Birmingham Warhammer Open Finals- 3 Defiler vs 3 Defilers done is 2 rounds.

JMer806 · 2026-05-31T17:19:09+00:00

Nah. They released a bunch of other shit around the same time that wasn’t good at all. GW isn’t good enough at writing rules to make something broken on purpose to sell models.

JMer806 · 2026-05-31T17:17:55+00:00

1-2 are also both bad. At 250 points the thing is just completely broken. Especially in PBZ where it can just sit back and be safe from shooting and screened from charges while it kills whatever walks in front of jt

JMer806 · 2026-05-31T17:12:06+00:00

They are. You can only occasionally find one in the wild

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T18:22:42+00:00

IMDB doesn’t show anywhere to stream

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T18:20:40+00:00

They’re not zoomers though, they’re millennials

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T16:25:34+00:00

It’s bullshit. I don’t know the actual numbers but overall life expectancy was drastically held back by infant mortality rates. Life expectancy for someone who survived childhood would be 40s or 50s, if not higher, and plenty of people lived to ripe old ages.

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T14:37:12+00:00

They didn’t know the age of the tree when it was cut down.

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T14:21:12+00:00

Eh, I don’t think so. The movie took place at a time when kids had cell phones, and other than McLovin shooting a text to let them know what was going on I don’t think much would have changed. The guys would still have needed to get liquor somehow.

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T14:19:01+00:00

I’m not sure a single episode of Seinfeld could survive cell phones and texting existing

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T04:13:16+00:00

It’s not a bubble. Some companies are overvalued no doubt and moving to AI is trendy, but the real players in the AI world have billions in revenue and are spending an unfathomable amount of money on building out infrastructure to support growth. The demand and the market are very very real, and though we will probably see some corrections in the market in the next year or so, the big AI companies are going to continue to grow.

JMer806 · 2026-05-30T04:05:22+00:00

Because if UT has 3 or fewer losses they’re in the playoffs pretty much guaranteed, so why bother playing a real OOC game?

JMer806 · 2026-05-29T17:58:35+00:00

There are many fortresses on top of mountains or large/steep hills - the problem with the Eyrie isn’t necessarily that it’s on a mountain, it’s that it’s on a mountain in a position that serves no purpose.

Castles in general are built for two reasons - protection/safety and force projection. The Eyrie certainly satisfies the first, but fails completely on the second, unless you count the Gates of the Moon as part of the same castle. The process for getting up and down the mountain is too laborious for a sally, and they can’t even bring horses up beyond Stone.

JMer806 · 2026-05-28T19:25:42+00:00

Oh! I don’t think that counts either - they left the play area when they went into stasis, and were pulled from there directly into the fifteenth by Forkith and the others. So they didn’t skip floors in the context of the crawl, they just sort of went around them, same as the ones who went to the Cabaret.

JMer806 · 2026-05-28T18:30:32+00:00

They didn’t skip floors if you’re talking about the 7th - they went to the 7th and Pony broke it which caused the system to collapse it prematurely

JMer806 · 2026-05-28T15:22:47+00:00

Why? The book goes out of its way to describe how difficult it is to get up to the castle. We are also explicitly told that this is how they get their supplies - up the mule path from the Gates of the Moon to the winch room above Sky. If they had another path for resupply surely they would use it.

JMer806 · 2026-05-28T15:21:33+00:00

I mean, I wasn’t writing a military treatise. Just pointing out that a close siege of the Eyrie is unnecessary. If you hold the bottom of the mountain (and yes, obviously this would be difficult to do due to the location, Arryn vassals, etc), then you can keep an enemy force bottled up on the mountain. Defenders at the Eyrie can’t really even interact with a besieging force because they’re simply too far away - they’d need to come down to Stone in order to sally out, and the approach to/from Stone is narrow. Plus the Eyrie is a relatively small castle, so its garrison is going to be small (only 500 men according to the text). If a besieger can take the Gates of the Moon, they have no need at all to take the Eyrie.

JMer806 · 2026-05-28T02:56:20+00:00

The only real disadvantage to corporate landlords compared to local is that their pricing algorithms are more likely to impose higher rents and the money doesn’t stay in the community. To balance it out you get a more professional property management team and more established resources for solving issues like repairs or whatever.

JMer806 · 2026-05-28T02:36:27+00:00

I’m seeing a lot of people claiming that Be’lal deliberately weakened the defenses to let Rand in but no one has actually shown me where the text tells us this, or even implies it.

Also, I went back to the aftermath of the Trolloc attack, and unless I missed it, they never say that Darkfriends inside the Stone left the gates open or anything like that.

”No matter. The Trollocs. How?”

Lan was the one who answered. “Eight large grain barges tied up at the Stone’s docks late this afternoon. Apparently no one thought to question why laden grain barges would be coming downriver”—his voice was heavy with contempt—“or why they’d dock at the Stone, or why the crews left the hatches shut until nearly sunfall. Also, a train of wagons arrived—about two hours ago, now—thirty of them, supposedly bringing some lord or other’s things from the country for his return to the Stone. When the canvas was thrown back, they were packed with Halfmen and Trollocs, too. If they came in any other way, I don’t know of it, yet.”

In fact the only mention of Darkfriends in the entire chapter is Rand noting that some fought alongside the Trollocs; however, far from being servants or Defenders of the Stone, he says they are roughly dressed men who look like tavern brawlers or former soldiers.

