244. Dominatus Campaign, New Warhammer Heroes, Warhammer+, Victoria Minis Kickstarter

In this bumper episode I go through the Dominatus Campaign system, look at the new Cities of Sigmar Warhammer Heroes collection, discuss the new Warhammer+ minis and price increase and lastly review the Victoria minis Kickstarter featuring two new ranges which would be perfect for any aspiring Astra Militarum general.

Victoria Minis Grimdark Empire: https://victoriaminiatures.com/collections/grimdark-empire

Watch the episode on YouTube: 
https://youtu.be/qGVtbxRUDNo

Transcript

Intro

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Hello everyone, this is episode two hundred and forty-four of the Lookout Sur Podcast, the greatest podcast ever, with the fewest amount of views, at least on YouTube. So while this show is popular on the podcasts of Great Britons and the Americas, as it often is, um, obviously I've been transitioning over to YouTube, but still doesn't do very well in terms of numbers. So I'm asking a favor right now, before this episode even starts, press the like button over on YouTube. Or if you're listening along on your podcast, feel free to give it a watch on YouTube. Watch along as you hobby, for example. A great way to idle away many an hour. Obviously, when I do an episode, I try and incorporate some visuals to it. This episode is no different. So I think the podcast is slowly becoming more and more reliant on watching along versus listening along, although I think you can do both just as well. But it's probably a little bit more beneficial to watch the show. So yeah, hit that like button now. And if you don't like the episode by the end, you can remove that like button, depress that like button. But yeah, up front, like it and maybe share it with a friend, and then you can slag it off at the very end of the show. Let me know down in the comments either way. What's happening in this episode? So this is a jumbo episode. Last week we talked about chapter approved. This week we're going through the Dominatus deck, where I go through a lot of the cards, work out how it's played, talk about the campaign system, discuss if it's any good, do a little comparison between the Dominatus deck and the old crusade rules. There's a lot of topic to talk about. That is one whole section. But that is not all. There is more. I go through the new Warhammer Heroes Age of Sigma miniature range. I also go through the Warhammer Plus new miniatures and also their sneaky price hike that they do and discuss whether Warhammer Plus is worth subscribing to. And if that is not enough content, I also do a Victoria Miniatures Kickstarter review where I go through their latest range of effectively Astra Militarum regiments and talk about how fantastic those miniatures are. And then in addition to that, there's the classic five-star review and outro. So a whole lot to jam-pack into this episode. And if this is not enough Lookout, sir for you, there is more Lookout, sir, over on Patreon where we have another episode of Transitional Noise, which went out live last week in between the two episodes. So last episode of Lookout, sir, we talked about chapter approved. As a companion episode to that, I wanted to talk about the Warhammer 40k app and basically review its new features, go through its functionality, its design, critique it to bits, which is what I'm probably most well known for, if anything. Maybe Nitpicker should be my middle name. But yeah, I do a full deep dive into the Warhammer 40k app, talk about it, look at the new War Journal features, and also as part of that discuss whether it's worth subscribing to Warhammer Plus. So yeah, you can find that over on Patreon. It's a whole extra hour and a half of lookout serve for you if this episode is not enough. So yeah, for those at bonus episodes are available to Patreon supporters. Just a way of saying thank you for supporting the show. So that's all greatly appreciated. And I think this intro is far too long as it is. It's almost a classic length intro. So yeah, we're gonna get on with the show. Uh our main topic, let's talk about Dominatus, transitional noise.

