 All right. Hello everybody! If it's Wednesday it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for a slightly early edition of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me as always is my co-host Tom. What's up buddy? How you doing? Hello friends. Also joining us this week for the first time, very happy to finally have him on. He's a celebrity in his own right and I'm glad that he's dain to join us today. Mr. Owen Jackson, how you doing brother? I'm very well. Yeah, really excited to have a chat with you guys. This is an institution of Warhammer and I'm blessing you with my presents. Oh and Jackson's here! Oh and Jackson! I get this often. Oh and Jackson! Welcome to Warhammer Weekly! Oh and Jackson's here! Oh and Jackson! With the original Warhammer Weekly! Wow! It's going to be a crazy show! Hi. Yes. All right so yes as you can see there's a lot of excitement for sure. Absolutely. And uh and we're going to be talking about TTS today. Uh so... Hit like and subscribe! Hit like and hit like and subscribe. Apparently that's A. Stop. Hit like and subscribe. Okay. All right well there we go. Is it energetic opening? All right well as you can see oh and lots of people the excitement is just spreading. Uh we're going to be talking about TTS today. Tabletop simulator for those not in the know of the acronym. Very excited but of course first let's get into some news. Tommy what do we got? Uh it's beautiful. Well we're going to skip the rumor engine because it's just 40k nonsense so whatever fine. Yes um and we're going to talk about the thing that actually is is the story here um actually yeah. Uh can I just talk I don't care about the reveal event like that's fine. Sure. I just want to talk about like her city for like ever. Yeah I understand you're very excited about this. Well well let's do this before we try before we get into it let's let's do this. Oh and what's your take on all the reveals including cursed city but anything that they revealed this weekend is dead in the divine. What did you think of everything? I think it's great that we're all the people that collect those armies uh are getting some new stuff. I think you know there's conversations around um you know the the way in which the luminet has been released but we all want new stuff. We all want to be excited. We all want to be you know enthused about potentially buying that unit and thinking about what its force course is going to be like. I mean how far are the uh the Roo riders going to be moving they're going to be moving 16 inches 18 inches with a pseudo fly maybe you know that's pretty exciting um and uh yeah and I'm concerned about the arches though because they've only got one string so is that a 10 inch range because the three strings is 30 inch range. That's exactly how the math works you've nailed it. That's how they do it right um it's it's 20 inches and then five for every additional string. No no it's it's it's a diminishing utility by half okay so like basically the first one seven inch both well yeah the first one is like uh what 18 inches and then that's not quite right but you get what I'm saying right the first one would be like 17 and then 25 and a half and then the four and a half left or whatever like that's how it would work everyone is adding half of the previous one it's like a reverse Fibonacci sequence or something. So yeah that's exciting um and then yeah uh I kind of I'm fanboying on on on Cursed City uh along with along with you both um I kind of thought that uh you know Quest was was a pretty solid pick by you guys uh you know a good shout out there. I know Tom was Tom was basking in the glory of his his foresight. I mean that was just complete luck like to be very clear like there was no inside information there there was no actual like rumors or anything. I was like you know what let's go Warhammer Quest. We haven't seen one of those in a while Blackstone Fortress is wrapping up. Sure that's what we're doing. Yeah I mean I'm yeah I'm not surprised they've gone for like a very horror-esque sort of aesthetic you know you see how popular the horror you know uh sort of movies and and series are on Netflix and what have you it's you know it's a prevalent sort of cultural uh sort of subject matter isn't it and then you'd look about Dracula and vampires and oh two three years ago somebody watched the Castlevania series on Netflix and was like I've got an idea. Well no I mean so two years ago we actually had a Warhammer Quest rumor um that leaked out. I mean I would assume it's actually probably had a uh a kernel of truth in it that the next Warhammer Quest we were going to have was going to be undead based. Sure um and I mean and this was like right around the release of uh Soul Wars. Yeah like so this was like the summer of 18. So um I suspect that that may have been a like a legitimate leak um that you know they were really early in the development phase for the next Warhammer Quest um for like what they're gonna do with the AOS version because they had already turned their attention to um to to 40k to Blackstone at that point. So um I just I am so stoked for this thing like I it cannot come soon enough other than I have projects that like as soon as it comes like I'm gonna immediately just divert all my attention to painting those bottles. So that's gonna so I probably need to get these done first. But uh I'm really excited. Yeah man me and you both and you too as well I'm sure Vince right? 100% yeah I'm in for all this vampire stuff. I'm excited you know Smashbat had my attention for a little while not gonna lie. Can Smashbat smash that is a question that that we all should be asking. The answer most of the time is yes. Yes it's always yes. Yes he can. Can Smashbat smash that yes he can. And I really liked it and I thought about doing it as like a 24 hour army paint because I think you easily could. I think flesh eaters are you know a perfect army for that kind of nonsense. But the problem is is that I really hated the Vargulf but he's kind of the centerpiece. I wanted you know I needed like three cool models to be three cool Vargulfs because that's everything else can just be junk nonsense because who cares. I don't I don't care if my Vargys don't look cool or or whatever Vargys or whatever you know what I'm saying. My Crypt Flayers there we go. Don't look cool because who cares right. But in the end there's just like I could not stand the old existing Vargulf model and there was just there's just not really anything that caught my eye as a replacement because it's such a weird model. This sort of Wolfen vampire he's bigger than an ogre but smaller than like the normal centerpieces. He's just in this very weird space that there's not a lot of others out there and I looked at all over the place. A lot of people make great suggestions demon demon prince ask space. Yeah yeah sure yes but anyways I'm honestly here's my hope that we get a model in this that kind of fits for it because I wonder if one of the bad guys doesn't end up the big wolf maybe central guy maybe if he has like his his final form or Vargulf uh-huh yeah because he's like a feral form kind of thing yeah like he's a very feral wolf and vampire or something I mean you know they don't curse so uh but let's talk about this cover that I've got up on the screen uh oh and unless you've got the show up live you won't know what I'm talking about because you can't see it but I just have the cover of Cursed City. Yeah I know the artwork I've inspected it in detail we're good we're good man all right all right my palace so first thing first thing on a draw everybody's first you can clearly see the KO here so that's just number one and they talked in uh the lore there was a nice little lore bit that