sprue

Quick update. Played some games with the mosquitos to see how the tactic faired against my friend's Guild. It was a 20 ss match. He drew treasure hunt and I drew assassinate. His list: Sonia Executioner Samael witchling stalker my list: Jones 2 mosquitos 3 bayou gremlins hog whisperer The first turn was very uneventful. I was able to draw my hand but couldn't kill anything due to distance and I couldn't harm anyone with the mosquito because they stayed within range of sonia's ability to counter spells. The second turn was more interesting, I launched a gremlin turned pig at him and he cam forward with the stalker. This time he decided to see what I could do with the mosquitos so his crew left the safety of Sonia's aura. The mosquitos made quick work of Samael and the Executioner but couldn't kill the stalker because of the low casting score they have. It was just bad luck he didn't get fend off the first two attacks. 16 isn't hard to beat. Turn three I got the mosquitos wiped out. Since they all have to stay in close proximity to each other for their trick to work Sonia blasted them away with liberal use of cheating fate plus soulstones. There was no way I could have fended her off even with the joker and all four of the 13's in my hand. She then started pounding away at my gremlins with her remaining spells. Turn four we exchanged blows and I was left with one gremlin, jones, and the hog whisperer, all severely damaged. By turn 5 he had the treasure and was making his way back to his deployment zone, but on turn 6 I finally won the initiative and was able to shoot her dead before he could create a wall of flame and make his escape. My final conclusion is that mosquitos are no where near as deadly as everyone fears. If my opponent had not made the error of leaving sonia's protective aura then he would have made it to my crew in tact and would have started killing my gremlins off. Where I once believed Sonia was the weakest of all the Guild masters I was surprised to see her effectively destroy most of the gremlin crew on her own. The game came down to who won the initiative on the last turn and if I had lost then I would probably have lost the game as well. If I had not gone after the Guild crew with the mosquitos they'd still be alive and able to help put severe damage on his crew but severe damage for a Gremlin or a pig is only 3 and I'd have to deal with an samael and the executioner, one of which would most likely survive and kill them. I'll play another larger game soon and see how it goes then. We had a good time and it was a very close game. I'd like to see some reports from other games involving mosquitos.

what I'd give for one of those, I don't think I'd be able to get them into the country though. Australia is pretty tight on importing animals, even dead ones. I'll just have to frankenstein one.

When doing a demo game it's always better to let the new guy win! Nothing gets someone interested in a game easier than letting them feel like they have a good grasp of the mechanics and game strategies. Once they start playing a little harder you can increase the complexity and competitiveness of your list. It's like training wheels for gamers, you don't want to scare them off before they're confident.

So the selection out here is dismal. It's still very cold and insects are very hard to come by. I did however come across a centipede and a spider. On that subject I'd like to warn any intrepid bug hunters out there to be careful. I am not too knowledgeable on the various poisonous insects of Australia, but my wife was shocked to find I'd brought a white tail into the house! I or my bug sniffing dog could have been hurt so I'd suggest only capturing things you can identify.

I like it. It's a great way to deal with something that you really don't want to get up close and personal with.

He'd be pretty useful in a res or neverborn crew.

Well, you wouldn't make an initial flip because you can't, you'd have to go straight to the cheating fate part. I don't mind your sass werecat but it doesn't do you any favours. I think I've said my piece and I'll leave it at that. You're either willing to take on a challenge or you want to bring the game down to a level you're comfortable with. People say that I won't have opponents who will want to play me, but on the other hand, I enjoy challenges so if someone doesn't want to provide that, then I won't enjoy the game much either. Maybe I won't want to play them because they lack the willingness to find solutions in what's meant to be a strategic game. Having fun is all about your attitude. You can have fun if you want to.

