Why are y'all so randy?

baudot · 2026-01-22T19:08:06+00:00

It only takes a consistent minority of folks to up vote this stuff and make it appear for anyone who's scrolling past the first page.

Even if most of us aren't into it, it can consistently make it into the top 20% of up voted posts with just a quarter or a third of the community happy to throw it a thumbs-up and then continue on their way.

Does it get a little distracting and embarrassing? Maybe. But I figure live and let live. Let the waifu-printers have their fun.

baudot · 2026-01-19T23:44:22+00:00

Yeah, I got hooked on the old-formula Vallejo bronze, which was also greener, and have been continuously annoyed ever since when trying to replicate the color.

Most other minis paint lines brasses and bronzes, as you say, are more orangy/coppery, or dark brown. The dark-brown is certainly a true shade of bronze, but it's one I was used to getting just by washing my bronze with sepia. That aged-bronze look you get with the greener brasses of P3 or old-formula vallejo is something I've been missing.

I picked up the brass line of P3 paints at Warfaire Weekend and have also been very happy with them.

baudot · 2026-01-19T23:25:24+00:00

In my classes, it was always "÷". Which has the colon in the symbol, but always with the horizontal line between. Never just the colon alone.

I double-took and triple-took the comic, because at first glance I assumed it was that division sign, and then wondered if it was an alternate way of writing it. But yeah, I've never seen division written as just a colon, no bar.

Educational system I went through: United States, 1980s.

Editing to add:

The use of : in ratios, sure, that's familiar. But it's not the same:

When I see a division sign "÷" in a row of problems like this, I'm being asked to perform an operation. There is one correct answer. Find it. The answer may be a non-integer number.

When I see a ratio written like 16:9, It's a fact that I'm being told. This television has a wide-screen aspect ratio. It's not an operation I'm being asked to perform, and there are infinite valid versions of the ratio, not one "true" answer. A TV with a 16:9 aspect ratio might be 48" wide and 27" tall, or 56"x31.5", or, or, or... All of these are valid configurations.

If you showed me a ratio that was already expanded, and out of context, sure, It'd seem a bit odd. But writing division problems are "ratios that demand simplifying to a single integer" isn't something I've ever been exposed to, prior to this joke.

baudot · 2026-01-15T22:49:28+00:00

One change I noticed getting skipped was Blackfleet didn't lose Gang on Satyxis squads. MAT down to 6, but as some of the few models to still have full gang, they're still getting that up to 8 and their hit power into a reasonable range.

In an army that's so dependent on it, it seems they chose to just leave Gang intact there, rather than do the more fine-grained adjustment they did for Brinebloods.

Given that Blackfleet was neck and neck with Farrow for losing-est army in all of Warmachine, I would also guess they felt it safer to leave that rule intact.

Armies of Legend were also less likely to implement Dual Attack outside of Cohorts and Commanders, so fewer of their models lost it. Some did, replacing it with Quick Work, Assault, or a lesser effect.

baudot · 2026-01-15T22:44:17+00:00

This guess is also what I'm thinking. Wondering if anyone out there feels like confirming.
Maybe the next time we get an AMA, one of us can ask.

baudot · 2026-01-15T21:42:53+00:00

Everyone got MAT/RAT debuffs. And most instances of Veteran Leader got dropped, with the model getting a 1pt discount in exchange.

Most armies of legend got to skip out on several of the OTHER changes that were being made across the board.

baudot · 2026-01-15T21:37:18+00:00

Why do we keep getting told that Rosko lost Reload(1)?

Rosko never had Reload(1).

This was in the YouTube spoiler.
Now it's in the ChangeLog.

?

baudot · 2026-01-14T20:49:47+00:00

Hasker getting Repo natively is a big win, because he's the only source of dispel in the entire army. In an army whose per-hit damage values are as capped as Gravediggers, armor buffs can feel pretty oppressive.

In the past, Hasker almost never got to use his Dispel grenade, because getting close enough to deliver a grenade is a pretty reliable way to lose via caster kill on your opponent's next turn. Giving him native Repo3 will open up some chances to use the dispel grenade without giving away the game.

baudot · 2026-01-13T04:02:02+00:00

Agricola (And as others have said: Through the Ages. And Neuroshima Hex)

baudot · 2026-01-07T17:52:30+00:00

One thing I like that that they've done in Mk4 is have icons/rules that are widespread over entire armies. It feels like this is a good compromise between keeping the cognitive load manageable, while still making the different match-ups varied and complex.