got shared around talking about this particular Barak that had started developing anti like ghostbuster weapons I know no other way to say it they they developed ghostbuster weapons like grenades and carbines and stuff they made to kill their real weapons yes yes which is fantastic I love that they're they're like well we gotta so which by the way the whole reason ghostbusters is cool is because well not only is it like one of the funniest movies ever made but it's also a great take on like meeting the supernatural and just defeating it with like blue collar working technology like it's just blue collar guys doing work and they beat it with technology they don't do any supernatural stuff right there there's not like one of the ghostbusters isn't a spellcaster no they don't call in Constantine they're like they're like no we'll just shoot them although I would I would say that if they don't have one of like a clockwork ghost catcher sort of Dwarden clockwork brass ghost catcher they throw down I'm out I'm out of this opportunity he better have a thing on his belt that's yeah like clearly some kind of like tossed grenade with a cable yeah where he just steps on it on a button uh and so so happy to see that guy and you can see the witch hunter there as well which we've seen lots of introductions for they gave us his background story which was super cool uh but back here we have this blind priestess lady which looks awesome and is also a rumor engine her staff is the the you can see from the artwork this is the staff that we had seen like the top of one of the rumor engines staff pictures uh but this figure up front here which is like the warrior woman uh who is clearly like sort of leading this particular yeah yeah she's got this big lion pelt on her shoulders and yeah absolutely I'm really hoping this is a warrior woman of a DASA like this is the coolest bit of story I read about when I read about it in uh soulbound and soulbound and I really want to see them bring that to life so she has a big giant sword check she's got big lion pelt on check okay tell us about the warrior woman of the DASA the DASA is a very old city in uh Akshi it dates back to the age of myth it's on a major trade road going south from anvil guard and to connecting to other cities and it has connections to hammer hall and to anvil guard into lots of the other big cities uh the um the main defense force of EDSA E-D-A-S-S-A if you want to look this stuff up it's in the soulbound book and in some other places um is the the warrior women of EDSA who must go out and kill the the lions like the fire main lions or whatever something some name like that that roam the the river wastes around the city and they have to defeat it in hand to hand combat and then slay it and take its pelt uh which by the way feels a very white lion story like white lions had a very similar sort of ethos right had to go out and you had to kill the the white lions or whatever tame one slay one whatever I don't remember and uh yeah thank you it was also in I think one of the go track novels as well I want to point out to the audience I'm going to interrupt you right here because I know that you can go on for five more minutes sure the reality the reality is this um Vince didn't know that I was going to ask him about the warrior women of EDSA like from like to unpack that that was all extemporaneous sure from when he read about them because he was interested in like this is not a bit folks no I like I just about this but I knew but I knew that it was something that when you're playing in the soulbound that he was super into and so I was like why don't you tell us about that Vince yeah so I'm hoping that's what she is yeah so it's just it's great stuff they're they're traditionally like the the culture is they they see Sigmar as a big lion headed god so it's like Sigmar in his armor but he has the head of a lion and they integrate a lot of sigmarian type teachings into the so they have a mix of like worshiping the comet and stuff like that with lions and things like that anyways it's great uh I hope that's what it is I think it's super cool so I'm excited for that big I'm excited for all these figs I can't wait to see these are two more heroes so we know we've also got probably the big ogre guy and then the kurnathi so there's still two more that we have no idea what they are since there's eight total um yeah may I ask a question of you both yeah have you played Blackstone Fortress I never played Blackstone I played plenty of warhammer quest that they're the first one the silver tower I planned on it like I actually bought the stl files to print my own tiles and I was going to buy like all of the Blackstone stuff and then I heard they were wrapping it up and I'm like oh well no I'll wait that they're going to return back to AOS at some point and they did so I think the the thing that excites me about it is the fact that uh sort of tied into Blackstone and I didn't play silver tower or hammer hall but so I was kind of fresh into this straight Blackstone but they they they very much tied into the story had how you had disparate characters which in the normal life would be sworn enemies and how they then team up uh for a common cause so I think I love the idea that they would have a destruction faction figure and perhaps a maybe a chaos light figure if you know what I mean like a chaotic figure that perhaps is sort of the dark barbarian was yes you know he was he's a chaos dude but he was still in here like you know chopping it up next to a stormcast hero or something so yeah yeah it's interesting I'm hoping that they learn their lesson from hammer hall so like because like my kids have been without us knowing about this launch my kids were bothering me to play silver tower and the warning request so we've been like rolling a bunch of dice and playing here at the house and so we're getting ready to do hammer hall and I've loved digging through into the hammer hall material because like there's a whole system of like things to do when you're not adventuring so you can like gamble and wrestle and pit fight and you can do all of the things and that does stuff for you and you can earn things and renown and items and all that outside of actually like dungeon adventuring there's a huge host of like like side questy like and it's very reminiscent of hero quest where like you'd go and like they had like all the stuff that you would buy from the city like you're doing all of that shopping and you can also do these like little side interval things and like whenever you return to town you would roll on an event chart like there's a d66 event chart through those there's like different festivals and a bunch of other stuff that's like in world sometimes that have mechanical influences sometimes it was just a really interesting like story beat about hammer hall and that was all in shadows so like I'm hoping that it is as as involved with cursed city as it was with hammer hall yeah what I'll say is I think that what's cool about cursed city is I want to see them do the same thing with Blackstone fortress where they used it to explore interesting corners of the universe that we would never get a whole army of so like the AI machine man who can actually be taken in like an adeptus mechanicals force or the zote stuff like that I would love to see those kinds of people get figures that's why I'm hoping for like the warrior woman of a dosa type that that's what this is because we're never going to get in a Dawson force right like I mean I guess maybe somewhere down the line wouldn't that be neat if we had some kind of a dogs of war or something and it had those minor forces but it's a good chance to to explore those concepts there's so many cool