dannydb

hi all so I've been playing a few months now, mostly have the rules down to a tee, thought still having to spend a lot of time looking up obscure rules now and again (plus the rulebook's index is terrible in my view and not at all detailed enough. however even when rules questions don't come up the game does seem to take a lot of time, I had a game last weekend 50SS of sandeep vs dreamer that took over 4 hours to play, which is fine in some regards as we were playing at a fairly casual pace, having a couple of laughs etc but its still a long time considering i've seen most tournament games allow for half that. now i guess some of this does come down to I was playing Sandeep for the first time and it took some thought to what he could do, and there was a lot to think about from his regard, but the rest of the crew save the oxford mages, i tried to keep quite simple (e.g firestarter and kudra as warding rune holders and relatively cheap beaters/scheme runners) and a variety of garmin, no emissary or mech rider or other crazying things. however a lot of the game was spent me trying to work out what to do with all the models and what order to activate them in, something I want to get quicker at as i can't imagine me dilly dallying over which model i need to activate is much fun for my opponents. I guess part of it is just getting used to playing with the models and learning what they do but there still seems to be a lot of time spending reading, planning and re-reading just to make sure i don't screw up. I guess this is partly me falling in to the trap of having a bought a lot of models in a short amount of time and thus not having time to learn them all, but is there any way to speed this up, do try to do a bit of light reading over the cards when i've got some free time, but is there any tips and tricks for memorising the basics, or speeding up the decision making process (mostly on what to activate when)

one of my first thoughts when putting this up would be ironsides as potentially lesbian, or if hertosexual she would probably be the dominant in the relationship

well nice to see that the discussion is plodding along nicely. It does seem to be that there isn't many comments on the majority of characters (I mean other than kiri and mccabe and a couple of hinted at relationships, none of the characters seem to have significant others mentioned) I do agree though if it was something to be more included it shouldn't be something that is rammed down the reader's throats which is just a massive turn off (for example for people who watch Dr who a huge turn off this season has been the fact that Bill has mentioned the fact she is a lesbian in 99% of the episodes- WE GET IT BILL YOU LIKE WOMEN YOU SAID ALREADY!) Sexuality is part of a character not their entire character and although it would be nice to get a bit more more information about the masters spare time, this should be to the benefit of the story and malifaux universe not the determinant of.

so something was thinking on the other day. one of the great thing about malifaux is the diversity in characters. i've been playing been playing GW games predominantly for most of my gaming life span having only recently started malifaux. i mean in GW games 90% of the characters are caucasian males, malifaux does seem a lot more balanced (i mean a few weeks ago we had 6 people playing malifaux, the only caucasian male master was the dreamer, with lady J, zorader, linch, mei feng and ironsides making up the other 5 masters- in fact we joked i was the most discriminative (vs dwarfism) person as I didn't take mouse however one thing that doesn't seem to be talked about much is characters sexuality, is this mentioned at all? (I've only read the 2nd ed "rulebooks" none of the other fluff). are there any known LGBT characters out there, either known or hinted at, or am I assuming that reproduction even works the same way on malifaux and all the characters are in fact asexual

Ice dancers are also good scalpels/scheme runners Raptors are just real good miniatures some schemes benefit from having a showgirl for practiced productions

just to point out with merc tax its 3ss

i'd also say child as something to give extra burning is a real good idea! i always think its a good idea to work out when building a crew is weather or not you want to spend the game setting your own stuff on fire and benefiting from that (e.g rail golems, large arachnids, carlos etc) or your opponent's stuff (then gunsmiths, fire starter etc are much better) kaeris can do both role's o.k but if you try to do both you will run out of activations very quickly!

well essentially are they better scheme runners than ice dancers? I mean they seem to be our premium scheme runners

how good is the valedictorian with sandeep- looking to him up and add the oxford mages to form an academic based gang full of loveliness and the valedictorian being a henchman also allows for holding warding runes. essentially at the moment I'm thinking of backing him up with either val or Kudra with carlos with practiced productions as my other warding runes henchman when I go down that route but just wondering which of the two is the better or do they do vastly different roles for the crew- kudra seems to be a lot more buffed by having gamin around with her upgrade but considering the summoned gamin seem much better for running scheme so don't really want to be relying on that if she's a bit of a wet lettuce without the her upgrade, the gamin, warding runes and 3 mages

:-(

:-( was thinking making using raptors to make things beasts- i guess i could spend time making my own constucts beasts- mean non master i can't turn mei feng in to a beast and blade and claw off her and then rail walk up hang on is the porkchop a beast?

does blade and claw have to be friendly beasts? i now just want to try using a raptors to pull rail golems in to the middle of enemy formations and really puny enemies hiding in the middle of formations in to my claws I've completely derailed this thread haven't I- its gone from how to mei-feng to how to do cheesy tricks possibly in a meifeng gang

this is a great idea, i guess the scorpius would be the most on theam and could be both blade and clawed and rail walked to as needed! I guess there are other beasts that could be use, raptors (for getting laz up on top of buildings) hoarcats

yes assimilating railwalk is proving to be not as easy as I thought what you could do I guess is move the mech piggies once and then stop, use the mech piggies scrap marker to make mei feng a robot and then go from there. but then your own moving the mech piggie once, so your just slowing mei feng and the piggy down to speed lazzy up? not sure thats worth it