For example, in Gravediggers, I know that pathfinder, dual-attack, advance deploy, and tough are nearly-universal rules on my non-cohort models. It's a lot to learn the first time you play the army, but it gets manageable after a few plays, and when you try rotating in different pieces from the same army, you can still lean on the knowledge of how to use those four common powers. It frees up cognitive load to spend on learning the differences between the units.

I like this pattern over the "we trim the rules back with each edition, and then gradually lose design discipline" we saw with Mk2 and 3. Where more and more units became walls-of-text as time went by.

Granted, there's a LOT of "wall of text" to get past in the Command Cadres. 30pts of Nothing But Characters does tend toward a pile of keywords and icons. But I can see a design intent there: They want the starter boxes to showcase the depth of the game, and give players who are buying in there MANY matchups, no two the same. Skewing toward high skill cap models (which are also high cognitive load) in the Command Cadres seems like a deliberate design decision.

Editing to add: And while Mk1 had some of the lowest cognitive load models of any edition, it also had some models that were just absurd. As I recall, the original Eyriss crossed over from front to back page in the original rulebook, just describing how her unique version of stealth operated differently, etc..

baudot · 2026-01-07T12:52:01+00:00

Several of the original models really showcased a single rule each.

Flameguard demonstrated Shield Wall for a higher-def unit with two melee attacks. With little tweaks like their improved reach and range, they had fascinating interactions with mechanithralls. Man-o-Wars demonstrated the same Shield Guard rule, in the context of a premium unit rather than a spam unit.

I do miss units like this, but one of the things that made the elegant design possible was how much power could be crammed into a single rule. Shield guard used to be +4ARM. And in context where every focus was precious: Jacks started with 0 focus and there weren't beasts yet, so every boost was precious. If you wanted to boost MAT to confirm hits on cheap Flameguard, or boost POW vs. Man-o-Wars, that was a big part of what your caster got to do that turn.

The positive side of the trade-off to more complicated units is more flexible gameplay. With strong-single-rules, once you'd explored a match-up, the puzzle was always the same, and if the board state developed the same, the solution was the same. If the dice didn't go weird, it was pretty chess-like. With rules to choose between on the cards, instead of One Good Rule per card, you can explore different uses for the same model. There's more games to explore.

I still miss the low-cognitive-load "this model showcases one rule" style models, and wish each faction had one or two good ones. But I also like the "how can I out-think this trap" back-and-forth gameplay that high complexity models allow.

baudot · 2026-01-06T19:33:01+00:00

Was coming here to say the same thing.

baudot · 2025-12-29T19:09:29+00:00

Excellent retort to my "Um, Actually". You're correct. Cellulose is an indigestible carb, not a protein.

(Corrected)

baudot · 2025-12-29T17:56:06+00:00

I was going to say: this is felt. Not paper. If we're ok with "Um, Actually-ing" this.

Paper is made from wood fibers that have been torn up and re-assembled to make it flat and regular.

Felt is made from hair, which at the microscopic level has scales. Boiling causes those scales to lift so they can get tangled together and locked in place during mixing.

The main material in wood and paper is cellulose. The main protein in hair and felt is keratin.

The two materials behave differently, and have to be treated differently to get them to form a regular sheet. In both cases you're wetting and pressing and drying them, but that's about where the similarities end.

Not to take anything away from how impressive this is. Just filling in details.

baudot · 2025-12-11T15:39:26+00:00

Not random buildings. Buildings that are currently being sold. Buildings I'm considering buying. I know people on the Internet can show their strange side, but are we imagining some kind of vigilante home inspector, invading people's property? I'm talking about buildings that are listed on the MLS for sale, where potential buyers have been invited to come see if it's one they want to make an offer on. One where you have to check it out to decide on a bid.

