I had a couple of meetings today that will hopefully lead to getting my medical issues sorted out. The people I talked to about it last week were all hellfire and brimstone, but I am not quite ready to burn down City Hall without giving the system a chance to answer my questions. The people I talked to today are a little more level-headed and seem to have good working relationships with the medical personnel. Hopefully I can get some answers and get this sorted out. The military is a decent career path as far as pay and benefits go, but it can be mind-wrenching sometimes to sort through the many levels of administration and bureaucracy.

Just saw an ad for the video game Battlefield 3, and noticed that the guy loading the round in the tank at 0:55 pushed in the round with open fingers instead of a closed fist. That's a good way to get your glove caught and at best lose some fingers. With the way that breech comes back, you're more likely to get maimed or killed. I suppose I'm being a bit of a pedant, but after you've seen that gun jump back once, you never again want to be anywhere but plastered up against the side of the turret when the gunner squeezes the trigger.

I've got a large pile of gaming projects in mind for when I get home, but without all of my books and figures close at hand, it's hard to remember what I've got for any given project. I've been following some stuff on eBay and The Miniatures Page, but I'd hate to duplicate things I've already got or relegate even more stuff to the dusty pile in the attic. I'd like to put together a few small forces for The Lord of the Rings, which is something I've mentioned on this blog a few times over the last few years. I've actually got four or five lists written up, mostly using figures I've already got in my collection, but each army needs one or two units or heroes to complete the 500 points. I even have a good number of the Evil forces (Moria Goblins and Easterlings) painted up already. My Dwarf army is still sitting in boxes, and my Fiefdoms list exists only in my imagination aside from a Prince Imrahil I picked up on clearance at some point in the hazy past. I would really like to do a Far Harad list, but that range is all metal models in blister packs, which gets expensive in a hurry. I love the way the GW Lord of the Rings figures paint up. They are a joy to paint. I think they strike the right balance between being too simple and being overly complicated. There is detail where you need it, but not six billion skullz and bitz and details that turn into a huge time sink, like you see in the Warhammer and 40k ranges. I may sell off some of my spare figures in those lines so that I can expand into more Lord of the Rings stuff. It's a shame I didn't do that several years ago when the local Hobbytown had a metric buttload (as opposed to an Imperial buttload) of the stuff on clearance. Now I think they've just got an Attack on Weathertop boxed set that has been there long enough to pull seniority on several of the employees.

Back in the USA

I've been back in the US for about three weeks now, but I haven't made it all the way home yet. During the demobilization process I expressed a couple of my medical concerns and got pulled into a Warrior Transition Unit pending some surgery on my feet. Today I was informed that I will not be receiving the surgery as my condition has been rated by the doctor as not serious enough to prevent me from deploying again, and now I will start the process of being sent home to return to duty. I will probably wind up opting to have the surgery done on my own dime by a civilian doctor as it causes me a lot of discomfort and affects my ability to do my job. It has been a frustrating process, but I guess the upshot is that I will soon be able to return home to my wife and kids. I should not complain much more as too much whining is unprofessional, so I will close out by saying that today I am in a rather dark mood as I feel I've been strung along by a series of doctors and have been delayed in coming home to my family without anything to show for it.

The twins have been growing their first couple of teeth and have just recently become mobile. They are quite adept at finding ways to get into trouble while they explore the house. Their older brother is no stranger to mischief, either, as he usually has more energy than he knows what to do with. I am looking forward to seeing all the kids again and getting to know the twins, who are now twice the size they were when I was home on my R & R leave.

I have plenty of idea for hobby projects, but I am not sure how much time and space I will have when I get home. One of my first tasks will be to clean out the garage. I hope that will not take too long, but there is a lot of stuff. I need to do a few things to my car to make sure it's good to go. I had hoped to get out to a convention this year, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen. School starts for me in January, so I need to get mentally prepared for that, especially if I am going to be taking Math courses. I would like to fit some painting into my schedule, but that always seems to go out the window. My time management skills are awful, and when you add that to all the little emergencies that pop up in a household it seems like nothing ever gets done.