Dominatus

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In this part of the episode, we are going to go through Dominatus, the campaign deck. Last episode we went through chapter approved, so I thought it only suitable that we go through the next part of the Armageddon box set and do a deep dive into the Dominatus cards and see how this campaign works. Now, for reference, I've not actually even looked at this deck whatsoever. So this is going to be a completely blind review and a read through. You are going to explore it as much as I am, and you get my kind of live reaction to what I think of this. So yeah, let's unbox the cards and see what we've got. So we've got a bunch of cards. Let's put that to one side for now and look through the Dominatus rules. So the following rules and deck will enable you and other players to fight for the fate of Armageddon. Get ready to fight over unique locations with new missions, earning glory for your alliance and upgrades for your characters, all in this new format. Designed to be used with any chapter-approved mission deck, you can play this campaign with as many players as you wish to organize. While you can stretch a single deck across multiple players, we recommend that each player has a deck for themselves for convenience. Okay, that's interesting to note. So the pack contains the agenda deck, the agenda achieved deck, the briefing deck, location deck, and upgrade cards, and it says further categorized as battle honors, battle skill cards, and relics. I guess it's worth noting that things like honors and relics all sound very similar to the previous crusade system that we used to have. They used to also be battle scars, which is where you could pick up injuries, so it seems like we're not getting that in this format. Okay, so I've just split out the deck into the corresponding piles. So for the first one, we've got the agenda deck, uh, which is this one here, which is probably has one of the most sets of cards, 27. It's actually the second most. Um, and then you can see there is content on the other side, quite a lot of stuff to get through. Um, then there's the agenda achieved deck, which has nine cards, as you can see here, and then again on the other side, just a uh back piece, nothing else. Uh looks like these are split between orcs and imperials based on the icons. We have the briefing deck again at nine cards. So this talks about force disposition, and again, orcs and imperials by the looks of it, although it's interesting to know there's a skull icon, which is maybe for someone that is neither orcs nor imperials, so that would be interesting. Um, and again, there's some contents on the back. Then we've got the location deck, which is also nine cards, so nine seems to be the default for most of it. You get a nice picture of a map in terms of where it's going to be, and then you've got some extra war zone rules on the back of that card, and then the upgrade deck, which actually has the most cards, uh, which is 35 in the deck, and these are split out by battle skill, um, battle honours, and relics as well. So battle honors and a relic, and then the backs of these cards are all the same with that symbol. So the first thing we have is the briefing cards. It says that these frame the narrative for each alliance across the three campaign phases, listing the agendas players can attempt depending on their forced disposition and that of their opponents. And it says for more information on forced disposition, see the chapter approved mission deck. Um, although, as we all know, it doesn't really help you all that much because it doesn't really explain what they are, but they are actually in there. So that's where the forced dispositions are and where the missions are. So you've got to check out chapter approved for that info. It says on the reverse of each is a range of outcomes depending on how many narrative points you have gained. The card itself will inform you on how these are earned. So let's look at the very first one. So I'm gonna find one which has the phase of one because I assume this is gonna be the first that you'll get in a campaign. It says liberators. I'm pretty sure this is gonna be the imperial symbol, but I guess we will find out. It says our fleet has established orbit around Armageddon, and the time to liberate the war torn world is nigh. The first wave of our forces must make planet fall without delay, securing landing zones and establishing beachheads so that the follow-up waves can deploy to the planet's surface intact. So you've got your force disposition. Uh so for this one it seems if you're doing Purge of a Foe, for example, you get a choice of all of the different force dispositions to go up against, but they've kind of combined several of them. Uh so I think that one is taken hold and priority assets. Regardless of which one of those you are, you're gonna end up doing effectively these two missions. I assume these are missions, or they're agendas, I guess, rather than missions. Um, so yeah, the green one is in fact taken hold. Uh, regardless of your take and hold or priority assets, um, your opponent's force disposition will determine which of your agendas you are. Um likewise, disruption and reconnaissance are combined here as well. And depending on what your opponent has, you'll get one of effectively six different agendas. Although, actually, looking at it, Planet Falls repeated twice, secure perimeters repeated twice, as is vital strong point. So there are only three different agendas for you to pick from, and they're kind of combining it based on your force, disposition, and your opponents. So I guess you could argue it's a bit of an illusion of choice. It'll be interesting to know how thematic these are uh done, basically, based on your disposition and your opponents. So, yeah, you'll see what your disposition is, your opponent is. That gives you your agenda, uh, and then at the back it says gain one narrative point if your alliance has control of this phase's location, and you gain one narrative point if your alliance is in ascendancy. Now, this all rings a bit similar to the Crusade uh when we did Crusade Armageddon, which was a previous episode you can go back to. I think there were elements of ascendancy in that, I can't remember for sure, but I think there might have been in terms of I assume it's gonna be you are uh in the lead as a group, your alliance, your faction has more points than your opponents. So, yeah, in this one it says you gain one narrative point if your alliance has control of this phase's um location. Obviously, this isn't the phase card, this is just talking about the briefing. So, obviously, at some point you're gonna have a location card which will tie into this. Um, and you gain one additional narrative point if your alliance is in ascendancy, and then I guess this is the outcome based on your score. So if you score two narrative points, you have this full heat of text. Your forces have fallen upon Armageddon like a thunderbolt, hurling the enemy back in disarray. You have swept clear a broad breech head and heavily reinforced it, leaving you in the strongest possible position to proceed with the liberation of Armageddon. If you have one narrative point, you get you have successfully carved out a beachhead on the surface of Armageddon, albeit at a bloody cost. As fresh waves of warriors and the war machines are ferried down from orbit, the war of liberation must begin in earnest. And then if you get zero narrative points, the initial planet strike has failed almost completely. How terrible for you. Uh you have established a handful of tenuous speechheads, but a terrible cost and with little hope of holding them for liberation of Armageddon. Now teeters upon the brink of disaster. So what's good about this is this card ties in to your faction, which we're assuming at this stage is the Imperials. You are the aggressors landing on Armageddon, and depending on how many points you get, it really depends on how well you're doing in the campaign for this phase, and you get a nice narrative outcome explaining it. And likewise the orc player, or maybe if there's a uh you know, raiding uh non-orc, non-imperium faction, they will have their own card as well, which will also tell a similar story, but from their point of view. So a bit like how forced dispositions I said is two sides of the same coin in terms of the mission. I suspect these cards and the outcomes will effectively be two sides of the same coin. Uh be interesting to see how the third faction ties into this. Um, so yeah, we shall see how that goes. So next up, it mentions the location cards. These represent strategically important zones on the planet Armageddon. Each one features a location bonus. If an alliance takes control of a location, all players in that alliance gain its location bonus for the remainder of the campaign. On the reverse of each other war zone rules that apply to every battle fought during the same campaign phase. So that's great because it means you get specific campaign rules that are going to mix up the missions in addition to the actual mission you're playing. Uh, so yeah, let's look at a location. This one's called 1-2, um, which is. Yeah, so it's interesting that there's locations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 uh, for phase one, which I'm assuming is going to be a dice roll-based uh way of determining the locations. Uh, this one is the Mannheim Gap. Uh cussing through the mountain range west of Hivert Volcanus, the Mannheim Gap has been the site of countless battles, the twisted detritus of which now clog the pass. Warriors waging battle here do so between vast canyon walls, the threat of lethal rock slide, forever looming above their heads. It was an integrable part to the Armageddon campaign, which was the one where Argonne and the Greenarts were fighting each other, not the one just prior to Armageddon, uh, which is a book I've still yet to go through, and it's not the Armageddon book, which I've also still got to read through. So, yeah, you give the location bonus if the alliance takes control of it and it lasts for the remainder of the campaign. So I guess if you win a phase, maybe you win that location, we'll have to see. Uh, but this one is battle tested. While an alliance has control of this location, when a player in that alliance draws battle skill cards, they can draw one additional card before choosing which to keep. Okay, so it just gives you a bit of extra choice, which is quite good. So it'd be interesting to see if you can fight over the same location in different phases. Uh, how that would work would be interesting to see. I guess if we have a quick flick through. So obviously there are different locations, but they're all different. So there's no repeating location, so you don't fight over one in a different phase potentially, but it'll be interesting to see. And then there's the war zone rules which apply to the battles during that particular phase. Uh so the first one is canyon wall. Battlefield edges that are not the attackers or defenders, battlefield edges are canyon walls. When a unit makes an ingress move, models in it cannot be set up within six inches of a canyon wall unless that model has flight or deep strike. So that's very narratively interesting. I mean, I don't personally, I very rarely see anyone use ingress moves off the table. It's predominantly always deep strike, but that's not always the case. But then there's also rock falls, which is when a unit ends a move excluding pile-in and consolidation moves within six inches of a canyon wall, make a hazardous role for that unit. Uh, okay, that's interesting. So when you're just moving near the canyon edges, there's a chance you might get hit by falling rock. Um, yeah, sort of thematic, not a huge game breaker, or uh, you know, might not even come into effect in a particular game, but good that it's there. Um, okay, so those are quite interesting. I don't think we need to look at any more just yet. We then have agenda cards. So agendas represent goals that you can attempt to achieve during each battle in the campaign phase. Each alliance has a unique set of nine agendas, three for each campaign phase. On one side of the agenda card, there will be a narrative description of your goal you're attempting and a list of conditions. If met results in the player gaining agenda achieved cards, on the reverse is a primary mission, which tells you how to gain VP in the battle. So I'm guessing by that assumption, your primary mission makes me think: are we not doing the primary mission from chapter approved then, even though it talks about chapter approved, at least with the force disposition? So maybe it's replacing those uh primary mission cards, which is interesting. Um, yeah, so there are. So if we just bring this card back in, which was for phase one of the liberators, uh, which is the Imperium, um, there are Planet Four, Vital Stronghold, and Secure Perimeter. So let's go through the secure perimeter one, which correlates. Uh so secure perimeter, you can get uh basically if you're Purge of foe and your opponent is Purge of foe, disruption and reconnaissance, uh, all the alternative is you are disruption or reconnaissance yourself and your opponents are reconnaissance, purge of foe, or secure assets. So, yeah, that's quite a unique way of determining your agendas without you having to sort of pick yourself. So for the secure perimeter, it says your warriors must secure the planetary beachhead by driving off local enemy forces and capturing the territory they hold. Only in this way can you establish a strong perimeter that will allow follow-up waves to land safely. So the agenda achieved card, which is only done if you meet the conditions of the agenda card. Um at the end of the battle, you gain one agenda achieved card if one or more of the following conditions are met. Oh, so this is how to get the agenda achieved card. So you gained 35 plus victory points at this primary mission during the battle, or there are no enemy units within your territory, because it's one or more of the following conditions. So you don't need to do both. Uh so that's pretty good. And then on the back is the secure perimeter scoring. Uh so second battle round onwards, end of your command phase, or end of your turn, if it's the fifth battle round, you control two or more objectives, excluding your home objective, you get five VP. And then also at the end of your turn, your opponent controls no objectives within your territory, five VP. That seems reasonable. Uh, also there are no enemy units excluding aircraft and battle shocked units within your deployment zone, three VP. So you can get eight victory points just for having no opponents in your territory whatsoever, uh, and your deployment zone in theory. Um, because then you'd be scoring both in a roundabout way. So yeah, that is it. Well, securing perimeter sounds exactly like that's what you're doing there. So that's quite uh good and thematic um mission, I would say. But uh 35 victory points. You can score uh what's that, 13 a turn. So you'd have to do pretty well for at least three of five turns to be able to get those. I think what would be quite interesting is to see how your opponent's mission will marry up to this one, because they're obviously going to be doing a different mission, and like I said before, two sides of the same coin, it'll be interesting to see uh what the orcs will have. That will be their mission. So if we have a quick look at their card for phase one, so we need um to be able to do secure perimeter purge of a foe, purge the foe. Okay, so purge of a foe here and purge the foe here gets you repel the foe. Um but interestingly, will there be a different way of unlocking it? So for example, secure perimeter is um you could have disruption versus disruption, which actually would give you up here loot and scout. So actually what's clever is you're not going to be doing the exact same mission um based on force dispositions, which is good. So yeah, let's look at the loot and scout one. Although it would feel like repel the foe would be the more thematic one, but yeah. I think any of them could be dig in. Also, sounds like it would uh fit fit with the uh secure perimeter. But let's find loot and scout and see what that mission looks like. So here is the oppressors, which are V's. Uh Luton Scout. As the invading forces drive out from their landing zones, they seek to seize local supply cachets to fuel their war effort. You must move quickly to ransack those sites that you can reach in order to deny these prizes to the enemy. So for agenda achieved, uh, at the end of the battle, you gain one agenda achieved card if one or more of the foreign conditions are met. So similarly, you need 35 victory points or more, or three or more objectives, excluding your home objective, has been looted, uh, which is very different from your opponents. Uh so I guess looted is going to be an action that you can do here, which it is. So it happens in your shooting phase. One unit within range of an objective you control, but does not have one of your operation markers on it. Okay, so we need operation markers. So the use limit is up to twice per turn. Each unit that starts this action, this phase, must be within range of a different objective. So you've got to try and loot two different objectives. Uh completes immediately. That objective is looted. Place one of your operation markers on that objective and place one of your operation markers on the unit that completed this action. If the unit is destroyed, remove all operation markers from it. Uh so you basically can loot an objective only once, because it can't have an operation marker on it. But in theory, a unit looted could have multiple operation markers on it, because it could loot multiple objectives. Okay, so second battle round onwards, at the end of your command phase or the end of your turn, if it's the fifth battle round, if you control one or more objectives, excluding your home objective, you get five victory points. Uh the end of the battle, at the end of the battle, for each objective looted by your army, you get seven VP. So that's quite a lot. And also for each of your operation markers on a friendly unit, you get three VP. Oh, that's clever. Okay, so you want to loot objectives with your units, but you ideally want to keep those units alive as well, which is gonna be the hard part, I would say. Um, and it is also using an action, yeah. So that's not easy to do for certain armies. Uh, but I guess if you know this beforehand, you can sort of tailor your army to make sure you can try and achieve these objectives, which would feel thematic uh unfair. So, yeah, that's interesting. I like that they've got different things that they're doing. It's a nice uh two sides of the same coin, and there's multiple combinations of how you do this. Um, so this is effectively replicating all the different primary missions that we get in chapter approved in terms of the force dispositions give you different um primary objectives that you can be doing. Uh, and they're both telling a different side of a narrative story, which I think is really good. But it's all randomized in a way as well, based on forced dispositions, but not 100%. They're not. I think uh chapter approved give gave you more choices uh because it was literally you know take and hold versus priority assets, you'll have one unique set of missions between those two. Uh, there's no way of replicating it. Whereas this way, there's only effectively three different possible outcomes per person. So, regardless of the dispositions, there's a couple more that will match up and be paired off, basically. Okay, next up we have the agenda achieved cards. When a player gains an agenda achieved card, they take one corresponding to their alliance. They do not have any effect until the end of a campaign phase. A player cannot have more than three agenda achieved cards at any one time. I guess this is where it's kind of important to have a different deck per player because you would start running out of these cards quite quickly once a campaign gets going. If you've got multiple people constantly getting uh cards, uh in theory, there I think they'd be uh yeah, they're broken down by uh oppressor, liberator, and raiders. So raiders is like the not orcs, not imperial player, which is good because normally it's imperial, chaos, and then Xenos is the raiding force. Um so in theory, you've got some cards that can be reused, but you know, for multiple players, you're you'll run out quite quickly. Um so actually, if we look at this, it says you can only have you can't have any more than three agenda achieved cards at any one time, uh, but each uh faction only has three cards each anyway, so you will physically cap out at three, um, because you can't have any more, and I think there's only going to be three phases in the game, which is interesting. Maybe there's like a fourth phase, but because you can gain a card once you've completed your mission, but I guess the phase will still be carrying on because other people will be taking part. Um but the card doesn't take effect until the end of the phase. So if there are only three phases, you can surely only have two cards, unless you can play multiple games per phase, maybe. Because in theory, if you can only get one agenda achieved card per phase, phase one, cool, you get one. Phase two, you'll be playing this card, and then let's say you can gain a second card. Phase three, those are both active, you win your final agenda achieved, but it doesn't actually take effect this phase, as per the rules. And then if there isn't a phase four, this card doesn't take effect. Um, so there might be like a final phase, final battle where this card would take effect. So that'll be interesting. We'll have to get into the rules to see how particularly that works. But yeah, definitely says that these do not have any effect until the end of a campaign phase. Uh, so it might be that at the end of phase three, this takes effect. So it might be it doesn't affect the actual missions. Uh let's get into it now and find out. Um, because we're constantly looking at the good boys, let's look at the Liberator deck. Uh, I guess you just randomly select them. It doesn't actually say, I don't think. If the conditions are met, players are gaining an agenda achieved cards, but it doesn't, I don't think it tells you which one in particular you get. So it doesn't seem like there's any particular way to choose your card. So maybe it's just randomized. Um, that would be interesting. Uh, here it says agenda achieved, and it says the exact same thing at the top of each one. So let's look at that. So it says at the end of each campaign phase, the alliance with the most agenda achieved cards is in ascendancy. So obviously that'd be amongst all the players. Um the first one, agenda attrieved, liberators, are these all the same? Oh, interesting. It seems like they are. Yeah. So it says at the end of the campaign phases one and two, shuffle the liberators relic stacks, then turn over a number of cards equal to the number of agenda achieved cards you have, select one of the revealed relic cards to keep and return the others to the deck. And that is the same for all of them. So actually, yeah, it doesn't matter if it you don't need to randomize it because they're all the same thing. So it's effectively just a way of points tracking what you're doing uh per phase. This is effectively your your campaign points, I think is what they were called in the previous um iteration of chapter well not chapter approved of Crusade. And I wonder. Uh yeah, it's exactly the same for raiders and oppressors. Uh, you get the same ability, basically. You get to get extra relic cards by the looks of it as a nice little bonus. And then next up is the upgrade card. So it says upgrade cards are acquired as the campaign um unfolds. They represent special abilities that can improve the martial power of your warriors and come in three types. There's battle skill cards, which are these ones here. They're earned at the end of the battle, there's battle honor cards earned at the end of the battle by the victor. There are five of these cards that can be earned during the first campaign phase, five that are earned during the second campaign phase, and one that can be earned in the third campaign phase. So if we look through these, you can see one, uh, then two and then three, which talks about the end of the phase. Uh, then there are relic cards, the most powerful type of upgrade and the hardest to earn, unlocked by gaining the agenda achieved cards. There are five unique relic cards for each alliance, and yeah, as I was going to point out, uh, so these cards are specific for the liberators. Um, then there's oppressors, and then there are the raider cards as well. It says that some upgrade cards can list a bonus effect that applies when the upgrade is given to a particular type of model. Such effects are always in addition to the normal effect listed on the card. A player keeps all of the upgrade cards they gain, but they cannot have duplicates of any upgrade card. So let's look at the first one for battle skill. This is high strategy, well-laid plans and an ironclad grasp of pressing strategic goals go a long way to overcoming an enemy's superiority in numbers and firepower. So this is who it's one character model. The effect is you start the battle with one CP, and then the bonus effect. So this is if it's given to the warlord. Uh, if this upgrade is given to your warlord, you start the battle with two CP instead. Okay, so that's quite straightforward. Uh, let's have another look at another one. Uh, so these uh affect a warlord, so let's find one that affects someone different. Uh oh, monster and vehicle. Okay, let's do that one. So this is terrifying presence. Fighting so long amongst such horrifying environs have left a dread mark upon their warrior, which strikes fear into their foe. So you select one character model. At the start of the fight phase, select one enemy unit engaged with this unit. Your opponent must make a battle shock roll for that enemy unit, which is quite good because one, you could knock their OC off, but two, more importantly, you can stop them from actually being able to use any stratagems on that unit. Uh, but there's a bonus effect if you give it to a monster or vehicle, um, which is quite difficult because it also needs to be a character, bearing in mind, but there are some monsters and very few vehicles, but there will be some that, like knights in particular, can be a character. If this upgrade is given to a monster or vehicle model, when making battleshock rolls from the result of this upgrade, subtract one from the result. Okay, so that is very strong. Um, yeah, so those battle skills are pretty cool, I would say. Uh, next up for the battle honors, uh, so these are the campaign phase ones, uh, so broken down into campaign phase one, two free. So maybe let's have a quick look at each phase, even though we've predominantly been looking at uh phase one so far. So fire and fury, uh, whether opening up with point blank fuselards at full tilt or unleashing deadly accurate volleys at range, this warrior favors the application of overwhelming firepower. So you select one character model, the effect is this unit's ranged weapons have assault and heavy. Okay, that's good. But if you give it to a monster or vehicle, while making attacks with this model's blast weapons, you can re-roll hit rolls of one. At the end of campaign phase one, the alliance with the most phase one battle honors takes control of the phase one location. Okay, so that's how you win the phase one location by having the most battle honors. Okay, I'm trying to work out how you win the battle honors because the agendas give you agenda achieved cards. The agenda achieved cards give you relics, which are these ones, not the honors. Hmm, okay, so there's got to be a way to unlock how you get the battle honours, and we've not got that yet. So clearly that's somewhere else in the rules. Uh so yeah, that was campaign one. Uh, sorry, phase one. Uh, then a phase two one, which is uh breach and burn. This commander is a veteran of urban warfare. They have trained their warriors to drive the foe from cover with volleys of fire, jets of flames, and hells of explosive projectiles. One character model. The effect is in your shooting phase while making attacks with this unit, this unit weapons that targets an enemy within 18 inches has ignores cover. And again, it says at the end of a campaign phase two, the alliance with the most phase two battle honours takes control of the phase two location. And then lastly, we've got phase three, of which there's only one card, uh, which is path to conquest. The skies are choked with ash and the battlefield churned to ruin, heaped with the dead and the dying. You have won a significant victory, but only time will tell if your efforts are enough to tip the scales of the war. So this is end of campaign phase at the end of the campaign phase three. The alliance with the most phase three battle honours takes control of the phase three location. There is literally only one phase three card, but I guess potentially multiple players could win each their own, so that's um the thing to bear in mind. Uh so yeah, otherwise there are one, two, three, four, five phase one and yeah, five phase two, uh, or one and two. I read I counted the wrong way around, but yeah, five of each and one of phase three. Okay, so we need to work out how you can win those still. And then for the relics, uh, so let's just look at one of the liberator ones. Mastercrafted armor, fashioned by the armor of sublime skill. This battle plate is proof against the most deadly weapons and dread foes of the 41st millennium. So it says for who you select one character model excluding epic heroes. The effect is this model has an invulnerable save of four plus, and the model gets plus one toughness, save and wounds. Wow, that's very good. Um that's quite impressive. Let's have a look at one of the oppressors, uh, which is enhanced bionics. Through intrusive and widespread surgery, the bearer's body has been extensively cyber organized. Very little of their original flesh remains, replaced by unyielding metal and rugged self-repairing orgmetics. So you select one character model, the effect is in your command phase, this model regains up to D3 lost wounds. And the first time this model is destroyed, remove it from the battlefield, then at the end of the phase, roll a d6, adding two to the result if it is infantry or mounted on a four plus, so not necessarily guaranteed. Set this model back up on the battlefield as close as possible to where it was destroyed and engaged with just three wounds remaining. And then for the raiders, let's do uh Maelstrom Clarion, chittering with overlapping screeds of disruptive data and sinister talismans, inbuilt technologies, scramble teleport locks, and coral beacons with a broad radius. You select one character model, enemy units that are making an ingress move cannot be set up within 12 inches of this model. So that's interesting. Um, I guess for raiders, maybe that one feels very chaos themed, I guess. Um, because I was just having a quick look through the name. So displacer field feels very um Jacrari. Uh disruption orb sounds a bit necronish. Um fate forged weapon feels very Eldary, I would say. Um and then cloaked in shadows does sound very tyranids. Uh so it does feel like they reasonably try to theme them to feature the gamut of all the factions. Um, whereas the orc ones, for example, power field projector, ruinator, temporal talisman, personal teleporter, and enhanced bionics. Yeah, some of those feel orky, some of those just feel super generic. Um, okay, what else do we have for the Imperium Mastercrafted Armour, Vortex Grenade, a very Imperium, uh, the Emperor's Tarot, uh, strategic laurels and blades of sacrifice. Uh so those uh feel very space marine themed, they don't really tie in with anyone else per se. Um, but a couple of them are generic Imperium. So they've done a reasonably good job of theming them, I would say. Although I guess the downside is it gives you some theming, but at the same time it's still just it's a bit generic, and you might find it doesn't particularly match up exactly with the army you're taking or how you would want to do things. Um, so maybe you'd have to customize things a little bit further. But I think for most people that would work perfectly fine. Right, let's get on with the Armageddon campaign. Uh, this is the introduction, so let's work out how it plays. So it says an Armageddon campaign is split into three phases, each of which consists of a number of battles. During each phase, the players will vie for control of a strategic location before moving on to the next phase. Taking control of a final location is key to achieving victory, but it is only part of the challenge. Each player also has a set of agendas they must achieve during the campaign. Only commanders who achieve military success while accomplishing these vital goals will achieve everlasting glory on Armageddon. So you also have the Warmaster. So Dominatus is best run with the Warmaster. They will take on organizing the campaign so that the other players can focus on playing games. A Warmaster can play in the campaign, and often will I find, but their primary role is to facilitate a smooth and enjoyable experience for all players involved. If such a heroic individual is not already volunteered themselves, the players can instead agree to take up the task of Warmaster between themselves. It could be, for example, to balance it out. Each phase is done by a different Warmaster if you want to take turns, so you don't feel like one Warmaster who's on one particular team has too much unfair say in how the game is being played. That might be a good way of uh mixing it up just to ensure there's some balance. So you've got preparing the campaign. Before the campaign begins, the Warmaster should share a battle. Schedule with all players, informing them of the number of games each will play and the army size they will need to muster. Below is the default battle schedule designed to be played comfortably over the course of a weekend for players who can muster a strike force sized game. So this is uh the default campaign. Campaign phase is the first encounters phase. So it says two battles per player. Okay, so you're interestingly that you're being encouraged to play multiple games per phase. Um and they're all strike forces. So battle sizes default. You could potentially escalate this, so you go from like incursion, strike force, and then onslaught. So you do bigger games throughout the campaign. But yeah, first encounter phase is phase one. Uh campaign phase two is the pitched battles phase. So again, two uh battles per player, and then the final mission is phase three, where you only play one battle per player. Uh the War Master will need to group all the players into alliances. The campaign must have an oppressors alliance and a liberators alliance, which is basically the Orks and Space Marines in Armageddon in terms of the theming. It can optionally have a Raiders Alliance as well. Alliances should be organized as evenly as possible and based on the different factions played, based on the different factions players are using if possible. Players should play the same faction throughout the campaign. Guidelines on organizing players into alliances are given on the next page. Note that these are not required. If it suits the group better to organize alliances differently, the Warmaster should do so. Um, so this is very similar to how the previous crusade stuff worked, especially the last campaign that they did. It's good that raiders is optional. If you have a very large, like big gaming group, then the raiders would make sense to add them in there. But those players could just equally be divided among the liberators and oppressors if you've only got maybe, say, five players between you, or yeah, odd numbers in general, that might work. So, yeah, we have, as we suspected, the