ideas that have been talked about in the books that honestly you're not gonna like okay here's a simple example we talk about stuff like grot bag scuttlers all the time maybe they'll eventually do that but I doubt we're gonna print a whole second goblin army that's just like goblins but they also fly you know or they also have boats like well I'd love it I'd love it but you know hey we have the goba palooza right sure we do he's got I mean the key is is we just need a re like another version of the grot book which is coming I mean like the reality is it's like we're we're on a clock with that book we're at two years it's one of our older books um and like there if you're talking about directions of design you know like the place that they can go is in the spiders yeah look I sure my point is that like it's gonna be a chance to to scratch the itch of individualized smaller items within the world and and bring those characters to life or those little stories so anyways this is an occur city show so let's not tarry here too long it could be events it could be oh we could be here I understand but I'm sure we'll get a lot more information in the coming weeks and I am very excited about all these minis so we do know there's eight heroes coming in the box yes as I said there's two unannounced because you've got blind priestess and warrior woman here these two and then over at karnathi so yeah two more than that so excited okay I'm also excited for those bad guys because there's five there's four more bad guys to reveal too yeah yeah um I mean what I'll say is this big about the reveals I will just mention it because I ought to mention it uh regarding the reveals um I like first I want to point everybody back to our show that we did yeah we did do a full reaction show on this yeah so if you guys want to know vince and ice takes um for regarding the lumen f it's fine there you go some people are wondering it's fine yeah I'm glad people got their foxes sure there you go uh all right cool I think I think we've touched everything out of there I am excited to pick up my first death army if eventually if the rest of the vampires that come out in soul-blind grave lords look like the vampires we've seen so far uh are you gonna are you gonna do an army yeah vampire I mean if they look as cool I'm definitely picking up that underworld warband and if what releases for the rest of the vampire stuff looks as cool as what we seem to be getting here in cursed city or what we've seen in that underworld there's no way I wouldn't buy that you want your castlevania army I'll buy I'll buy yes or or halloween town the army yeah sure so so here's the question vince yeah man when we go to have it later this year is just the answer we build we build the castlevania castle as our board like that is the board it's a pretty good board but it's something to discuss and then we just do a vampire we we just do like so really the castle is a tiny bottom and then it goes like right like do we just build that and then do our uh sure and get well just so you sold your 3d printer tom we got it we could have had done some work there but no we know if you the view isn't gonna hold you this to this now tom so you'd be careful throwing out ideas yeah grand vision you know people yeah all right uh there's one there's uh we got a new uh I know the next or good with a new next use item I think I know what you're gonna say next but I'll wait I'll let you do your job assuming you actually brought the news up which I'm getting seeing you forgot to do no I totally did we we got a new broken realms fiction gotcha that's right yes we did have over yeah okay have over to the to the to the news it's awesome and we we're clearly getting the it's it's all from the point of view of scraggrat by the way did you get a chance to read it no one I have not no I'm afraid not too busy organizing tournaments I'm afraid oh it's a likely story no it's a it's a good short story it's fun scraggrat gets gets himself caught up because he's brought all of his you know how scraggrat keeps all the mystical seers and stuff down in his cave and hops them up on mushrooms until they die and then he extracts visions from them right yep like we all do sure like you like you do and he so he's brought with him so he's part of the big war that gordrack is leading heading across to excelsis of course and uh he but knowing that he wouldn't have any of his seers he brought a bunch of them with him in a cage and one of them like is clearly actually possessed by like a zinge demon and so spits out the line that is now been repeated over and over again that is clear like it showed up in multiple stories and it's clearly like the line that if you that that is meant to be the sort of prophecy that that opens everything up I guess is what I would say like it's the central theme of this whole this whole story okay uh so I will actually bring up the specific line for you here uh the line he gets yelled at uh is where does he have it uh oh gosh darn it there uh you see so this is this is the zinge sorcerer speaking to scragrod and he says you seek prophecy wretch you go to your death the gate will shatter the earth will tear the sky shall eat the storm and the serpents tide will rise the changers riddle is born anew by the splitting mirror of the dark prince and this this is the second time you've seen this sort of prophecy this exact text come out so lots of fun things to theorize on their serpents tide that feels feels like marathi and the idnet right serpent tide okay that kind of combination there um the gate will shatter seems to be a reference to the the gate to azir the earth will tear probably referencing the whole broken realms thing uh the sky shall eat the storm uh feels like not a great time for sigmar probably who is the storm bringer of the storm god bad weather day by the sands of avans yes so is the sky the the seraphon i don't know or is it the luminous uh i i have no idea i don't know because that's the thing they keep it pretty oh they keep like all silly prophecies like that they get put in stuff it's very open ended but there you go that's like the third time i think it's been repeated in these stories from different the mouth of different characters so you know and clearly it has to do with like slanish and stuff like that so zinge seems to be really busy well he's got a lot of plans within plans you know that's all the dude does he's just just making plans he's got the longest list right vince that guy like you know nothing on my shopping list but yeah that guy he's just he's always got he's always up to something mm-hmm yeah uh i don't know that any of it ever comes to any fruition he's a bit like uh apocalypse in the x-men universe he has like five thousand years for his ultimate plan and it comes to nothing so uh he's also blue they're both losers i guess everybody if you're if you're a blue villain get out of here i guess um so yeah cool stuff uh good it was good short fiction and scraggie beats him to death with a giant moon so amazing so gets players around the world right everyone's happy yeah yeah so it's fun uh yeah and then the last big piece of news which you know i think this is we weren't going to get out of this discussion so you may have heard this week that the winter f aq dropped i feel like a few people have been discussing it indeed that's it i don't know what you're talking about man haven't really heard much about it people have been pretty uh restrained as they go through it i think the the most frequently asked question is where the hell is it i think that was the main thing right indeed and now we have it um be careful what you wish for uh yeah i mean i'm not going to do a two-hour bit of satire like uh like