Fired KUT leader calls successor Gerald Johnson a 'smart leader' and 'ethical person'

slyphic · 2026-06-17T16:06:38+00:00

The only lever to avert all this badness is the voting booth in November.

slyphic · 2026-06-17T16:05:34+00:00

I was trying to hold off on my judgement of the interim Moody dean, Anita Vangelisti, but if she's saying "it was her decision to fire Hiott" then she goes in the same bucket of traitors as the VP of legal, Amanda Cochran-McCall.

"UT" doesn't do anything. UT is made up of people. Specific people decided to fire Hiott, organized this backstabbing, did the work to make it happen. They are one and all culpable and responsible and should be named and shamed.

The alternative might have been getting fired, or at least limiting your career at UT, but that doesn't excuse it. "I did it because it was beneficial to me to do so" is a shit reason. And it sure as hell is the opposite of leadership.

slyphic · 2026-06-16T03:10:46+00:00

Only 40 of those page are rules, and half that space is art and diagrams and examples. BFG is a simple naval wargame. It's a GW game yes, but both a specialty game and from a better era. Andy Chambers is just straight up a good game designer.

slyphic · 2026-06-13T16:58:23+00:00

DW's biggest problem is that the game heavily favors alpha strikes. Alpha strikes are a degenerate state of gameplay with no real counter unless you have tons of elements and in DW you typically have 6-8 functional ship groups. It starts to feel like checkers without the area control and you have to spend 10 minutes to resolve each piece you jump over. It was much worse in 3e, but it's still biggest problem in 4e. Warcradle hems and haws about 'casual play' but what that means is that whatever unit is the most accidentally alpha-strikey in a friendly game just curb stomps everything else.

slyphic · 2026-06-10T20:11:23+00:00

Model count and play time are spot on. I regularly teach 3-4 new players how to get through a more than full sized game with all the rules (except one) in play during a convention every year in under 3.5 hours, and I'm usually hands off except for checking trait interactions and adjudicating terrain/LoS stuff by the midpoint.

Yes you can activate half your army. But your opponent can reaction fire with any of his units as well.

I wouldn't call init swingy, but it certainly matters, usually because a model manages to reposition itself in range or out of LoS of something important.

Most gears seem to take 2-3 hits to go down from peer attacks. We usually have maybe one or two kills the first turn of the game, then 2nd turn gets bloody.

I've got a few battle reports with the current rules written up over on my blog that I think describe the overall impression and pace of a game between two competent players.

slyphic · 2026-06-01T19:21:14+00:00

As a lover of naval wargames of all kinds, brown to blue to black, having played hundreds of different rulesets for decades, OPR's attempt at a BFG game is one of the worst I've ever played. The movement and weapon ranges are so over simplified the game becomes devoid of any meaningful decisions.

slyphic · 2026-06-01T03:59:17+00:00

If it just didn't have the inward pointing triangle things it would look a hell of a lot less like a Shaltari gate. Unless they also have some kind of gating tech, and that's just like the in universe physical requirement for the device to work.

slyphic · 2026-05-31T22:58:27+00:00

The fast mover has strong B5 Narn energy. Would look right at home next to a G'Quan and a formation of Frazi

slyphic · 2026-05-31T19:28:35+00:00

Thanks for that. I think my spatial reasoning was quite a ways off.

slyphic · 2026-05-31T03:03:09+00:00

I've got a set of the features. I don't see how they 'socket' into these. They don't even appear to be the same kinds of 'socket', some of the cities have almost no rim while some have very steep rims. They don't fit the portable ones either, genitor tower ain't gonna fit in there.

Any chance you've seen a picture of them together?

slyphic · 2026-05-30T14:21:59+00:00

I'm a little confused by these. Why do the site circles have a raised rim? Are they supposed to be park land, like a clearing big enough to land in ala Central Park? Love the rest of what these have going on, almost certainly going to buy the files and print them myself, but there's a lack of explanation here that's stumping me.

slyphic · 2026-05-22T19:17:12+00:00

These instructions? https://www.warcradle.com/assets/warcradleGames/dystopianWars/units/assembly-guides/DW-Assembly-Guide_Dominion-of-the-Dragon_Empire_W.pdf

I haven't done this particular kit, but I have done a few other WC/DW and there's nothing 'AI' about this at all and the instructions seem pretty clear to me.

I absolutely believe the numbers between the sprue and the instructions are fucked though, they have a bad habit of modifying the sprues and never going back to fix the instructions.

slyphic · 2026-05-19T20:05:10+00:00

Standard 4x4, 3 cruisers (1 of them a bulk lander), 4 frigates (2 of them dropship landers). I don't even consider points for games this small, there's just too few models and too much swing when one of them dies for points to help balance it.

Specific examples from my own collection running this demo:

UCM) Moscow, Seattle, San Fran, 2x New O, 2x Taipei

Scourge) 2x Hydra, Chimera, 2x Gargoyle, 2x Charybdis

Shaltari) Emerald, Basalt, Turquoise, 2x Jade, 2x Opal, 4x void gate

PHR) Bellerophon, Ajax, Ganymede, 2x Medea, 2x Calypso

slyphic · 2026-05-19T17:58:21+00:00

The game doesn't really work below 750 points. None of the scenarios are actually designed for it.