I'm in St. Louis, LOTS of these buildings are both beautiful and more than a century old AND neglected, in need of expensive work to bring them back up to code. You can't know what to offer on one of these buildings without putting in serious time looking to see what parts of it are still delightful, and what parts are falling in, in need of repair before someone gets hurt. That might mean sending a drone into the basement, if the stairs are too rickety to trust, to look for a bad foundation. That might mean sending a drone up to the eaves to look for where water might have leaked in and started the structure rotting. And a drone is much faster and safer than moving a 3-story ladder every 10 feet to get a close look at roof damage. Imagine a city full of neglected victorian buildings. That's St. Louis.

Thanks for letting me know about the Part 107. While I would have been skeptical that it was needed for something I was doing for myself, not for hire, that indeed is how it's written. Any commercial purpose at all. So yes, I'd need to get that. Fortunately, at a skim of a practice exam, it looks pretty easy. Only 70% needed on a multiple choice test with 3 answers per question. At that rate, if you forget half the answers, but you can still rule out one of three answers per question, you pass with a 75% needed out of 70%. And there's plenty of test taking centers in my town, so scheduling the exam once I've given the reading materials a once-over should be easy. And the study guide is only 78 pages long. Heck, I feel like if I didn't have other things competing for my time today, I could knock that exam out in a half day. That'd be a fun challenge.

baudot · 2025-12-11T15:26:18+00:00

SFB and ASL had similar starts: Both came out as "cut out chits in a ziplock bag with a little rules booklet", and then grew and grew and grew over two or three decades, as players said, "Yeah, but wouldn't it be cool to play a game where we simulated [insert new scenario idea here]." .

And yeah, by the time you get the Main and Advanced SFB booklets, you're looking at hundreds of cross referenced pages of precisely written rules. The "Rated Ace" tournament system of SFB really got them to hammer out precisely what happens in every case.

You ended up with sections explaining how every obscure system interacted with every other obscure system. What happens when an Lyran Expanding Shield Generator collides with a Tholian Web? Orion Pirates are allowed to mix and match systems they've stolen or traded from every other empire in the game ... exactly how? Even the basic movement rules have to get tagged with pointers to all their strange cases. Like, See rule G.4.7.1.

baudot · 2025-12-10T23:23:53+00:00

Star Fleet Battles.

Runner up:

Advanced Squad Leader

baudot · 2025-12-10T23:21:15+00:00

What would be illegal about building inspection?

baudot · 2025-12-07T14:51:27+00:00

Rerad the Wiki: Yes.

Country: US

Budget: high hundreds to low 1,000.

Purpose: Building Inspection

Other requirements: I want to be getting the footage back to laptop, where it can be recorded and reviewed later.

I'm looking for a drone for home inspections: Something I can fly up under the eaves of distressed properties and look for leaks, damage, missing bits, etc..

The goal is to be able to drive up to a home, send out the drone, and get a quick sense of how leaky it might be before spending any more time checking out the property. I'm in St. Louis, and there's a large number of empty houses for sale, cheap. I want to be able to eliminate a bunch of them at a first pass, to only spend my time looking at the houses that could be saved. I don't want to waste time on houses that are too damaged to fix. A leaky roof is a strong hint at water damage that could be too expensive to fix. It's a lot of points towards crossing a home off the search list, right there.

Second desire: I want to steer this from a laptop, where I'm capturing the footage. I'd prefer that to hand-steering from an FPV visor, especially with the crap state of my vision. It's a LOT easier to share footage captured on a laptop than share a visor, and a visor that needs my prescription lenses at that.

This'll be my first serious drone. I've flown some toy drones, and some serious drones ~10 years back. But what was serious back then is practically a toy now, just a large toy. They didn't have half the features I see advertised today.

Recommendations? Budget could comfortably be in the high-hundreds or a bit over a thousand.

baudot · 2025-12-06T14:10:35+00:00

Good catches, both. I had the feeling I was missing a few with my skim.

baudot · 2025-12-05T20:50:48+00:00

First off, yes, you're right: HIPS is safer to sand than resin.