Start making terrain with multi level surfaces. Buildings, train platforms, ravines, large hills, bridges, etc. This will give you safe zones that will make it impossible for mosquitos to get everywhere on a battlefield with summoning. Then of course you have Hamelin the rat catcher. He's mosquito proof and can cast obey

I'm sure most tournament organisers will have a problem with stalling. If you're going to put time limits on things then there has to be a rule for that as you can stall without infinite activations since time limits aren't part of the rules in the first place. That's just bad form. I've never been to any tournament or friendly gathering and had someone say they don't want to play me. If you look at the opposite side of the coin, people who are willing to accept a defeatist's mentality are not rising to a challenge and their not bettering themselves. You can't increase your skill to the point where you can beat a skilled opponent if you're not willing to play that opponent in the first place. I'm not pointing any fingers I'm just trying to put forth the idea. It's always better to challenge yourself, to see if you can get out of a difficult situation. You may loose a few times but we all do when we're learning. If don't try, you can't learn. If I had never mentioned the mosquito tactic in the forum, we'd never have the opportunity to try to figure out how to beat it.

Cain, I'm not trying to be rude, but I can't understand why you'd throw in the towel or refuse to even attempt to try and beat this list. What would your opinion of Rocky be if he refused to train and fight Apollo? What would have happened if Frodo never left the Shire or George Washington said "I've lost too many battles, I don't want to be a general any more" Please try for the sake of trying, and do your best.

I'm interested in seeing you're most creative interpretation of a mosquito totem. Get out there and harvest some body parts, stick em together and take some pics. Clever use of arthropods should include splicing various body parts from assorted insects to create the ultimate blood sucking horror!

Glad you like it. My new plan is to start splicing parts from different insects together. My shopping list is looking like this: head: fly abdomen: bee Thorax: wasp (the skinny ones) legs: mosquito hawk or daddy long legs Now there's a thread idea "McMourning's bug butchery"

Cain if you try to use parasitic infection on a master it's going to fail. The best result a mosquito can muster is 18 (ca2 + 14 from joker + 2 from reckless abandon) most likely it will be a 16 as the mosquito won't be in range of the reckless abandon aura. A master's average df is around 4 + they can cheat fate so lets say 10 + use soulstones. So the mosquito will probably fail and that ends the infinite activation. Additionally, there are lots of models with a df of 6 or 7 so they will have an easy time beating a 16 as well. Guild players can use Perdita as well. I seriously spent over an hour the other night typing up a list of tactics each faction can use to kill the mosquitos and I eventually got fed up with it because after an hour I'd only finished with the Guild, Res, and Arcanists. Every faction has plenty of tricks. I'd like to see what your thoughts are after you've tried playing against a gremlin army that uses this tactic. Play a few games and see how it goes. Real games are going to be much more telling than a hypothetical scenario.

Fair enough. I'll report back on how Teeth does this weekend. Leveticus starts with 6 cards, goes to 8 with alyce. gets two more for casting spells (hopefully he's created some abom's) rearranges his deck and then goes out in a blaze of glory by taking 12 wd from the desolation engine. He's dead now but who cares, he's already activated and he'll be back next round. You now have 22 cards in your hand. Good times

Try it out. See how many cards you can draw before your opponent kills one of the mosquitos. With bete noire your opponent will be able to summon only one mosquito. With other factions, any master will be able to use a soul stone to spray the landscape with mozzie guts. It seems woefully overpowered when you think about it but when you get down to it it's not hard for a good player to handle. A lot of people have already come up with a contingency plan to handle this.

Lordknyght got me thinking about mosquito reproduction so I researched it and found out that it is the sucking of blood that triggers the start of the reproductive system in female mosquitos. Larva hang around for about two weeks and then become mosquitos about two days after that. Just thought I'd share.

Drawing lots of cards is a primary feature of the gremlins and its not going to go away by changing the Mosquito's rules. Every faction has it's pluses and this is one for the gremlins. Even Leveticus can draw lots of cards. He gets a hand of 6, draws one when he casts a spell, gets to rearrange his deck, Rusty Alyce give him 2 more, and he can sack the Desolation Engine and draw cards there as well. So I don't think that gremlins are really ahead of everyone in terms of balance.

If they errata it I won't be too disappointed. Though as I've said before, I really don't think it breaks the game. I do hope though that they play test it very thoroughly. I'm playing a game this weekend and I'll be testing it myself so I'll let you know how it goes.

I think those are both good ideas. I personally think it would be easy to just change it from (all) to (2) The last thing I want to see is a big change to the rules like what happened with the grave robbers.

