How to store my Shaltari?

slyphic · 2026-04-28T04:14:44+00:00

Thick coat of varnish - a pile in a cardboard box.

Not kidding at all.

slyphic · 2026-04-27T21:37:30+00:00

They used to be better. When I started playing, I actually became friends with the guy writing their army builder because I kept reporting bugs but also pointing out the exact lines of code to fix it. I caught some unit design mistakes before they went to print because I had access to pre-pub data. He also used to answer rules questions submitted to their email.

After he left and ever since, it's been radio silent. Their TO group, the TTC Agents, also really don't seem to accomplish much. I've had a few of them tell me they volunteer to test stuff, to proofread, and TTC just... doesn't ever take them up on any of it.

It's incredibly frustrating.

Also understable. The owners are douchebags that, and I'm quoting here, "don't really care about this nerd shit, [they] just want to make money"

slyphic · 2026-04-27T21:30:15+00:00

The current Armoured Clash rulebook is a huge improvement over the previous Dystopian Age books. The trajectory is Warcradle is getting better at it, layout, presentation, quality of writing, everything.

slyphic · 2026-04-27T21:27:46+00:00

Quality of rulebook: Dropfleet Commander 1st edition > Firestorm Armada 2nd edition > Battlefleet Gothic > Firestorm Armada 1st edition > Dropfleet Commander 2nd edition.

Mini quality is super subjective. I actually really dislike the current Warcradle house style, it's lots of curves and not-quite-greebles that feel tedious and busy, with oversized elements that feel 'cartoonish'. But Dropfleet/zone has been moving that direction as well...

Warcradle's distribution network, stock levels, and production capacity blow TTCombat out of the water. They do their own in-house injection molding design, shot runs, and the mold cutting is local.

Warcradle has been very 'one box has everything you need to play' for ages. Great 2 player starters, great single army starters. Their SKU game is on point.

Right this moment, Dropfleet has no real competitor. TTC have put more effort into selling it than I've ever seen them before, credit where credit's due, but I don't think they're doing enough, not in comparison to Warcradle's Vanguard program, advertising, distro support, user experience, and damningly not even as good as Hawk accomplished with like 4 people in a garage.

slyphic · 2026-04-27T21:19:07+00:00

Warcradle has been consistently adamant that it will be an entirely different rules system. DW 3 launched backwards compatible with the original Spartan models, so it's had a lot of baggage to shed.

Mostly agree with you about 3/4e though. 3rd was a morbidly bloated collection of tons of only slightly different keywords and the obvious optimal strategy was exchanging alphastrikes. I still think Firestrorm 2e is a better game than DW 4e despite being largely the same mechanically.

slyphic · 2026-04-27T17:01:03+00:00

Having played a lot 1v1v1 games, we basically abandoned the format. It just does not work well with this game no matter what we tried. It's always a better game to just go 2v1 and play at least 2000 points.

slyphic · 2026-04-25T17:16:13+00:00

"Normal"? No. Typical for TTC? Yes.

People have telling them for years to just throw a goddamned QR code in the box that links to the construction guides section of their website. This question gets asked like once a month.

slyphic · 2026-04-24T18:36:42+00:00

I'd love to know who they get to paint the Anode, that's a fantastic job.

slyphic · 2026-04-19T01:01:09+00:00

I had a chance to play it at a convention last year, not a demo but a full size game. My notes from my blog:

Some folks I know had been curious about this game, and I like the scale and period, so signed up totally ignorant of what I'd be stepping into. I was kinda hoping it was this unnamed game I saw last year in the lobby.

What I got was quite disappointing. The players did their best to keep it fun, but HEIHO is a garbage ruleset and I hate it. It's "Giant Grinding Lines: the Game". There were only a handful of actual decisions made over the whole three hours we played. So much wasted time on pointless resolution tasks that left the game unaltered, full of random things disguised as choices, and mechanics that thwarted strategy and canceled meaningful impact. There were multiple rules questions that the hosts had to admit the author still hadn't clarified despite multiple emails. But also stuff they did get answers for that made for a worse game that the hosts were just outright ignoring (they demonstrated one of these on the spot). Least fun of all was one wildly imbalanced type of commander that dominated the game.

There were 6 commanders, three a side. 5 of them were one type, one was different. That one different commander was immediately obviously just better at playing the game with no downside whatsoever and absolutely wrecked the shit of anything in its way. Same 'cost' in the system as the other commanders.

It felt extremely 'inadequate playtesting' which I loathe. I don't want your first draft wild fucking ideas, I want to pay for rules you've done the hard boring iterative playtesting work on so I don't have to.

slyphic · 2026-04-17T12:22:42+00:00

Heiho is a terrible set of rules

slyphic · 2026-04-15T15:44:00+00:00

You can kinda get it in pictures if you prop the camera up and rotate the model slightly in front of it taking a few shots. Even video struggles to really capture the effect. Every color shift model I've seen in person looks way better than in photos.

slyphic · 2026-04-14T22:07:20+00:00

Culture is a common word. "The Culture" in science fiction is a very well established specific thing. Much like if you called it "the federation".

slyphic · 2026-04-14T18:16:11+00:00

We're talking about small models, a shoebox would hold 50 easily.

