The Wargarage and thoughts on 6th Edition

We've started writing up short battle reports of our league games over at wargarage.blogspot.com

Why Wargarage? Because we play our games in the Wargarage, that's why! The guy who owned this house before me was a photographer and the garage was his studio. Mrs Kastigaunt has very kindly agreed to let me set up a games table in here now, and it has become known as the Wargarage.

The Wargarage

Anyway, I'm not much of a tactician, but here are some thoughts on 6th edition so far.

The first thing I need to tackle is the terrain placement system where you take it in turns to place terrain in table quarters. Poot is not at all convinced.  He says that terrain placement shouldn't be tactical and I can certainly see that argument, but I think that it does mean that you play on more varied tables. In our 5th edition games we tended to play with pretty samey tables and probably used to overload the terrain. I do miss the battles over a nice central square of buildings with an objective in the middle. There's no much incentive to set up this sort of thing up now because everyone will be busy making a nice little base for themselves in their deployment zone instead.

We haven't had many flyers in our games so far, but we have tested out the rules using winged  hive tyrants. Snap-shot rapid firing to try and knock them out of the sky is really good fun. When you finally knock em down and fire the rest of your units with normal BS it is incredibly satisfying. 

Poot's winged HT... already painted when he bought it, currently waiting to be stripped.

However, I must admit that I feel there is some cynicism from GW behind the flyer rules...With no FAQ allowing any unit in my codex to purchase skyfire as an upgrade, to combat flyers effectively I need to either 1. Buy flyers myself or 2. Buy a fortification like Aegis Defence Line 3. Focus fire everything at flyers using bs1 while the enemy ground force advances unmolested. Now I know that it is GW's job to sell models, and they have mortgages to pay, but for me this is a cynical manipulation of the rules to sell extra bits of plastic. Bad GW!

I want to buy flyers because they are interesting units that work well in the game, not as part as some artificial flyer "arms-race" because the 41st millennium doesn't appear to have ground to air missiles.

One of my pet hates about 5th edition was that the rules made bullets go around corners. A single model in the open would mean that you could put wounds on the rest of the squad that often you couldnt even see. I'm really glad that this has been fixed now, and working out cover on a per-model basis seems to work well too.

40k Cat "helps" us get to grips with 6th edition.

The secondary missions that give a VP for first kill, linebreaker and slay the warlord are a really good idea and work well. There is one unfortunate side effect however. I run a Space Marine Librarian as my warlord in small games, and with toughness 4, 2 wounds and 3+ armour save he's not particularly hardy. So far in EVERY game I have played in 6th I've had to hide him to stop him from becoming an easy VP for my opponent after his retinue gets gunned down. Even when I sat him in a Terminator squad he ended up running away on one wound. This is probably just poor tactics on my part, but it doesn't feel great having him run away every time, and I don't expect that it's very much fun for my opponent either.

There's loads of other stuff in 6th that's worth writing about but that will do for now...