I think Khail has a point. Unless some errata has changed the wording it doesn't say bete noire is summoned. She replaces the killed/sacked model so I imagine that means she is in its exact location but on the positive side not slowed. I think it has a longer than 22" range. If canine makes two move actions and makes two more move actions before being sacrificed it will have moved 32". Wait, maybe you've made a typo and you meant 32 not 22. my bad

I've discussed it with a friend and I think the consensus is that it's pretty easy to kill one of the mosquitos and end the process. Once models close in with the enemy it's very likely that they will be killed before you draw much of your deck. We'll be testing it this weekend. I started writing a list of ways each faction can deal with mosquitos before they get out of hand but it got too long and I decided it doesn't need posting. Each faction has several ways to kill a mosquito once they've closed in (or in bete noire's case at any time) If you haven't closed in with your opponent then who cares if your opponent can draw a million cards. All the gremlin's spells will succeed but they won't be in range to do anything offensive to you and then the gremlin player has to discard all his cards and start over next round. As far as my opponents' feelings are concerned, I have every faith that they will be able to deal with this tactic and provide a challenging and enjoyable game as everyone I've encountered thus far at our club is extremely intelligent and very experienced.

Lordknyght I get what you're saying. When you try and inject realism and common sense into a game then of course what you're saying makes perfect sense provided that an all action does require all your attention and concentration. Since we can't truly know how much focus is required to do this we have to use our imaginations. I have to disagree with this though. I think the 0,1,2,all denominations are purely a mechanic to give players flexibility and provide some balance to what each model can achieve during its activation. I don't think it has anything to do with how long an action actually takes if we tried to be realistic about it. Some actions have a (0) cost because they want you to use it and not be penalised for it. Some actions have an (all) cost because I'm sure the designers felt that it was too good to use in conjunction with another action (they didn't want us to be able to summon a steampunk abomination immediately after scavenging a scrap counter). It's simply a way to make sure a model can't do too much in one round. If you look at some actions you'll see what I mean. If Leveticus scavenges (an all action) in reality it could take just a moment (because the scraps were right at his feet) or it could take hours (because it was buried under six feet of rubbish) Or let's look at Marcus' stare down ability. It's a (0) action but come on, I think I can smack a person with a stick quicker than it takes to complete a stare down but an attack costs (1) ap. Who can say how long it takes to inject larva inside someone. The time is limited only by what we can imagine. Perhaps larva can be distributed as a topical contact cream (mosquitos might suffer from premature ejaculation) It's really up to you decide. But I'm sure the game designers didn't want mosquitos flying 10" to their host and then performing the larva action, hence the (all).

I've already asked about it in the rules section and it is allowed. The rules very clearly state what an all action requires and what is not allowed. Nowhere does it say that a model must have more than one ap, only that an all action is the only action the model is allowed to perform. The reference to 0 actions is only there to make sure the reader understands that an action that costs no ap is still an action and therefore not allowed with an all action. It is neither a loophole nor a technicality. The reasoning behind an all action is to make sure that certain actions cannot be used in conjunction with other actions which might have been obtained by a model's abilities or spell effects from other models. i.e., they don't want it to be combined with things like fast, melee expert,casting expert, or any other effect that offers extra ap. So based on these examples I have to say that it is not in conflict with the spirit of the rule. I'd also appreciate it if you didn't question my integrity. Some people simply interpret the rules differently than you. I invite you to visit the rules forum and have your say on the matter. I do feel that rules should be based on the direct interpretation of printed rules and not drawn conclusions so until an errata is produced which changes the rule the rule will stand. I also want to reiterate that this is not a game breaking manoeuvre. Mosquitos can easily be pushed out of range of their target or killed (bete noire is an excellent way to stop this). There is no shortage of powerful and effective models available to all factions. It's up to each player to recruit wisely and play with cunning if they want to win.

I don't believe it does no. There are lots of ways to kill mosquitos. Or just add a line in the Larva ability that says you can't do it on the turn you're summoned. People complain about a problem too easily before looking for a solution. I say this with the best of intentions. It's better to think of a way to overcome a situation than to say that the situation is not fair. The mental exercise will benefit you more and make you a better player.

slow is not an action. All actions are the only action you are allowed to take, they don't have an ap cost associated with them.