Vincent Villafranca

I have seen the next level, and it is this guy. 


Okay, the design of his page is horrifying, but his robot chess pieces? 

Fucking amazing. Click the link and check him out. You won't be disappointed. 


Well, except by the layout/graphics/etc of his website, which is awful. His work is excellent, but man, you'd think the guy could design a better looking website. Of course, maybe he's too busy turning out masterpieces like this to give a flying shit about web design:

In which case, more power to him. 


Happy Friday, people. 

What the crap is going on with Dreadnoughts these days?

By now, everybody's seen this ungainly monster. I'm still on the fence about whether I like it or not, since it's not exactly a new design:

Yeah, that's right. Instead of grabbing a movie design to repurpose (go see Terminator 5 to see where the Dreadknight came from), FW went back several generations to the old Epic scale game and up-sized that thing. Someone loved that ugly little thing so much, they went back and made it the de-facto "old dreadnought, instead of the one we all knew and loved from the early days. You all remember Chuck, don't you? from the 40k Compendium? 

There he is, the poor lil' roly-poly guy. Look at him. Gonna go stomp some Chaos Squats with those two twin-linked bolters of his. Who's the big man? Not you. Sorry, Chuck. 


We're supposed to believe that during the 40k timeline,  Lee Iacocca took over Mars and started cranking out the K-Car of mecha:

Go research K-car, kids. It's a real term. 


There's more than one entendre at work, here. 


Get it? 


Good. 


Personally, I'm glad GW didn't slink away to the movies again. It wrecks the consistency of their design quality--- ooooh right:

C'mon guys. A Glaug from Macross? What were you thinking back then? Even FASA learned that lesson the hard way with the Marauder. You're all over the place with rules, all over the place with design.

Sigh. 

That brings us back to Monstroso, there:

There are some things I like about this model. I feel that it's generally a step in the right direction, I really do. In fact, you can shut down all the current model production lines now, from Rhinos to Stormravens, and art direct everything around the curved, riveted lines of this model. For consistency. 

However, there is a another shade of consistency at work here.  

This design is consistent not with rest of the angular, slab-sided, reasonably well art-directed army. It is consistent with the brand new, hero-focused, special-characters-grant-special-rules bent of the current codexes. There is one message you can take away from this, and it is:

"We envy Warmachine."

Think about that. 

DALEKS ARE SUPERIOR!

Played Necrons vs Vulkan Marines today, and this was the highlight of the match. They took a round to devour his Thunderhammer Termie bodyguard, and ate Vulkan the round after this pic. 


Game ongoing. 2 combat squads, one Assault Squad, and one Dread left to go (that LR is immobilized and weaponless). Updates to follow. 


UPDATE


After swallowing Vulkan, the Daleks engaged a combat squad and proceeded to pummel them to death with their doom plungers. A full assault squad nearly deep struck in, but hit a building. The subsequent mishap roll resulted in them dropping in dangerous terrain across the board instead. Destroyers disposed of that Rhino in the foreground, and the Warrior squad behind them held firm against that Tac squad you can see on the left. 


To make a long story short, a round or so later my opponent conceded. As he was short on units, he was unable to effectively contest control enough objectives. Had we continued, he could've squeaked out a draw, but I think the death of his rock unit (and the delay of his assaulters) dismayed him a bit. I put on my teacher hat and pointed out some  things he did well (covering his Rhinos long enough to make it across the board, targeting/downing my Destroyers with his Rifleman dreads) and some things he did poorly (choosing to assault Warriors in a ruin with his Termies instead of sending them at some Destroyers in the open who were 7" from the LRR).