Book of Heavy Metal

Hello everybody!

So last week I received my copy of the Mechanicum "Red Book" with the heresy stuff put all together in a nice and organised way and not having to have all 5 books breaking your back. Now whilst this news pleases me greatly, you will see later why this book has somewhat upset me.

Firstly, let me go through some of the good things:

1. Soooooooooo pretty

I mean look at it! One thing I am a massive fan of is how Forgeworld make their books, they are sturdy, beautiful and usually quite organised. In addition to this I am so happy they keep the old school layout of units and upgrades for armies like how 40k used to be until they all became "datasheets" and "formations". Along with all the artwork this book is just a lovely thing to flick through as you are building your army of killer robots. Speaking of which....

2. Cybernetica rules!

I love robots, and having an army of purely robots was what drew me to Mechanicum in the first place. Now before this book came out there was the Legio Cybernetica element from book 2 that basically turned Castellax into compulsory troops and not a whole lot else. Now with this book they have made their Magos on par with the regular ones, along with giving them some specific rules and buffs, which I enjoy greatly.

Ok, now the bad things about the book:

1. Points changes

Grrrrrrrr!!!! Now I understand that  a whole lot of people believe that this is in aid of balancing out what was considered a very powerful army but it still upsets me. The biggest sting is that my beautiful Castellax are now 20pts more each, meaning my units are now 60-80pts more expensive. Thanatars are also more expensive in being 10pts more which isn't so much of an impact as I obviously don't run as many but still. It is a fairly obvious ploy to make people use some of the other things as Castellax were extremely powerful at a troops choice but come on! I have a Throne of Skulls event in a fortnight and you are throwing my testing and army building in a complete loop.

2. More robot hate

Now the previous part upset me, it did, really. It upsets me but I could deal with it as I can tweak some things and move on. But this part as well REALLY upset me to the point of coming cloe to just dropping out of the Throne of Skulls event altogether. Basically from this point forward any Automata cannot claim objectives...ever. I have an army of robots! So essentially I now have a choice, do I want to play with my robots and hope I don't pull any objectives that involve capturing? Or do I take Thallax a bunch instead? I don't dislike Thallax, but they aren't proper robots. I wanted my whole army to be on 60mm bases or larger damnit!

So overall I am slightly annoyed with the book, and as said earlier this is an obvious ploy to get people to play a more varied and spicy Mechanicum deck. It is trying to make you play Tech Thralls, Thallax and Scyllax as your troop choices and I understand that, doesn't mean I have to like it.

There we go, rant over, the soapbox can go sit in the corner again and I will go back to my cheery disposition.

Next post is something very....very special. Some folks know what this is going to be of as I have been waiting so long to be able to post about this.

But until then, take care everybody!

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