Horus Heresy Solar Auxilia Armoured Battery (Basilisk & Medusa)

[Petitioner's City]

16 minutes ago, Xirix said:

They updated some of the more god-awful things in the Legacies PDF (like the Attack Bike) semi-recently, so I don't see why updating things in the Libers would be off the table. Whether they do or not though...

 

As Ben, one of the designers said on the Merchant Princeling discord, there is a preference to make less changes to paper-published books. 

 

We've seen that Specialist Games/Specialist Design Studio prefers what topsy kretts of yaktribe calls "stealth errata", publishing new versions of the same types of rules with the changes unmarked or unemphasised (sometimes with a poor attempt to produce an errata for an already published book, or none at all). This may be what happens to auxilia, but I'm not sure beta garmon will be the book to do that (if there ever is one). 

[Noserenda]

44 minutes ago, Petitioner's City said:

 

As Ben, one of the designers said on the Merchant Princeling discord, there is a preference to make less changes to paper-published books. 

 

We've seen that Specialist Games/Specialist Design Studio prefers what topsy kretts of yaktribe calls "stealth errata", publishing new versions of the same types of rules with the changes unmarked or unemphasised (sometimes with a poor attempt to produce an errata for an already published book, or none at all). This may be what happens to auxilia, but I'm not sure beta garmon will be the book to do that (if there ever is one). 

 

1 hour ago, Xirix said:

They updated some of the more god-awful things in the Legacies PDF (like the Attack Bike) semi-recently, so I don't see why updating things in the Libers would be off the table. Whether they do or not though...

Yeah we might see the pdf legion ones updated but the SA ones in books are screwed, like, ive heard a certain vehicle couldnt be errated to have the right weapon option solely because that particular weapon was not otherwise present in the Liber and thus not in the weapons section... Let alone changing an entry unless they absolutely have to.

[Joe]

In all earnesty, I'd expect any major changes to occur later down the line during a mid-edition / "new" edition refresh. i.e. whenever they re-publish the core rules and army books with updated FAQs/Erratas, as is the norm for SGs.

[Marshal Rohr]

Some Twitter and discord rumblings the stock on these might be more limited than the mark 3 box. We are entering Cursed City levels of encrapification for ordering models. 

[Petitioner's City]

2 hours ago, Joe said:

In all earnesty, I'd expect any major changes to occur later down the line during a mid-edition / "new" edition refresh. i.e. whenever they re-publish the core rules and army books with updated FAQs/Erratas, as is the norm for SGs.

 

But its crap if so - we've seen so many issues from day one, and it's maddening that knights, auxilia, even mech, are saddled with things that just don't make sense - probably for 2-4 years. 

 

I'm also not sure Munda has had a positive fix from a gang construction perspective because the makers have not really touched the problematic weapon costs or weapon stats that have existed since 2017, merely continued to add new things - they won't touch so many things because they are in various publications which seemingly can't be "undone" or errata'ed. The new rulebook was lovely, but by not addressing the "armoury" and fighter stats to costs with a ground up refresh, it leaves things deeply imbalanced. 

[armarnis]

13 hours ago, Joe said:

In all earnesty, I'd expect any major changes to occur later down the line during a mid-edition / "new" edition refresh. i.e. whenever they re-publish the core rules and army books with updated FAQs/Erratas, as is the norm for SGs.

 

Which is just a godawful and terrible way. 

Years ago they gone the extra steps to publish Updates so you could cut it out of the white dwarf and glue it into your dex. 

Now we have Internet in freezers and they cant be bothered to do the same with downloadable pdfs. 

To me thats neither incompetence or Lack of time it is just a lack of recognition of the customers. We paid once then surely we will pay again for a fix of their :cuss:up. 

 

Sad thing is, we do

[Petitioner's City]

Although maybe just maybe Beta-Garmon might herald an errata! Please Mr Hoare!!!

[Astartes Consul]

16 minutes ago, Petitioner's City said:

Although maybe just maybe Beta-Garmon might herald an errata! Please Mr Hoare!!!

 

I mean, it would be the perfect time to do it. Every time a Campaign Book comes out, aka. once a year at the moment. 

[Stitch5000]

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it is going to get an errata... If it did, everything would be a disembodied S8 AP2 statline. 

[Noserenda]

More regular and reaching FAQ/Errata would be nice but i certainly got the impression we will be looking an annual go over outside of a token effort soon after release for things, so Autumn again i think?  

[Stitch5000]

1 hour ago, Noserenda said:

More regular and reaching FAQ/Errata would be nice but i certainly got the impression we will be looking an annual go over outside of a token effort soon after release for things, so Autumn again i think?  

We are really not asking for an errata or an FAQ here though... What you are discussing is a rebalancing, which seems to be... divisive... to say the least, at least in the case of 40k

[SkimaskMohawk]

It's divisive for a few different reasons.

