Thursday, June 6, 2013

Imperial Armour Vol 12

This is a quick review of IA12. I'm doing it because this book has been a bit of a revelation to me and I almost didn't buy it. It seems a bit tricky to get people to agree to play against IA books in any formal setting so buying a big heavy glossy book of rules you'll never use seems redundant.

However. This book is more than just rules. It lends itself to informal play and does a really fine job at that. Note, I haven't played the missions/campaign yet.

So you get a bunch of fluff followed by campaign rules and then 3 army lists. -Death Kreig, Minotaurs and Mynark Necrons.

First the bad. I'm like the photographs and artwork in general, however I don't think the black (or almost black) background to the vehicle profiles is an improvement. Some of the necron vehicles looked ok, but none of them looked as good as the white backed images normally seen in forge world books. They are not bad, just not as good as the previous books- IA11 and Betrayal.
Maybe I'm biased, wanting diagrams for painting, in a sense, but I think showing detail is important, and this takes the edges off the art.
Secondly, I'm not convinced about the points values. I think a couple of models like the Hades drill at 50 points- down from 100 with 5 guys and the space marine sentry battery at 15 points each are a bit too cheap. Some of the units like kreig troops are more expensive but.. have pseudo fearless. I still get the feeling that Forgeworld put points costs on as an afterthought. I'm sure they don't but it's certainly not as finely grained as GW.
I don't mind paying a few points more and having a fluffy, underpowered army that looks awesome. It's if it's too cheap that the problem occurs.

I have 9,10,11 and Betrayal, all excellent but not as inspiring as this book for getting you to game- and in my case, build terrain. The difference here is that the battles in those books felt like one-off things you might do ..once.. whereas this campaign rules feel like something you could repeat and adapt for different races.

More later

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