liberators, which are those who seek to free Armageddon, destroy the occupying forces, and re-establish imperial rule over the planet. The forces of the Imperium would be best suited to this alliance. Um, I guess if you didn't have any spaceman or imperial players whatsoever, you could make this up of Zenos raiding factions and just have them represent uh the Imperium. But, you know, I don't think anyone's going to be short of spaceman players. Um next up you get the oppressors, those who wish to destroy Armageddon, slaughter its populance, and watch the planet burn. Forces of orcs are best suited to this alliance. In previous campaigns, it would be chaos, as the most obvious ones, but obviously the narrative is pivoting back to orcs, and they're the ones that have been there all along. Uh, if I remember rightly, in the last uh campaign that we talked about on Armageddon, the orcs barely got a look in, it was all chaos, but chaos wars driven off. So maybe the orcs have time to flourish, now chaos is no longer there. And then raiders. So the raiders on Armageddon range from Xenos warlords to Chaos Renegades, all seeking to further their own agendas. Lis Alliance is best suited to those who carve their own path. So again, it's Chaos, which is a big faction in its own right, but also the other Xenos races as well. Um, but you could easily have maybe some of them uh joining liberators or oppressors narratively speaking. Um, obviously things like Eldari uh might fit in with liberators quite well, whereas perhaps Drakari um would team up with the Orcs maybe and side with them. Uh depending on whatever your narrative goals are, I guess. You I'm sure you could work it out. It says once players have been grouped into alliances, it's time for the struggle of Armageddon to begin. Yay! Okay, so then we've got the start of the campaign. So players start the first campaign phase using the sequence below after completing phases one and two. Start the next campaign phase and repeat the sequence. At the end of phase three, the campaign ends. So it's a three-phase campaign, quite simple. Start the campaign phase. At the start of each campaign phase before any battles are fought, the warmaster must roll one d6 to randomly select one of that phase's location cards, as I suspected. So let's do this. So phase one, roll of one or two, the Manhattan gap, which is the one we went through before. So that's quite straightforward. So we would have that location card. Uh players read their alliance's briefing card for this phase. Again, this is what we went through before. So uh the oppressors have this briefing card, uh, and then the liberators have this one, and then the raiders have one. So each faction would have their own sort of summary in terms of what they're trying to do. Uh, so we read the briefing phase for liberators. Let's quickly read through the other two just to get a sense of the theming. Uh, so for raiders, it says our time on Armageddon is coming to an end. Oh, wait, hold on. This one's phase three. That didn't sound right to me. Uh, yeah, phase one. Here we go. The conflict on Armageddon offers us a unique opportunity to complete our goals without our enemies' awareness. First, however, we need to make contact with our assets on the surface to gather intelligence while inserting forces behind enemy lines, ready to launch targeted strikes when the hour is right. Uh, we already did the Liberators one, I believe, which is about making planet full and securing landing zones. And then for the oppressors, they have Armageddon is ours. Our armies have conquered its hives and dug in across the Ashen wastes, and we will not yield to these invaders from the stars. Throw the enemy back into the void, whatever you can, and scorch for land where you cannot. Make the foe regret of the day they ever came to Armageddon. Thematically makes sense, unless you were reading the previous um Crusade Armageddon book, because all of those hives were actually taken over by Chaos. Um, so I guess maybe narratively they have been since reconquered by the Orcs uh since that Chaos incursion. Uh yeah, so maybe need to catch up on the Armageddon books to find out what's been going on. So yeah, so each one would have one of those, and then your force disposition and your opponent's disposition dictates your agendas. And as it says that players gather their alliance's agenda cards for this phase, which, as we talked about, would be things like secure perimeter, which is your primary mission, as well as how to achieve your agendas to get your agenda achieved cards. So that dictates how you start the campaign. You then play battles. So players from opposing alliances now battle each other. The Warmaster can leave players to arrange games themselves. Alternatively, they can organize days and times to help everyone play an equal number of games. In campaigns with a large number of players, each alliance can be broken down into smaller subgroups and they are then matched against each other to make arranging games simpler. In order to play a battle, the players generate a mission from chapter-approved mission deck. Players who wish to curate this, but otherwise, players should follow the instructions in their mission deck. In any case, the mission sequence is supplemented with the rules on the following pages. Okay, so that's interesting. It still says you play the chapter-approved mission deck. Now, are they talking about secondary missions or primary missions? So I assume they're talking about the secondary missions, not the primary ones. Or would that be also primary? And you're also doing your agendas as well on top, which would be very confusing. Um, so yeah, if I just get the chapter approved cards out, talks about create the mission, your secondaries, determinant attacker, defender. In my mind, the the dispositions created the primary mission. And it does say here on these agendas that you get your primary mission. So these are the primary missions. So when they're saying here chapter-approved mission deck, generate a mission from the chapter-approved mission deck. I I assume what they maybe mean is talking about the cards for deployment zones. As in create the battlefield, I think you'd be doing. So in the determine mission step, read aloud all war zone rules for that phase from your location card. Um so as we talked about, we had battle tested in the Mannheim Gap. That's our nope, that's our location bonus. It's over the other side, the war zone rules, the canyon walls and the rock falls. So that's our war zone rules. If both players wish to attempt agendas in the battle, um, if not see declining agendas below, do not use primary missions. If both players wish to attempt agendas, do not use the primary missions in your mission deck. Instead, after revealing force disposition cards, the players use their alliance's current briefing card and use the chart on it to compare their selected force disposition with that of their opponent. This combination was in the specific agenda card, which will state the primary mission for use in the battle, which is this card here. Uh, as we talked about, force disposition, opponent's disposition, and then your agenda card that you need to do. So interestingly, you can just play a standard mission and not use that. Um, but why would you? Like, because one agendas is kind of uh helps you win the game. So it sort of would be a bit silly not to. Okay, then we've got declining agendas. If one or both players decline to attempt agendas in the battle, determine primary missions as described in your mission deck, but only the player that declined to attempt agendas can score VPs for that primary mission. A player that opted to attempt an agenda cannot score VPs from that primary mission, instead can use primary missions on their agenda card. Slightly awkwardly worded, but basically what they're saying is let me just draw one of these random cards. So if you basically had reconnaissance and your opponent had uh priority assets, so you would be doing as an orc player uh here, you could be doing loot and scout. That would be your mission. And for some reason, if you don't want to do loot and scout, you can do this one instead, which is search and scour, so you can score these VPs. Uh your opponent can't score it if they declined it, but if they did decline it, they would be doing their corresponding chapter-approved mission deck as well. I presume this is just designed for people that don't want to have fun and just want to play chapter-approved missions and be like, I'm a tournament player, and I'm being forced into this campaign against my will to have fun. So I'm just gonna play these cards instead. But you do you, you do your own thing, and I can still do my thing that I'm more comfortable with. Um, maybe potentially you think you've got a better chance of winning if you knew what these cards would be. Um, yeah, I don't know. That one feels like a bit of an odd choice uh to include it. I guess it also does give you a bit more mission variety uh that you could then play not only the agendas but also the chapter-approved deck in full. Interesting. Uh so then says in the declare battle formation step, each player can select up to three upgrade cards they have earned during the campaign and give each of those upgrade cards to a different friendly unit until the end of the battle. The unit cannot have more than one upgrade card. Okay, so interestingly, upgrade cards don't seem like they're permanent cards that go onto a unit, they just last for the battle. Uh, do they get to keep them afterwards? Maybe it will say in the next section. It might be that they get temporarily added on and then removed, and then you can put it on a different unit. Or maybe they're just a once per campaign thing. Uh but you can take up to three. So it's not too imbalancing the game and it limits the amount of kind of things you need to remember in the game. The problem with Crusade was you could over time have five, ten different units, all with several different upgrades. Came a lot to track. In the determined victor step, each player that opted to attempt an agenda in the battle checks for conditions listed on their agenda card. If they are met, the player takes the number of agenda cards listed. So let's say in this instance, you're the orc doing loot and scout. The agenda achieved is if you get 35 or more uh victory points for your primary mission. Uh, but obviously, this isn't the chapter-approved stuff. This is specifically to do with the agenda. Or you have three or more objectives, excluding your home objective, have been looted by your army. So if that is complete, you gain the number of agendas achieved, which is one in this case. During campaign phases one and two, the victor randomly draws one battle honor card from that phase's deck, and your opponent randomly draws one battle skill card. Okay, so that's how you win the battle skills and battle honors. So the winner gets a battle honor, the person who lost gets just one battle skill card, and if the battle is drawn, both of you randomly select one card from the battle skills card. Uh so you get one each, uh, regardless if you win. You can't get multiples, but there might be ways of gaining additional ones. Um, and if a player gained one or more agenda achieved cards from the battle, they randomly draw one additional card of the same type at the same time. Each player then selects one of the drawn cards to keep and returns the other one to respective decks. Which I also believe is what basically the agenda achieved uh card says. Uh shuffle the Liberators deck, then turn over a number of cards equal to the number of agenda achieved cards you have. You can then reveal one relic card. Okay, no, that's different. So this is different to what you're getting here, uh, because relics are separate from the battle skill card. Um it's interesting because it feels like this is a rule that's in addition to what you get here. But I guess this is because this is based on the number of cards you have, whereas this is just one or more. Although it feels like confusingly these two things were meant to say the same thing, and this is just a printing error. But I like the idea that maybe that's how you get relics, but also you get an additional bonus for having agenda achieved. But it just feels odd that this agenda achieved detail isn't on the card itself. Okay, a bit odd, but it is what it is. Um during campaign phase three, the victor gains the phase three battle on a card after conquest, and players prepare for the final climatic battle. Yeah, because that's basically the you've almost won card. Uh so as I suspected, there is maybe technically a game four. Although that says during campaign phase three. So I guess you'd still play out three after conquest, and players prepare for a final climatic battle. Yeah. Uh end of the campaign phase. So this is step three. At the end of each phase, each alliance adds up the total number of battle honor cards achieved from that phase and the number of agenda achieved cards the players have. Then before starting a new phase or ending the campaign, resolve the following. So take control. The alliance with the most battle honor cards gained during this campaign phase takes control of the current location. If a location bonus defines additional effects when the alliance takes control, resolve the resolve these now. Uh so this is like location bonus for Mannheim Gap, for example. Uh, in the event of a tie, tied alliances use the total number of battle honors it gained over the course of the entire campaign as a tiebreaker. If there is still a tie, the warmaster should decide how best to resolve it. Um the warmaster might be in one of the teams, uh, so he needs to do something fairly. Maybe you just roll off at that point. Um, or you know, the warlord that slayed the most models, something, I don't know. Um, okay, then you determine the ascendancy. So the alliance with the most agenda achieved cards is in ascendancy. This will help determine the narrative outcome in the phase, see below. Invent of a tie, all tied alliances are in ascendancy. Then you have acquire relics at the end of campaign, phases one and two. Each player takes the alliance's relic deck and randomly draws a number of cards equal to the number of agenda achieved cards the player has. That player selects one of those relics and keeps it and returns the other to the deck. Uh so that bit actually is um what relates to this. Uh so the agenda achieved card is talking about the acquire relics step. Yeah, it's odd that it just doesn't include this bit here about drawing extra cards, but is what it is. Then update your narrative outcome. The player reads the narrative outcome for the phase. These are on the reverse of the briefing card. The outcome depends on the number of narrative points your alliance has earned during the phase as described on that card, uh, which is one we already looked at. So you've got zero narrative points for effectively losing, one narrative point for doing okay but not great, and then two narrative points for smashing it. Um so yeah, that will determine how well you're doing at that uh point of the campaign. Right, then so players discard all agenda achieved cards they have from the previous phase, which makes sense because the agenda achieved cards are just really like points. Like as I suspected, this is because this is the same wording, there's nothing unique about them, it's just a way of tracking victory points, basically. Um, the assumption is that you're only playing two games per phase, so chances are you're only ever going to have two of these cards per phase per person at the very least. But potentially you could do more, but you only have three cards, and that's worth bearing in mind. Step four is the end of the campaign. Once the outcomes of campaign phase three have been read, the campaign ends. Okay, interesting. So it talks about during phase three, the player gains the phase three battle on a card path to conquest, but then you still play a final climactic battle. So let's have a look at phase three stuff to see how this ties out. So we got our phase three card here. Uh I don't want to, you know, spoilers, read too much about it, but let's just look at the end to see what we get. So we get two narrative points uh if you control this phase's location, and gain one narrative point for the alliances in ascendancy. It talks about once the outcomes of a campaign have been read, which are these ones, it ends. So this is um how you win. Uh, but there's also three points here. So I guess that's when you have like a complete domination uh there. But then it also talks about drum campaign. The Victor gains the phase free battle honor card. So let me quickly find that one. So this one is Path to Conquest, which is what it talks about. End of campaign phase at the end of the campaign phase three, the alliance with the most phase free battle honors takes control of the phase free location. There's several, but let's look at this one, which is high varon subspall. Uh, your location bonus is a hard fought victory when an alliance first can take control of this location. Each player in that alliance that has three or more battle skill cards gains one agenda achieved card. Okay, so this is giving you a bonus not to the games you're playing because you've just played them, but helps you sort of win the game basically. Um, but there are war zone rules to be fighting. Okay, interesting. I like how it says you'll get the path to conquest and players prepare for a final climactic battle, but because I guess there's only one battle. Yeah, I just find this a bit confusing. Victor gains the phase three battle on a card, but you would have only done that once you've done the battle, which is the path to conquest card, uh, which is this one, and players prepare for a final climactic battle, but this is in the determined victor scepter. You've already done your last battle. Unless, of course, you gain this at the beginning of phase three rather than at the end. Yeah, confusing. Where do you do this one final battle? Unless you've done phase three, then you do I don't know. Yeah, so it's odd. So phase three of the campaign, final mission, you play one battle. The winner of that battle in the determined victor step uh assuming each player attempted to do the corresponding agenda for phase three, which is determined by this card. So you select which ones you're doing. Let's say we're doing capture trophies. Um maybe in this example that's actually quickly dig out a card to make sure there's nothing on there that I'm missing. So yeah. Capture territories. Um you've got your conditions as normal. The agenda achieved at the end of the battle, you gain one agenda achieved for one or more of the following uh conditions are met. Uh 35 plus victory points from your primary mission. You recovered three or more operation markers, and then at the end of the battle, you gain one additional agenda card. If the following is met, the enemy warlord was destroyed, and you recovered the resulting operation marker. So you've captured your trophy. So yeah, that doesn't relate to the battle honor, that relates to completing the agenda, which is this bit here. And then during campaign phase three, you've done your one battle, you are the victor, you gain the battle honor card this, and then it says the end of campaign phase three, the alliance with the most uh battle honours takes control of the phase three location, which in this example is hive sport archeron. But it says, and players must prepare for a final climactic battle. But there isn't one, you've you've just done it. So I feel like this wording is wrong, but then path to conquest also implies it. So it says the skies are choked with ash and the battlefield churned to ruin, heaped with the dead and dying. You've won a significant victory, but only time will tell if your effort will be enough to tip the scales of war. So I think this is implying you finished the fighting, but what actually you're doing is the climactic final battle is just tallying up the points to work out who is the actual victor of the entire campaign. So yeah, I feel like the wording of that is somewhat wrong. Players prepare for a final climactic battle. You you've just you just finished it. So that is fundamentally a mistake and quite a confusing one. Uh, I hope I'm not the only one as we've been going through this. Um, so yeah, that is perplexing and a bit of a boo-boo on Games Workshop's part, I feel like. Um yeah, which is unfortunate. Uh then the last bit is modifying Dominatus. Uh so the rules represented here offer players a quick and simple campaign experience that can be replayed multiple times. A Warmaster can modify any of the rules to better suit the needs of their gaming group. For example, while Dominatus is designed to be played over the course of a weekend, don't think it is, to be honest, a Warmaster could use a steck to run a longer campaign. This can be achieved by increasing the number of battles in a phase, remembering that phase three should consist of a single climatic final mission. Okay, so it talks about that there. Um it is also perfectly acceptable for the Warmaster to vary the size limit of players' armies in your campaign evolves, perhaps starting off with smaller battle sizes in early campaign phases and growing in subsequent phases. That's something I said earlier. Warmasters are free to change or introduce new rules to better fit their own narrative, perhaps allowing players to swap factions mid-campaign or even change alliance as new packs of forged and traitors discovered. Such rules can bring new dimensions to your campaigns, but Warmasters should remember that their role is to ensure everyone taking part has an enjoyable experience. Yeah, I feel like that is just sort of saying to homebrew stuff and make up some rules as you want. I don't think they've done a great job of explaining what they should be. They've they're very broad strokes, and I think it in part they need to be broad because you don't know what people's gaming groups are like or what people's factions are, things like that. However, I think maybe giving us a few more definitive examples would be quite helpful. But this is the last page, this is basically filler content, and they say we're going to print off another like four pages for the booklet. Uh, then we could have had some more examples. If you look at my previous episode about Crusade Armageddon, they have the exact same structure in terms of the number of battles, but instead of it being done over a weekend, it's over, I think each phase is a month. Um, and the number of battles I think is kind of similar, uh, with the exception I think you do multiple battles in the final. Uh so I would go back to that episode, or if you've got that campaign book, use that as a guide to help determine what you want to do. And then in terms of modifying rules, I would maybe look at trying to balance the teams, maybe, is probably the biggest issue I can immediately think will happen. One team has just significantly got a group of much better players than the other teams, and they're consistently winning all their missions and stomping everyone else. So it's not very fun for the other teams. Um, then maybe you need to look at ways of splitting up that force. Maybe some of let's say it's space marines, right? Some of the space marine players have to either change faction and use a different army if they've got a second faction. So maybe they switch to playing Orcs or playing Xenos and then they become a raiders faction. Um, maybe some of those space marines uh just have different ideologies and under the guise of an Inquisitor, they then become the raiding faction if you didn't have the raiding faction. So that way you could um split it out that way. Uh potentially that maybe mucks up in terms of the number of people and who they're playing against in terms of the team sizes, maybe. Um so yeah, that's something to consider and think about. But yeah, those are the rules. Um with that all said and done, let's get on to uh overview and uh my thoughts and feelings on the campaign. So before I get into my final thoughts, I was just having a look at the upgrade cards again and just trying to work out exactly how they work because they state at the beginning of the battle you select three upgrade cards that you've got and you give them to a unit, but it then doesn't really say what happens to those cards. Otherwise, do they disappear? Do they stay uh on the unit? But actually, it specifically says if I read it out, uh each player selects up to three upgrade cards they have earned during the campaign and give each of those upgrade cards to a different friendly unit until the end of the battle. However, when it comes to the actual upgrade cards description, it says a player keeps all the upgrade cards they gain, but they cannot have a duplicate of an upgrade card. So my assumption is, for example, if you gain your mastercrafted card in phase one, you can apply it to a unit in a game phase two, and then if you're doing another phase two or even phase three uh mission, you can reapply that card either to the same unit or to a different one, um, or not at all, and because you might have gained another card that you then want to subsequently apply to maybe the character that this would normally go on. Uh, so you get to keep all your upgrade cards, so that's interesting. Overall, the Dominatus deck is quite similar to Crusade. I would say it's slightly more streamlined in terms of the upgrades and kind of XP tracking. That's not really a thing in this, so you do lose a lot of the narrative flavoring of knowing your units and characters, uh gaining experience points, and then picking and choosing uh different relics or upgrades and abilities and skills that those units can have. So you lose a lot of that, but in turn, the benefit of it is it streamlines the game. You don't have a lot of paperwork to deal with, you don't have to keep track of like your kill points or doing your secondary agenda actions that you could have done in those old crusade games. Uh, but you do lose out on a bit of narrative and being attached to a unit because it's done so many battles and it's gained so much experience points, or battle scars, for example. The idea that you could gain a battle scar uh used to be very cool. Um, I guess in this deck, uh if you win a game, you get a battle honor, which is like a really good uh kind of battle trait, and then if you lose, you get a battle skill. Uh it would be an interesting incentive. If you lose, you got a battle scar, so you have to apply it to a unit and it's a negative. Um that would have been an interesting option, or maybe it's got a bonus but also a negative tied to it. So it's like maybe you get plus one toughness, but you get minus one movement, something like that. Um, would have been maybe a bit more narratively uh interesting. Because I I but I think Games Workshop overall does like to go with the everything's fine method, where there's no negatives, there's only positives. So I can understand why they would want to do that. Because there are feels bad to having negative consequences uh applied to your units, and this is a very positive positive. Uh, you get to pick the things, you get to pick the units that those skills get applied to, and technically it's a one-off, but you could do it again and again across the course of the campaign. Uh, the campaign structure itself, some of it in terms of the rules writing was a little bit confusing, especially when it was saying win your final card for phase three and then do your final battle, but you've just done your final battle, so that was confusingly worded, I would say. Um, but overall, the idea of um getting like your agenda cards and your location cards, and you're fighting over a particular location, and depending on your unique faction that you're within, you have specific agenda cards. That's all very thematic. That sounds very good. However, I could imagine that maybe as a Tyranid player, which has a very different sort of playstyle and thematic feel to it, a lot of the cards you might be getting, including battle trait cards and battle honors, won't feel very appropriate to you in the same way as if you're an Imperium player with a Space Marine, because those decks are clearly designed much more for Space Marines in mind. So I feel like if you are a Xenos, especially playing slightly more out there, outlying factions, you might struggle to find some of the narrative in those cards in terms of the way they've been written. But overall, it's very good, I would say. It'll be fun to play. I think it'll be quite interesting as a gaming group uh to get together and play some games. I feel like the card format, and I'm again gonna credit Richie uh with this, is uh Richie often says that everything's just becoming decks of cards. Chapter approved is a deck of cards, Dominatus is a deck of cards, um General's Handbook is now a deck of cards, and I do feel like there's both with chapter approved and with this, there's a wealth of different cards that you need to sort out into different piles even before you can get started. Whereas a lot of this stuff could easily be just a couple of pages in a book that you could easily flip back and forth. I don't think you are really getting much benefit having this in a card format over a book format. The one benefit is probably the upgrades, that you can randomly shuffle them, uh draw them, pick between them, and go, cool, this is being applied to this unit, and you could put it either next to it or you can have your three cards just next to you on the tabletop, and you can tell your opponent what they're being associated with. That's the one real benefit over having a book. Um, but on a book, you could have some tables that you could roll on and randomise it that way. Uh in Crusade, you still either get to pick, and normally it'd be what you and your opponent best feel like fits for narrative. Whereas randomly gaining a vortex grenade um might not feel very thematic, but that's the one you picked, maybe. Um, so yeah, I'm not necessarily sure you get much choice in those upgrade cards. It feels very light. Um, let's see. So for the relics, you get was it five? Yeah, you get five cards to pick from, which is ultimately one table that you would have gotten in Crusade. Uh, in fact, less, because you it'd be D6, right? So you'd probably get six options. Um, and those are five upgrades that you can get across an entire campaign, um, of which you're doing five missions. So, in theory, you could easily, well, I guess you wouldn't really care about getting an upgrade for your last mission. So, you'd only get them for your first four. So, out of five cards, you are potentially always going, well, not always, you are potentially you could max out and get four um four relics, let's say. Uh, maybe that's not entirely true, but then maybe there's extra cards which allow you to draw extra ones. Um and you and but you can only in a mission take three. So I feel like if you sort of repeat this campaign again and you're playing the same faction, the upgrades are going to get boring quite quickly because there's just not enough. Having maybe a uh a deck that's also not only just uh themed to you know the liberators and oppressors and raiders, but maybe like a generic deck of another five or ten cards uh that you can then go, okay, cool. I'm gonna just go for the random pick instead this time, as opposed to the faction-specific one. That would just give you more choice. Um, maybe next year we get a different um set of cards, and it'll be themed to a different location. So instead of um Armageddon, let's say it's Leviathan or Pyria Nexus, and it'll be the same thing, and it'll be it'd be different relics, and then but maybe you can combine them. So maybe you can go, I'm gonna take my uh Dominatus uh relics and my Pry Nexus relics, and I'm gonna combine them. So I've got even more choice. So then it might get even better. Uh, but in the moment I feel like some of those choices are a bit limited, and if you were playing uh several campaigns, it would get a bit stale quite quickly, potentially. Um, but I mean some of these relics you could easily make up your own uh as a warmaster, uh create your own, and then have a table for people to roll on. Um and in a way, honestly, that would maybe be a bit more fun, especially because you could theme them to people's armies. So yeah, that might be an interesting uh thing to do. Uh yeah, the locations uh seem quite thematic. Uh so the Manheim Gap and uh the Hive Archon Subspraw, we've got you've also got uh Titan Grave, Eyes of the Emperor Observatory, uh Blackfire Death Pits, Victoria uh Victoranus Spaceport, uh Cereba Base, which I've not heard of before, uh the Morpheon Line, Volcanus Archipelago. Some of those ring a bell from previous campaigns, but not all of them. Um so yeah, I like the idea that you can get a location and you can score it and you get an extra bonus. I like that there's an element of team bonding uh in terms of how you score, but then there are individual agendas which help you get those relics, which or battle traits, battle skills. So there is an element of playing as an individual as well, yourself, to try and win something for yourself as well as for your team. So I think that's good. But yeah, the overall campaign structure does work well. Uh, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Specifically in the previous campaign, crusade uh campaigns, basically you couldn't just win if you won the first two phases. If you won the first two, but then you but then it was still all to play for for the final campaign uh phase, which it feels like it still is here. Um, but the previous campaign phases give you bonuses to help you win that final phase. And it feels like that's still the case here, but obviously I haven't read through all the cards, so I'm not entirely sure. Um but yeah, overall I would say that's good in terms of the structure. I feel like Games Workshop's finally nailed how to play a good campaign and for it to be reasonably balanced and for it not to be a whitewash in the first phase, which means people are only then just fighting out for a draw for the final, everyone can still have a chance of winning in the final phase, which I think is good. Uh assuming that's correct, which I think it is. Um so yeah, would I recommend playing Dominators? Um, I mean it's the only other thing to do technically via games workshop other than chapter approved. Uh so yes, I would do that. Um again, slight confusion with uh the primary missions and how they interact with chapter approved. It wasn't quite clear until you read through the whole thing uh in terms of you do one or the other. Um, because some of the again, some of the wording was a bit confusing. I feel like it was a bit odd that it gives you a choice to ignore the agendas and just try and play chapter approved, which seems a bit counterintuitive, because why would you do that? Unless it's trying to make you play this as like a tournament weekend dressed up as a campaign weekend. So you could do your three teams, you could ignore the agendas in here, and you could just concentrate on chapter approved, but have some thematic level of um winning bonuses and points, but ultimately ignoring some of the more thematic mechanical elements. Because it might be those um agendas are completely mad and not very balanced in the same way that maybe chapter approves being fine-tuned, uh, but I don't know. So maybe that's why they've done that um for people that want to just be a bit more tournament focused uh but still play a campaign, perhaps. I don't know. That seems a bit of an odd choice, but it is what it is. So yeah, I think I've said everything I can think about for this. Uh, do let me know down below in the comments if you're over on YouTube. Uh let me know if you played it, let me know what you think about it, or generally let me know what your thoughts and feelings are on the Dominators deck. With that all said and done, we get on to the rest of the show. Transitional noise.