 

When it's done too often, it gets really hard to keep up with the rebalancing churn if you don't have a huge pool of models for your faction. And, on top of trying to produce the now-good models and get playtime out of them before the next update you have of the other side of the coin, being....

 

Units circulating out of use in lists (to put it nicely). Whether it's a direct mechanical nerf, a buff to competing options, or the cases where they said "lol, no duplicates of buggies any more ork players. Also less planes. Thanks for the money!". No one likes having units that previously had a role and felt fun to use, and now languish on the shelf because they're a liability to include in a list.

 

When you combine the two in a seasonal cycle, you can get caught in a cycle of playing catch up with the meta units and feeling frustrated that your last set of expensive minis has now been phased out. Sometimes the nerf bat swings so hard the entire army gets out on ice and you have to transition to another one to have a reasonable time on the table (custodes have that particular peak-valley-peak cycle at the moment). 

 

But guess what? No one's asking for rapid fire 40k churn. We just want stuff that was circulated out of lists on the edition update to not be a liability. It's disingenuous to try and conflate the two, or to pretend that asking for them to be usable means the depths of 1st in 7th arquitor/Medusa battery spam. If the current Medusa/basilisk rules were in the 90-110 point range people really wouldn't complain as much; they'd be about as spammable as the Scorpius while still being significantly worse.

[WrathOfTheLion]

I'd like them to adopt what they're doing for MESBG and ToW, which is a twice a year update on a relatively fixed schedule.

 

After a couple rounds, when they get things relatively in order, those updates should be fairly minimal and the game should stabilize.

Edited February 27 by WrathOfTheLion

[Marshal Rohr]

15 minutes ago, WrathOfTheLion said:

I'd like them to adopt what they're doing for MESBG and ToW, which is a twice a year update on a relatively fixed schedule.

 

After a couple rounds, when they get things relatively in order, those updates should be fairly minimal and the game should stabilize.

Considering ToW is only projected to have a semiannual update cycle and hasn’t actually had that yet, I wouldn’t hold out for it coming true. We will have check back next January to see if it actually achieves it. 

[WrathOfTheLion]

27 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

Considering ToW is only projected to have a semiannual update cycle and hasn’t actually had that yet, I wouldn’t hold out for it coming true. We will have check back next January to see if it actually achieves it. 

I suspect it'll hold true, as some of their design interviews looked like the same development team as MESBG, which has consistently done that. I might be wrong there, it's hard to tell when only going by first name.

 

Either way, that would be an appropriate pace for 30k and Legion Imperialis, so I'd like to see that as the way they go forward there too.

Edited February 27 by WrathOfTheLion

[Petitioner's City]

On 2/27/2024 at 5:24 AM, WrathOfTheLion said:

I suspect it'll hold true, as some of their design interviews looked like the same development team as MESBG, which has consistently done that. I might be wrong there, it's hard to tell when only going by first name.

 

Either way, that would be an appropriate pace for 30k and Legion Imperialis, so I'd like to see that as the way they go forward there too.

 

It is the same team; it's run by Rob Alderman.

[WrathOfTheLion]

3 hours ago, Petitioner's City said:

 

It is the same team; it's run by Rob Alderman.

Cool, I thought that might be the case. So my thought there is that if it's the same people and they've been consistently doing that in the past, then I see no reason a priori that they wouldn't follow through with that for other things they work on. That team/side of the division knows how to schedule their time.

 

That said, in relation to the 30k side of SDS, it's definitely something that the 30k/Legions Imperialis design team (which I assume those two games are designed by the same team) need to get their ship in order on.

Edited February 28 by WrathOfTheLion

[Petitioner's City]

1 hour ago, WrathOfTheLion said:

Cool, I thought that might be the case. So my thought there is that if it's the same people and they've been consistently doing that in the past, then I see no reason a priori that they wouldn't follow through with that for other things they work on. That team/side of the division knows how to schedule their time.

 

That said, in relation to the 30k side of SDS, it's definitely something that the 30k/Legions Imperialis design team (which I assume those two games are designed by the same team) need to get their ship in order on.

 

I think it's clearly different design methodologies, although as I understand it, everything (both fantasy and scifi) is under Andy Hoare as the overall manager of Specialist Design Studio? 

[Noserenda]

Yeah i had understood at SDS everyone works on everything to some extent, been a while since i last asked though, so they may well have become more/differently organised.

[WrathOfTheLion]

3 hours ago, Noserenda said:

Yeah i had understood at SDS everyone works on everything to some extent, been a while since i last asked though, so they may well have become more/differently organised.

I suspect they have two game design teams now, maybe three. HH/Legions Imperialis is one, ToW/MESBG is the other. I don't know where Necromunda sits in all of that, same with Titanicus and AI.