Puerto Rico

The guy who lives next to me over here in the desert is a board game fanatic. He plays them, he designs them, he loves them. He works the same job I do, but on a different shift, so we don’t hang out much. He’s recruited a group of people to play a game called Puerto Rico in the evenings, when I am sleeping, but he came in the other day while I was on shift and talked me and the Lieutenant into trying it out. It’s a typical resource management game, with players trying to colonize an island, build infrastructure, grow crops, and ship those crops out for victory points or sell them for money to buy more buildings. I’m sure the website for the game offers a decent summary of gameplay, but you have to balance out all of the different actions you can take and eventually build more buildings and ship more goods than the other players. If you get out of balance with your resources, it is possible for the other players to lock you out for a turn or more based on what they choose to do when they lead a turn off. It seems like an okay game, but I haven’t quite grasped all of the rules or even all of the objectives yet. We may play again sometime soon, if he pops in again during my shift.Here's the game description from the Board Game Geek site:

The players are plantation owners in Puerto Rico in the days when ships had sails. Growing up to five different kind of crops—corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee—they must try to run their business more efficiently than their close competitors: growing crops and storing them efficiently, developing San Juan with useful buildings, deploying their colonists to best effect, selling crops at the right time, and, most importantly, shipping their goods back to Europe for maximum benefit.

The game system lets players choose the order of the phases in each turn by allowing each player to choose a role from those remaining when it is their turn. No role can be selected twice in the same round. The player who selects the best roles to advance their position during the game will win.

Blah Blah Blah Games Workshop

There’s been a lot of talk on the web about Games Workshop’s recent doings. As is usual with enthusiasts, the talk ranges from Apocalyptic End of the Hobby fare all the way through the spectrum to This Is the Greatest Thing Evar I (heart) GW 4EVS!!!! Actually, that really only applies to the ‘all-new’ Finecast range, which is pretty much all of the metal models from the catalog pulled out of circulation and swapped out for resin castings, along with some new releases for Tomb Kings and Dark Eldar, the most-recently published army books for Warhammer Fantasy and 40k.

The talk about the changes to the distributor agreement and the general price increase has been mostly neutral or negative. As I understand it, GW noticed that people in Australia were buying many of their miniatures from retailers in the UK, because currency fluctuations made the Australian MSRP much higher than paying for figures and shipping from the UK. Independent retailers in Australia, and more importantly, the local GW shops were seeing a lot less business, making them unprofitable, while shops in the UK were rolling in Australian money. Games Workshop made changes to their agreement, making shops sign some sort of agreement saying that they wouldn’t ship figures to certain countries. No agreement, no retail account. Games Workshop claims it’s a move to help recruitment in their local Australian shops, growing the hobby and helping the gaming community in the long run. People who were purchasing or selling the figures across the ocean see it as a ham-fisted moneygrab that restricts free trade and flies in the face of freedom. I think it could have been handled better (Games Workshop isn’t known for being tactful when it comes to legal actions), but I’m sure the company has a few accountants and economists looking over the numbers and this will probably blow over and work out in the end. Gamers in the affected countries will either buy the figures at the higher prices, quit gaming altogether, switch to a different game system from another company, or find another way around paying MSRP and wait for GW to catch onto it and snuff that, too. It probably doesn’t really affect me personally all that much, and it will probably not affect the ‘GW Hobby’ in Australia as much as the Doomsayers are predicting. It wasn’t handled well, and GW’s corporate attitude tends to default to condescending and secretive, but gamers will either pay the enforced prices or find another way around it.

The timing is a little off as well, with the annual price increase being announced at about the same time. Price increases hit about 1/3 of the line, with most of the increases coming in at 10-15% over previous levels. Some of the prices got smaller adjustments. Army books took a decent-sized jump, with the softcover books jumping up to $33 each. The hardbound books jumped up to $41.75. Most of the Lord of the Rings line jumped by quite a bit, and almost every Battleforce and Battalion took a big leap. Then it’s just a random assortment of boxed sets to fill out the remainder of the increases.

One notable thing missing from the annual price increase list is the Finecast models. They didn’t escape from it, though. They got a lot more expensive as part of the rollout of the ‘new’ line. Some of the figures got increases of up to 50%, making them more expensive than comparable Forge World models. Again, aside from a few new releases for Tomb Kings and Dark Eldar, these are the same old metal sculpts recast in resin. The casting quality from the press photos and releases has been pretty bad, with plenty of miscasts, air bubbles, broken parts, and mold lines across the line. Some of the pictures I’ve seen are pretty horrid, with entire parts missing and Space Marine figures with only half a Boltgun. Quality control appears to be uniformly terrible, and so far GW hasn’t addressed it. The much-touted midnight online release also got flubbed, with the website failing to update and offer the new models for same until several hours after midnight. I didn’t buy a lot of the character models anyway, but I did buy some of the metal figures from time to time, and it seems like there are always a couple of must-have units that aren’t available in plastic, so this change will probably affect me a bit. I hope that I can find most of the models for my lists on eBay in the old metal. Unfortunately a lot of other people have expressed the desire to do the same thing, so it may be a good time to put your metal figures up on eBay. So far I am not impressed with Finecast, and the switcherooney price increase that goes along with the change seems a bit underhanded.