Drat well that does break things up, back to the drawing board then! Does lazarus work without without the the railwalk assimilate then out of interest? obviously there is going to be a lot of constructs in the mei feng crew, but not sure how many of the arcanist constructs have abilities worth copying with it

well sorry to Derail the thread slightly but was looking in to a bit of a combo regarding mei feng, although its a bit model intensive, as its mostly 0 actions which are probably going to be going unused in the first turn anyway (which is when i can see your wanting to be using rail walking to anyway to make sure you get mei feng up and ready to smash) essentially the idea is Walk the mech porkchop up twice towards wherever you want to go, dropping scrap after first walk turn Meifeng into a robot with sparks 0 ability using lazarus 0 ability copy rail walking, moving essentially almost and extra 2 inches + 30mm for the scrap marker- doesn't sound like a lot, but could be the opportunity to then walk and then go blasty blasty with its gun turn 1 that might be missed otherwise then meifeng actually goes does her thing

Isn't the porkchop great with Mei feng for railwalking?

so picking arcanists as a fraction to concentrate on was a good idea! guess that means i'm going to have to get used to playing with carlos vasquez then (as not picking up a collet box!) thats fine as he was included for most of my "dummy" lists for kaeris then!

So sorry to double post! so thinking about the strategies and schemes are there things I should be looking out for? are there certain combinations that are almost impossible to score from, are there combinations that are almost "auto picks" as they easy to score from? are there certain strategies/Schemes that thing "right Im playing X strategy so i need Y model and 2 Z models? I mean I'd imagine for turf war where everything is bunched up there is need for models who dish it out up close as personal and/or aura/blast effects to take advantage of the fact everyone is bunched up, where as say reconnoiter which seems to want everyone spread out its prob best to look for models that can function without being in the range of 3-4 other models

I will have too look in to this, I'm picking up a smart phone for my birthday after finally getting fed up with my "drug dealer" phone so that definitely something I'll be getting!

yes i know it just without the card we didn't want to have to keep flicking around the rulebooks as we are still learning the rules most of us! but yep from next meeting we should have the cards to do them! i've also been given a camera so expect some pics after my next gaming session, might even eventually start some battle reports!

I know its not technically ironsides related but had a couple game with the oxford mages this weekend (both with ironsides and karis) and struggled to keep them out of combat, with their "short" range they tended to form a 2nd line just behind my brawlers but in both the games I played they ended up in combat so unable to help much (other than the blood ward one) how do you keep do people keep their mages safe, I guess i didn't have enough models in the front line both games so that might need to be reminded but with the modes i had I wanted to keep them safe from teddies grasp!

drat i mean still ended up just "winning" (we are sill playing just kill each other atm, the group is going to pick up some strats and screams cards next week) but having the Rail golem venting steam over everyones faces at the end would have been great!

so another few weeks go by- finally paint up all my models (I won't subject the internet to my terrible painting skills by showing pictures!) however did get 2 games in vs the dreamer the other day- first game was I played ironsides and essentially got a massive moshpit going, so while I manage to get up to adrenalin stupid and then go to town beating down on alps and daydreams, however she couldn't attack the thing doing all the damage, the widow weaver due to it being terrifying and my willpower being though the floor. however did pull off a nice trick of doing some more beatdown on the alps, then using ironsides zero to go and hide behind an already activated lord chompy bits turn 5 game 2 was a lot more competitive after i switched up to karies, though did make a terrible error of first turn i basically turned all the fire on rail golem to put its burning through the roof (was up to burning 15!) then thought I'd fire some oxford mages at him as well for some and decided to red joker the damage on my triple neg flip (rules question do i have to take red joker? my opponent said i did but I wasn't sure) which left rail golem in teddy killing range Speaking of oxford mages, how do you keep them safe, I mean there short range meant that i spent most of the time with them just behind my main line but my opponent tied them up every single game- though he did outnumber me and I really wished i had my raptors to help make up numbers (or maybe i should have just taken a couple of fire gamin over something else)

So fairly new player to the game still learning the ropes and expanding my collection one of this I'm kind of interested in is how much tailoring you do when building a list depending on announce fraction- I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to almost exclusively play arcanists for a number of reasons and have bought a number of masters to complement this (karies, ironsides, mei feng, rasputina and sandeep currently, also have ramos's box but mostly for howard and joss rather than to play ramos and his spider factory) however just wondering how much thought I should put in to choosing master depending on what my opponent is bringing, e.g if my opponent is declared neverborn, how much weight do I put behind rasputina hoping that they go for a wp based 'attack' strategy and thus counter this in the same vein to this, what are the fractions real strengths- for example as said above Neverborn to my understanding tend to attack willpower rather than defence with lots of lores, I've heard never to bring armour vs outcasts, Vs ressers conditions, constructs rather than living models and corpse marker removal but what about the other fractions lastly I'm hoping to start playing more strategies and schemes games rather than just kill everything. Are there any Schemes that are almost impossible to do together? are there certain schemes that if the come up should be almost auto picked and a list built around (e.g if one of the Schemes is bodyguard and the strategy is turf war, do I just make a list of ironsides, joss, 3 mages with all warding runes and wards and march up to the middle of the board and beat faces? etc) hope this all makes sense and thanks in advance!