Warhammer Heroes

SPEAKER_00 1:26:59

This part of the episode, we are looking at the latest Warhammer Heroes range, and we're gonna give it a little review. It's still just me on my own for this section, so you'll just have to put up with me talking to myself, like some kind of Tyler Durden madman. Uh, yeah, so this is Cleanse of the Mortal Realms with the new Warhammer Heroes, and uh the Warhammer Hero series is basically blind boxes. Basically, you buy a single box, you don't know what's inside it, and you get a random miniature, uh, one of seven, it says, and they're previewing, I believe, six here with always uh one model kept hidden, so you don't know what it is. Uh, the very first one was a space marine series, uh, if I recall correctly, and I could be getting the order mix up. First uh was classic tactical Mark VII space marines, then it It was uh Blood Angel Terminators as a second series, uh, and then I think the third series was uh Death Guard uh that they did. And I want to say that was all of them. Uh so this in technically this would be the fourth uh and the first for Aegis Sigma, uh, I think. I think that's correct. Uh and uh, you know, I'll probably put them up uh here for you to see as I've just been talking if I'm correct. Um but yeah, apologies if I've got that wrong. I've not researched uh this episode whatsoever. Uh yeah, so we get uh yeah, six models, six heroes uh that we get here, plus one which is hidden. So let's look at them all individually and see uh what we think about them. So let's read out what it says. So it says those familiar with Warhammer Heroes from last year's Space Marine Strike Force will know to expect character full models. So if we quickly look at this, you can see that actually there was a I guess a third series of uh Space Marines that they had done. I'd completely forgotten about this one. I think at this point I'd sort of lost interest. Uh to be honest, I only ever bought one, and that was the very original tactical space marine uh box. I bought one and I was like, this is sort of expensive, uh, but I could see why uh people find it quite fun. And then later, at least uh one of the versions of the Space Marines, which I don't think was this version because it hasn't got a kind of captain star model, unless it's him. Um but yeah, one of them, which was um basically became a kill team uh starter box set as well. So there's been quite a few iterations of these models. Uh and as you can see here, it was originally designed for the Japanese market, uh, hence the Japanese uh branding, and then the sprues themselves are actually have much smaller connector points on them, so they're much easier to clip out because it's sort of leaning into that gum dan style uh model kits uh that Japanese uh people are used to. They're trying to kind of ease into that market. So yeah, uh Space Marine Strike Force uh was one of the earlier versions. These models make a characterful addition to any cities of Sigma Army or indeed any Warhammer collection. They can be assembled without glue or tools because they're push fit, making them ideal for any new Warhammer hobbyists, and they come in a red coloured plastic, so you can paint them in any colour you wish. Uh yeah, they've always done them in coloured plastic, and as I said, the connectors are so small, in theory, I think you could pop them off with a bit of twisting or pushing, but personally I would still use a knife, and you probably want a knife just to do some uh clean up on them anyway. So, yeah, you get uh Arch Knight Kenzo, the Drake Blade. Uh he is joined by Colourbearer Brigson, Wildercorpse Hunter Curl Dernan, Forge Priest Brother Belius, Pyrocraster Ignachan, and Fusil Trooper Brennwick. God, all the mouthful. Um there's also mysterious seventh character whose miniature will remain secret for now. They basically tend to remain secret. It's clearly a witch hunter model, um, especially the big hat and torch is what's giving it away. Uh so yeah, you've got your knight up here, then you've got your colour bearer, which is your standard bearer, uh, the fusel character uh is this one, the wielder corpse is uh the one on the bottom left, uh, and then the brother, who is the priest, is this guy up in the top right hand corner, and then uh I guess uh which one was uh Forged priest, oh yeah, forged priest, and then pyrocaster is this uh last one in the bottom right if you are watching along on YouTube. But obviously, they're starting off with probably the best, which is the Pyrocaster Mini. Absolutely gorgeous, and I have to say, all of these models are pretty stunning. I think later on they say that you can just, you know, use them as alternative sculpts, because actually a lot of these are interesting sculpts, but they are basically just replacing a standard model in a complete unit of 10 men. Uh so it's not like it's the leader of that unit, it's not like it's a character model, they're just interesting. I hate using that word interesting all the time. It's just uh yeah, a variant sculpt. Uh, and a lot of people are just, you know, little uh hobby I don't want to say butterflies, hobby collectors, and they want to collect every um every sculpt, every possible kit possible for their army. Uh uh I haven't quite gotten around to doing that for my night haunt, but I've I'm at the point where I'm not too far off of owning all every single possible model that they've ever produced for them. But I sort of feel like that is a bit of a a madness way to go. Uh, but it is certainly something people can do. And yeah, these sculpts are very cool. Um, potentially for some of the character options, this might be a cheaper way of getting a character than just buying the standard box set, uh depending on the price. Um I can't actually remember what these blind boxes go for. Um, but for ultimately a character, it might be a bit cheaper. But for a just generic, you know, trooper new sculpt, very expensive. But there's uh there's also the fun gambling element of you don't know what you're going to be getting, uh, which is another conversation to be had entirely. Uh but yeah, let's look at this miniature. Uh standing on a tactical rock. This is the pyrocaster uh with a staff with some kind of uh ember storage at the very top, like almost a lantern, and he is pulling, I guess maybe it would be a lantern, and he's pulling that flame across into his hand because he's a pyromanter. That's very uh cool. Uh he's got a kind of helmeted mask um with some sort of divots in for where he would be breathing. Um overall, yeah, I really like the style of the dress and the cloak and the uh coat that he's wearing. Uh there's a couple of like little bottles and trinkets uh hanging off of his belt, and then you've also got some additional detail with some extra flame where the staff lantern thing has like hit the ground uh and it's sparking flames from there. So it's a really dynamic, uh yeah, really striking mini and has a phenomenal silhouette. This is yeah, Peak Warhammer, and I think anyone can basically go, Oh, well, this would be a great model to collect and paint, even if you don't collect this army, and maybe that's what they're trying to do here. This isn't just trying to aim it at all cities of Sigmar uh collectors, maybe hobbyists that just like to paint. This is a great way of randomly getting uh some miniature to uh paint up and enjoy, or maybe convert. Like I could imagine these miniatures being very cool if you want to do a more time war band, uh, if you wanted to convert some of them maybe to be like an Inquisitor for 40k. I can imagine um maybe some kind of Necromda character potentially it would work as well. Uh yeah, so definitely lots of lots of options. Um so yeah, let's look at some of the other sculpts. This is the Arch Knight at Zeno. Uh interesting kind of dragon helmet, but also like a dragon pelt on them. So you can see the claw hanging down from their armour, and also what I'm assuming if we could see the back is a complete cloak made of dragon scale or uh draconif or some kind of uh yeah fantasy creature, and you can see the the quintessential tail there uh also, uh which is quite interesting. Um the base, very cool. They've added on some extra tufts, but you can see some skull details again, tactical rock. Uh the sword is very nice. Um yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting model. I don't necessarily think it's the best or strongest one, but it is very quirky. Really reminds me of the bird knights that they did, which was a limited edition model where the character's got a big metal bird beak helmet. Uh, that was very cool. Yeah, similar vibes to that. So maybe you'll get a set of different knights dressed up as creatures. Um, I guess it's sort of taking and riffing off the element of you know how knights used to have heraldry on their helmets, you know, it might be a little lion or dragon or something. And instead of it being a symbol on top of the helmet, it is now just the entire design of the helmet. Um, doesn't look very practical, but certainly looks very uh cool and makes them look like they're cosplaying as a dragon, basically. This one is a fusel trooper Brennwick. Uh you can see almost their custody's style inspiration of a gun on a spear, uh, you know, halberd uh type combination, which is I'm trying to think if that's how all of the fusels uh look. I thought it was a slightly uh different design. Yeah, so I thought I would just double check. Uh this is one of the three guild fusiliers, which is one of the original sculpts, not one of the newer ones that they released, which was the Grenadiers. Um, yeah, they have a gun similar to this, but a different sort of halberd. It's more of like a pokey spear. So this one's a slightly um alternate design. So it would stand out slightly. Uh again, tactical rock. I do love the little two uh guns on the helmet. Uh, that's a really nice uh feature. Overall, a good design. It could represent a uh your champion, uh your unit champion that you get in Age of Sigma, so your your sergeant, if we were talking about uh sort of Space Marine 40k terms. Then we've got the Wildecorps hunter Carl Dernan, who's a very cool-looking character, got a crossbow, uh quite a heavy crossbow, in fact, uh slung over its shoulder on a huge tactical rock uh this time. Uh yeah, I really love the design of the Wildecorps hunters uh with just the whole medieval garb that they've got on, the little um I don't even know what the word are, not quite cranellations, uh, but the little uh sort of diamond patterning uh trim on the uh top of the cloak and also at the bottom as well of their outfits. And then they've got nice sort of armour details on the shoulder pads and the knee pads, and then clearly a backpack full of stuff as well, and it looks like a sword that he's holding, but it's um still in its um still in its sheath. So uh yeah, I think this one's a very cool mini. I like the face, um yeah, it's kind of very strong heroic pose. This one. Then we've got the forged priest brother Belius, uh, who's a yeah, he's a big old boy. Um, he is a large character. Uh got this mad like wheel on his back covered in candles, which is, you know, peak war hammer, uh super mad, uh, big beard, uh, big sort of tattooed belly uh that he's got holding a quite also big um hourglass, which is very cool, uh, which is normally a nighthorn symbol, um, interestingly. Uh and then a sort of classic sort of war hammer uh with the S for I guess Sigma uh on it as well. And then, you know, dangerously running around in sandals, uh, which isn't you know very practical. Um and then yeah, big old belt and an enormous book. Uh so everything about him is big in general, uh, and also on a big tactical rock. Uh yeah, so I really love this model. I think it's very cool. Love the sort of very uh yeah, priestly vibes to him, especially when it comes to the cloth hat that he's wearing and the robes. Um I think it's uh all a bit outrageous. But the sort of the almost a penitent style of it, having this big wheel on his back, which is, you know, I guess sort of similar motifs to, you know, uh Christians carrying crosses on their backs and stuff like that, but it's done in a much more universal uh symbol of just a wheel. Um yeah. Yeah, I can't think of any movies where characters are doing this, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some obscure, you know, 70s movie set in a medieval period where people are carrying wheels on their backs uh in the background or something. Um yeah, I I like that style. It feels much more kind of classic Grimdark, um, which a lot of sort of Asia Sigma doesn't lean into that often, um, but occasionally does. Yeah, this is this is very cool. And then lastly we've got the colour bearer Briggson, who is a standard bearer. Uh so the banner is very big, they've got really large blank space uh in this sort of diamond shape where you can put your transfers in, which is always good, so you could swap that out for whichever city you want your your cities of Sigma to represent. Uh there's a little sort of reliquie bone uh piece of the top with the twin-tailed comet uh above that, which is some classic Age of Sigma detailing, just classic Warhammer in general. Uh got a big trumpet, not really any tactical rock this time. Uh nicely painted though, love the chevrons on the sash, uh, really nicely uh painted. Um, yeah, great sort of bit of chainmail detail. I feel like uh some of my earlier criticisms of the original Cities of Sigmar Range was it was all very pointy. Uh everything was very angular, and they still do have that, so you can see the bottom of their cloak does go down to a sharp point, but they've got a lot more roundedness in terms of like the cloth and um the overall shapes of the armour. Uh, some bits like the helmets are still quite angular, but I feel like they've toned down some of the angular shapes um across the range as we've been seeing these new models. Like this they still exist. For example, the patterning on the banner still quite very angular, but it's just not quite as crisp uh and sort of looking very digitally sculpted as they might have done in the uh very original set of models. And maybe that's my criticism um being a bit unfair back then, but it feels like they've they've softened it and toned it down. So one of my original pet peeves, I think they are actually alleviating in this range, um and they're toning down some of that uh angular shapes uh to the design, which I wasn't a fan of. Uh so that's very good. Um, yeah, so those are all the models. Uh they say, as well as being ideal replacements for existing characters, you can also use the path to glory rules in Battle Tame Cities of Sigma to bring these heroes to life on the tabletop. So uh Path to Glory is sort of their version of what was Crusade. It allowed units and characters, I believe units as well as characters, to level up and um gain experience points. Uh there it was it was a slightly different system though. Uh I think they have much more unique uh missions that you play specifically for the Path to Glory campaign, although I could be wrong, and I might be thinking about uh Age of Sigma 3 rather than four. Um but yeah, overall uh Path to Glory always seemed like quite an exciting thing to do. Um, it's worth noting. Uh so they obviously show you the box design here, which I think is just dripping with coolness. Like I love the black and white artwork with the red model, the jumbo Japanese characters, the sort of stark white, black, red combo looks amazing. They're showing you uh the sort of Age of Sigmar symbols, so they're showing it's Warhammer and bottom right. I guess the right-hand one is saying it's Cities of Sigma, for hence the big S, and then the one after that on the left hand side is showing you that it's Warhammer, Age of Sigma. So potentially they could swap swap out these symbols quite easily to have a bunch of different factions shown off here. It really reminds me of the Ogre Moore tribes army box set. I feel like maybe the same person did the design, or one person was heavily inspired by the other, who knows which order. Um, but that black and white contrast and the lettering, yeah, it all looks phenomenal and looks really good. Yeah, it says every display unit will have eight blind boxes. There's no guarantee that you'll get all seven miniatures if you buy a full dispenser of eight boxes, and that you'll be able to buy them from selected retailers. Um, it's worth noting that previous versions, maybe not the very last one, but the original um Warhammer Heroes that they did, if you bought a dispenser which had all the boxes, I guess it was eight as well, if you bought all eight, you would get you would be guaranteed to have one of every single miniature, because maybe the ratios for finding them were slightly different for each of the designs. Uh so for example, the unnamed or unrevealed hero would always be the rarest, which traditionally would be a captain in the space marine heroes range. Um, really hard to get hold of. But if you bought the whole box of eight, you would be guaranteed to get it. And they don't give you that now, which I think is a bit rubbish. Um Games Workshop, especially since historically you could do it. But this is much more in line with sort of generic blind box uh miniatures that other companies also do. So it's not like it's a terrible practice, um, but it does mean it's gonna be quite hard to get hold of all of these miniatures, um, and also it's probably gonna be quite expensive. Let's have a quick look at the current miniatures if you can still buy them anywhere. So, yeah, I've just had a quick look online, and sort of on average, is it's like five, six pounds per box, so that could be quite cheap. For a whole set of eight, you're looking between 40 to 50 plus pounds uh for a full set, so less than 10 pounds a mini. Um, yeah, it doesn't seem like you're getting a huge amount of discount for buying the full set, but then you're not guaranteed to get all the miniatures. Uh so yeah, if you were to purchase the current Pyrocaster, which is actually a brand new miniature that they've released, that is £25 from Games Workshop from their website. So that gives you an idea that actually, if you would rather take the risk and get this one miniature instead, and it only costs you, let's say, seven pounds of the high end, that's a bargain, right? That's very good. However, it might be that's quite a rarer miniature to find, so you might have to spend maybe 20, 30, 40 pounds to actually get it, in which case, if you only wanted that miniature, it ends up being quite expensive. Uh, but if you are Cities of Sigma player and you would ultimately want all of these, less of a big deal. I guess also the downside is uh if you don't collect Cities of Sigma, there's not really any way of using these miniatures elsewhere. This can't be used in, for example, Spearhead, because that's not the scale that Spearhead plays in. There's Warhammer Underworlds, technically still a thing, although doesn't seem as regular updated as it used to be. And there is, I guess, technically war cry. Um, if they gave you rules for this whole uh motley crew as a underworlds warband or a war cry warband, then it would be kind of great quality of life, um, a great deal as a consumer because you could dip into those uh systems, or if you already played them, you could dip into Cities of Sigma faction. Um Um, because otherwise you're buying a bunch of models which you can't really use unless you own uh the Cities of Sigma's armies, but you'd also need to own all the individual units. So the Wilder Corps, the Fusileers, I guess uh the priest and the Pyrocaster are characters. Um the Witch Hunter could either fit into the Wildercore hunters, although I think there's a couple of named characters which are witch hunters, so I guess you could swap it out for one of those. Um, and then yeah, the the knights and the regular um uh Cities of Sigma kind of guys, uh, you would need you units for those as well. So yeah, utility-wise for gaming, this is only really great if you collect this faction. However, these are just phenomenal models. I would be quite tempted myself to pick a couple up. I would I always love a witch hunter miniature, to be honest. Uh, so I would love to get hold of that one. Maybe you could wait until people start selling them on eBay, because that invariably is what happens. So you will be able to get hold of individuals but a slightly marked up price, right? So I imagine the witch hunter model will go for a lot more expensive, uh, I mean probably £30, £40, £50 in its own, um, because people just want the guarantee of getting it. Um, the Pyrocaster, I imagine, will go for £25, £30, similar to the actual character model, and then the rest maybe a bit cheaper. So, you know, £10, £15, I wouldn't. Yeah, £15 seems about right for those ones, I would have thought. Uh, but that's just me guessing. I'm not entirely uh sure on those. I guess we'll have to see what the sort of the demand is for Cities of Sigmar. What's also interesting is this is the first Age of Sigmar Heroes range that they've done, and it's not been Stormcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:00

