Australian gamers

Since moving to Australia for work in the last couple of weeks I have since discovered that Perth has a lively and interesting 40k scene.

Now having spent a couple of consecutive afternoons at the local store I can see myself coming back however what I'm more interested in is getting these people out of their retail happy-fun-vibe shells and into something a bit more brutal and competitive.

In looking at Kirby's post about competitiveness in people he is fundamentally correct. At a psychological level people who play sports are instinctively compelled to compete against others for material benefit, despite any claims to the contrary. Whether that material benefit is measurable eg money or un-quantifiable eg prestige and leadership value is moot. They tend to come hand in hand.

One minor observation about Australian players so far is that they have no, read 0 (zero) functional knowledge of the direction of GW and performance based analytical review of what they're using, where or why.

Simple example: yesterday I was watching IG and CWeldar fighting it out on a 4x4 board. I'm assuming about 1k each player though I could be wrong.

Rough estimation of player forces:

Eldar; farseer with guide. (yes only guide. No army list but no other power or wargear expressely used so this is my assumption.)
Bikeautarch w/ laser lance
roughly 20 guardians with support platforms (2x scatter lasers) with warlocks in each squad.
1x10 dire avenger squad
Wraithlord with brightlance and sword?
Nightspinner with shuriken cannon?
falcon with scatterlaser. no upgrades.

IG; 6man command squad with at least 1 voxcaster, one commander and 1 commissar.
2 chimera with heavy laser thingies both containing melta veterans
1 basilisk (? really. so retarded)
1 mortar squad of 3
3 hwts with MLs & HBs on opposite side of board.

Amazingly the IG player lost. The falcon died in turn 3 having accomplished fucking nothing but shaking the basilisk and the guardians did fuck-all as well. Autarch creamed a chimera and its veterans before dying like a chump to MLs.

CCS did nothing. Like literally nothing except fire off orders once and dying like bitches to moving after being hit by nightspinner. Idiot. So fucking stupid. Basilisk fired once AT GUARDIANS WOO.

I could go on but it's just so sad.

I mean look, these guys are nice enough but they're obviously new and totally can't accept an alternative point of view on what they're fielding. The eldar player told me he'd been playing for 3 years which is hard to believe since he was using store models in 2 cases. Even if he was telling the truth he took himself pretty seriously while he chopped up a total newb with a bajillion unpainted models with his own craptacular army.

It wasn't just the list construction that was poor, it was their utilisation as well. The whole game reeked of amateurish decisions with little to no understanding of the underlying principles of the game. I'm all for playing 'just for fun' but these two clearly thought they were pretty pro, even going as far as to argue (admittedly only a little) over a couple of things. Totally pointless. I would savour bringing my army to the local scene here and totaling that other eldar player. I wouldn't even need to build a list specifically designed to do it either, a balls-standard army could have done the deal in 3 maybe conservatively 4 turns.

My list to use against that other eldar player?

3x5 Direavengers w/ gunxarchs in eml waveserpents w/ scannons.
1x autarch w/ pw & fusion gun
2x falcons with eml and holofields.

that's roughly 1k isn't it? I don't even care to count.

9 s6
10 s8
everything able to move 24"
reserves manipulation.
Anti-infantry to deal with stupid troops choices.
Why holofields? Simple. Falcons take only 1 hit to kill. So holofields increases chances of weapon destroyed? As if I give a shit? I have only 2 MBTs, if weapons get popped that's better than losing the chassis and everything else at the same time. The 70pts those holofields cost me wouldn't be justified by taking more troops, another autarch or warwalkers or whatever since the falcons themselves are there to suppress infantry and KILL tanks.

Who is the workhorse here? Noone, really. Waveserpents carrying 3 s6 1 s8 can multirole, falcons can multirole, autarch is there to mop up. Direavengers dont have bladestorm since that's a waste of points. The extra Ld and a higher I for at least one guy seems justified though.

And there you have it. Resilient and flexible. Not even designed to specifcally kill his list, it just will though, through being better constructed.

Working on some fiction

So earlier this week I started writing up some background to my army. In lieu of actually being able to paint/build what I've got since it's in another part of the country, I've taken to writing up some speculative fiction on them to stay interested.

It probably won't last but it's worth starting anyway.