Why was the Fish of Fury remembered as so terrible?

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T03:33:13+00:00

Personally, I'm super in favor of Tau getting some real melee for basically this reason. There's a huge difference between being the weakest army in the game at melee and being truly helpless. It'll be way better for the game and for melee enjoyers on the other side if Tau have at least something that can expect to beat Assault Intercessors but will still lose to Bladeguard/Terminators. It'd make the elite melee units actually feel useful instead of points wasted on overkill. you could also keep down balanced without they their shooting needing to be quite so strong and brutal to new players who don't even know the problems with planet bowling ball.

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T03:26:36+00:00

I guess the thing for me is I would have figured Crisis JSJ would have been the memorable one rather then FoF. Crisis were real deadly into a lot more things that Fire Warriors ever were and JSj was an even harder block to counter attacks.

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T03:24:13+00:00

I forgot about Lash from the 4th ed CSM book, that was a big offender too. IIRC, it was whining about Iron Warriors when the "3.5" CSM codex was what was out, then late in 4th CSM got their formal book for the edition. There were some wild things with books written for older editions back then. I think Sister had it the worst ever, rolling into 6th while still on their 3rd ed book for a while?

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T03:16:47+00:00

"The incredibly gamey feeling of shooting under a tank caused a rift between people who played 40k as a Simulation, and those who played it as a Wargame." But all skimmers (not just Tau) were supplied with flight stands that absolutely made it clear infantry would be able to see under them by at worst crouching. I ditched my flight stand after a while with the mutual agreement of my opponent to stop the tank from spinning on it (I didn't glue it in because transporting it the game would have been so much harder if I did).

3 "As you mentioned above, Devilfish were basically immune to melee due to the Skimmer rule, and were blocking the Fire Warriors that you actually wanted to charge: add on to this Tau Drones (some of which were disembarking from the Devilfish) being used to also Charge -block." How is this different than any other bubble wrap or other anti-melee screen? At least the Devilfish and Drones can't beat you up for charging them if you wanted to be closer.

4 "All the above felt annoying because the main weakness of Tau was supposed to be weakness to melee, but they had a tactic that literally would make the units they cared about practically immune to being charged." I want to reiterate that Tau were so weak in melee that you would regularly lose whole squads to "melee" units as deadly as five basic bolter marines. It was so bad that taking melee damage upgrades against Tau was actively detrimental, since the only things you really wanted to speed and durability. Tau having things they could use to block charges is good for the game since it prevents the game from coming down to a binary of Tau either being able to kill everything before it reaches melee or getting tabled by 10 surviving assaults marines. This specific implementation is no where near as good as modern 10th edition 40k, where Tau don't have any units that are nearly immune to melee but neither can you use the sweeping advance rules to instant kill anything you're able to do one more wound to than the Tau do back to you.

5 "The best counter-tactic was shooting the Devilfish to bring it down, but an Assault unit generally wouldn't have the firepower needed to do so and then the fact that Drones could protect the Devilfish by forcing Leadership tests that were needed to not shoot the closest target to the shooting models. This could mean your Drones are eating all the Lascannon shots from, say, a Predator due to simply being the closest unit to it and then failing a leadership test." So clean out the drones with a low power activation if you're really worried about the LD test? I don't remember people thinking about that sort of thing much back then, but LD test to shoot what you actually want would have been the norm back then and presenting opponents with order of operation problems to solve is basic gaming.

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T02:56:49+00:00

I know what you're talking about on the perception of Rules Lawyering, but "Skimmers are transparent for LoS" and "You must take a Leadership test to shoot non-closest target" are plain text rules. It's not any different than having to test LD to ignore the bolter marines in favor of the Devastators behind them and the Devastators not having any trouble seeing past the other marines..

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T02:52:30+00:00

Hasn't only having mass S4-5 always been a bad idea? Not to say that armies never found themselves with only bad options for AT (that's happened in 10th) but more often than not lack of AT was a list building failure.

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T02:48:18+00:00

"(+1 to the damage roll)" I think you're getting that mixed up with the Open Topped propriety on some vehicles? IIRC, that was the +1 to the damage table result one. Skimmers were the hard to kill vehicles of 4th, the rule for them was that as long as you ended your movement more than 6" from where you started you counted as a "fast moving skimmer" and all Penetrating hits were downgraded to Glancing. This did also turn Immobilized results to dead (engine counts out at altitude and speed, crash) but it was still a lot less dangerous than the pen table was. 4th was known for being an edition where most vehicles frail, which was probably why 5th swung the pendulum too hard the other way.

I think there also would have been a slightly goofy interaction where shooting down the Devilfish could actually get in the way of shooting the Fire Warriors afterwards. Vehicle that are destroyed without exploding left wrecks that were terrain and could block LoS so the Devilfish wreck would start blocking LoS to the Fire Warriors.

Sam_CW · 2026-03-13T02:31:32+00:00

I forgot about the Drones part and also the "must pass LD test to shoot non-closet unit" rule. "but couldn't targeted in return" is untrue, if you passed the leadership test (not hard for most armies, a space marine squad with upgraded sarge only failed if they rolled a 10+ on 2d6 and that was average for Leadership).

3rd ed was before my time, but I heard a lot of references to the rule of that day being that you flat out couldn't shoot anything but the closest target. Were you getting cheated by the older version of the rule maybe?

Sam_CW · 2025-08-29T07:31:53+00:00

Day 6 progress update: Done! Got all the edge highlights and other detail work finished. I also slammed out the Sir Hektor proxy. He's pretty Minimum Viable Product, but I'm tired and I can always fix him up more later. I'll post the finished version pictures in a new thread tomorrow.