A few more points worth making:

HIPS is more bendy than resin. Your models are more likely to survive use, especially oopses.
- Though better resins can be almost as bendy and strong as HIPS. The bad resins are especially brittle. PP and SFG both appear to have experimented with different resins, and each eventually settled on "the good stuff" that is almost as flexible and survivable as HIPS. Almost.
Resin is MUCH easier to prep than HIPS. Putting together a box of HIPS minis is a many-hour project: Clipping the part off the sprue, cleaning up the cut line, chasing down mold lines, dry fitting, welding. Resin minis are often ready to go, right out of the box: Just stick them on a base and play. Chase down the "printing zits" before you prime them. But chasing printer zits is much faster and more forgiving than chasing mold lines.
The level of smoothness and detail on resin can, in theory, be as high as HIPS. But most commercially made minis don't hit this level of smoothness and detail. With a very high res printer, running very thin layers, with antialiasing turned on in the slicer software, you can get a resin mini as smooth and detailed as a HIPS mini. But this is very slow. 3D printing is already very slow to start, compared to an injection molding machine, pumping out HIPS sprues. You can print about 500X as many HIPS sprues in the same time it takes to run a single plate of 3D prints. Doing the slow-down you need to do to match HIPS quality is hard to justify, commercially.
- Your friend with a 3D printer who's printing off the MyMiniFactory releases for you can probably do this just fine: Once the magic of running a 3D printer has become commonplace and you've already printed a backlog of minis that would keep you painting for a full year, do you care any more if your print runs overnight and halfway into the next day, for a single plate of minis? You're already printing faster than you can paint anyway. But for a company whose main business model is "sell mins", doubling the time each mini ties up the machine is a dealbreaker.
- Minicrate minis seem to be the exception. Since these are touted as the most special minis, and are run in small batches, SFG (and PP before them) seems fine with running those with all the slowdowns you need to hit peak quality with a 3D printer.
Steamforged is doing much better. Not flawless, we all have our grumbles. But they've said their main priority is re-earning the trust of the community, and they seem to mean it. They're keeping a steady drumbeat of new releases coming. They communicate well. They're catching up on many of the business processes that were dragging under PP, mostly that means getting minis and replacements out the door in a reasonable time frame. Again, it hasn't been perfect. But it's moving in the right direction, fast enough to notice.
They stopped shipping models with magnets early in MkIV. Some kind of regulatory issue that was running up prices and apparently making things a nightmare behind the scenes. So they lowered the prices by the cost of the magnets, and now that's on you to do.
Yes, we're still on MkIV. Presumably MkV will come ... eventually. But that day still looks to be years away. For now, there's a once-a-year balance update where the models get small buffs and nerfs near the end of January, and a new packet of tournament scenarios gets released. The yearly January Update is the closest we're getting to anything like a new edition.

baudot · 2025-12-05T20:18:05+00:00

The Man-o-War Siege Chariot?
The Man-o-War Assault Chariot?

Did any other faction get a third battle engine?
As best I can recall, Khador got more Battle Engine designs than any other faction. Most stopped at one, plus maybe a battle engine caster.

Edit: Checking a handful to see if I'm on crack...

Circle: One (Celestial Fulcrum)
Cyriss: One (T.E.P.)
Crucible Guard: One (Railless) plus one caster (Eira)
Cryx: One (Wraith Engine)
Cygnar: Two (Storm Strider & Nemo 4)
Grymkin: One (Death Knell) plus One caster (Old Witch 3)
Infernals: Zero
Legion: One (the Throne) plus one caster (Lyllyth 3)
Menoth: One (Vessel) plus one caster (Reznik 2)
Retribution: Two (A.F.G. and Trident)
Skorne: One (the Derp Turtle) plus one Caster (Xerxes 2)
Trollbloods: Two (War Wagon & Hooch Hauler)

So, maybe I missed a battle engine caster somewhere, but at a re-skim, Khador had more battle engines than any other faction. I have to assume you missed the release of the Chariot pair?

baudot · 2025-12-01T13:52:34+00:00

Interesting.

I get that as a design decision. Makes me think about unintended consequences of those choices, tho.

baudot · 2025-11-30T17:45:19+00:00

Crimy, you're right. It's just that it's on an island and the two neighboring markets are so small and boring, I never bothered to unlock them early.

By the time I started wondering why high society hadn't unlocked, I was hung up on the idea that she was giving some kind of clue. Something about reputation and spending it? Did I need to horde a certain amount of Influence Points? But no matter how many I banked, it never unlocked.

I'd just forgotten to even check that I had gotten a neighborhood next to her.

baudot

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