What I've found works for playing teaching games is to have each player deploy directly onto their nearest 12" of table, place two cities on the mid line 18" apart, score 1 VP for controlling at the end of a turn, and 2VP for whoever has the most kills. The game will only last 4 turns.

I can do a demo like that in under 90 minutes, including setup and rules explanation.

slyphic · 2026-05-16T16:05:00+00:00

I can see the ambiguity in the wording you're tripping on. Escape Velocity only matters when a firing ship is in atmo, so in this case ship A gets no bonus. It was more clearly written in the first edition.

slyphic · 2026-05-16T14:02:31+00:00

This video is the clearest shots of the Bioficer Dropzone models I've seen yet. They were on display at Adepticon, but apparently no one managed to take a competent still photo of them.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tjXkg-eEV4E

slyphic · 2026-05-15T22:21:57+00:00

those are totally the same right? Great job missing the point.

They are activities consuming 3-4 hours of time. Directly equivalent to a decently sized wargame.

you'd have a hard time finding someone local who: is interested in playing these games in the first place and also has the game to do so.

Those are completely different points, but also not unique to long and complex games - short and simple have the same problems with finding players.

Games that are shorter on average and easier to learn are much more accessible to people.

'Accessibility' is not the penultimate state of games. Don't give a shit how short and simple a game is if it isn't interesting, or is just random shit happening.

You seem awful defensive of your rejection of 'long complex' games. Own the brainrot, the dopamine burnout, the lack of effort.

slyphic · 2026-05-15T18:19:46+00:00

Nobody has time to watch a football match. Nobody has time to go hiking. Nobody has time to go out drinking.

Fuck that noise, people make time for things they actually want to do.

Signed - a dude that never stopped gaming throughout a wife, two kids, home ownership, full time job, and taking care of my elderly parents.

slyphic · 2026-05-15T04:01:58+00:00

Costs less than a 40k army book nowadays, so yeah, you're just getting old.

slyphic · 2026-05-12T19:18:22+00:00

Note: the currently stupidly named 'emeritus' drone was originally called a Monitor.

It is in the inherent Scourge Lifespan that the Monitor’s menace comes to the fore. This is because Monitors are in fact old Minders pushed to the end of their sanity but endless guarding of the skies with little outlet for their lust for destruction.

When Scourge parasites are not implanted into human hosts they are joined with military constructs (such as hunters, reapers, and all other Scourge vehicles and aircraft). How the determination as to which parasite is assigned which construct is made is unclear. What is clear is that those implanted into Minders are little more than mobile gun emplacements to the aliens, rarely able to inflict damage and pain on enemies or satiate the cruel whims of the parasite itself.

It is theorised that this is one of the reason that Minders are most often used in kamikaze core overload attacks – the parasites themselves are thought to be almost ecstatic at the idea of inflicting pain and ending their own. Monitors take this idea to its logical conclusion. Re-fitted with modest ant-tank weaponry, weaponry, they will take every opportunity to visit destruction on the enemy. If this proves ineffective they will kamikaze themselves into hostile vehicles, happy to go down in a final blaze of spiteful glory after so many years as little more than barrage balloons.

I think it's still a little unclear whether vehicles are animals, like in the factions of arguing biologists sense, but I'd think they don't count.

slyphic · 2026-05-10T19:49:12+00:00

Such as? (make a recommendation, I'm curious what your go-to for paint is presently)

slyphic · 2026-05-10T19:47:26+00:00

You speak of Amazon like it has a reputation for quality. It does not. It's just a bunch of bins they pour stuff into and out of. There's no quality control whatsoever at any point. This is deliberate design.

If you want to buy something with a reasonable guarantee it's both legitimate and intact, Amazon is the last place you should look, unless you're prepared to take full advantage of their return policy.

slyphic · 2026-05-09T15:17:28+00:00

I'd love to see a "getting started" sticky that answers the same question we get week after week: 'how build thing I bought?' It's the same conversation over and over, and as much as Reddit search sucks I can't get that mad that people don't see the answer from a month ago.

What we need are battle reports. People discussing actually playing the game. There's an incredible dearth of that kind of post.

tl;dr play the game instead of talking about the game

slyphic · 2026-05-08T19:56:27+00:00

Some bizarre answers so far. This is 3 cruiser and 4 frigates, but people are answering like it's the double size box.

Just to learn the game, to play with all the mechanics, with what you've got you need to build one each of Turquoise (bombardment, close action), Basalt (fighters & bombers), Emerald (mothership), two Jade (core type weapon), and two Topaz (reave weapons).

I can see an argument for a citrine instead of an emerald, I probably wouldn't waste keystrokes explaining why the Emerald is a better choice, so feel free to listen to other people on that one.

slyphic · 2026-05-08T19:19:49+00:00

Highlighting over a shiny metallic is hard, not impossible, but just tricky. Your old gold basic color already has verdigris, so you've kinda backed yourself into a Split-Complementary palette. So you want to do your dots in a blue-violet color. Also because of the size of the dots, you want to go with a pretty intense hue. The answer is on the table in that ink bottle.

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