[The Drake Queen & the Terracotta Sentinels]

8 minutes ago, Lightbox said:

Definitely massively inspired by Cathay due to my enjoyment of my Miao Ying playthrough on total war 3, tabletop wise I'm planning to use a pre-existing battletome and make them a counts-as sort of conversion project though I'm still fully settling on which faction. I was originally going to do stormcast dragons but have since realised as cool (and low model count!) as they are they may be a touch too oppressive as a pure army currently.

I guess Cities of Sigmar is also always a strong contender when Stormcast are involved. Probably the easiest way to run a bunch of miniatures from different factions in one army. They even have some dragons of their own!

[The Drake Queen & the Terracotta Sentinels]

Fun lore! Is this supposed to be a Cathay/China homebrew faction?

[Almost tabletop]

2 hours ago, lare2 said:

Oh, there's also Reikland on the flesh. The wood is dryad bark drybrushed with sylvaneth bark and then washed in agrax. 

Say what you will about drybrushing, I feel it looks far more natural on organic objects, like the wings and wood. 

People really undervalue drybrushing because it's seen as a beginner technique. It's true that as you progress in painting you will feel less of a need to rely on it as a silver bullet for all your highlighting and blending needs, but it's still a super useful tool to have in your toolbox.

You just need to use the technique on parts of the model where it excells. For any fur, feathers, wood and rocks, I would pretty much always just drybrush them. Anything with a lot of fine structure. For metallics and smooth, flowing shapes like cloth, maybe not so much. But if you really get into drybrushing and learn to do it right (like Byron from Artis Opus on youtube, for example), it works well even in those contexts.

Your Yndrasta is really coming along well, by the way. Great colour choices and execution!

[I really dislike faces]

Your Stormcast are really starting to take shape! It's always nice to see your progress.

But yeah, faces, how do you deal with them? They are definitely one of the few places on a miniature that you can't cheat on. Or if you can, I have not found out how. Two things have helped me get better at faces, particularly eyes:

Number one is to just bite the bullet and paint the eyes on every miniature. You never get better at stuff you don't practice. It was a pain at first, but I definitely started to notice some improvement with time. Number two was to get the order of operations right. I had always tried to do the eyes last, but that's hard because at that point you are likely ruining the skin you have already painted. Now, I usually do the basic skin colour first, then a dark wash, and then I start with the eyes. That makes it way easier in my opinion, because you don't have to worry about messing anything up. I also use the method of putting down a thin off-white line in the eye area, then putting in the pupil and finally cleaning everything up with skin colour, so there is usually a good bit of white/black outside the lines.

Another secret pro tip is to put the pupils into the corners of the eyes instead of the center. It's way easier to get right and your models won't end up cross eyed. Oryou can just, you know, learn to love the mysterious shadow over the eye area you get from a good dark wash and stop worrying about it. It's not like you can tell from a few feet away anyway.

[Wanted to start off...]

Quote

My phone really doesn't have the best camera and I'm far too poor to invest in anything to improve the situation.

I think your pictures look pretty good already, but in any case, here's what has helped me take better photos with my phone camera:

• Take a picture from further away and then crop it. That helps getting your miniature in to focus properly. Modern phone cameras have high enough resolutions that you won't end up with tiny ant-sized pictures, anyway.
• Make sure you have natural light and a background for best results. In practice, that just means moving next to a window and holding up a piece of paper in the background.
• After taking your picture, run it through automatic colour correction. You probably already have a program that can do this (as well as crop pictures) on your phone. Additionally increasing the "pop" slider makes your models even more readable by increasing the contrast between separate parts of the model.

[Game #12 Soulblight vs Ogor Mawtribes]

Thanks for the report! It's very easy to read and follow. Congratulations on your victory!

I find it interesting to read about playing Age of Sigmar in Korea. I have visited Korea recently and looked into modelling/hobby stuff while I was there, but it seemed very hard to find anything tabletop game related. Those Gundam stores are top notch for hobby tools, though! Anyway, I was not even aware that there was an AoS scene in Korea, since it was my impression that it's super hard to even get hold of GW models over there.

