i have loads sitting around unused from the Dark Vengeance box set and they would be a good cheap alternative army to my main gang (Van Saar) in games.
I will wait for the rules for Van Saar to drop sometime soon and despite my reservations about some the models looks, I'm still excited by the release.
The next thing i want to cover is the new Kill Team. I really likes playing kill team in the past, although i usually just played the basic setup and didn't go in to any form of campaign setup. I haven't played any games for quite a while and i was wondering what was going to happen with the release of 8th as a number of the rules for specialists are now defunct, as the universal special rules now no longer exist. While many of the rules could be carried over with a few minor tweaks, it appears that they have basically re-written the whole game. While at the moment there doesn't seem to be a lot of information going around, there is some bits and pieces. The biggest thing that i noticed from the announcement on the Community page, is the fact that they say the game doesn't use the 40k rule set. So the question is, is this every part of the game or just the core mechanics? are we going to see the return of templates, a la Necromunda, or will weapons still be the same, just the core mechanics will work differently, to represent the model based play style, rather than the unit based style of the 40k game. The other things that i noted were, that it seems that pretty much every faction will be represented, although whether there will remain some of the restrictions, such as no 2+ saves, will remain, is up for debate. The also seem to be a command point system, similar to the way that 40k works, which would make sense. There are also still going to be specialists, however, they look like they are going to work in a very different way to the old system, i don't think that you will be able to pick to the same extent that you did, which i think will be a shame, but i don't really know, as all that we have seen is a few blurred screen shots taken from the video. The original video quality does not seem good enough to get clear pictures, which is understandable, they want to tease us, not give everything away.
I have already been thinking about possible kill team options for my forces but its still quite hard to really settle on an idea when you don't know what the options are really going to be. I am really excited by this though, as it will hopefully be able to give me my 40k fix but at the faction of the time and space, i have already been chatting with a friend, who doesn't get to play much with family commitments, about meeting up for a game over lunch. If the format stays the same, this could be a real possibility and may even allow us to get a proper narrative going.
Above I mentioned about using some spare Chaos Cultists in Necromunda, well, I'm hoping that i may be able to pull double duty with them and form them in to a Kill Team force as well, along side some Chaos Marines that i have knocking around, give myself some options, other than guard and Marines. I will be interested to see how they work out the kill teams for the new edition, as the way it worked out before, with teams of 200 points (or was it 250?) meant that for a guard list you could take nearly 50 blokes, with a whole bunch of conscripts. Granted you weren't going to kill much, but you could swamp the whole arena and stop your opponent doing pretty much anything. Even with standard guard you could still seriously out number your opponent.
I don't know when we'll hear more about Kill Team, but i hope its not to long, although the list of things i want to buy from games workshop is getting longer by the day, with Forge Bane, an Imperial Knight, Van Saars gang and now the Kill Team stuff! Oh well, at least GW are getting things right these days and releasing stuff we all want to buy!
No comments:
Post a Comment