Ish

‘Tis the reason for the season.

That makes as much sense as anything... Plus, putting on my Star Trek nerd technobabble hat, it would make sense that a gravity weapon would probably have some kind of localized high density gravity field, which would distort light. Blue shifting it towards the violet end of the spectrum...

Wreck It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet, took the kiddos tonight. Did you like the first one? Do you want to see the same movie but with most of the nostalgic video game references replaced with family-friendly internet memes? Well, have we got a movie for you! Not a bad film, but probably not one I could recommend watching unless you’re watching it with your kids. 3.5 outta 5.

Won’t most of the standard Deep Strike denial strategies work against this? It can often be difficult to find a spot where a Drop Pod or a 5-Man Termie Squad can safely land... Plopping a giant Ork battle bus onto the table could be even trickier.

Death Guard got hit hard by GW's "copyright all the things!" naming practices. Not quite as bad as AoS's Khorne units (since the Death Guard names are made out of real words), but still to a degree that makes the Space Wolves' Wolffrost Frost Wolf and the Stormcast's Stormthunder Lightning Storm look almost sane by comparison.

I just find bourbons pair poorly with cigars and as such, that means I prefer scotch. Thus, as a confirmed scotch drinker, I am legally required to mock whiskey drinkers at every opportunity. I mean, I won’t say “no” to a nice bourbon when offered. Uncivilized is one thing, but that’s just downright barbaric.

I think the the tear drop template should have been retained.

Are you taking the piss or do you not know anything about how alcoholic beverages are made...?k Mash refers to the materials that brewers use to produce the liquid (the wort) that they then ferment into alcohol. Bourbon uses a mash that is primarily corn, single malt scotch whisky (which is what civilized men drink) uses malted barley, etc.

That’s not just the federal government sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, that’s actually the main distinction between bourbon whiskey, rye whiskey, rye malt whiskey, malt whiskey, and wheat whiskey. All of these are made from mashes with different grains. Although why anyone drinks the stuff is beyond me. I’ll stick to whisky, like the lord god intended.

A flamethrower is basically a wesponized water-pump. Spraying some sort of liquid fuel at high pressure and igniting it... Even the largest of them are really short-ranged. For example, the M132 Armored Flamethrower, a.k.a. “The Zippo,” was a modified M113 APC, that traded its passenger compartment for a buncha fuel tanks and an M10-8 flame gun... Which was basically a firehose that shot literal fire. Maximum effective range on it was still only about 200-ish meters. (Imagine a Space Marine Rhino with a Hellhound turret.) Man-portable flamethrowers, like the M1, M1A1, and M2 that the U.S. used from WWII through to Vietnam, all had an effective range of 20-ish meters. Even when flying a close ground support mission, aircraft all operate at much higher altitudes than that.

I just prefer having options. (And yeah, the flamethrowers versus aircraft thing is just silly.)

I just wish they had options beyond the Phobos Pattern Land Raider...

Value is inherently subjective, I agree. I don’t value these as much as a collector would.

It was all about servicing the customer.

Those prices are insane, given that you can buy an entire army elsewhere in this scale for under $50 USD...

You misspelt “Harmony House.”

That’s why I’m leaning towards foot sloggin’ Custodes. Deep Striking the Allarus Custodians (and Vexillia) to deal with any especially potent shooty threats, sloggin’ the Custodian Guard (along with the foot Captain and other Vexillia) onto or near any mid-field Objectives, planting my feet, and just holding my ground for as long as possible. Custodes are pretty damn difficult to shift out of a spot they don’t want to give up.

Kinky sex?

I miss actual human deejays. There is definitely something special about the careful way an artist, producer, and engineer construct an album... But there’s equally some magic to having a person who deeply loves music and knows his audience can select songs from multiple bands to play in a sequence. The machines that drive Clear Channel’s automated stations don’t do “deep cuts,” and streaming services have a bias (which we program into them ourselves!) to only reinforce what we already know we like. Thank the gods of rock’n’roll I spent my prime music years in Detroit. Probably the last bastion of real radio on Earth.

The downside to the Coronos is the financial cost and the difficulty in transporting it. I’d probably add a pair of Land Raiders if transport becomes a must have... I’ll keep it in mind though.

The Eldar were pretty much the uncontested masters of the Milky Way for a loooooong time. The War in Heaven ended in M59 BCE (roughly 60,000 BC). Afterwards, only the Space Orks and the Eldar were left standing... The Orks did what they’ve pretty much always done and rampaged around like interstellar football hooligans on jihad. But the Space Elves actually built a star-spanning civilization. It would last for about 90,000 years. Slaaneesh was created during the Fall of the Eldar (M29-M30), roughly concurrent with the Unification Wars on Terra and Mars, when the Emperor “revealed himself” and took over the solar system. The resultant creation of the Eye of Terror was an outlet for the pent-up Warp energy that had impeded human Warp travel for so long, leading to the thousands of “lost human colonies” of humanity. With Warp travel becoming possible again, the Emperor could begin the Great Crusade. Without the Eldar Empire to contend with, the new Imperium of Man could grow virtually uncontested. Anyway, during the ninety millennia that the Space Elves were thriving across the entire Milky Way, I think it’d be absolute folly to say that none of them were ever corrupted by Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, or one of the minor Chaos Gods. Likewise, surely a few must have gone heretical during the last eleven millennia, right? So go ahead, convert some Wych Elves and Storm Guardians to run as “counts as” Cultists; Turn that old Avatar of Khaine model into a Daemon Prince; Mix a few Farseer bitz with your Aspiring Sorcerer bitz and make a Tzeentch-Seer... It’ll look cool.

I'm not saying we reduce it to the "Combat Patrol" or "40K in 40 Minutes" level, but I think you could have a rewarding game in less time at the 1500 Points level. That gives you enough room for most armies to still fill out most of a Detachment's force org chart, lets players take a nice mix of core concept units and one or two specialist units, and still fills out most of the table.

It’s Warhammer, everything is dialed up to “11” in terms of exaggeration of scale.

Can I grumble now about how I think tourneys need to make an effort to move to lower point values... or have I beat that dead horse enough?

Except for the ones that aren’t... Fallen Eldar are extremely rare in M42, but between the War in Heaven (c. M59 BCE) and the Fall of the Eldar (c. M29–M30) they existed in sizable (if still rare) numbers as cultists, renegades, and other social malcontents. Chaos daemons don’t only whisper into the ears of human psykers.