Wednesday, July 9, 2008

AT-43 News: another Frostbite preview

Hey everyone,

The latest update from Rackham is a doozy with lots of great stuff in it. First is the new faction for the Red Blok, the GenCol. For those of you that don't know, this group is actually mentioned in the RB Army book and they are responsible for everyone's favorite clones, Odin and Manon. So what does the faction look like? For their advantage they can field several copies of the same hero and they can ignore the limitations on officers. Wanna field two Urods? Knock yourself out!

Their disadvantage is that any unit that does not have an officer is eliminated as soon as the player doesn't spend LPs to activate it. I have to admit that I am not too sure how this is really a disadvantage; I have never seen a RB army with so few LPs that it could not activate all of its units twice in one turn if they wanted to, but time will tell.

As an added bonus, GenCol also has access to bacteriological grenades. There are effectively a locked damage weapon, causing two points of damage on a 5+ regardless of armor. Talk about packing a nasty punch!

Now when I first saw this the first thing that came to my mind was "Oh my god is that broken!" but after giving it some more serious thought, my opinion has changed. Yes, the idea of fielding two Urods is sick but then again so is the cost. That is over 1100 points in two minis, which is about enough for me to field a couple of units of Bane Goliaths and an Incubus with v2.0 nucleus cannons, or for a Karman player to field four Easy trikes. So while it first struck me as just wrong, it really is not that bad once you stop and think about it.

As for the grenades, these also are not as bad as they first sounded to me. A 5+ damage test against everything is pretty potent but they have to hit first and with an accuracy of 1, it will make it tricky to say the least.

Well, that is it for now but come back soon for the first of the preview pics of the Cogs and ONI plus some wild speculation on all of them. Until next time, may all of your dice come up Dragons!

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