Nutella

Nice line up! You guys had a pretty fun company sized game you made a few years ago.. The Other Side.. Would be cool to see some new stuff released for it in a future sale! 🙂

Only flaming skulls

you could charge away from the wall since you aren't engaged... it's still an incredibly dumb situation though.

I'm leaning toward agreeing with Nikodemus' original argument that the ability would be triggered after step 3 but before step 4 (the duel). I'll add a reference to the Ability Timings section on page 34: "Most Abilities are passive and always in effect, but some occur as a result of another game effect. In these cases, the Ability will use the word “After.” These Abilities happen after the effect in question is resolved."

What faction(s) are you playing? Cult of the Burning Man What faction(s) are you playing against? Abyssinia mostly, just wrapped up a tournament where I got to play against Hordes and KE players more though. One or double commander? the tournament was 1 commander so we've been playing a lot of that. Hoping to switch to mostly two commander now. Also 2v2 team games and 1v1v1v1s! Overall impression Super fun! I wish there were more Operations to play, but the ones we currently have are providing enough variety for the time being. What do you like/dislike about your chosen faction? I love the play style and esthetic of everything so far. Only thing I sort of dislike is how reliant several squads are on having a Raving Madman. Anything you are concerned about, rules wise or anything else? I don't like that gibbering hordes get arbitrarily screwed on Pitched Assault due to how their glory mechanic works. I'm hoping that gets fixed eventually Looking forward to....? All of the new factions coming out! I know a few people holding out for them

Try taking the upgrade that removes LoS as a requirement for academic models. it also does other silly things like let you hire academics out of faction, draw a card when another model discards a card (for a point of damage) and lets academics not randomize onto targets within aura 6 of sandeep. also he has a cache of 4 so stoning for a suit isn't the worst use of a stone or two. As for the topic, i had suggested before limiting beacon to gamin and academic, or card discard each time you use beacon, or even just putting the whole ability on a limited upgrade. The sheer amount of flexibility sandeep has is what makes him such an issue imho.

I think you're right that the strategies and schemes are progressively getting more complicated, but that's the direction the game and the community wants to go, at least for competitive play. Based on your grievances, I think you'd really enjoy playing some of the story strategies! They're usually much more focused experiences, affording you far more freedom in your crew selection. I don't think i've ever had a bad experience with them

They're pretty fun assuming you're using enough terrain and can keep them out of harms way. I've considered them outside of showgirl crews a couple of times. They can make scoring certain schemes much easier to do. They don't get seen a lot because your opponent can punish them for bad positioning pretty trivially, and also there are several other options in the faction that set up scheme markers almost as well for less risk. They're certainly niche but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.. There's a weird trend going on where people only want to have models that are good enough all the time in all situations, but IMHO it's these niche case models that make creative play viable. I'm assuming the mentality is coming from people wanting the smallest list of models to practice with for competitive purposes.. In any case.. there's no harm in trying them out in a few games!

I haven't had trouble getting value out of these guys.. in fact out of the 70 or so ironsides games I've played, at least 1-2 have made it into at least 60 of the games.

Large tokens in the game will have models on them constantly, so I would recommend thinking of having a flat solution for them. For regular terrain, malifaux stuff should work well. Only caveat there is that scatter terrain ends up being more annoying than impactful. We ended up grouping our scatter together to create larger elements which behaved more functionally in game while still making the board look snazzy.

Well you would definitely know 100% for sure that the December Acolyte isn't going to use his zero action to place herself 6" away where as before it would be one of the many things that could happen. I guess if one were to play heavily into the gamin / academic theme already, then the change would do very little to cut down the variety of actions that could happen, but I also think it's not unreasonable to expect that an opponent would be familiar what Sandeep can do within his theme. My issue with him is that because most things in the faction can take his actions, it creates an incredibly large amount of new combinations and flexibility that, at least to me, is unreasonable for someone to expect a player to remember when playing against a single master. Add to that having to keep track of which summoned gamin has what version of upgrade, which mage has which upgrade, which of Sandeep's actions have been taken and whether or not Sandeep has taken his 4th AP this turn and the most common reaction people playing against him have is "wait, what exactly just happened?" I'm also not saying that it's definitely a balance issue, it could be.. but who knows.. To me, it's just a NPE that could be addressed and he would still be on the short list of top masters.

Sandeep’s Beacon ability to specify friendly Gamin or Academic models and decrease the range. This would help add some predictability on what models around him are eligible to take his strategically powerful cast actions. Imbued Energies to give 2 cards instead of 4. Right now the upgrade is too resource efficient making it an auto include when you have a spare stone or two.. December Acolytes could use 1 less wound. Given the offensive strength these guys have, having one less wound would be more inline with what i’d expect from a 7ss model. I also don’t think they need a drastic change to make gunsmiths viable in crews outside of ironsides. Mechanical Rider’s scheme marker trigger should probably be once per turn.. Because of how they are now placed x” away from the target’s base, they are more often eligible for schemes than the markers were previously. In the context of Arcanists, it can make certain schemes really hard to deny (may be different in gg18). Angelica’s pushes should probably have some target number on them, even if its low. Personally I just don’t like strong actions like that without some kind of target number. As for things to make better, there are a few weak models in the collection but I don’t see any that are in urgent need of a fix. I’d love to see some of the other factions get a few things adjusted so they can have a hiring pool as deep as ours.

I'd like to see an FAQ for Asura regarding disengaging strikes as well.. The way the ability is written looks as if it went through quite a few iterations to get where it's at, and doesn't really resemble any familiar abilities to use as a comparison. So until there is an FAQ, i'll likely be playing the model in the most conservative interpretation. I do have to admit that the main value I saw with Asura was in the ability to have a ton of zombies with high stat disengaging strikes.. and if it's possible to do that multiple times in an activation, then the model isn't costed appropriately.

I originally understood it how you did, but after discussing with a couple people in my group, we were still confused and ended up going with you choose one of the actions and cant take the other for that activation. I feel like you're correct and the intention was likely 1 attack per activation period.. and I'll likely start playing this way from now on. I'm also interested if anyone has opinions on whether you can use these attacks as part of a disengaging strike?

So I tried this out in 4-5 (some were weird story-league scenarios) games and it’s been very fun! I’ve been using these core models for any scheme pool just to get a feel for how it plays out: Nicodem Maniacal Laugh Buzzards Asura Emissary Conflux of Death 2x Necropunks Rogue Necromancy Between the Shards and Mindless Zombies, it's very easy to control movement on the table while also providing a nice bit of threat with the zombies. The amount of times in a game where Asura’s attacks end up being a major influencer hasn’t been as high as I originally expected to be, but on average, the zombies end up hitting around ml9. Also anything that can alpha strike one of the two key models hurts quite a bit, and because neither of the models are undead, Nico has a tough time supporting them. Because of this, I end up playing the Emissary and Asura in a cagey manner until the zombie horde is established. One difficulty I’ve run into is figuring out how to score my secondary scheme after claim jump with this setup.. this is probably a mixture of needing more practice with the models and a side effect of playing it into sub optimal scheme pools. Other fun things discovered while playing: - Necropunks with leap, flurry + taking Asura's attack - Buzzards removing slow on the Mindless Zombies is great, supporting Nico during Mwahaha activations is also great - the 14 wp duel has some neat synergy with rogue necromancy.. haven't fully utilitized it though Has anyone else been playing around with super zombies?