Will all of this drive me away to another game? Probably not. I am too invested in the background and the figures to really go elsewhere. It really just pushes me further along a path that I’d already started down. The last two or three years of price increases have pushed just about every GW model up and over my psychological impulse purchase line. I can’t just go into the shop and buy an infantry box anymore. More often than not, it seems, I walk out empty-handed after a trip to the shop. Or if I feel really guilty about not buying something I will get a bottle of paint or a Thomas train for my son. Every year there is something, like the repackaging on many of the regiment boxes that dropped them from twenty figures to ten per box and increased the price per figure. Then the next year the ten-figure boxes got another bump in price. This year it is price increases, the great Australian trade embargo, and a poorly-executed exchange of resin for metal. Next year Games Workshop will do something else stupid that many people hate and more than likely increase prices on another group of figures. I can no longer afford to buy every shiny new thing that comes out, so I’ve been brain-storming about what to do. I took a look at my figure inventory and realized that at my theoretical painting rate I have something like a six-year backlog just in Warhammer Fantasy and 40k figures, but much of it doesn’t really fit into any list that I actually want to purchase. My plan is to focus only on the army lists that I really get jazzed about. I will work on one major project each year, and mix in one or two minor projects as well. I’ll probably start with one of my Orcs & Goblins lists, as I have most of the figures for them already, less a couple of trolls and maybe one or two odds and ends. A minor project to go along with it could be a skirmish game (maybe some Pirates or Old West figures), some terrain, or something else that’s been sitting on my shelf for a while. That system should allow me to focus my time and money on projects that are actually meaningful to me. I suppose it’s similar to The Pledge or the Frugal Gaming movement. Talking about it is all fine and good, but the proof is in the doing. Games Workshop will still be getting some of my cash, but not as much of it, and I should be getting more bang for my buck. I hope that the quality control on the Finecast line improves, as I may wind up needing a few of the figures to fill out my lists, and I’d rather not have to build a Boltgun or a cape from scratch.

Miniature Me

My sister made a doll of me for my oldest son, so he would be able to have daddy around while the real deal is overseas. It's a fairly common thing to do, and it's generally seen as kind of a sweet memento for the kids to carry around and talk to and act as a place holder. Well, this is kind of like that, except that it's a bit more frightening than comforting. This is me, in doll form:

There's no accounting for taste, and my boy has taken a shine to it, so it all works out. The photo she chose is not that flattering, but it is pretty accurate. The uniform is from the wrong service, but my sister's husband is a Marine, so I can let that go. I think it helps my son to get to sleep at night, and after all the trouble we've had with bedtime over the last 2 1/2 years, anything that makes it easier for him to go to bed and actually go to sleep is worth its weight in gold. I also hear that Miniature Me is serving a dual purpose. Apparently he was using the doll as a makeshift gun and shooting members of the family. It's a good sign. He's got the bloodthirsty bit down; now I just need to teach him to paint and roll dice.

Really, Games Workshop?

Well, Games Workshop is rolling out yet another set of price increases. It probably doesn't rank very high on the scale of world disasters, but it just seems like a bit much. I guess it's good that I have an attic full of figures that need painted. There aren't a lot of things I "need" for my next few army lists that I don't already have, but the cost of a playable army is already more than my house payment (really most armies are close to two house payments unless you can find a good deal on second-hand figures) and that is a lot of cash. I usually make the argument that at least it's not as expensive as some hobbies, but it's getting there.

In other news, I am currently reading book 16 of the Horus Heresy, and after the last few books I am full of ideas for my miniatures. We'll see if I get around to actually doing any of it, but it's exciting to have so many ideas. I haven't touched my paintbrushes for a little while. I got hung up on painting some cloaks and lost my momentum. I would like to get back into the swing of it. I'm also trying to decide if I should do a Traitor Guard army in addition to my Orks, so my Imperial forces have more than one enemy to fight. These Traitor Guard wouldn't be all mutated or anything, they'd probably just deface the symbols on their vehicles and have a different color scheme.

Not much else to report from over here in the desert. I hope the next few months go quickly so I can be home before my kids are all grown up.

Orc Lists

A week or two ago I went through the Orcs & Goblins army book and made three lists based on what I view as the main Orc & Goblin tribes. The first list is made up of Forest Goblins and Savage Orcs. This includes the Arachnarok spider and every other Spider-riding unit in the list.