rob did on his show uh i literally typed in the chat 20 minutes into it this is why no one likes british humor it was glorious though the way they kept going yeah oh my god it was like that horse was beaten into adams uh yeah what do you think vince yeah well well hold on i want to i want to i'll i'll i'll i have an answer but i want to let i want to let you guys go first i don't want to i don't want to go first here i don't want to color anything because i've i've been thinking about this for a while so but as i'm sure we all have uh tom i'll let you go first tom can jump on this grenade first sure i'll jump on grenades um i mean what i'll say is this initially i was like whatever like like it's just i was so just dismissive of it because um um because in general it doesn't have like so many people aren't playing and aren't playing competitively like we just you know it's just it's not that big of a deal and then i went to look at night haunt points and realized that they had uploaded the wrong old pdf i'm just laughing i'm just laughing at rob who said i'm no coward i committed you did commit to that bit that is maybe the greatest longest commit to satire in the history of satire anyway please continue tom no worries so like and i realized they had uploaded the old pdf and i went and looked at my fireslayer and and so the points had reverted back to the old ones and all the points changes weren't marked so it was truly like the wrong document got uploaded yeah yeah sure sure i mean the data been changed but they used the wrong table yes right and then i looked at fireslayers and it was the same thing and i was like i was okay being apathetic when it was just like okay we didn't want to do work sure when it went when the motivation is is you know what there's not enough people playing we're just not going to update these points we're not going to take the data that's out there we're not going to like we're not going to honor those things and we're just going to wait until things kick back off so when it was just being lazy i was it i was like whatever it's excusable i can respect you know some some good some good slaw we've all got stuff going on sure we do everybody does but uh when it's the wrong documents like so they didn't even upload the right things of what got uploaded sure of the very little that changed yes yeah that's when i'm like if you had done nothing it would have been better for some of these armies literally because the points would have at least been right sure well and i assume those are going to be fixed or those aren't the real points or whatever so yeah sure who knows oh and what were your what were your thoughts yeah just kind of disappointed really i mean the the general there was obviously a lot of people who are upset but it all just comes from a place of love right we love this game yeah and i don't think that the uh you know it's a bit like they could have just doffed their cap to the community and just been a little bit like okay we haven't got time to put in place the full implementation of all the rules that are all the changes that that are needed to balance the game correctly and there is obviously some credence to the argument or to the point that there aren't as many games going on as normal and i understand that they won't want to validate what's happening on tabletop simulator because essentially it is an infringement of their copyright so why would they validate something which right right there is a counter argument to that which is they've made record profits so the argument that tts is stopping people from buying miniatures but that's a side we can maybe talk about that later but um but just just to be like hey you know we can tell that eels uh the mosa guard have needed you know a tweak you know for a long time and we you know we hear you on on croak there hasn't been that much okay that many games played but for him to come in at the same points that drake a hammer dress was released at 320 okay so those are equivalent models in utility yeah sure yeah yeah um you know um i just felt that it would have been nice to just go we can't give you the full package uh but we're gonna we're gonna address these these these headline issues just because we know that that's gonna make people's the people that can play that's gonna make their games better um but yeah it was yeah but just just to to do what they did like i think even nothing also like they need to learn from politicians right why didn't they do the feq on the friday and then the day after go look at all this new stuff get excited about this whereas they built us all up and we were like you know the dock battle tome the morathe book was fantastic look at these changes they are listening they are doing it we're in this is great and then they just serve up the biggest wet far ever it's just oh yeah but i'm i care about the game and i want them to know that it's coming from a place of love and i'm not angry with them it's just disappointing right and also if you look at the situation we're in outside of the game we need a little bit of joy we need a little bit of excitement we need to get the old hobby juices going right and there's nothing like knowing that the army and the units that you love like some eternal guard i'd love to look to run some eternal guard you know give us some some cuts on those and i'm gonna finish my block of 30 eternal guard but i'm not gonna touch those models now that i know that they don't seem to be cared on the things happening about them you know yeah that's kind of you know it's just that feeling a little bit of you know just just disappointment i think that would be my my headline i think that's what it says on my notes bad communication disappointment give us something to show they care about that part of the community because i know that we're a small part of the community right the competitive scene who care about these sorts of things but that doesn't mean that we we should be ignored that's kind of my overall thoughts yeah i think you're both i think you're both very much on point there i think the i'm not angry but i'm disappointed is exactly the correct summation right i because in the end when i think about this here's here's sort of the summation of thoughts i would have on it one you committed to doing this we didn't force you to do it you said you're going to do this and you published it out and said this is the commitment we're making okay fine now if the reason you didn't do it this time is because well first of all it's not because you don't have enough data there are lots of games being played in other parts of the world that are safer and there are tons of games on tts we'll talk about why tts is perfectly valid as a data source that needs to be taken by the grain of salt but it's still valid they can use that in the background they don't need to be validating it directly like in in some way like we used it they don't need to be publishing in the article we used 7 000 tts games or 50 000 tts games they can still use it but three there's also just common sense right they have their own internal and external feedback mechanisms like that is to say there are play testers and they play the game and there are people who inside and there are people who are online like us talking about things every week they can look at tournaments and see that the same lists are happening over and over and over again like it doesn't i don't need data to the nth degree of statistical significance to make some inferences and if they had said i'd want to take a lighter touch i would have been great i would have said yeah that's the right answer be conservative right uh so one we have this commitment issue you said that you made a commitment you