This is the voice from the future. No, my sweet Summerchild, you are wrong. There was, in fact, a Stormcast Heroes box set released in October 2024.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:16

I think this is very fascinating that Games Workshops made this move. It could be to tie it in slightly with the slightly more recent Cities of Sigma release that they've done, you know, since we had the Cogforts a few months back, and we had the Grenadiers, etc. So it might have been sort of part of that design remit. They had all these extra designs, or they deliberately did these extra designs to tie it in with that, and it's not been, you know, exactly in sync. It's lined up. This is a few months later, but they're still riding what that wave of Cities of Sigma are. It might be, and this is something that most players have always said that Cities of Sigma should be the poster boys of Age of Sigma, they shouldn't be Stormcast Eternals, because I think most people find Stormcast Eternals, A, too similar to Space Marines, and B just a bit lackluster and they're lacking character. Um that they're just not as interesting in the same way that Space Marines are, I think. Whereas Cities of Sigma have a lot of flavor, lots of interesting themes to them. They're humans, so they're just instantly much more relatable, uh, and they've got a lot of kind of uh kind of crazy technologies, magic, um, and yeah, just ultimately cool medieval aesthetics that is much more grounded and kind of classic Grimdark that Stormcast just don't have. So is this games workshop signalling to us that Stormcast might no longer be the poster children of Age of Sigma? Possibly. But you know, maybe it's just a pure coincidence and then this is just tying in with that recent release. Uh yeah, overall, very good, a really strong set of miniatures. I would say the two slightly more normal ones and the knight are my least favourites. I mean the banner one, uh the colour bearer, I I quite like. Um, my favourites probably Wildercall, uh Pyrocarsten the Priest, I would say, and whoever this uh witch hunter is, I think will be phenomenal. So I'm looking forward to seeing that one revealed at some point in the future. So yeah, that's all I've got to say on this topic. Let's get on with the next part of the episode. Transitional noise.

