Those of you who’ve listened to the most recent Lost Hemisphere Radio will have enjoyed my breaking Tim Banky’s mind a little by trying to validate Kossite Woodsmen in the context of the theme force for Zevanna Agha, the Old Witch of Khador. I thought I’d take a little moment and share my thoughts here on the blog as well, and perhaps explain why.
One of my locals – Hi, Tom! – said the other week, when I was discussing the army in-store, that Chris has got to Chris. It stuck with me. This basically means that I gotta be me, it means that if something is rampantly unpopular on the forums, it gets my attention, and I start pondering. I guess you could say there’s a degree of blind faith in Privateer, but in the end every release that is sent to us has been through waves of both internal and external playtesting, in an effort to provide us with something that’s cool, yet balanced. Some things are tested more than others, I’m sure, and there are definitely models that I look at and quite simply have no idea where to go with them, but by and large there’s a certain rhyme to PP’s reason.
If a model costs X pts, if its abilities and stats are just so, there’s some combo or something out there that led to PP deciding that this was to be the final iteration of that model.
This has in large part driven the optimism I have about most new releases. I’m not so arrogant as to think that I have a Masters degree in model design – there are other blogs and podcasts with contributors who are FAR superior to me when it comes to tactical and strategic analysis – but darn it, I’m stubborn, and I refuse to completely write off anything. There has to be some way to make that unloved model work, some scenario where it’s the perfect solution to the problem at hand. The challenge, of course, is in finding it.
This drove my dogged persistence in mastering Amon Ad Raza’s Wanderers of the Faith, with its reliance on Allegiants and Idrian Skirmishers and its complete lack of Choir, and the High Reclaimer’s The Flames of Reclamation, which requires multiple units of Cleansers, a posse of Reclaimers, and again, no Choir at all. The end result was surprising success in some events in which I was essentially able to rogue the meta. Because both theme forces were “crap”, no-one had bothered to actually include them in their tourney prep, and I was able to capitalize, which basically just reinforced my reasoning for why I’d bothered to play them in the first place.
So now we come to 2014. Templecon marks the end of the Lost Hemisphere Gaming Year, and the beginning of the new. While I have any number of potential projects to work on, one thing I did want to do was paint up another Warmachine battlebox for demo purposes, and since I’d nabbed a Khadoran battlebox months ago, I started pondering alternate Khadoran schemes.
- Then it occurred, what if I want to do an extended demo? Better push the box to 25 pts.
- Then it occurred, what if I want to try dabbling with an alternate caster? Better grab one or two… and since I inevitably choose models based aesthetics and how interested I am in painting them, I grabbed Strakhov and Old Witch.
- Then it occurred, since I’m looking at working on these anyway, is there’s a theme force I can push here for 2014’s project?
Breaking through the clouds that surrounded my imagination, shining their beacons that mark them as some of the most maligned models in the entirety of Warmachine and Hordes, they came. Lanky moustaches, a mix of bows, crossbows and rifles that somehow have the same weapon profile, and there’s even one in a dress…
Kossite Woodsmen.
Oh yes, thought I, this should be a thing…
(to be continued)
Behold, for the enjoyment and edification of all, Lost Hemisphere now has a new swag store. The old one’s still up and running for those who feel like getting in touch with Lost Hemisphere: The Original Blog, but in the age of Lost Hemisphere: The Next Bloggeration, we look to a more… sophisticated means of swaggery. Hence, you can now get LH stuff from MyLocker.