The second list is Night Goblins and Squigs. I added some Stone Trolls to this list for muscle, as I figure they can be found in the same caves the Night Goblins inhabit. I also added a couple of Spear Chukkas, which aren't specifically Night Goblin war machines, but could easily be converted and probably would be useful for cave fighting due to having a flat firing trajectory when compared to Rock Lobbas and Doom Diver Catapults. I guess that doesn't matter too much in game terms, but it makes sense when considering the 'reality' of Night Goblins battling the Dwarves and Skaven for control of the underground. My suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

The third list is a bit larger, and is what you could call a traditional Orc & Goblin list. It's got all of the standard units (Orc Boyz, Goblins, Snotlings, Boar Cavalry, Wolf Cavalry, Chariots, Trolls, and Giants) as well as the war machines that didn't make the other lists (Doom Diver Catapult, Rock Lobba, Snotling Pump Wagon). It even has an Orc Warboss on a Wyvern. I wasn't sure about this one, as it's a huge number of points to spend on a single character, but I have the model and need an excuse to paint it up, so it's in the list.

If I were able to up my painting production and paint a couple hundred models a year, this group of lists would probably take me about 2 1/2 years to finish. That's a pretty long time, but at least now I have an idea of what I actually want to paint up for each army. I'm pretty sure I have some surplus figures that I can try to sell or trade for the things I still lack. I'm planning on making additional lists for every army I'm working on.

March Update

I've been working on my Dwarf army and with the completion of the current 5-model batch, I will have 35 models finished, just over a third of the army. I've got a pretty good system going for the models, so they are going faster with each batch. The most time-consuming part of the work is painting the beards, but painting beards is also the best part of the process, so it all balances out. I hope to work my way through some more of them.

I recently got books 9-12 in the Horus Heresy series, so I should be reading through those over the next week or two. I just finished reading the first Ciaphas Cain omnibus, which takes a more light-hearted look at the 40k world. It was pretty good, and I look forward to ordering some more of those books.

After I got back from my R & R leave, I took a little break from exercise, but I've picked that back up. Running isn't quite the chore it's been for the last few years. I finished my run today and realized that I was only wheezing and snorting during the last half-mile or so, rather than being out of breath in the first couple hundred yards. We have a PT test coming up, so we'll see if I continue making gains. When we got here I was barely finishing the 2 miles in the minimum 17 minutes, but I've worked that down to 15:50. It would be nice to get under 15 minutes by the time we go home. I also need to push myself on the other events and my fitness in general. I've been considering the P90X workouts as I've heard good things about them from many sources, but haven't justified ordering the DVDs just yet.

I also bought a car, which has been quite an ordeal. We've been looking for something pretty much since we traded in my truck for a minivan to replace my wife's Subaru wagon before I left. While I was home on leave we looked at a whole pile of cars, and I've been a fixture on the car sales sites and fueleconomy.gov during most of my free moments. We nearly bought two or three cars, but things fell through each time. We finally found something that met our transportation requirements and fell into the right reliability/fuel economy/low mileage brackets. I'll admit that it doesn't look that practical, but it was a decent compromise. That big wing on the back is a bit silly, too, but at least it is a factory option and not something from the aftermarket. My wife is not a fan of garish yellow cars, but she knows that I like flashy colors when it comes to shoes and cars, so she relented in this case. For the most part I hope to ride the commuter van to work and save that gas money for other things, but we wanted something with reasonable fuel economy to drive when the commuter van or my motorcycle (52 mpg) weren't an option. I'm pretty happy with our decision, but we'll see how it works out for us over the next several years.

Our twin boys are growing pretty well. I think they are both rapidly approaching 9 pounds. My mom got to meet them for the first time a couple of days ago, which is pretty neat I guess. My wife had a family friend take some family pictures of her and all our boys, and they turned out pretty nice. I don't have access to any of them here, so you'll just have to take my word that I have a pretty good-looking family, especially when I'm not there to lower the bar.

Phoenix Fire Games, Part 2 and Malifaux

I stopped back into Phoenix Fire Games this evening and had another look around. It appears that their Customer Loyalty program is a bit more robust than the one at Hobbytown. The Hobbytown program here offers a $5 coupon for every $100 you spend, good for use on any purchase over $25 in the next 90 days. Idaho has a 6% sales tax, so the coupon almost covers that. Most of their Warhammer box sets are marked down from list price a fair amount, while blister packs and army books are usually sold at MSRP. Core rules are usually offered at a discount as well. I'm not sure what formula they use, but it works out in general that the Hobbytown prices are pretty competitive with internet prices, except during seasonal sales, bulk purchases,  and/or when the Pound is weak against the US Dollar.