Warhammer+

SPEAKER_00 1:54:38

In this part of the episode, we are looking at Warhammer Plus. Yes, it's that time of year again where we find out what miniatures we're getting with our Warhammer Plus subscription. And I guess we can do a little audit of whether or not we want to keep our Warhammer Plus subscription going, whether it's worth it, and if you're not a subscriber, maybe you can decide whether or not you want to jump on board and sign up to Games Workshop's latest, you know, monthly money payment system, removing yet more cash from your wallet. I guess now is a perfect time to also plug episode three of Transitional Noise, where I did a deep dive into the Warhammer 40k app and I show off all the features with that. And as part of that, I also talk about what you get as a benefit for being a Warhammer Plus subscriber. So if you want an in-depth look of that Warhammer 40k app, head over to Patreon and check out that episode. But for now, yeah, we can get back to looking at the glorious miniatures that the Games Workshop are revealing to us. So they give us a video, but then they give us some photos as well. So let's take a look at those. It says Raf of McCrag continues the sterling tradition of space marines stabbing orcs on bases, depicting a dynamic blade guard veteran dispatching an orc in the midst of a furious melee. Don't let the name fool you while the images above is painted in the glorious blue of Son of Gilliman. There are no sculpted ultramarine details on the model, so yours can be from whatever chapter you like. That is great to hear. Uh so yeah, it's a phenomenal mini. It's interesting that it's a blade guard veteran, which we'll talk about in a second. But I just want to talk about the concept of orcs being stabbed by space marines. There's a few that this brings to mind. Uh the first is Bayard's Revenge, which was a limited edition of Black Templars Emperor's Champion model. This one I think is phenomenal based on some artwork, which you can just see on the right of the miniature. Personally, I think this one's fantastic and would maybe be a better conversion for Blade Guard veteran. But I don't think you can get hold of this mini anymore because it was like an anniversary exclusive miniature. The other one, which is a bit older, again, limited edition, which was Sergeant Jovan, which was I think maybe a Warhammer annual miniature, or I don't know, I think it was maybe a store miniature that they did. So the store anniversary miniature. So yeah, this time it's just a humble chainsaw decapitating a much smaller orc. Um, but yeah, those are the two that uh this springs to mind. Both of them are exclusive miniatures, or all three, in fact, are exclusive miniatures. They're not, you know, your standard base miniatures that you can buy direct from Games Workshop uh all year round, and they're not evergreen products, so to speak. This one's obviously the Warhammer Plus Limited one. Uh, yeah, really phenomenal. Interesting to note. Uh, firstly, that you get a slightly different pauldron with no trim on one side, so it feels like they're leaning more into mixing and matching armor marks. I can't think of many space marines that are primaris that have completely smooth pauldrons. I believe some of the new Armageddon intercessors have them, but this is a slightly bigger shoulder pad because it's on a Blade Guard veteran, so yeah, that's kind of interesting uh to note. But nothing else really is different in terms of armor mark styles. You've I'm pretty sure you've got the same design on the chest piece. But what is different is that there's no tabard on the miniature. Uh, so instead it's got the classic belt and tarouges, and it hasn't got the kind of tabard cloth that goes over the armor. So to me, this doesn't particularly look a Blade Guard veteran because it's missing that tabard, which was quintessential. Worth noting that I didn't ever care about that because I actually removed those from my miniatures, and instead I sculpted abs uh in the stomach area, and then I had my own Tarouges to match the Minotaur's theme of my army. Obviously, you can't see the detail of the shield, but obviously that would be the same as the classic uh shields. The sword is clearly also being plunged into the ground because it's so long, uh, but it's kind of got some cool wrapped in purity seals. I guess you could be finicky and say that purity seal wouldn't survive because the if a blade is active, the sort of the power sword itself in theory should disintegrate anything it touches. So that's a finicky point, which we've also talked about in some of the more recent Vanguard vets had that issue as well. And like with the old blade guards, they've also got the Indomitus symbol on the wrists as well. Uh, again, that was a detail I think I removed on mine because I wasn't that fussed about that. Um, but yeah, the York looks very cool, very beefy on a huge sort of tactical rock, actually. We can note uh coming up, looking like it's in the style and painted in the style of Armageddon as well. And actually, these pictures slightly lower down, you can see a bit more of a tactical rock. You can see the design of the shield and a close-up of the iron halo and the bareheaded option, uh, which isn't one I would personally go with because I like all my mine tools to have the helmets on. And then, yeah, you can see a better design of the tilting shield as well. So, yeah, overall it's a very cool miniature, and I think most spacemane players love a blade guard veteran, is obviously on a slightly bigger base than what you would have for gaming purposes, which is a bit of a downside. So you couldn't really just swap him out. Maybe you could count him as a lieutenant or a captain, maybe. Uh, I think you'd still need to use um a smaller base, even if you did that. But I think in terms of posing and the fact that you've got an orc there, probably does make it feel a bit more like a character model. Um, but just yeah, technically a bit hard to play using this model. I guess they're maybe aimed more at painters and hobbyists. They had a similar issue with the last Warhammer Plus with the Necromoncer. The Necromoncer was on a much bigger base than what it would technically have to be on. And if you were to put this model on a very small base, it just wouldn't really work. But maybe you just kind of you swap it in and out when you want to. And if you're playing a casual game, you just stick this bigger base size guy down. I guess you could potentially uh get rid of the orc completely, uh, maybe have a smaller, uh, you know, maybe like a cultist or something, which isn't as impressive, but you could swap out the model, theme the the victim, so to speak, uh, to your army, but then that would also potentially give you a bit of leeway for uh doing it on a smaller base as well. If you wanna if you want to be kind of hardcore gamey and make your base sizes match because you care about that, you could convert this model up to to make it work. But as it stands, you kind of have to go with a larger base, I think. You could go with a slightly smaller one where all the detail overhangs, but I just don't think it will look as good. So yeah, that's the space marine out of the way. I think it's very good. Yeah, it's a it's a strong one, and I think most players for 40k will have space marines and therefore want this, because I think it's a very cool miniature. Next up is the Age of Sigma offering from Games Workshop. The Plague Knights Burden shows Magakin of Nurgle Rotsword dragging an unfortunate free guild soldier to some grim fate. Both warriors' armors look battered, and we suspect at least a few of those dents on the free guild plates were caused by the vicious maul the Rotsword is carrying. In my mind, this is a really phenomenal miniature. Really reminds me, yeah, posing wise, of what I was doing with one of my Terminator models. Basically, I posed him so he was dragging a space marine along, but I never got around to painting up the space marine. But the design is there that I could slot him in. So yeah, concept-wise, I think this is phenomenal. I love the armor detail, like the plate mail, all the extra details. Um, I think the legs maybe look a little bit static, at least from this angle, but the armor is just phenomenal, and like the painting of the rust, just being lightly in the recesses, is phenomenal. The moon looks really cool. The helmet with the horns growing out of it, completely mad, but very in keeping for uh Magakin of Nurgle. I keep saying Magotkin, I don't know why, I'm just a bit mad like that, but it's Magakin of Nurgle. And yeah, you've got this extra sort of uh dress uh of it's not quite chain mail hanging down, it's not quite plate mail, these little uh circular, almost like coins hanging down. You see it in a lot of the chaos uh miniatures that they've done, iron golems. Uh for Walker I had that detail throughout. And I think even some of the newer Barrow Guard miniatures have that kind of armor detail as well. Yeah, I don't know what it's technically called. Um, and then we get some view of the back, really hulking, and actually you can see that the legs are sort of striding forwards, which you can't quite appreciate. Uh, you've then got some cloth hanging off the shoulders, sort of like mini tarouches off uh one side, so very asymmetrical, very uh kind of Roman legionnaire vibes uh there, which is very cool. Not much to say about the free guild person. Surprised they've got a helmet on, so I do wonder what kind of free guild person they're meant to be. They just say free guild soldier, so a bit generic, but maybe they're a knight of some kind because of the helmet. But again, that they're just a person being dragged along on the floor. But yeah, I love it. The mace is very cool, and probably my favourite bit of this miniature is the head, because I don't think the helmet the helmet option's okay, but I love the grizzly, somewhat deformed face. I think that looks really phenomenal. And you can see they've sort of bulked out his head with some, I guess kind of cloth padding for where the helmet sits on top. But yeah, the little the little head looks phenomenal. I just love it. The painting, great. I would love this model, uh, probably just a paint up. Like I do like a lot of the new uh Rotsword Hagakian aesthetic that they've been doing. I think that's phenomenal. I think this is an excellent miniature. Again, on a base that's far too big, but again, you just just don't care. Just don't be too worried about it. But again, it's an alternative model, so you could have it and just you know, uh swap it out in your casual games, but not in your tournament games where people would care about it. But ultimately it's a great painting piece. I guess most of these Warhammer Plus miniatures are painting pieces. And then let's get on with the interesting news. So they say both Space Marines and Rock Swords have unhelmeted head options. But from the 25th of August, your Warhammer Plus subscription will include not just one, but both subscriber-only miniatures. On top of that, for the first time, your subscription will also include a Warhammer yearbook, an indulgent look back at the best Warhammer miniatures of 2026, which is odd because we're already in 2026. So is it just looking back on the first half of the year? It's not going to show us any miniatures going forward, unless, of course, this book we don't get until next year. So historically, to get the miniatures, you would subscribe monthly, and at the end of the first year, you would get the miniatures. So if you were to subscribe monthly from now, you wouldn't get these until you've paid your full year subscription, so 2027, which would make sense for the book. But if you paid up front, which is what most people do because it's slightly cheaper, but also you get your miniatures at the start of the year rather than the end. So yeah, they show us the 2026 yearbook. Maybe this would make more sense if it was 2025 rather than 2026, but who knows when we get this. Uh, yeah, the Warhammer Yearbook is a new addition to your subscription for 2026. This is a lavish coffee table style annual, so it's implying it's quite big. Uh, packed with photos and artwork celebrating the worlds of Warhammer. This book, like the miniatures above, are included in your subscription. Of course, Warhammer Plus is more than just miniatures and books. Yada yada yada. You get uh Warhammer TV. Uh the next 12 months will be four new animated series and over a hundred new episodes of hobby, gaming, and lore shows. So the most important thing to get from this is the new animations will include Pleris, Journey into the Mortal Realms, and the much anticipated Astartes 2, which is something they promised us basically at the dawn of Warhammer Plus, which I want to say is probably five years old now. So that's a long time people have waited and subscribed for Warhammer Plus with the Astartes 2. I think people were originally hoping it would be within the first year or maybe two of Warhammer Plus, not having to have waited this long. Also, you get the Warhammer Vault, which has back issues of White Dwarf, plus Imperial Armour books and other books as well, which you can see here. They are effectively PDFs. And then you also get access to the apps for 40k and Age of Sigma. You get access to them anyway, but you get to unlock extra features so you can build extra army lists beyond the default one. I think that is pretty much it in terms of extra features so far, unless they are going to give us extra stuff as well. Uh, you also receive monthly Warhammer merch discounts, uh, which I do, and I don't think I've ever used that. Uh, you can subscribe monthly or choose annual option and get 12 months for the price of nine and get your subscriber exclusive miniature and yearbook early. So they're giving us the yearbook early. How does that work when the year is not complete? Who knows? And that'll be interesting to see. Uh, and then the two new subscriber exclusive miniatures means that last year's pair are cycling out, uh, so you get a last chance uh to buy them, uh, which were these two. And again, phenomenal minis I chose for Sober like Gravelords of the Necromancer, even though I don't personally like Necromancer Mini, but the guys coming out from the graves and the Dafferato skeletons are phenomenal. Uh the Elder model also uh phenomenal as well. Uh so yeah, this is great news. So yeah, this is uh cool miniatures. Uh let's have a quick look and see how long Warhammer Plus has been going on for. Yeah, so I've just logged into my Warham account to see how long Warhammer Plus has been going on for. We're currently on year five, going into year six. So six long years in theory, we've had to wait before we get started two, which is pretty shocking. I mean, I'm not surprised it takes a long time to make, but Games Workshop has been terrible on communicating that it would take that long. They kind of sold us, and I think a lot of people were originally very salty about Warhammer Plus, because they sold it with us with the promise that we would get weekly animations, uh, which didn't turn out to be the case. They told us on the promise that uh we'd get a Started's 2, which hasn't been the promise until now, six years later, effectively. So yeah, disappointing on that front. Warhammer Plus has sort of evolved. I think they've got to the point where they know probably most people don't really even watch Warhammer TV. I mean, occasionally I'll watch the shows, but they're sometimes quite sporadic in terms of when they come out, and sometimes they do several episodes, and then there'll be a big long gap before there's the final episode. So normally I just try and wait until the whole series is out and then I'll watch it in basically like an hour, because on average they're like 15, 20 minutes long each episode. So it doesn't take long to get through a show. So they're saying they're giving us four series of animations, which is probably at most four hours worth of content in terms of the whole series, because each series will be an hour tops, if that. Um, but they are very good. I do really like them. The hammer and bolter, I really like to be the original 2D art style, it did progress and get a bit better. They've now switched more to the 3D style, which does look good, but I don't personally like it as much. It's not quite hitting that 80s retro kids TV show for me that the original did. But I imagine actually the 3D models is a lot easier to do because it's less labour-intensive. You know, you're not having to draw and animate every every single frame. Uh, and also I guess in theory, you're potentially just taking your 3D sculpted, CAD-designed uh, you know, miniature designs, and you're porting that into an app and you're animating them. So maybe using 3D artwork, they've got all the assets basically already created from the miniatures and they're adding extra detail to them rather than sculpting them all from the ground up digitally. But I mean, I'm not an animator, so I wouldn't know. So yeah, I guess the yearbook will be interesting to see what it is. It's great that they are giving us both miniatures up front rather than having to pick. It's worth noting though that I guess most people probably just play 40k. And then the people that play Age of Sigma don't play 40k. I feel like I'm probably one of the rare players that does both systems. I highly recommend it. I always say Age of Sigma is a good game system to play. Obviously, there's a bit of a learning curve between the two different systems, and trying to mentally keep both systems separate in your head is actually a bit difficult, and that's probably the biggest uh downside to playing both games. Uh but as you can see, the sculpts for Age of Sigma right now are just they're just phenomenal. So yeah, it's great that they give you both, but chances are most people don't need both, and probably don't have both factions. Most people have space marines, so that's a bit of a no-brainer, but not everyone's gonna have Magakin of Nurgle, for example. And I think over the course of the different editions, I think this is the first time we've actually got a space marine model. So if we just log into my Warhammer very briefly so we can have a look. So yeah, last year was Elder and the Necromancer for Soul Blake Gravelord. Year four was Cities of Sigma and Inquisition. Year three, they're not actually showing, and I think that was because year three was the year I didn't subscribe. I remember it was a Kazakin for Warhammer 4DK, uh, but I can't remember what you got for Age of Sigma. Yeah, so having looked it up, it was Carl of Von Karstein for Sub Like Gravelords, which was like a very heavily armoured uh vampire. Uh yeah, for year two, we got the classic uh Chaos Terminator based on some very famous artwork. Plus, we also got a Chaos uh Sorcerer with a bunch of familiars, which is the one I went for because I really loved the familiars rather than the witch. Uh and then year one, we got the Orok Mega Boss, and then we also got the Eversaw Assassin, which was a really phenomenal mini. So I've got four Warhammer Plus miniatures so far. And you want to know how many I've built and painted? Absolutely zero. They all exist in their boxes, still completely unopened. So while it's great that the cost of the subscription is basically offset by a miniature, they're not really miniatures I care for. Well, they're cool, but I just never get around to building them because for me I'm much more of a gamer-focused hobbyist as opposed to just a hobbyist and painter. So these are all arguably very cool minis, but I normally focus my next build and paint project around something I actually want to play on the tabletop. So for me, these are things I've not really ever got around to building. I came close to building the Inquisitor because I was gonna build it and paint it at the same time as the Inquisitor I built for my 500 Worlds campaign. But in the end, I just like that miniature so much, which was the Erasmus, I think, store anniversary miniature. So I just built that one in the end. I never got around to building this one, but I but I came close to doing it. So it nearly happened. So as soon as they announced it was two miniatures, I had, and they were giving us this yearbook, I had a strong suspicion that Games Workshop was gonna up the price of Warhammer Plus. Um so much so I said as much to my friends. It just felt like it was an obvious thing they were gonna do, and this is slightly sneaky gimmick to make you buy into it. And lo and behold, that is exactly what they've done. So they have emailed some people that their Warhammer subscription is due. I think I'm about a month behind, so I think I get mine sort of more end of August time, or maybe even October, I can't remember. I've not had this email yet, but someone in my group has, so they screenshotted it and sent it over to us. So yeah, it says, Thank you for being a Warhammer Plus subscriber. To mark five years of the ultimate Warhammer subscription, we're making some changes. From the 25th of August 2026, Warhammer Plus subscription will include two subscriber-only miniatures instead of one and a Warhammer yearbook available to claim. Oh, from January 2027. Okay, that solves that question. So it is a yearbook for all the miniatures, but we obviously don't get that for this year, so we're not getting that early. Makes perfect sense because it's a yearbook, right? So that's good, I think. Um, but we just have to wait for that. We wanted to give you a heads up that monthly subscription will be changing in price from $5.99 to $6.99 per month. So an extra pound, uh, which is you know around about a 20% increase. So, you know, it's not a 10%, it's not in line with inflation. It ratcheted it up somewhat. Uh, the price of an annual subscription will change from £49.99 to £61.99. Uh, the equivalent of £12 months for the price of nine. Yeah. So the annual price is going up exactly £12 in line with the monthly one as well. So from a £12 increase from just shy of £50 is feels like quite a steep increase, to be fair. So I don't like that. I think it's a little bit scummy in terms of just how expensive it is. It's great that they're giving you an extra miniature, but for Games Workshop, this miniature costs nothing at all for them to produce in the grand scheme of things. In terms of the actual purse brew production, you're looking at pennies, which is obviously some everyone is well aware of. Passing miniature production doesn't cost a lot when it comes to actually producing it. Obviously, there's a labour cost as well. There's the cost of designing it, and the most expensive is the tooling, which is in the tens of thousands of pounds. So, yeah, I feel like they're ratcheting up the price, probably also because they know they can do it because Astarte's 2 is coming, and that they're gonna get a whole bunch of extra people coming along to watch Astartes 2. So I suspect there's an element of that. It might be also because the price hasn't changed much over the last year or two. I could be wrong. I feel like initially it was $4.99, and then there was a subsequent price increase. I can't remember exactly. Yep, so we can have a look back at the original Warhammer Plus article when it launched. So you got your free miniature, you also got a free £10 gift voucher, which they did for the first few years. Uh, subsequently, I feel like they've shifted this over to the Warhammer store. So if you have a Games Workshop account, since they updated the Games Workshop website, you get an anniversary £10 discount, which they still be doing. But yeah, so you've lost out on the £10 discount, you don't get that any more. Uh, subscribe for a year and get two months for free, which is slightly different. You're getting three months for free, not uh two months for free. So that's gone slightly better. And then what else do you get? Your battle reports, uh your animations, your Warhammer Vault, uh, your premium map access. That hasn't changed. More content added every Wednesday, and I sort of felt like very originally they were putting a focus on animations being a real big thing. And year one, they did a relatively good job at that, but I think they oversold it in terms of their promises, in terms of like live streams and what they talked about, which didn't really come to pass. And then obviously, they've got the miniatures uh being revealed here, and the assassin as well. They also say regular extra bonuses and offers are planned for subscribers. The first is available today where you get £10 a voucher. That never really materialized in terms of anything else. There was perks for going to Warhammer World events, which they did for a year or two, where you would maybe get a free packet of dice or free tokens. Ultimately, they just stopped doing that because I don't know if they can be bothered or if it just wasn't worth it. Obviously, I was in a privileged position where I was one of those sort of regular attendees or semi-regular, I'd go several times a year. So it'd be great to get a free pack of dice. Uh, for example, I think my Inquisitor dice that I sometimes use, I got for free. But then I think I ended up uh actually, no, Dan gave me his set because I want I needed more dice, because the current dice you don't get enough of to make you're just shy of 20, basically. Uh so yeah, they talk about the different battle reports, uh, the animations. So they say the first Warhammer Plus of Wednesday kicks off with three whole episodes of Hammer and Bolter, this new amphology series, Tales for Tales from the Corners of the Galaxy, everything from the rise of mighty Warlords to lowly Imperial Scribes. Meanwhile, the Blood Angels enter the frame. The first episode of Angels of Death, this uniquely stylish journey into darkness sees the Sons of Sanguinous, grapple with both a vicious Gene Steel occult and the black rage that dwells within their own heart. So that was quite a good and quite well-received series, I thought. The Warhammer Plus Vault has always been a bit of an odd one where sometimes they were very consistent about adding in new white dwarfs. Then they sort of stopped for a while because I think maybe they twigged you could just not subscribe to White Dwarf and you could just wait six months and you'd be all caught up. But then I think they've started to add them back in. I sort of feel like they should yeah, bit do a bit more with this. And I think the user interface around Warhammer Vault is pretty terrible. So the functionality of it is not great. It's a bit annoying that they have things like Imperial Armor books, but none of the old rules, which would be really interesting. But it's great for looking at art and lore. Not the most user-friendly thing, but it's okay. And yeah, they show you some of the older things like Gathering Storm and Campaign Books and you know Age of Sigma 1, for example. So yeah, that is uh the Warhammer Plus. Yeah, I it's kind of nice that you get two models, but like I said, I've not opened up a single one. The Blade Guard VET is probably the one I'd most likely build and paint sooner than everything else, because I've got a bunch of blade guard vets I do need to build. I've got some built already. I just need to paint up those units so I could easily slot this guy into that process. But yeah, it's kind of annoying, it's going up in price by £12. That's a bit painful personally, because predominantly I don't really watch the shows all that much. Occasionally I will once in a blue moon. It's good that they've expanded it out originally. They did the masterclass show, they did Drop Pod, which was like a sort of discussion of the animations, but they've since expanded that out into a sort of whole host of different shows from like kit bashing and painting challenges and building armies and more sort of tactical level things like victory points. Um the designer interviews I think are the most fascinating ones. Occasionally I'll try and watch those, but it's yeah, it's been a long time. I think most people just forget Warhammer Plus is even there, and I think in a way, Games Workshop wants you to forget it's there because they just want to take that annual money. Uh it doesn't really matter if you use the product or not. I mean, God, that's a bit cynical of me, to be fair. But they do put stuff out, and I guess they do want people to watch it, and ideally, you know, they want Warhammer Plus to be a success. But they're really dangling the fruit of the free miniatures. That is ultimately, I think, what people use to mentally justify the price to them because ultimately uh what did we say it's going up to? Uh it's going from £50 to £62, and that is really just so I can use my Warhammer Plus app and my Age of Sigma app and have multiple Army lists. That's the most regular uh use of the Warhammer Plus subscription that I get because I do that, you know, I access the apps most weeks and I create army lists probably every month quite easily. Uh although I could quite happily stay with the same list and use the same one again and again. I only occasionally vary my lists up purely because for some of them, like uh my Thunder Warriors, I don't have that many models. I've sort of got just above 2,000 points, so my list variation is quite slim. Uh Age of Sigma's a bit different because I've got a lot more Nighthaunt now. I don't know if I ever did a guard harm, I've got huge stuff I could do for that as well. So the cost and whether it's worth it is ultimately down to you to decide. It's gotten increasingly more and more expensive. As I said before, it was originally basically uh $4.99 a month, and then it went up to $5.99 a month, and now it's getting to $6.99 a month. Yeah. So it's it's not getting cheaper, uh, which is a bit of a downside because they're not really offering you much for your money. I would personally rather be uh paying less. I'd rather pay the $5.99 and not give a yearbook and not get the extra model quite comfortably. Both of these models are phenomenal, like they've uh really knocked it out of the bag. The Mega Kin and Nurgle one, phenomenal, but I would probably pick the Blade Guard vet if I had to choose because it's more practical one. I think ultimately it's the the lesser of the two sculpts. I think the Magakin one is phenomenal. I think that's by far the better sculpt. But because I have a space aminami, I would pick this one. So if I had the choice between a slightly cheaper option and only getting one of those models and not get the book, I would do that. Yeah, the coffee table yearbook, great idea, but I don't care. I don't need it, it's just another book. I say that as a massive Warhammer book collector. I would yeah, I would almost rather they give me a reprint of Rogue Trader or second edition 40k or something like give me a a tome that is difficult for me to get hold of. That would be much more unique and interesting and fascinating than a book of all the stuff that you sold me last year. I mean it's kind of novel, but yeah, I don't think I'd ever really use it all that much, personally. Um yeah, so that's this portion of the episode. I've tried not to be too negative, but yeah, I hate uh price rises. Uh the miniatures are very cool, so that is something at least. Uh let's move on to the next section with a classic transitional noise.