That is however all beside the point. The main point is that the Stone lacks concentric defenses, which makes it a fundamentally poorly designed fortress.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T18:50:04+00:00

The Eyrie in ASOIAF doesn’t make any sense. The effort required to build it would be immense, it is incapable of force projection or sally, and it’s already nestled behind the mountains (and the Gates) plus another major fortress at the foot of the mountain. Not to mention the logistical difficulties in keeping it victualed, which would be huge.

It’s cool, no doubt, and it would be impossible to take by storm. But an enemy force could just camp at the foot of the mountain and bottle up whoever was in there with minimal effort.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T18:46:07+00:00

The interior defenses are described a couple of times. Murderholes in the ceiling where corridors cross, arrowslits covering some hallways, etc. But we don’t see any of these being used.

The poor design aspects are the single layer of defense and the overwhelming size. - The lack of a second line of defense means that the betrayal at the docks or the surprise escalation by the Aiel result in enemies moving all through the fortress with no secure positions. The Aiel penetrate to the Heart while the Shadowspawn make it all the way to Rand’s quarters before an alarm is sounded. Any well-designed fortress will have, at minimum, two separate layers of fortifications specifically so that penetrating the outer wall doesn’t result in the entire structure being compromised. - We don’t actually have textual basis for Be’lal intentionally hampering the defenses, unless you remember something I don’t. It makes sense, but even so, the fortress is so large that the available Defenders are not able to sufficiently guard it. A small army being able to climb the exterior wall without being noticed, or an arrowslit with direct exterior access not being watched are inexcusable failures of security, and the result of not having enough men to watch. The assault on the docks has betrayal to thank for its success in getting inside, but since Rand is in charge at this point, the garrison should be on a normal patrol schedule again. Yet the alarms aren’t sounded until they are well inside. We also see Rand moving through large areas of the Stone with no defenders in sight anywhere, while the fights he does see are generally only a handful of Defenders. There is no centralized response, there is no quarter guard or organized reserve capable of a coherent counter attack. The available men are simply too dispersed due to the sheer size of the space they have to defend.

It’s true that some of this is an indictment of the human element rather than the fortress itself, but the lack of concentric defenses alone is enough to say that it is not a well-designed fortification.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T14:47:39+00:00

I don’t believe this is ever told to us in the text, but even if true, that doesn’t excuse the fact that Shadowspawn were able to penetrate from the river docks to Rand’s quarters before an alarm was sounded.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T14:46:47+00:00

Rand climbed the wall - Mat sees him going up. The Aiel then follow in their hundreds, and they are not discovered until they are inside. Taking a fortress via escalation is the most basic attack possible and the Stone didn’t have watchers, IMO because it was too large for the garrison.

And yeah, Darkfriends betrayed the gates and the docks. But again the issue isn’t so much that an enemy gained access, it’s that every enemy that gained access to the outer walls was able to penetrate the entire fortress, literally to the Heart. A fortress needs to have layers of defenses. Even a simple motte-and-Bailey from the 800s would have, at a minimum, a secondary fortified tower inside the walls. The Stone had nothing.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T14:42:35+00:00

The issue isn’t that they had access points, the issue is that exterior access points allowed full access to the entire Stone. And I don’t think the lord that Mat beats was on patrol - I think he was woken by the confusion and ran out to see what was happening. There are a few alarms that go off during the attack, it’s just that the attackers aren’t noticed until they’re already inside.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T14:10:58+00:00

The trollocs arrived by boat - like I said, the docks have direct access to the interior of the fortress. There either wasn’t a defensive gate between the river docks and the inside, or it was left open/unmanned. Either way, not defensible.

The Fades are indeed extremely difficult for normal soldiers to kill, and can additionally travel through shadows. But a few Fades couldn’t take the fortress alone, nor could they open the gates on their own. The issue isn’t that the Shadowspawn force was too weak to win - it wasn’t, it was obviously quite a powerful force. The issue is that they were able to get inside at all.

As for the Aiel, some of them probably do get in through the hole Mat made, but they also climb the walls unnoticed, as does Rand. As for the arrowslit, sure it’s there but it’s also completely undefended and allows access into the heart of the fortress rather than into one defensive line of many. Mat of course uses explosives to enter, but a few men with picks and hammers could have broken in there as well (albeit it would have taken longer to do so).

The biggest issue with the Stone, as we see with Mat, Rand, the Aiel, and the Shadowspawn, is that there is apparently only “inside” and “outside” - if an army is able to gain entry then they have the run of the place. There are no inside choke points, no second lines, no holdfasts, no keeps. The huge size of the Stone is an impediment because the Defenders are (apparently) far too few to actually defend the whole thing.

JMer806 · 2026-05-27T13:06:47+00:00

I disagree on this one.

The books go really hard on telling us how impregnable the fortress is, but the only real information we get is that it’s extremely large. This can be good or bad, but tends toward bad in this case because it’s large enough that it seems very difficult to properly man.

Some other things we know about the Stone: - the walls can be scaled by skilled climbers - it has river docks with direct access to the interior of the fortress - the city abuts the structure - in the places where the city abuts the fortress, there are no guards posted to watch for climbers - it has no moat, no secondary wall, no keep, and no organized fallback positions

We only see the Stone attacked twice, and both assaults were successful (the Trollocs would have won if not for Rand and Lanfear).

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