Our life for the next two weeks lives in these great boxes.First week back at work was a slow one for work, I caught up with some old mates, we had our place sprayed for roaches, boxes arrived for our upcoming move, I had a job interview, and a mole (maybe skin cancer?) removed, and finally, caught up with my stepdad. In amongst all that I managed to rework a couple unexciting UI classes, and built out the start of the model for the standard Exo.
Our life for the next two weeks lives in these great boxes.
The work on the standard exo has been great. Once again working from NoLeternox's amazing concepts, this ones coming together pretty quickly. The major forms are done so far, I've got a decent sense of how the textures are going to come across, so the next step is building out the detail. I've borrowed some weaponry from Interloper to stand in for the time being, but I honestly don't hate it? Might end up keeping those heavy flak's!
Hard to go wrong with a good orange and black theme.
Given that the proportions are different to the existing stand in Exo, one thing that's likely to happen is that I'll need to redo all the animations I've done so far. This is a bit of a pain, but it'll be more than worth it. Overall I'm super happy with how this is coming along.
The goal for the next week or so is to crank out the final work on the UI and get a damn build live. It's been too long, and the delta between the live version of the game and my dev version is getting pretty large.
Before I sign off though, its been damn good to watch the launch of Warhammer The Old World. I was super concerned when I started work on Charge, to realise that this was coming, and while GW has seemingly done a pretty good job at reviving Warhammer Fantasy battles, they in my opinion, haven't done much to address the many issues that system had, so I'd like to quickly go over what I reckon they are and why I thought Charge can/would solve them.
There's something about ranked forces facing each other that just fills me with excitement
Models in Units First and foremost this is the most frustrating thing they've refused to change. WFB requires not just movement of dozens of ranked individual models, but calculation on their attacks, hits, wounds, etc. It's infuriatingly slow, argument prone and doesn't really contribute all that much to the game's outcome? Kings of War streamlined this in a lovely way, reducing units from models to single large bases. You still get the cool factor of heroes doing their thing as individual bases, but without 90% of the faffing about.
Command and Control No popular Rank and Flank (is that an oxymoron?) has any concept of this. Sure they might have bonus leadership scores for units in range of a powerful leader unit, but it feels wrong that you could send a unit out on their own without consequence in a battle of this type. A unit left alone and without command could make disastrous choices, could open up a flank, or potentially, could win the day. They're a chaotic factor in the calculus of the battle.
New Models
A huge part of the tabletop hobby is building & painting your little toy soldiers. It's an awesome experience seeing your units ranked up together, ready to face your opponent. To relaunch the game with sprues from 1993? Come on. A certain part of me says "if it aint broke, don't fix it" but also, this is Games Workshop, they're not shy on money to pay for the artists + tooling required to build out some new undead horsies.
GW copyright 1993, or the year before I started in the hobby
Next week will likely be rather busy as well, with lots of moving boxes and whatnot. Really hoping I'll get that build up though.