decided not to do it and your reason for not doing it isn't it doesn't hold water now if the real reason for doing it was because well we don't want to cause a lot of shake-ups when we're about to release four broken realms books where we're going to do a lot of the the work we you know about this and we're also about to go to aos 3.0 in the summer that's all fine i have no issue with that then you could have just hit you could have been super light touch with it done only you know maybe touched a few of the worst offenders and then in the communication strategy and ultimately this is my largest complaint it's the communication strategy right because what should have happened is you could have done nothing let's even say and put out we know that there are some competitive challenges in the game right now right we're aware of those however over the next five months we will be rolling out four additional broken realms books uh that are going to have that are going to that we're going to help and focus on armies like silvanet beast of chaos and and you know whatever right and the blades of corn to make sure that these armies have fun new and exciting ways to play that are not only competitive but narratively fulfilling and interesting and they wouldn't have had to say anything more than that i don't need to know which the books those are going to be in i don't need to know when they're coming out they can end that with stay tuned here at warhammer community as we continue to show you more of these books that are coming we're committed to improving your game experience over the months to come and and this is the vehicle we're going to do it in great all it would have taken like i'm on board for that because honestly a lot of people who play this game don't look at the FAQs okay it's true it's true like i had but in my saturday group the number of times somebody's been like oh i'm gonna do this thing i'll be like now you can't do that thing that's it's in the FAQ i got changed they don't read the FAQs they don't care sure and there's plenty of people who are like that right so if the better vehicle but but those players know about marathi okay like they're aware that broken realms marathi came out and they own that book right because that was a release they were excited it did cool stuff it touched their armies so if that's going to be the vehicle to make changes i'm okay with that as an excuse here right because hey we're about to release this whole thing and it's going to make big changes so changing stuff now it's just going to be it's just going to cause you know tumult in a way that will be actually a negative a net negative to the game fine say that you can say we're going to change we're getting there be patient yeah exactly like just the communication strategies ultimately let me down and when they started hyping this they should have said that weeks ago by the by not now that should have been the statement to set it up weeks ago this FAQ weeks ago when they talked about it when they released the 40k winner something they should have put out a separate article saying on the AOS FAQ this one will not contain points here's the explanation why yada yada yada everything i just said yeah okay and then what comes out in the FAQ we all expect it we're like okay great cool it's yeah you've got expectations yeah okay great and and sure would there still have been some people who are angry on the internet yes of course there's always going to be people but the reaction would have been you can't get rid of the again the internet's all binomial right like the discussion is only it tends to get down to like best thing ever worst thing ever it's not that this wasn't the worst thing ever not even close okay but it was there were certainly opportunities for improvement there in both the communication strategy in what was ultimately executed on and what was delivered okay because we could have helped some armies that are suffering and brought them up we could have adjusted some of the worst performers i i played a game this last weekend it was a team game but my my opponents the team was one person playing the all squig army like the squig battalion and the whole squig army and the other person was playing an all lrl army and the squig player was dead at the top of two and the lrl player didn't die until the end of round five okay and this the squig player was like why do you have so many rules why are they all so good right okay like everybody like he was flabbergasted at what the lrl player was saying they could do okay so there's just some armies that aren't gonna like they just don't you know like they could have paid as much as everybody else does and the design space is different and again i'm not asking my ultimate pushback is never that we should be aiming for competitive perfection that's nonsense that's chasing a dragon the the competitive tip that we sit in the reality is we they shouldn't be paying a huge amount of attention to us sorry like no they should pay a little because we're going to point out issues quicker than the casual people will find them but ultimately we're not what makes them money okay but that doesn't mean that you completely ignore it either it means that it's a source of data you should balance and when you've got things way out of whack like croak and skinks and things that they do in fangs of sotek and stuff like that when you've got that kind of stuff going on that's a challenge right and you can rein in these these high things help some of the lower people and open up play options that's what keeps the majority of your player base happy which by the way just to pivot this to end on a positive the coolest thing about the faq was the idolaters change where man it was so good and can now get more of the idolater lord this was great this was a great change and it's like baby it's back sure okay i have i have an interesting thought on that but you you carry on then so i'll tell you at the end you're fine so my my thought is not and i by the way i i see your comment i i don't think they only look at sales i don't think that's true i think they listen to a lot of different things i think they have their own ideas about what they're doing and like normal humans they're trying to balance a lot of stuff like as somebody who this is my professional life like i am a product manager and i lead the development of a very massive very complicated project and product sweet i can tell you that like when people complain to me i hear it that it's not only revenue that drives everything you do like that's life right and that's true for all of product management if you go to every product management seminar i've ever been to every training class i've ever taken revenue is is discussed and it's a very minimal part of what you overall use to shape your product roadmap nonetheless you still have challenges in delivering okay nobody cares about my professional life so the the idolater thing was great and if we're going to make those kinds of changes that's cool i love that stuff of adding in that kind of work right thing why didn't we do that with other things right like like why why did we decide that's the vehicle to do the idolater change right but not to add like a magic item table to the idolaters right or a battalion to hark your maybe that's part of their balance or mishobbin sorry so you can have more narcotics than one maybe they're the absence of items as part of the balancing of idolaters yeah i don't i don't know but no it's the balance if we didn't want use another page and had nothing else to put on there right and the the point is is that like it's a weird vehicle to do that i'm thrilled they did it was cool that's a cool change it opens up a