 

Perhaps the HH/LI team will move to the same style of updates, but they have a lot more on their plate. HH 2.0 had to come out and they had a shakeup of the team when Anuj left, then they had to do LI pretty much right afterwards. So that team with lineup changes has been doing multiple new games straight, whereas ToW/MESBG only had to maintain one of their games, and develop the other. It's a bit of apples and oranges here, so I don't know if we'll see things change to that as an overall policy until SDS stabilizes some now that all their games I think are out.

 

I think we'll see in-depth HH update now that they can pivot to maintaining, but we'll have to see how that turns out. In the meantime, I'm going to work on a SA army and grab some units like this Basilisk/Medusa just for the rule of cool. I think it'll take a bit to see a rules update for them though, I doubt SDS is going to do a 3 year cycle like 40k does, and they may do even longer than a 4 year update. It'll really depend, and we won't know until we see 3E come out sometime in the way future to see if they have any schedule or timeline on editions.

Edited February 29 by WrathOfTheLion

[OttoVonAwesome]

I imagine it'll be same as 1.0 and we'll see .5 edition update with new rulebook and redbooks for each army once enough campaign books come out that it gets pretty cluttered in collecting all of them. An annual chapter approved book would be nice. Used to love those. Compiled rules from white dwarf and other sources and adjusted points but I geuss those days are done.

[Petitioner's City]

25 minutes ago, OttoVonAwesome said:

I imagine it'll be same as 1.0 and we'll see .5 edition update with new rulebook and redbooks for each army once enough campaign books come out that it gets pretty cluttered in collecting all of them. An annual chapter approved book would be nice. Used to love those. Compiled rules from white dwarf and other sources and adjusted points but I geuss those days are done.

 

I really doubt that!

 

2 hours ago, WrathOfTheLion said:

I suspect they have two game design teams now, maybe three. HH/Legions Imperialis is one, ToW/MESBG is the other. I don't know where Necromunda sits in all of that, same with Titanicus and AI.

 

Perhaps the HH/LI team will move to the same style of updates, but they have a lot more on their plate. HH 2.0 had to come out and they had a shakeup of the team when Anuj left, then they had to do LI pretty much right afterwards. So that team with lineup changes has been doing multiple new games straight, whereas ToW/MESBG only had to maintain one of their games, and develop the other. It's a bit of apples and oranges here, so I don't know if we'll see things change to that as an overall policy until SDS stabilizes some now that all their games I think are out.

 

I think we'll see in-depth HH update now that they can pivot to maintaining, but we'll have to see how that turns out. In the meantime, I'm going to work on a SA army and grab some units like this Basilisk/Medusa just for the rule of cool. I think it'll take a bit to see a rules update for them though, I doubt SDS is going to do a 3 year cycle like 40k does, and they may do even longer than a 4 year update. It'll really depend, and we won't know until we see 3E come out sometime in the way future to see if they have any schedule or timeline on editions.

 

So some history. In 2019, Andy Hoare became the head of heresy, after having run SG for 4 years and made some fantastic successes (with Munda ultra profitable!). While Anuj left in 2020, he wasnt the lead - his own socisl media and appearances show that Neil Wylie was the lead from 2017 to 2019. As far as I understand it, Neil is still there?

 

In running heresy, Andy also runs specialist games - and presumably now oversees all of SDS, but has a scifi team (or teams). I'm not sure 100% that the heresy dev team is the same as the traditional SG team today (ie Munda and LI), you dont see the same names popping up on WHC and WD. However it's clear the model and graphic designers are consistently the same (eg Steve May across Heresy, Necromunda, and Old World: Louise Sugden across the same + Blood Bowl - although many yesrs ago now; etc). I'm curious if Bedford runs also model design for TOW/middle earth/blood bowl, but I've always felt he's been focused on munda and heresy as chief of model design? 

 

You also can see things on job adverts; at the beginning of Feb there was a pure Munda design role, which bodes well for that game too :)

[Lord Marshal]

Pre-order next week.

[The Scorpion]

On 2/29/2024 at 1:47 AM, Petitioner's City said:

 

 

You also can see things on job adverts; at the beginning of Feb there was a pure Munda design role, which bodes well for that game too :)

Will it be enough to make Flamers usable one day? Emperor knows what 'munda needs most is a soft but comprehensive revision of the game's bone structure, such as special rules, point pricing, and most of all, skills.

[Petitioner's City]

9 minutes ago, The Scorpion said:

Will it be enough to make Flamers usable one day? Emperor knows what 'munda needs most is a soft but comprehensive revision of the game's bone structure, such as special rules, point pricing, and most of all, skills.

 

Id argue combat too, and shooting, and a whole whole lot more (I rewrote the game for my group, starting back in 2018, and have carried on ever since!).