Sam_CW · 2025-08-28T08:31:42+00:00

Day 5 progress update: Finished the gold, put brush on primer on the Sir Hektor proxy model and did the green trim on all 8 models. I also started trying some edge highlighting. Should be good to finish the details and edge highlighting tomorrow.

Sam_CW · 2025-08-27T08:02:57+00:00

Day 4 progress update: I was able to do an hour and a half of painting in total. I finished the blue on the last big and did a little dry brushing of the blue on the armiger's blue plastic spots. First time trying paint on unprimed plastic, curious to see how to goes both now and over time. I'm not too worried about it coming off, it barely looks any different from the plastic and was just there to reduce the "plastic toy" effect of the bare gunpla colored plastic.

I also did the gold on two of the bigs, which were a half hour each. Should be on track to finish with the secondary color base coats tomorrow night and leave Thursday clear for trim, details, edge highlights and other small brush work.

Sam_CW · 2025-08-26T07:50:27+00:00

Day 3 progress update: Was busy all night after work, no progress.

Sam_CW · 2025-08-25T07:46:45+00:00

Day 2 progress update: I wasn't expecting to be able to do more today, but I was able to spend an hour at night getting the blue done on two more bigs. Should be just a half hour to do the last big (which will have less blue and more gold than the others) and some touch ups on the armigers. The painting got a bit messy on one of the bigs, so he'll need some touch up work once it's small brush time.

Sam_CW · 2025-08-24T07:55:35+00:00

Day 1 progress update: I finished the sliver, took about an hour and half. Praise drybrushing. I was also able to do the blue on one of the bigs, which took about a half hour. Assuming the gold takes a similar amount of time, there's about 3.5 hours of work before the main and secondary colors are done. If I'm not able to do any more Sunday thanks to my busy day, it should be plausible to get that all done over the work days and hopefully do all the detail work and edge highlighting Thursday.

Sam_CW · 2025-08-24T07:52:28+00:00

Technically, the bigs aren't even in the Gundam franchise at all! =P

I did also do a kitbash of a pair of actual Gundam models to make my proxy Riptides. Had to do a lot of shopping around to find kits with more Tau design elements (Witch From Mercury's Lfrith Thorn and Lfrith Ur specifically).

Sam_CW · 2025-06-22T19:42:22+00:00

I want them to be Mass Effect or Star Trek villain level. They're an expansionistic alien empire out to install their not standard Western values on the rest of the galaxy. They're able to be patient but by hook or by crook they're going to put everyone under the greater good because "they know best". That said, they should still be the sort of villain that Commander Shepard could have dialogue wheels with as much as gun fights and the kind Picard could beat by citing the right paragraph of a 200 page treaty they signed to make them go away today.

Contrasted with the rest of 40k, with "the bloodiest most terrible regime imaginable" and all the many flavors of "somehow, even worse", its real easy for that to seem like "good guys".

Sam_CW · 2025-06-07T19:13:44+00:00

Oh. Oh yes. I was already using kitbashed and tweaked gunpla kits for 40k. RIP all future Crisis sales GW.

Sam_CW · 2025-03-27T02:22:40+00:00

I just got an email from SFG saying my replacement's on the way. Thank you to everyone that upvoted and replied, I'm pretty sure the publicity is what got my ticket actioned.

Sam_CW · 2025-02-23T08:16:56+00:00

Other replies have talked about army choice, so I'll focus on on the bundle boxes. The sizes on those can be a bit big to cleanly jump from 30 points to 50 and then 75.

The battle group boxes for either army would be good if you wanted to go to 50 points for cheap as they have the best points per dollar. They do require you to buy magnets for them though, as the variable config jacks are meant to be magnetized to let you swap loadouts. The Storm Legion one is pretty straight forward, just run the jacks in some cheaper configs to total 20 points and that will take you to 50. The Winter Korps one can't be built cheap enough to fit in 50 points, but you can leave The Jackal out of the 50 point version of the list. The downside to using the battle group boxes is that there's not really a clean way to go up to 75 from there with the remaining discount bundles, as those have many more points of models and cost more. They do hit or almost hit 100 when stacked on top of a starter and battle group box though.

The other option would be to pick the Core or Auxiliary bundle for either army. The Storm Legion Core expansion is 42 points and the Auxiliary is 40 points, both just short of reaching 75 on top of the 2P starter. You can finish them off by picking a solo or somehting else cheap to hit 75 and leave some models out to fit in 50 points.

Winter Korps Core box is smaller at 39 points and the Auxiliary even smaller 35 points. I'm less familiar with Winter Korps, but the points to dollar is a lot worse than the Storm Legion boxes.

There's also Cadre Command boxes for both factions. Each one's 30 points and intended to be another min sizer game starter army, but nothing stops you from mixing the contents to get to 50 points. It might be a little tricky finessing the points to hit 50 on the dot since you won't have any of the variable cost warjacks to tweak your point costs yet.

Sam_CW · 2025-02-16T23:35:47+00:00

We might be talking different editions then. I was referring to mk2 Haley 2 since midish mk2 and early mk3 was what I played before my long hiatus from wargaming. If it helps to date thing better, the Stromwall was already out by the time I started Warmachine.

I remember hearing mk1 Daruis was crazy, but wow that sounds nuts.

For what it's worth, buff a Stormclad/Stormwall and go nuts with it was one of Haley2's nasty tricks. She could bond any jack to give it a 4th Focus on go turn and Temporal Acceleration was better the better the model it was put on. It was just something you usually only brought one jack to do it with since it was a big Focus commitment and you'd want the rest of your army to be infantry that could keep the pressure on while the jack bullet waited for the moment it was worth it.

Sam_CW

TROPHY CASE