really cool set of armies for that right uh and i think that's great i was so excited to see that change because it's cool armies it's a lot of people that i think are going to be really excited to have it and don't worry doug i see doug saying we're talking about the faq don't worry doug this is the civil rational conversation about it and we'll be done quick stick around doug we love you hopefully still here uh so i think that's the kind of stuff that i'd love to see honestly that was the type of stuff i'd love to see them do more of in these faqs because i ultimately don't think that's a super competitive thing that got introduced maybe there's some competitive list maybe there's not we can have that discussion another time but it certainly opens up a lot of people who are real excited to build an army and that's what i care about every time more than anything else opening up more interesting ways that people are jazzed to build armies is the way they succeed financially and making us happy yeah periods right those are all my thoughts on i just had two things vince uh one thing about the competitive scene being such a small factor in the overall picture and and and as a competitive player i fully appreciate that but i think the the way that the competitive scene and the players and the clubs and everybody when we within 24 hours of the feqs or a developments in the game coming out we's we we sniper zone in on those issues don't we and it's not for just for us it's for the guys at the shop and the girls at the shop who go in and they have a crap first game because some broken thing that their friend brought that they didn't know was broken because it's just the models they like they you know they hose off their opponent in two turns and yeah you have a crap time right yeah so i think that the argument that we're such a small part of the community is valid but i think that we watched the backs of everybody else so we all have a good time playing warhammer right i think i think that's correct yeah we can be it's it's good competitive players we've seen is like a lighthouse right like it's cool we can help we can we can warn you when you're about to crash into some rocks but it's not that our concern should drive everything because that's certainly not correct yeah yeah we're we're good at spotting problems not always the best at finding solutions correct also there's a tiny bit of irony with the idolators changes in that the they're not using tts data to drive their decisions but they've created an environment where you get the most tts army ever in like 150 uh three up re-rollable save plague touched iron golems you know we're all so good together yeah you're gonna see a lot of iron golems sitting the table that box is gonna is gonna is gonna be uh seen at tournaments frequently i suspect yes we'll see we'll see how good it is i know tom's already had his three aim list of madness but yeah i posted it last night at 3am and doom was like it's beautiful that's like yep uh so uh at any rate that's that's the faq um one thing i'll close out with is um i know some people were talking about points changes and should we do player comp and should we do player point changes no no put that idea away simon you're a great person awesome player no like no just a thousand times no that's a terrible road to go down it's a whole separate show i'm not gonna get into the reasons that i've been around for 23 years long enough through every form of comp possible i do not love this idea in fact i hate it like i hate hell and all montague's uh so no definitely not it is a path down which we ought not tread correct that way lies damnation and it is a road to hell paved with good intentions which i agree there's good intentions there like let's just all put up with this sorry australians in new zealand's who are still getting to play regularly i'm sorry i gotta put up with more fangs of so-tech tts players we'll talk about i'm sorry we'll see what happens in the next couple months things will change it's fine right we're in a season this this two will pass this two shall pass yes like we we suffered through vanguard wing and change host for a year folks we can do it as a desert group we can do it all right we we can get through croak it'll be okay uh oh uh so i do want to answer and then before we then we'll we'll be done with the news ghost went and said when will the results the latest survey be discussed next week uh next week i'm going to do the npe result show we're going to do that and uh i am really excited folks about some of the insights that we've found in this data there is one that i am so excited about and it speaks directly it's like one of the most things that smacked me like right in the face that has to do with exactly our discussion on competitive players and not being the tip of the spear it's so fascinating if you scale it up you'll see you'll see next week come back there is some really cool findings in there especially when you bust everything out army by army so when you want to know the shape of what kind of armies tom likes it'll be the findings the findings next week yeah there you go exactly just sort the list by like most hated and it's like tom army tom army tom army yeah there you go but no that's going to be really fun so yes we'll we'll next week will be a powerpoint show don't worry all right great uh well let's go on to some pick of the week we're late into it but that's all right uh that was a long new section for a good reason uh pick of the week oh and what would you like to share with everybody well i'm not going to go full tyler on you i haven't got like 10 um but i've got i've got two um i've been having a play with green stuff for the first time ever and i've stumbled across a lovely guy i actually i watched one of his videos and he called out to your hobby cheating stuff actually vince so this is like a little shout back to him uh it's a guy on twitter on youtube called the modern synthesis oh yeah mr pink i believe he calls himself um he does like live green stuff twitch sort of sculpting sessions and he's got some really cool videos there um breaking down the basics of green stuff and i just found on top of your initial video when you were working on that little round mirror i watched that one vince and then and then i moved on to to mr pink and yeah i just found it super super informative and um yeah watched that in the last couple of days really enjoyed that um and then the only other one um is i've got to wreck my boy um rob sims at the honest wargamer i know he gets lots of shouts out here um but yeah he's he's like a he's going for the 2021 he's the new rob um he's got a big mouth and i know that and it has put people off in the past and he won't mind me saying that but he's got a bigger heart okay so if in the past you felt that maybe rob turned you off because some of his comments and stuff i just want to implore your viewers to give him another try because he loves this community he loves this game um and he doesn't know i'm doing this so i hope he doesn't mind at a minimum you should be watching the very very fine stat center that happens every uh every week with mr oan jackson which is a great show and that's you guys cover results and it's like if you want to know kind of what's going on with this it's awesome you guys do a great breakdown oh thank you appreciate that the one show i would ask people to to jump in on was the monday faq show it's a big slab of satire but i think that monday night show in the uk now they've got a great cast character everyone bounces off each other um it's really fun and informative so yeah i would say if you want to give rob rob another try who you haven't heard of him the the faq show from from