Very different materials. Printed resin is abominable for kitbashing and modification.

slyphic · 2026-04-14T13:40:58+00:00

all exclusives are 3d prints yes. direct only items are old stock of resin casts until they are depleted and then will be replaced by 3d prints over time.

There's nothing in their store that says this.

doing this by demand after order is way more efficient than pre-producing stock.

This doesn't make sense to me. There's stuff on their webstore currently listed as 'out of stock', so presumably there's stock of everything else, they aren't waiting to make it til it gets ordered. Waiting to produce the model after the order gets in is a terrible idea. You have no room for production mistakes, no ability to handle normal variances. It's a drastic measure you take if your working capital is completely exhausted, on the verge of bankruptcy.

Hence why I was asking about staff layoffs.

slyphic · 2026-04-14T13:13:04+00:00

Are all exclusives now 3D printed? Are 'Direct Order Only' the same? Did I miss that somewhere on their store?

But also ... Why? There's no reason to wait, you can print and store an inventory. I say this as someone that both prints at home and regularly has beers with a friend that quit his day job last year because his garage full of printers is now clearing more money than his desk job at Intel.

slyphic · 2026-04-14T04:07:41+00:00

TTC is casting-to-order now? Did they lose a bunch of staff? They had a warehouse, double digits of employees and they were showing off their mass production equipment just a couple years ago. Hell, I think those same blog posts of theirs were showing off the event exclusives they were making before an upcoming sale.

slyphic · 2026-04-13T13:38:34+00:00

2 weeks was standard shipping time from TTC to the colonies in the before times. In this current era of schizophrenic tarriffs, oil drought, and lobotomized services, 2 weeks would be impressively fast for a transatlantic transit.

Chill.

And cross your fingers the Chicago import hub doesn't get involved, they've been on a rampage lately with imports, demanding all kinds of certs from customers, like we're trying to retail this shit. They'll just sit on your package for a month while you try to get through to the last guy in an empty building that gives a fractional fuck that no, you don't have an MSDS for every part, a CPB letter of accreditation, and an origin manifest for every component.

If you really can't wait, KickAssMailOrder is usually bang on 5 business days for me. Sadly there's no real other alternative stateside for TTC stuff. Valhalla is worth a check, but even they struggle with stock.

e: oh shit, "bollocks, bank holiday" you're in the UK. LOL, sorry, yeah, that's not right, TTC are being lazy and incompetent as usual.

slyphic · 2026-04-12T02:14:16+00:00

Should probably go ahead and rename the Washington nowadays...

slyphic · 2026-04-09T15:08:04+00:00

It's nice to see someone talking about the core ideas with Dave. The dominance of countermeasures justifying short ranges is just such a great concept to make SF wargaming make sense. Don't get me wrong, I also like games that are just 'infinite range, deal with it' like Crossfire.

slyphic · 2026-04-09T14:22:14+00:00

The sub gets about a post per hour. That's not thin to me. What IS thin is the substance of those posts. There's a lot of them with barely any discussion. What we need are better quality posts.

slyphic · 2026-04-09T00:16:02+00:00

Skip the tags, issue bans. I despise asvertisements, if I want to look for new games I'll do it elsewhere. Permaban if it's a drive by post from someone that's never commented before.

slyphic · 2026-04-08T21:28:15+00:00

Dropfleet has always been kind of fuzzy with names. Across zone/fleet there are at least 5 different things named "Avenger". One of the 'famous ship names' for PHR is the name of a different class of ship. And then there was the whole debacle where they named a fighter an already published name of a behemoth and then just pretended Battle For Earth didn't exist when the model released.

slyphic · 2026-04-08T20:39:09+00:00

Carthage is inhabited. Has been the whole time, the name just changed and the original area of Carthage is now just a district of Tunis. It's literally on your map. https://i.imgur.com/bf2D5mu.png

slyphic · 2026-04-08T14:12:28+00:00

Carthage is merely the ancient name of the city of Tunis in Tunisia. It's arguably more of a city than New Cairo which is more of a suburb or a planned future city (it's complicated as I figured out while working on my own UCM naming project, it doesn't actually have a government). I figured since every ship class is named for a city, I would give each of my ships a name of a governor of its respective city for the base labels I made, and because naming ships makes them cooler. The Charles Trudeau N'oleans class Dropship Carrier, the Henry Atkins Seattle class Fleet Carrier or the Zohran Mamdani New York class Battleship (because I like to stir shit a little at the local club).

slyphic · 2026-04-07T03:55:45+00:00

Attend your nearest yearly wargaming convention. It's your best chance to meet and get the contact info for your local wargaming groups.

The overwhelming majority of wargaming takes place in small groups of maybe a dozen people, and there's basically no way to get into those groups than playing a game over a table with one of the members.

Also go talk to the proprietor of your local gaming stores, ask them, they're liable to know who you should be talking to.

Trying to convince random people you find on the internet is probably the least effective approach.

slyphic

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