[Vindenspite: WiP Crimson Guard and the Frostqueen]

I like those conversions a lot. Are all the guns and swords from Freeguild kits or do you use 3rd party/3D printed bits?

[Vindenspite: Building the crimson watch]

I hope you keep going with these blogs. I enjoy your models and the lore you come up with.

[Balance as a Wicked Problem]

On 5/4/2021 at 12:17 AM, FlatTooth said:

Also y’all get right out of here with the “well REAL battles weren’t balanced!” Logic. I’m not commanding a huge campaign with multiple forces, utilizing terrain and hoping to whatever gods I pray to that my people make it through another winter. 
 

I’m throwing dice around with my friends and I don’t want to lose because my book got the bad rules designer or the uninspired rules designer. Is that unreasonable?

I liked that comment more for the part about people saying they want balance, even though they might actually want something else.

If we think about balance soley in terms of win percentage, I think casual players could easily deal with winning only, like 40% of their games (play five games against your friends, win two) if those games are still fun, interactive and you feel like your choices during the game matter. But one faction sitting at a 40% win rate while another sits at 60% would be evidence of a pretty bad imbalance in tournament play.

Recently we have come to talk about play experience in addition to balance, which I think is a good development. But I think there are still more facettes of the game that people do care about, but which are not yet common topics of discussion.

One of those is, in my opinion, room for expression or creativity. I think a lot of people want to be able to build a list that is uniquely their own, without feeling like they have to make bad choices by including their pet units along the way. This aspect of the game is somewhat related to balance, but not in a way that would be expressed in tournament win rates, for example. If every faction had one build that could compete at the top level, we might see very balanced tournament results, but it might not help players who want to build their dream list of all dwarves Cities of Sigmar, necessarily.

[Balance as a Wicked Problem]

Good read! I always enjoy your blogs.

To me personally, the biggest insight from looking at balancing a game inside the Wicked Problem frame work is from the first criterion:

"The solution depends on how the problem is framed and visa versa."

I think we see this a lot in discussions online. As an example, I think I have seen all of these as definitions of "balance" for AoS:

• Armies should fall within a 45%-55% win rate interval in tournaments.
• There should not be a handful of armies taking the majority of podiums in tournaments.
• All armies should have a chance to at least meaningfully compete in tournaments/causally.
• All units should be viable choices in tournament/casual lists.
• All kinds of lists (specialized and mixed) should be viable in tournaments/casually.
• New players should not have to worry about stomping/being stomped by their friends in casual games just because of army choice.

All of those have a claim to be definitions of what it means for the game to be balanced, but achieving 45%-55% tournament win rates will look very different from enabling a large variety of list and unit choices in casual games.

I actually think there is a stronger case to be made for game balance being a Wicked Problem than you try to claim in this post. Leaving aside the points that Rittel & Webber make about Wicked Problems being high-stakes (because that does not really have to do a lot with why these problems are hard to solve, it just means that failed attempts will be more costly), you seem most hesitant to claim that characteristic #2 (no stopping rule) obtains for AoS. I think that's just because of a misunderstanding, though. The stopping rule point is not about whether Age of Sigmar will eventually stop. It's about whether there is a definitive point at which we can say that we are done balancing AoS. And to that, I think, the answer is fairly clearly "no". Even if we go with the most hard and fast definition of balance (45%-55% tournament win rates), we could argue that since new models and armies are continually being added to the game, the problem of balancing does not stop there. Or we could ask ourselves, once we achieve a 45%-55% interval, if it would be worthwhile trying to bring up those armies sitting around the 45% mark.

I also think that characteristic #6 (no finite set of solutions) applies: Even if we think points values are enumerable, we are not limited changes to points and numerical characteristics on warscrolls when trying to balance the game. We are always able to just invent more rules that were previously not in the game at all. The recent rumours about charge reactions are an example of this. Those are not a thing at all in current games, but are now treated as another tool in the toolbox of AoS balance. In that way, balancing AoS is very unlike, for example, putting together a puzzle or solving a math problem. If you can't figure out how a puzzle goes together, really can't just invent a new way to make the pieces fit.