this last monday that would be my pick of the week nice very nice uh tommy what do you got um i don't normally spruke vendors okay maybe that's but uh you know i uh i saw a post today and it got me thinking i was playing with some of my like playing a game and had it was had some game aids on the table and just like recognize just how thankful i am to propainted studios um for some of their like stuff yeah uh whether you know like i was using the ko like ship thing but they just have tons of like token sets and stuff like that and so if you guys aren't familiar with uh propated studios i would encourage you to check them out or realistically any of the other like kind of small businesses um that are part of our community that are supporting our community because people aren't playing and so if they're not playing they're not using these game assisting things if they're not using these game assisting things they're not often putting in orders and so uh i would encourage you to check out propated studios or just any of the other kind of small businesses in our hobby and find an opportunity to support them this week that's what i'm gonna say no that's a great that's uh super great point especially now especially during this time when a lot of them you know like any kind of retail outlet or a lot of those smaller companies they rely on being at conventions for a lot of their yearly sales going to adept con or going to nobents of like that they've missed a year of those conventions like for propated like an entire tab of theirs is like event support yeah like fees and stuff like that well that's not none of that's happening right so he's buying those products and so i just i would encourage you guys to go find some small vendors and support them very nice uh my pick is a little bit unusual but that's all right and certainly a gentleman who doesn't need me sprucing him but that's okay i think it's it's awesome so squidy old squid marminatures he put up a video today earlier in the day that was all about that he had craft world studio come and paint a miniature and craft world studio is a really unique and interesting couple of folks and they paint in a wonderfully beautiful very artistic impressionistic sort of way using color in very different ways if you're interested in different takes on painting and paint they are kind of one of the they're there are very few other people in the entire miniature painting world who paint exactly like them who use color exactly like them and if you want to see their their method in live it's just an hour long video of them painting like like them painting a mini it's very straightforward it's actually doing like a bus so it's larger scale but the lessons are the same and i think it's just absolutely fascinating if you've seen her um craft world's uh archon that she's been working on uh that she shares around it's absolutely gorgeous so they do um they do plenty of gaming stuff as well as display stuff more traditional kind of larger scale models and uh i love that squidy did that and got them on they have such a wonderful uh style obviously they have a patreon as well but go check squidy's video out it's it's an hour of just absolutely mind-blowing content if you are used to very traditional painting uh the way they use color and explore that stuff will just even if you just take the lessons it'll help you think about color in a new way so even if you don't paint in that exact style there you go check it out uh and they're both really nice people okay so uh all right bringing us i'm gonna jump in real quick go for um i have another one and i don't normally do this either um but i'm gonna spruke one of vince's videos oh okay um i don't watch vince's content i'm gonna be honest here yeah it's not surprising to me um uh and but he like he's been talking about the sprugu stuff for like for years and i'm just like i don't i don't have time for that like i use i use this like tester cement stuff which is functionally the same thing only it's not mixed together uh and um and he was talking about i was like okay maybe i'll do it and then i looked up and i'm like but now i gotta get it like a glass bottle and i saw like i have a baby jar like up there that was empty and i was like oh and i'd actually picked up another set of the like plaster bond stuff which is the same type of like sure that's why i was like oh i literally have everything within reach right that i need to make this stuff and uh so i watched his video and i made it uh and it's changed my life yes i know this is a thank you thank you like it will change your life because you get to paint with plastic that's what it's doing i am going to reaffirm vince's video if you have not discovered and like i had this entire like one of these entire little catch trays of like of of shavings yeah like it's like as i'm scraping and all that i scrape into it and so literally i just had this huge thing of plastic and i was like well i gotta i was gonna throw this away anyway so i threw all the jar and just lets it and then i started working on some of the stuff some of these gaps and it like it changed my life folks and so um go watch vince's video and and make yourself a jar of this it like truly is one of the cheapest hobby buys you will ever make and it will change how you do how you build models yeah i mean when i did those giants just to put a pin in this when i did those giants which were full of insane conversions and parts and stuff and any other i used zero green stuff on those giants and they have no gaps it was all just with sprue everything i just shaved it fit it till it was close and then sprewed over done because it's just painting with plastic um so at any rate you scrape it down the level back off again yeah exactly and there's no once it dries it's just plastic so you can just do everything you normally do shave it cut it sand it whatever yeah it's you need to market this vince sprugu right it's happy man the earth product energy you can do this it's miraculous and you know what you could just source people's sprues because nobody's doing anything with those i have the distinct feeling someone will just bring this to market i'm sure someone will just pre-made this stuff the the hobby in general like what we actually need to paint is water a fairly decent brush and like five colors of paint that would actually be the end of what we needed because everything else you could just mix right but that's but obviously that's not what's on my wall around me as i say sitting in the middle of 800 pots of paint right uh so um there's if if if there's something that you normally have to make by mixing somebody will probably make it so there you go uh okay cool beans let's get to some hobby time all right oh and what are you been working on buddy well i've been a little bit busy uh i haven't really done loads of hobby but i have i have got a tts army that i've been having fun with which i've decided to bring to fruition um so yeah bring in bring from from from pixels to to plastic so yeah i've got this little guy uh it's my lord exorcist i don't know if you're gonna be able to see him i'll try but he's a kind of living city lord exorcist yeah that looks cool so uh i've just gone pretty ghetto on him i've stuck him to the base and i normally wouldn't stick him to the base but yeah he's he's basically some silveneth parts i've got some little sprites and then yeah i used some some green stuff to make some little vines it reminds me of the the you know in the core book how they have the pictures of the core book for a os2 how they have the pictures of like the citizens of all the different realms and they have the cool like uh guy ran person with all the like life and plants and stuff