Friday, July 23, 2010

List building - Stick with it or change it up?

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've gotten busy with work and other things. In this post I'd like to discuss list building. I'm relatively new to the hobby and I only have about 15 games with my Tyranids. I hate to say it, but I think some would say I've been list hopping, trying new things. You see, the one thing I love about the Tyranid codex is that is has some amazing fluff to it. The stories of hive take overs are cool, the special characters are cool and have great fluff, so since I'm the narative type I try to fit them into my list, and I tend to stray away from the Tervigon spam lists that are running around the net right now. I like to play lists that can be competitive but also different from the norm. For instance, I really like the idea of a stealer shock list, but let's face it, in today's 5E mechanized lists, it doesn't work very well unless you just get really lucky with those 6's.

What about you guys? Are you new to the game? Are you list hopping and experimenting, or are you finding what's out there on the web and sticking to what wins games?

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The point of this blog

I've been reading several blogs over the past ooooo really 5 to 6 months, as I never really delved into internet reading about 40k or the people who play it and provide help to those who've just started out. I'm relatively new(playing for a year and a half), and what I don't see are a lot of blogs from the new comers to this game. I keep thinking to myself, why is that? Well, this past weekend in our local gaming group I got to experience loss, like 9 games worth of loss for the disorder side in our current home brew campaign. As fun as 40k is for me, losing all 9 games on our side was not fun at all! So why is it that we don't see many blogs from the new comers? Well my thoughts on that are this, we don't see them, because no one wants to go onto their blog and post how they lost horribly the day or night before. I keep getting told that you learn about this game through the tactical decisions that you make, and to be quite fair to those who keep saying this. I don't think I ever think about tactics on the fly like I should be doing. I always wait until the end of the game to analyze what happened, and most of the time in order to make myself feel a little better, I try to focus on what my opponent did that was wrong rather than what I was doing that made me lose!

What I'm trying to accomplish here is a little perspective(yes I watched ratatouille with my 2 yr old last night). What is it that the new players can focus on in order to have fun in this game of 40k? Is it tactics, is it rules, is it list building? I think it can be all of the above, but where I fall short most of the time is tactics. I simply move things 80% of the time without really considering what the purpose of that move was for. I think since I play nids, I'm always just thinking about where can I get at and claw something, like I'm actually putting myself into an Tyranid and using their mindset. Which often times results in me getting shot up with something that negates my armor save and kills my troops off the board!

So on to the purpose of this blog! What I would like to accomplish here is a place of solace where new players could come and ask questions, and discuss among other new players. Why is this unique? Well mainly because we don't have years of rules floating around in our heads, and when we don't know something we go look it up! There is always some gray area to rules and how they are interpreted, I don't want to get into that, but I want to delve into things that should be RAW(Read as written). I want to get into tactics questions, I want to be able to hopefully provide motivation even during times of distress to those who feel like they've chosen the wrong hobby. I know I did this last weekend, and let's face it. We put a lot of money, and then even more time into creating our armies, and when we get wiped off the table it's a tad discouraging. So let the noobs of 40k unite!