Victoria Miniatures Grimdark Empire

SPEAKER_00 2:27:04

Slightly differently, uh tangentially related to Warhammer because it's not games workshop, but it is still models that you could use for Warhammer 40k. Victoria Miniatures is a well-known third-party retailer. They are doing a Kickstarter currently. By the time this episode is out, the Kickstarter is closed. But the models are quite cool, so I did want to have a look through them and show them off. And I believe you can still buy physical models direct from their website. But let's take a look at the Kickstarter, look at the miniatures. You can see already what they might be inspired by. Uh, they're calling them the Grimdark Empire. They have the Victorian Guard on the left hand side, which was obviously very inspired by the Praetorian Guard, and then we have the Tannenberg Fusiliers, which is obviously very inspired by Morgian Iron Guard. However, both of those have real-world influences, which is where I think they can kind of get away with doing their own unique sculpts. Both regiments existed originally by Games Workshop, but Victorian miniatures have also done their own range of these originally in I think hand sculpted and produced in resin. These are digitally sculpted with STL files available to download and physical versions available to buy from the Victoria Miniatures website. I believe that would also be 3D prints rather than hard plastic, for example. The Victorian Guard and Praetorian Guard are both inspired predominantly from the movie Zulu, which came out in 1964 in the UK, which was following the real life story that happened at Rock Strift during the Anglo-Zulu War, and the Pith helmets, for example, is what the British military wore at that time in that area. They did also have the epaulets, which you see here on the right on the Tannenberg fusiliers. So yeah, the Victorian Guard have changed it up slightly, but I believe these miniatures are maybe interchangeable. Um and then the Tannenberg fusiliers, like with the Morgi Nine Guard, I believe are much more inspired by American military dress uniforms. So that really sort of sharp, clean, you know, nice and pointy hats, for example. Yeah, they all look good. Let's have a look through the miniatures and take a look at them. So you can see some uh maybe Still Legion inspired by the Steelborne Legion and a couple of other colour variations that they've given us. For example, the Stalker mechanised grenadiers, clearly doing a little nod to World War II, the Seventh Knight Fleet uh with their blue skin, giving me Admiral Thrawn from Star Wars, if I was to hazard a guess uh where it would be. And then we've got the Vutland 24th Royal Engineers, which is the Pith Helmet, and the Epaulets, which is very classic Praetorian, and then the Ashercore Battle of Sable 6, having a little bit of a colour scheme reminiscent of the Krieg, for example. So you can paint these models up however you like and not just in the kind of classic uh red uniforms. Uh so what do you get? The Grimdark Empire Digital Core set, 69 Australian dollars around 69 USD. Uh you can get uh one of each 10-man firing squad, 10 woman firing squad, so do uh different uh gendered sets, uh then with a 10-man squad and a 10-woman squad uh and a heavy weapons team, and likewise you can get that for either Victorian miniatures or the Tannenberg. Plus, you get a command squad plus some bonus stretch goals. So some of the stretch goals I think are locked at this time. Uh so this is the Kilmanock cap set, uh, which I think is sort of very sort of Scottish inspired hats. Uh the Picklehelm heads are unlocked by the looks of it, which was obviously uh German World War One inspired. Uh then we've got Sean Blackthorne STL, which is clearly inspired by Sharp, um, from the movie or book series Sharp, which is the Napoleonic Wars, which is very phenomenal. And you'll notice that even back then, between the Napoleonic era and the Anglo-Zulu war era, that the dress uniform was remarkably similar for a lot of things, similar sorts of uh styling with the epaulettes and the dress. That also comes with a hat option as well as a non-hatted option, and then looks like a sort of bolter design there rather than a las pistol, which is interesting. I guess they're doing their own thing, they're not being too married to the 40k system. Then we have the mortar crews. Now I love the design of these mortars, very uh Bolt World One inspired, a little bit reminiscent of the original Forge World Krieg mortars as well, to a lesser extent. And you can see here by the looks a bit that the base part of the model is quite similar, but the maybe it's the arms and the hats are the sort of main differing point between them. And this is something we've said for a long time in regards to the Games of Workshop Astral Militarum range, is that a lot of those models were originally the base models in terms of torso and legs, and the main difference was the head option, and then sometimes elements around like the epaulets, although in the case of the Praetorian Guard, they were just Mordian Iron Guard with head swaps basically. So they even had the epaulets as well. I think it was maybe in a roleplay book where they showed you a Praetorian Guard where they had a bit more armour on them. So I think they had armored shoulder pads, but they also had, I think, an armored uh torso piece as well. Uh then we can start see the modularity coming along uh done by Victoria Minches. If Victoria Minches can do it, maybe Games Workshop could do it as well, because it would be, I've always said, a great way for them to give us more of these unique regiments, unique flavour moving away from just Cadians. Obviously, they're giving us more Krieg, but for Krieg line was all brand new miniatures. Whereas as Victoria Minches is showing us, you could have a set of torsos and different arms and heads to give us several unique regiments. Yeah, so this is empty arms and weapons STLs, both the hands and arms with the padded shoulder pads and the epileps, and then we've got a bunch of different weapon options uh from grenade launchers, melter, plasma, uh las cannon, sniper rifle, a second form of grenade launcher by the looks of it, and a flamer as well. So, yeah, they all look very uh cool and interesting. I guess it's worth Noting that the closest thing Games Workshop has come to this kind of modularity is the Horos Heresy Specialist Games Department, where they've done all the different marks of uh space main armour, and the armour marks all are compatible predominantly with things like the command upgrades, the weapon upgrades, the heavy weapons, things like that. The closest thing Games Workshop has done to that kind of level of modularity. They haven't really ever done it in 40k. But it's great that someone else is doing it. You know, quite the Beskin caps, uh, quite famous for the you know British Royal Guards, I believe. Uh quite iconic, is good that giving us another variation for regiments, which I guess is very similar to Vostroyan, for example, if you wanted to do them. And while the Vostroians have different sort of uh bodies and legs, it's good that you could at least run something that's similar to them if you so desired. Uh then we've got more Pith helmets. This is the character heads, a pack of 15 male Pith helmet character heads to add more variety. Now I'll say this: when the Cadians relaunched quite a few years ago now, the sculpts were really phenomenal. Uh, but I just didn't really want Cadians. And at that point I went on a big deep dive into Praetorian Guard, loving the idea of it. I watched Movie Zulu for research. I got a couple of books around their uniforms and the different sort of ranks and different types of units that existed in the army at that time to try and do some research in terms of what I would do for cavalry, scout type units, things like that. And basically, while I really wanted to do Praetorians, the thing that was letting me down was the Piff helmets. Uh, there were sculpts, I think, at that time that you could buy from Victorian Minches, but obviously uh they weren't digital, so they weren't quite up to the same quality and size as the Cadian ones. Uh, so I'd be interesting now if these would be compatible with the new Cadian sculpts, because you could, if you wanted to, just get, say, the heads and attach them potentially to the Cadian sculpts. That would probably work quite well for some of the units. Yeah, I've always been someone that's been a bit cautious about using third-party stuff purely because I go to a lot of Warhammer World events or official Warhammer events, and things like this probably wouldn't be allowed. But if you don't do those and you just play on your own, this is definitely worth doing and is a sort of thing very tempted to get behind. Then you've got flak armor, which is, I guess, again, similar to the roleplay image that I mentioned. So you can upgrade your squads with flak armor torso. Also great for making things like uh sort of carapace armored units, or if you wanted to make something to represent like Kazakin, for example, uh, that would be very good. Love the power fist uh that this guy's got. Uh so then we've got parade pack, uh, which is a Tannenbergen Victorian male and female full clits, marching, saluting, presenting arms, more images, incoming. Um so I love the banner guy, that's very cool. Uh, you've got saluting uh and marching, reminiscent, I guess, especially the one on the left of the Atties poses that you got with the Krieg Forge World minis. Uh, I guess they're probably less interesting, but would be really useful for uh command squad, basically, for adding things in. Uh, then we've got crew cut heads uh male, so free digital corset rewards. So these are just crew cutters in just like the hairstyle. The faces all do look a bit samey, I guess because they're maybe leaning into that Mordian Iron Guard, because obviously you've got the Praetorian heads here. Praetorian heads are obviously famous for having big bushy beards or chops, mutton chops. I would like to see more of that maybe in this head, but this is for more for their Tannenberg uh style, so maybe not appropriate. But you know, maybe the odd moustache would look good, but does sort of look a little bit like the same person, slightly tweaked, but then maybe that's just the generic nature of the haircuts, perhaps. But you get lots of different poses. One comes with some glasses, so yeah, they look all right. Uh then we've got the foreign squad, which was your main uh sort of purchase, I guess. So you've got sort of a rank and file units doing first rank fire, second rank fire. So you've got some kneeling, some stood up. So on a couple, you've got the straps uh holding the belt up, and then on a couple, you've got them going across the body at an angle by the looks of it, which I believe is of a Sam Browning belt. Uh so that's very cool, but it's on it seems to only be on one of them. Unless, of course, it's that's incorrect when he's got two straps, and I can only see one there. Uh, but you can see the makeup of these firing squads. So you get a ton of leg options, both kneeling and standing, a ton of helmet options, two unhelmeted, and then some piff helmets on their own. You then get the torsos, and then you get a load of separate arms, and those arms have guns attached to them, and then some of them have close combat weapons as well. You get things like power fists, uh, you get like a vox caster type person, you get an officer with like a sash. Uh, this would be very reminiscent of old school games workshop, like the old Cadian models where you did used to have just heads and torsos and leg options, very modular, and in a way you end up with sort of uh lots of customization, but the poses are kind of samey, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but obviously they all need to be compatible. So you can build them in with lots of variety, but you don't get lots of flowing robes or very dynamic poses because ultimately a torso needs to be compatible with all the leg options. And if you had one person doing a mad pose running with his you know pistol facing forwards and his sword up in the air, that torso wouldn't be compatible with all the others, which is why I think Games Workshop has lent into these mono pose miniatures where you can have these very dynamic poses, but there's no compatibility amongst the miniatures. So if you're an old school gamer, which you might be if you're interested in these model ranges like the Praetorian Guard, i.e. the Victorian Guard, then you would probably actually quite enjoy that kind of old school modularity. I know a lot of people miss it. Um I miss some elements of it, but I do appreciate that there's a lot more kind of dynamic poses that you can get with the new kind of Games Workshop style of sculpting. So yeah, this is phenomenal. You could easily buy multiple boxes of these or multiple sets of them, and you could have a near-infinite set of miniatures just by building them, no kit bashing or converting in any way, because the very method of building them is kind of like kit bashing, because you're doing this picamix style of choice. Whereas if you were to build the same box of Cadian Guard, probably uh all your units would look very similar because they're also monopose. You might get an alternative sculpt if you're lucky. So maybe two sets could be reasonably unique, but after that, your third and fourth set of Cadian guardsmen would start to have a lot of repetition. With here, you've got a lot more variation, although the variation is in a slightly more unique way. So it's things like the heads and the different uh you know, how the weapons are placed to have the arms are placed. You will have ultimately several looking legs uh that will start to replicate themselves in terms of the pose, uh, but you can mix and match them with different torsos, different helmets. So each model is actually unique. So yeah, uh there's a there's pros and cons to both, and I think some people really love one version over the other. Uh, this probably requires a little bit more skill and finesse in terms of building, but you get a lot more creativity right up front, and this should be relatively straightforward in terms of building, shouldn't be too complicated. Then we've got the Tannenberg guys, you've got a slightly different hat here, which is very similar to like your drill instructor, for example, again leaning into American military style. You can see all the different head options, uh, a bear head, uh, cap, standalone, and again, multiple different kneeling and standing uh legs, and then you've got uh standalone weapons, wattcasters, load of combat weapons, you've got like a kind of rod of command sort of style, and then some esoteric sci-fi weapons as well, which clearly would be a plasma gun or a flamer gun or a melter gun, but they're their own unique spin. They haven't copied the exact style of games workshop weapons, which I think is good. Obviously, I think the Lazgun is probably the closest thing and looks very similar to games workshops in terms of like, you know, the the barrel design, I think it is is quite closely uh similar. And you know, I'm not saying that's good or bad. It just is what it is, and I think that's what people would want as well. They wouldn't want something that doesn't really look like a las gun if they gave them all sort of actual rifles or if they made them look like a completely different sci-fi weapon. I don't think that's what people would want out of this range. Um then we've got the female sets as well. So again, they're gonna come with their own legs, heads, torso options, exactly the same, just a female variant. So you can run them as their own squads, you can mix and match them between your squads, so you've got a bunch of uh you know mixed uh squads, so you can have even more diversity in terms of like your models and diversity in every sense of the word, I guess. And likewise you can do that with the uh Tannenberg as well. You can mix and match, have a bunch of different styles. That's all very cool. Then you've got the infantry squads, so they say the Humblefoot sloggers are the backbone of the guard force. These four infantry kits showcase the men and women of the Victorian and Tannenberg regiments as they fix bayonets and charge into the fray, a fully modular push fit, which is interesting, and interchangeable components combined with the firing line kit for near-infinite variation. So great that it's push fit, so you don't necessarily need to even glue a lot of your parts together, and that it's also compatible with the firing squad, so you get even more variations uh between them, which is phenomenal. So, yeah, here you've got some more like running leg poses and different stances. Uh, then I guess you're gonna have even more head options and weapon options. Uh, so yeah, between the two sets and multiples of those sets and combining those sets together and the sets of the men and the women, you've got yeah, thousands of different possible options in which to build your miniatures, which is fantastic. And similar for the 10-man Tannenberg uh squad as well. And then they do say that there are uh female ones as well included, but they've not given us any pictures. Then they've given us some more heavy weapon squads. So it says sorting for brave infantry are always the ever reliable heavy weapon platforms. They're definitely Savo, smashing the enemies before the charge. Tannenberg and Victorian male heavy weapon teams featuring interchangeable bolters, autocannons, and lasers are included in the Grimdark Empire Digital Corsair. So uh bolters, autocannons, and lasers. Uh so I guess that's sort of Laz Cannon sort of style. Uh, I guess the first one is maybe the autocannon style. The second one is maybe more like a classic kind of traditional cannon, so I guess that's the bolter version, if you wanted to run that as a heavy bolter, but it does look almost more like something you'd see in World War One. And then you've got the Laz Cannon variation where the crew is actually towing it like they've lifted up and they're moving it again, reminiscent of some of the poses that you got on the old Forge World Krieg heavy weapon squads, uh, which is very cool. Those are always the least popular ones, though, because people like more action poses for things like dioramas, fantastic, and also just for a nice bit of variation. I think that's also really cool. So you can see the breakdown of the miniatures here. So you've got poses, more kneeling, some sat down on the floor, and then you can see the weapons a bit more clearly here for wheel design. You're even printing, I guess, the base as well by the looks of it. And then, yeah, you've got some uh ammo canisters and a map and some shovels. So, yeah, lots of weapon choice there, and then you've got a similar thing for the Tannenberg ones as well. Yeah, so I'm sort of assuming the weapons and the poses are the same, but they're just sculpted differently for the individual uniforms for the two different regiments. Uh, then we have the Victorian Missile Launcher team, which I absolutely love the design of. It's on that classic two-man base. Um, I don't know if these would fit on the current heavy weapon bases for Games Workshop, because I think they have slightly smaller ones now. Uh, I don't know if they're designed to be one-for-one compatible in terms of base sizes. Not sure. The old style bases for heavy weapon teams uh back prior to uh I want to say 10th edition or before, uh maybe it was 9th edition, was much bigger bases, and then they shrunk them down slightly. So it feels like these might fit on the new style bases. But yeah, but just the design and style of that missile launcher is like phenomenal. Really, really love it. And love this guy holding his hat as well. This is kind of everything I want from a Praetorian Guard, so I'm glad Victoria Miniatures is doing it. Yeah, this is this is phenomenal. This is exactly what I want. Um, then we've got the uh Tannenberg missile team again doing similar poses, both of them sort of uh holding their hats or shielding their eyes from the sun, maybe. And then, yeah, is that version has he got binoculars? I assume it's the same one. Um if there was an option with binoculars, that would actually be very cool. You can see here it's just a hand, and yeah, this version is just a hand as well. So a binocular option I think would be a nice touch. Uh not that's really needed, and I don't think really missiles are particularly that long range to require binoculars. Maybe that is something you could have in the like the heavy weapon teams, or like maybe the mortar teams would have something like that. Uh but yeah, the design of the missile, fantastic. Then we get on to the command squad. So we've got Commander Kane here, obviously a nod to Michael Kane from the movie Zulu. Uh, it says you get special characters, medic banner, comms musicians uh to be revealed. I really like him. I think it's a really phenomenal miniature, and again, nodding to the movie that it is inspired by. We then got the sister medicus of the last lamp. So this is really interesting, it's a medical officer, but much more inspired by the actual historic time period from which the uh sort of Zulu movie was set, the Zulu War, as opposed to being inspired by the game's workshop stuff. So I like that they've kind of cutting their own niche here and they're going off and doing their own unique thing, which I really like. Then they've done a couple of work in progresses with some of the models, um, showing you like a drummer boy, I guess, and a banner, and clearly some kind of officer with chainsword. The pose very reminiscent, I think, to one of the old-fashioned uh Games Workshop minis, perhaps. But we don't know what that looks like yet. But ultimately, that's uh yeah, really interesting. Command squad. I would love to see what the rest look like. Then we've got optional add-ons for your pledge. So, yeah, here are some extra things we've got. I don't think these were revealed originally, they've since done them. So you've got the Tannenberg Roughriders, Kickstarter exclusive bundle deal. Uh, two new modular Rough Rider squads, including new torsos, heads, arms, legs, and horses compatible with all the Grimdark Empire minis. So maybe you could take the if you didn't like these helmets, you could go with the classic Piff ones, for example. Obviously, the grenade spear is much more inspired by the modern Rough Rider miniatures. The horses look very nice, uh kind of classic, like original, like miniature design. The running poses, I really like the kind of the guard, almost Napoleonic style uh helmets are very cool. But if you weren't a fan of them, I guess you could just swap those out for your praetorian uh pith helmets, uh for example. Uh but I also actually really like these ones, which is for the Tannenberg with that almost more American style cavalry. But if I remember rightly, in the Anglo-Zulu war, the British auxiliaries had a lot of riders that had these sorts of kind of cowboy hats and things, and they did have a blue colour scheme to them. So actually, this is also harking to some of that Anglo-Zulu um sort of time period for the for inspiration. So I do like that. I could quite happily almost run these guys uh in my Praetorian guard quite accurately in terms of how I was thinking about doing them. Maybe I'd be trimming some of the detail off the hats, for example, but ultimately they do look very good. Yeah, these guys also, yeah. I mean they're both phenomenal. I I like them both, to be honest. Yeah, really good miniatures. Uh so you can see some of the digital sculpts, different weapon options. You've got the kind of the pike upgrade that you can get for your Rough Riders. Obviously, these are, I guess, weapon-wise and rules-wise, I assume, following the Rough Rider squads, not the death rider squads. So as an option, they could have maybe given us a version that would count as death riders, perhaps a bit closer in just in terms of weapons, but I sort of feel like you could just run for normal spears and they'd they'd also work for deaf riders, right? I don't think there's too much variation between them. Uh, then we've got some commissars, Commissar Yusuf, Lieutenant uh Mira Drax, and Colonel Kilmore. So obviously a mixture of commissars, lieutenants, and colonels, some of which are more inspired by the Tannenberg style uh rather than the Praetorian style. I'm less keen on these miniatures personally, uh, but that's because I think I'm more leaned towards the Praetorian models than anything else. Slash Victorian Guard. I'm gonna use those words interchangeably. But let's see what else they've got. So we've got Tannenberg halfling snipers. Yeah, these are okay. I don't think they necessarily need the same sort of style caps, but I can see why people would want them to have that really nicely detailed painting work on the Cantina. Uh yeah, they're pretty cool. And then what other Victorian halflings? Again, they don't necessarily need to have the the piff helmets, but they do look kind of fun, to be honest. And you can see a similar pose here. So yeah, I wonder if the base mini is exactly the same and they've just swapped out the heads. I assume that's what they've done for these. Uh yeah, they look cool. I like them. They're also doing this one's sat down with its legs forwards, which is very reminiscent of a classic firing pose you got in the Napoleonic era war. Although in those days I think they used they were lying more flat down and they used their feet to support for a rifle. I think that's how it worked. So a little nod to that perhaps, or maybe I'm just reading into it. Maybe they just like to sit down on their bums as they shoot, which is quite fun. Then lastly, we've got uh some references to the Space Aussies digital set. I assume these are old miniatures and not new. I guess they would represent Catachans, for example, with a very much a crocodile dundee vibe to them, which is again a very old movie, not quite as old as Zulu. Uh it was more 80s, I think. Uh well worth checking out there. So, yeah, they're interesting, but I'm gonna skip past them because that's not what this is about. And yeah, they talk about you can buy physical kits uh currently 10% off uh from their website. So head over to victoriaminiatures.com. Uh then they're giving us a scale comparison between their models and the kind of I think maybe old Cadians, new Cadians, not too sure what that one is. And uh maybe yeah, almost looks like it's a Necromunda miniature, but I'm not actually sure. And then a space main primaris. It's great they talk about that they're made by humans, and I think they have a line about not using AI, for example, uh yeah, the bot at the bottom, and everything's like you know, physically made, hand sculpted, uh things like that. Uh let's have a little look of the about Victoria miniatures. So Grimdark Empire is Victoria Miniatures' sixth Kickstarter campaign. It builds on over 26 years industry experience delivering quality boutique miniatures for hobbyists all over the world. In 2021, uh I became, which is Victoria of Victoria Miniatures, the first woman in the world to win a golden demon slayer sword. That is very impressive. Ever since I've pursued a passion for creating quirky characters and modular guard miniatures, at first by hand, with putty and handmade tools, then more recently sculpting digitally to create miniatures that can be home printed. My goal was always to make the troops I wished I could buy. It's my absolute delight to be able to share these creations with fellow hobbyists. And I completely agree. Like I think there's a huge demand for these types of models, both in terms of the construction methods, in terms of the modularity, the actual regiment designs as well. I think are hugely popular and currently Games Workshop is missing out on not producing them. Maybe one day they will, and maybe that will kind of cut into Victoria Miniatures sort of market potentially. But for now, they're doing a great job by supplying us with something that Games Workshop isn't. And yeah, obviously it is embracing the 3D world and allowing people to download VSTLs, which I guess might be cheaper than just buying the physical sets, but not everyone has printers. I appreciate that. I don't have one either. Yeah, it'd be interesting to get hold of these and see what they're like in person, what the quality of the resin is if you bought directly from them. But obviously, if you were printing it yourself, you will be responsible for that. Overall, I think a really phenomenal range. I could see people just buying, for example, the helmets or downloading helmets and you know swapping out your Cajun miniatures, your official Games Workshop ones with just the BIF helmets, especially if you wanted some of the more esoteric, uh like heavy artillery pieces, things like that, because you could just use uh Games Workshop stuff. Uh, because obviously they've given us the basic heavy weapon teams here, but there are some much bigger artillery pieces, heavier weapons, and even things like you know, tank commanders, things like that we're missing here. That would be a great add-on for them to do if they wanted to explore the range further. But they are basically giving you what I've always said Games Workshop needs to produce a custom line. It's basically a command squad, a heavy weapon squad, and a firing squad, uh, or you know, a standard infantry squad. That's all they really need to do in terms of unique models, and then ideally a couple of weapon upgrade packs to allow you to do things like swap out artillery, crew members, maybe things like death riders, just swapping out heads or torsos, or uh things like tank commanders and things like that. So Victoria Minches has done a great job of kind of giving you as much of that as possible. It might be if this is a real success, they will produce some of those more niche upgrades or giving us some more options. That'd be really or some unique kind of custom characters, things like that. So I think the project's doing well. At time recording, there's only 35 hours to go, but by the time this episode is out, it will be gone. Uh, they've raised almost 100 grand, which feels like it's relatively popular. Um so you know, well done them. I hope they've done a good job. I hope they're happy with it. I think the sculpting is really phenomenal. I think Victoria and and whoever else has maybe sculpted them, if it was just her or part of her team, I think they've all done a great job. I think it really harkens back to original games workshop, but also they've done their own thing. They're obviously very inspired by the original history of both the British and American military. And I think ultimately that is why these two regiments within both Victoria Minches and sort of Games Workshop ecosystems have always been very popular for that reason. But it is possibly one of the reasons why Games Workshop doesn't want to go near it, because it's not very IPable friendly, like they can't trademark it in quite the same way and because it's not unique enough. So if they did it down the line, they would have to do their own spin on it, much in the same way that they teased us that they're doing still Legion, and the concept artwork was taking it in a slightly different direction, um, in terms of like some of the designs of the logo and things like that, so they can make it more unique to them. So, yeah, that's this section of the podcast. We're now gonna get on with the next part of the show. Transitional noise.