The Phoenix Fire Games Rewards program is based on the $100 model, but for every $100 you spend, you get 10% off on your next purchase. The website encourages you to load up and save, making sure that your 10% discount applies to a large purchase. On the surface it seems like a good system for someone who plans out an army and buys it all at once, with hobby supplies and odds and ends making up the initial $100 of purchases. It's not the 20% off + shipping that certain online retailers offer, but the online retailers can't offer a space to game and a local community of like-minded people. If you planned out your purchases, this program would probably work out a bit better than the Hobbytown program, but for multiple small purchases Hobbytown still offers the best deal locally. But Hobbytown doesn't really focus on gaming and has moved away from having games going on in the store, although the Hobbytown here in my town has a pretty active TCG group that takes over a large portion of the store on tournament days. They don't offer enough table space as the shop is quite small, so most of the games are played on the floors in the aisles, luckily away from the miniatures section of the store.

There were a fair number of people in the gaming area of the Phoenix Fire store today. It looked like they were mostly playing TCGs. I've purchased decks and cards for most of the major TCGs (Magic, World of Warcraft, Vs., Pokemon, probably some others), but the sheer number of cards and frequent releases overwhelms me a bit. I just can't process all of the stuff that's going on in most TCGs. Even when I was playing Heroclix, the sheer number of stats and abilities crushed my brain. The other guys who played seemed able to memorize every stat on every figure, but I never really mastered it. Anyway, there was a decent crowd in the shop and they all appeared to be having a good time. I saw one guy walking around with a Tyranid codex and a box of figures, but I didn't see anyone playing any miniature games. I didn't look too hard, though, and the event calendar says tonight was board game night. There could have been five games of Warhammer going on and I may have missed it.

One of the games on the shelves that  haven't seen elsewhere in town (I haven't been to All About Games recently) is Malifaux, the miniatures game by Wyrd Miniatures, It's a skirmish-level Steampunk/Fantasy game with an accompanying line of figures. I know it is a diceless game that relies on cards, but I don't know much else about it, aside from seeing the figures and reading about it on a few of the blogs I follow. To me, an uneducated observer, it appears to target the same sort of person who plays Warmachine/Hordes, which I categorize as a mix between a standard miniature wargame and a TCG. I don't think I'll buy into either system, but I can't say I haven't thought about it. I do hope that the shop runs a Warhammer or Warhammer 40k league around the time I get home from Iraq. I will try to support the shop, as it's the closest thing I've got to a local gaming-focused store.

Phoenix Fire Games

Yesterday I stopped by a new gaming store in the area, Phoenix Fire Games. They are located just two or three blocks from our previous home, which would've been nice to have at the time. I don't know how often I would go there now, as there is a Hobbytown located just down the road from my house here in my new city. The new store seems to have a fairly active event schedule, which is something Hobbytown doesn't offer anymore.

The shop looked clean. It's a bit small, with a few gaming tables in the back. Not a lot of GW product, but I think D&D/Magic/WoW TCG/Board Games are their main focus. They do have a Warhammer Escalation League going now, but they are pretty far along in the cycle at the moment at 1750 points. They also run weekly D&D Encounters events, which would be nice to participate in, as getting a group of friends together for playing RPGs requires one to have at least three or four friends with matching blocks of free time. But store-run events don't require you to have friends at all. I guess we'll see what the shop is running when I get back home. An escalation league could be pretty fun.

One god thing they had was a few of the upcoming Orcs & Goblins releases on a shelf for customers to look at. I got to take a look at the Savage Orcs box and the Arachnarok Spider box, as well as flip through the pages of the new army book. The switch to hardcover is an obvious ploy to add ten dollars to the book price without offering anything new in terms of content. There's nothing in there that couldn't be done in the already ridiculously-priced softcover format, which has gone up by ten dollars in the last five years anyway. But I am a shameless fanboy, so I pre-ordered it. Most of the new units have been previewed elsewhere on the web, with the big spider and some sneaky Goblin assassin-types being the main new entries to the list. The only other new thing that really caught my eye was the Mangler Squigs, described as two really angry Squigs chained together and sent spinning into combat, sort of like Night Goblin Fanatics on crack. Hobbytown used to put new models in one of their display cases for people to look at before release, but I haven't seen anything there for a while.

The shop also carries a few boxes from the Lord of the Rings range, which is pretty cool, but also probably a money sink for them. I have really mixed feelings about the Lord of the Rings games from GW. The miniatures are, in my opinion, some of the best-looking figures out there. I like them a lot. I just have so many game systems going right now that it's hard to justify really going after this one, too. At my current rate, the backlog on my shelves will take me approximately 3,500 years to paint, and each box of figures will add another year to that total. Still, it is cool that they carry portions of the line.