CannibalBob

While the Viktorias are the only Outcast masters that can use Von Schill and the Friekorps, the majority of masters from the other 4 main factions can use Von Schill and the Friekorps. So there are a lot of options as to who to use Von Schill with if you don't want him to directly lead the crew.

I have played many mini games over the last 20 years, and all told I prefer when games allow full pre-measuring. After many years I don't find that disallowing pre-measuring adds anything great to a game. I have found that overall the games I have played where you can pre-measure end up being much more interesting as both players are much more free to concentrate on their strategy and gameplay. Both players have full access to what it is that they can do each turn, and there is no issue of range guessing which I find to generally speed up the game.

You could also add Von Schill into your crew. Besides being extremely mobile and stupidly tough to kill he is also the bane of non-spirit undead. He ignores hard-to-wound on both his melee and ranged attacks and his clockwork seeker is one of the best ranged weapons in the game. He can easily and quickly get to a place to threaten and kill any Belles you need. He can also destroy any corpse counters that might be around to prevent summoning.

The librarian can be quite good in the Vik's force. Remember that you can choose to have any spell cast on one Vik also effect the other one. This means you can keep the Librarian back by one of the Viks and toss heals on her which will also heal the other Vik no matter where she is on the table. And at this point I think the merits of Von Schill himself go without saying. He is very good no matter who he is used with. However, he is quite expensive in a Vik crew considering how soul-stone hungry the Viks and Von Schill both are - and the Vik's have a cache of 0. That is the biggest downside of using him in a Viks crew.

I recommended Misaki earlier due to her adaptability. She is a bit squishy, but she can give herself high mobility with the ability to ignore movement effects or terrain. She hits pretty hard with her Bisento - and she has a spell to make it hit even harder (it gets really ugly). And she also has the ability to gain a 6" melee range if she needs. When you couple that with a weapon expert that has a high CB value and a magical weapon you have something that is very dangerous against spirits. I have not fought against Snowstorm with her yet, but I have had her dismantle Kirai's crew on a number of occasions. But having said that, I would agree with Headcase about Taelor. Taelor is not as adaptable as Misaki, but she is a good deal tougher and hits like a freight train. If you want to really be mean you could take both of them - although against Raspy one of them is probably enough along with the Viks. And if you really want to be mean then you ought to hurry up and finish Von Schill and his Friekorps. Those guys are just mean against Raspy as they ignore all damage from blasts or the shatter effect and they all have effective armor+2 against spells. They make Raspy work pretty hard to take any of them down with spells.

I would either take Misaki and use her to hunt down Snow Storm or else bounce one of the Viks in to cut apart Snowstorm and then yank her back out using the other Vik. Hit Snowstorm with high damage magical weapons and he will go down quick. That is a very expensive model for the Raspy player to lose.

Desperate Mercenaries are great models and extremely cheap. Given that with the Victorias you generally want to save a bunch of soul-stones for them the Desperate Mercenaries give you a good way to bulk up the size of the crew for cheap.

This is all true, but you can often outrange a number of her models and rather easily outnumber her. I find that the immunities do not really hurt Ophelia's crew much. It just means you get a lot less use from Pere, and against Rasputina I would probably just leave him behind. Other than that the only things that bear armor will stop is Raphael's "Hooeey!" ability and the Bayou Gremlin "Watch this!" explosion. Beyond that they just have armor versus shooting. But with good use of Dumb Luck you can tend to blow through armor. The LOS blocking terrain can be dealt with somewhat by simply outnumbering her crew. She cannot drop enough pillars to block LOS to everything - just to the important things. Between Rami and the standard Bayou Gremlins you should tend to outrange many enemy models and pepper exposed models with shots. Rami can often gun down at least one important target before the enemy takes him out (Gunsmith is a good one). It is not a fool-proof strategy, but I find that Ophelia does rather well against Rasputina.

The defense is not very great for Raspy crews in general. I find that Ophelia & kin + bayou gremlins can often just gun them down. Gremlins can dish out a ton of damage and the only real issues they have is low/medium CB and the amount of self-inflicted damage they do. Against low-df crews I find that I generally dish out more damage than they can often deal with.

Even with one pigapult this is an interesting idea. I had not considered sac'ing them with skeeters later in the game. I may have to save this one for future use as it is generally later in the game that I find the 'pults to be very hard to fuel - unless I have a plan to fling models late-game.

I use Ronin a lot with Von Schill. They are an all-round great model and fit very well into his crew. Other models that I find work well are Taelor, Desperate Mercenary, and Misaki. And all of those models work well with the Victorias' crew (and so does Von Schill) - so it ends up working out pretty well and you flesh out two crews.

I am still learning Somer, but two pigapults seems like a very overly expensive crew given that there is only so many models you can fling a turn, and keeping just one pigapult fed with piglets for attacks takes a fair bit of resources.

I believe that the central vortex model is from Magnificent Ego miniatures.

But wouldn't the crooligans steal all your lucky charms?

You could make her a spirit in a Kirai crew - which would give you access to more healing potential and make her rather tough to kill.

Ourselves? I think we are better at it than the Ortegas really...

As for Malifaux in general, I think pretty much anything from Opeth captures the feel for me. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQuXAojU8ds&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PLA85EF2125822E046[/ame] [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8atiEPs0bQ[/ame] And for some reason the video for Divinations from Mastodon makes me think of the Tyrant December, or Snowstorm, and also the story from book 3 with Joss. But thats probably because I want to think of December rocking out with a guitar. Plus any video that includes a Yeti goes up about 3000% in terms of awesomeness. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxelXPg961M&ob=av2e[/ame] Not sure if Colony of Birchmen fits a specific character, but it does seem to include a Nephilim Black Blood Shaman in it - and its kinda creepy to boot: [ame] [/ame]

This song reminds me of Nekima or Lilith: [ame] [/ame]

That was probably one of the most disgusting things I have seen on the intarwebz. Amusing, but disgusting. God I detest fast food, and to think that some people grind it up to make other meals...

Gotta love bacon. It's pretty much just meat candy.

I thought that Ophelia had a henchman reserve of 6?

The Spanish Inquisition.

No, its not a push - it causes a gremlin to make a WK move towards the piglet (note that it does not say directly towards). It only costs 1AP, and has a low casting cost of 8 - which means a piglet needs to flip a 4 to cast it. The only downfall to it is that it only has a 6" range, but it is easy to cast and gives you out of activation movement. Personally I find that in many games, and especially this one, effects that grant additional or out of turn movement are absurdly good. A piglet could easily cast this spell 3 times a turn to move a clump of gremlins around. You can use it to reposition models such as Ophelia, Somer, avatar Somer (he still has the gremlin keyword), Pere, Rami, the Pigapult (it is a gremlin...), Lenny, the Slop Hauler, etc. 3 points seems pretty cheap to me for something that not only can attack decently if you want it to, but that can also help you move your crew. I have been trying to use slop haulers to heal gremlins such as Ophelia or Rami who tend to self-inflict a bunch of damage to operate well - but I have found it difficult to get them into good position since "feed the piggies" is an all action with a fairly short range. Truffles seems like it might be pretty handy moving the slop haulers around. Or handy to get extra movement from gremlins to accomplish scenario goals. Too bad you cannot put them into a crew led by Ophelia...

It seems that piglets don't really get that much love, but looking at their abilities I am very intrigued by the Truffles ability. It seems to me that if nothing else they have quite a potent ability to reposition gremlins for relatively little cost. What do other people think about piglets in respect to the Truffles spell?