5 Star Review

SPEAKER_00 3:00:12

It's time for the five-star review, and I'm sad to say this is the last five-star review that I might ever do. Uh, purely because it's the last one. So if you would like to leave a five-star review, please do because you'll be at the very front of the queue. You can leave it on Apple Podcasts, predominantly audible, and also just leave it in the comments of YouTube, just tag it five stars, or use the five-star uh emojis, uh, and then leave your comment down there and I will add it to the list. But yeah, this is apparently the last ever one that I've got, uh, unless you guys give me some more. So that would be great. This one comes from Ian Hayden 666 from Apple Podcasts of Australia, all the way cobblamy down under. They say it's like a cold beer on a hot Aussie day. Yes, just like a refreshingly chilled lager hitting your throat on a 40 degree Aussie summer day. Lookout, sir, is your refreshing and satisfying podcast about our favourite pastime that involves getting together with your mates to play with toy soldiers and have a laugh. Not bad for a pomy beardie bloke and his mates, five stars lager indeed. Uh well, thank you, Iron Hayden666. Um, it is a hot day indeed over here in the UK. I'm sweltering away in my hobby shed because I don't have air conditioning like a loon. Maybe one day I'll get some installed, uh, but they're currently just sold out everywhere and impossible to get hold of. I'm glad you're enjoying the show. I'm glad you're enjoying my pommy beard, and also my mates Tim and Richie, when they do join me. Sadly, not this episode. Hopefully, they will maybe find time next episode. One of them is too busy looking after a newborn baby, so I wish Tim and the family are doing well. He's a bit busy uh being a new dad, so that's very exciting for him. So thank you, Iron Hayden666, for potentially the last ever five-star review. It'll be a sad day when there's no more, uh, which might be the case next episode. So everyone's got two weeks uh to get writing if they would like to leave me one. You can also support the show in a variety of different ways, liking and sharing on YouTube, just sharing the episodes with your friends in the chat groups that you no doubt have. Just be like, check out this episode, give it a listen or give it a watch. That's probably the greatest thing you could possibly do. But you can also support me in other ways. So you can head over to Red Level, links in the description where we have some merch, and you can also head over to Patreon where you can support the show, and that helps keep the lights on. There's also a bunch of extra episodes for you to listen to. So we've got three episodes now of transitional noise, plus a bunch of other extra content that we've made. There's a couple of very old battle reports and some other outtakes and extra stuff that me and uh Dan recorded over the years. So yeah, head over to there if you would like to support the show further. Uh yeah, thanks very much for those that do. It's greatly appreciated. Your name also, I haven't ever talked about, appears now at the end of the YouTube video in the form of credits. So you will do see your name up in lights on YouTube now. So if you're a Patreon supporter, you will get a shout out at the end of the show, uh, which is something I've been doing for the last few weeks, but isn't actually something I've ever mentioned to you guys. So so if you're listening along on the podcast version, I guess you've missed out on that and haven't realized. But yes, over on YouTube, your name will appear in credits. So yeah, with the five star out of the way, potentially for the last time. Sad times. Uh yeah, let's get on with the outro. Transitional noise.

Outro

SPEAKER_00 3:04:09

Time for the outro. So I don't think there's a huge amount I want to say in the outro, although we'll see how we get on. It's starting to get very hot in the shed already. It's set to be a scorcher, 30 degrees outside. Uh the temperature is getting up there already, and I'm locked inside to be soundproofed as much as possible in my non-air conditioned shed. So, yes, I'm slowly starting to have some sweat dripping down me. Sorry for that visual uh description. Uh, but if you're watching along on YouTube, you can just see it happening live. Good for you. Um, yeah, the outro originally I was gonna include the Victoria Miniatures section, but then I decided to do that as its own separate thing because I thought it was worth talking about. I think also, and I'll mention this again, John Blanche's On Guard Vanguard Kickstarter. I did see they were doing a whole section of late pledges for that. And I was also going to do that, so I was going to have a bit of a Kickstarter sort of special to the outro. But when I looked at it, it seemed like that had all closed down now. So that uh has been and gone as a late pledge mechanic, unless they're doing that off of Kickstarter and somewhere else. Um, but that also looks very exciting, and when there's more updates to that, or when I get those miniatures, I'll hopefully get to talk about that on the podcast. What else have I been working on? So, from a hobby point of view, I finally unboxed my double-sided mat from gamemat.eu, and I recorded a review from that, which I'll probably be putting over on my Beyond the Tabletop channel, which is a bit more hobby focused. I feel like the lookout ser format should be long form, me talking to the camera and being joined by Tim and Richard. Uh, so I thought that'd be better to do resurrect my old uh YouTube channel for that reason. Overall, it's okay. I'm not massively keen on the designs I would say that I picked, but it is what it is, and it will be a good, sensible gaming map once some terrains on it, I think, is the summary of it. Uh, but if you want to understand what my issues are with it, head over to Beyond Tabletop where in the next few weeks I'll hopefully have that video up. And if not, it's because I'm too busy trying to edit something else together. Uh so it hasn't happened. I've also been building lots of uh terrain for Age of Sigma. I've got one here that I finished just yesterday. Quite a big piece. Um so I've been doing lots of terrain for that so I can play a game of Age of Sigma. Dan, who didn't come around last time, is meant to come today, but I won't do a voice from the future. I'm pretty sure we are cancelling because as I've already said, it's a hot day. So 30 degrees by the evening time, this shed will just be unbearable. It's already unbearable. Um we're like at 1 pm at the moment. Yeah, uh, I don't think we'll do a game tonight because it'll just be far too hot, far too hot. But I'm getting a collection of terrain together, building it up. Uh, the downside of some of the Age of Sigma terrain is it's all a bit nondescript, and um all the pieces are from different time periods of Age of Sigma, so they don't really fit in together. So I'm trying to coalesce them and theme them a bit more and maybe customize them because I can't just build something out of the box as normal. No, I've got to spend hours and days of my life making it ever so slightly unique to me because that is how my brain works when it comes to this hobby. I can't just build it out of the box as is. I wish I could, but I just can't. So yeah, I'm doing that at a moment. I'm also filming some of that as well, and that will probably be another separate video on Beyond the Tabletop uh at some point in the future. Maybe it's months, maybe it's years away at this rate. Uh who knows when I'll get that done. So yeah, hoping to play some Age of Sigma. Speaking of Age of Sigma, um, there's a doubles tournament happening in Kempton, I think it's called, November, which is one of the new uh official games workshop events that they've announced, which I wanted to do a whole segment on its own right. Typically, events aren't really happening as much anymore at Warhammer World. They're going to be happening around the country instead, trying to sort of capitalise on it, uh monetize it, uh, do more events, make more money, I guess, and see what the demand is. Maybe try and corner some of that uh, you know, LGT money uh, because they've done quite well over the last few years in terms of doing like a tournament circuit and doing tournaments all over the country. I think Games Workshop wants to have a nibble on that pie. So that'd be interesting to see what the quality of their events will be outside of Warhammer World and outside of a Warhammer Fest, which is predominantly where I've done the tournaments. So that's a doubles event we're doing in November. So Dan of Lookout Surf Fame is gonna be there teaming up with Joe of Lookout Surfame, if you go back that far. So they will be there in attendance. Richie and Tim are teaming up, and myself and Sean um are gonna team up as well. Last time we teamed up, we did quite well. Um, I think was it last time? Maybe we teamed up twice. The very first time we won the best army at Warhammer Fest for the Asia Sigma Doubles. That was very cool. That's why I have a you can't see it over there, but it is a gold golden hammer trophy, which I will um won with Sean. So perhaps we will recreate that magic and do well. Wouldn't have thought so, but you never know. And in other events coming up, I think in August we're all off to Newport in Wales. Most of us are taking part in the Warhammer 40k narrative event. Tim ditched out on doing the 40k narrative to do Age of Sigma GT because he prefers that system now. Dan has done likewise, he's followed suit because he's not really feeling his age uh he's not feeling his armies, and instead he was going to do a kind of Death Watch Inquisitor force, because it's only a thousand points of the narrative event, which would have been very cool, but he's just decided to sack that off and lean into Age of Sigma, which is his current baby, that's what he loves more than anything else. So he's going to do that. It's still going to be Richie, our friend Spike, and me doing the narrative event. I think Joe might be there as well, but I think he's playing in the 40k tournament as well. So there's going to be a group of us going there next month. So that'd be interesting to talk about once that happens. In gaming wise, I think that's pretty much it. I'm hoping actually Tim's going to come around on the weekend to play a game of Age of Sigma with me, because again, he wants some practice for the GT. And yeah, while I don't need the practice per se for any event, I would just like to play with the new general's handbook because I haven't done that yet. So hopefully I'll get some games in in the future. And maybe we're talking about that in a future episode. Currently, I have no plans for the next episode because I've splurged all my ideas into this episode and also transitional noise last week. So if people have any ideas of what they would like to see in a future episode, let me know immediately in the comments or over on Instagram, because I'll probably be starting to record the episode almost as soon as this episode is out. Uh, because I know there's always a bit of a lag in terms of how long it takes people to get through an episode, because they're so long. And this episode is also going to be a long one, I believe. So yeah, thank you for sticking around for the whole episode. If you've made it this far, you might start to see the credits roll, because I think that means it's time uh for the show to end, mostly because I've run out of things to say. Yeah, next week Ogre Moore tribes are going to be released into the wild. I'll hopefully get my hands on that box and I'll get making some of the Ogre Moore tribes uh as well as probably 40k terrain. So, in addition to Age of Sigma terrain, I really need to get building some 40k terrain. So, yeah, that's it for this episode. Let me know what you thought, Dan, in the comments below. Like and subscribe, all the usual stuff. Please help spread the word. And uh yeah, thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye bye, everyone. Bye bye.