on them it reminds me of that yeah yeah i mean that's kind of what i'm going for i'm going for they're going to be the core the in my mind it's the guardians of guy ran so the it's this kind of ethereal force that gets summoned from from the ground at times of need um and it's a pretty low it's going to be a pretty low model count army so i figured i can go and i don't normally do conversions you know head swaps weapon swaps sometimes but but no green stuff or anything and i do love to paint so i just figured i'll i'll throw this down it's going to be a quick scheme so like ethereal imagine the the like the army of the dead from all the rings that kind of thing so i can throw some washes on there and some dry brush and some airbrush work and pick a few bits out but yeah so he was like an afternoon or a couple of hours of fun making little vines rolling up bits of green stuff that's awesome yeah so that that's me uh that's fantastic i love it i love it see that cities is truly such a wonderful army for conversion like to make it your own obviously i say that having done a big conversion myself for tempest i uh in my in the army that every time i posted it somebody would be like feels 240k and be like well how about you keep your pity to yourself at any rate uh so tom what are you been working on man uh well um i don't know how much i want to reveal um let's do this you can show whatever you want to show tom he's tom has been hopping a lot lately that's the story we're we're out of it um i have a frigate that i'm working on yeah yeah nice this is your rum runner for your uh for your for your bugman's team yep and uh and this is like a small part of the model sure he's got an insignificant part of the model so yeah i'm from earlier yes yeah so uh i'm excited the base may be 16 inches tall nice i love it i love how crazy you're going with all this and i love how big your ko army is going to be once you're all done with this like uh it's going to be pretty massive i'm going to need a lot of space like i was i was looking at my show because the funny thing is is like i've come to the end of my ko models i have about a hundred models more to paint but when you realize that most ko armies are like 20 models yeah sure you realize that like you know i have about 30 some thunders left to paint i have another 24 rigors which will take me to 48 um and then i'll uh and then i have basically a couple more ships but then like i still have all of my fire slayers to finish and they're all built or mostly built with like and then on top of that i still have a bunch of cities dordan that are like in baggies in my like stuff down here an old siege stuff and and so like i have i can literally work on this army for like four years yeah and maybe i will so we'll see i guess that depends on whether how cool those vampires are uh or what else comes out this year uh no that's awesome for myself it's been a very productive week so far since i've been back the first thing i did was i i spent a whole lot of time doing a lord of pain so i finished up my second lord of pain uh it's important to have all this stuff ready to go i like how he has a little head swap to just have his little little helmets they don't both look the same i don't love the actual helmet on the lord of pain let me say that so for that the face i should say so this guy took me as long or longer i should say then then what i've been doing idly over the past two days which was i painted about 50 minis not about i painted exactly 50 minis my speed painted them uh i had put together a while back you know one of my buddies he he's been i've played with him for 20 plus years and he likes to proxy everything he likes to play different armies all the time but he never paints anything and he was using a bunch of old figs on squares and eventually drove me crazy so i took all the old figs off and i put them on rounds and then i just like zenith filled them and then i was sitting here going you know i'd really just want something that i don't have to think about just some quick speed painting so i painted up like 30 halberdier spearman guys real quick and then i did 20 greatsword dudes a mix of like the elvish his greatsword unit is a mix of elvish greatswords and uh the old metal empire greatswords uh and so i got all those done and it only took i don't know this maybe like i don't even know 12 hours or something like that for all 50 models it was pretty fast and so those are all painted now he has his fully painted units which is fun and most importantly i got to do especially their big gold armor by playing around with this stuff which i'm real excited about so this is i know you can't read that at all because it's all shiny but this is green stuff world's pure metal pigments let me tell you folks i'm excited about this i am excited about this uh i have found the gold finally that rivals what i was looking for oh yes this is it because this is a hyper fine ground pigment so just so you understand this isn't paint right okay it's just pigment like it's dry right and you need very little of this and you actually mix it with stuff to make it paint and what i want to play with so there's like gold and anti-gold and bronze and copper and all that that i have like you what do you mix it with a medium or what sure well that's what i want to experiment with what gives you the best results in their video they mix it with their master medium which i do have some of um which is fine i also tried some gloss varnish because that sort of made sense to me but i didn't have a lot of gloss varnish i then i stumbled upon the metal varnish that comes with the um with the valet ho metal color and it's meant to preserve the shine of valet ho metal color and this i really like the effect of i also want to try alcohol some pigment fixers because you can mix it with any of that stuff right it's a really interesting product and it is so so so hyper smooth in the way it goes on it's crazy bright and shiny so yeah um we'll see but you're still painting that on the way you've been so can you sort of dust it on and then bind it if you want to put like a gold highlight onto the top of a shield or something you can yeah yeah you can you can apply it straight as like pigment it gets metallic pigment as well so yes you can just like pigment and then bind like put a fixer on it that'll work as well but in this case yes i was pre mixing it um where and once you get it mixed up i mean it looks so smooth and buttery is it air airbrush they say so i haven't tried it yet i will before i do a review um according to them yes it is fine enough to airbrush like the interesting part about it is you can because it's so because it's just pigment and you're using just medium you can really control exactly how thin you want it right so you can actually make it like just a gold sheen to like sort of glaze something out or to mix in you can use inks to activate it so if you want to take it and make a very darker brown color gold or green golds or purple golds or blue golds or stuff like that you can you can just use the ink and all the the medium in liquid in in in in inks to to be the binder right so it's got a lot of potential uh i need to play with it but yeah here i just used it to like do these whole all the armor on the the greatswords and the little things on the shields and play with that stuff just to get kind of a basic concept of it so um uh but it's cool i like it a lot it's really smooth and sharp and easy to work with once you get the mixing ratio down and i think that's what might put some people off because i mean you do have to like take a little pigment put it into a little palette put in some little medium mix it mix it mix it do a little test is it right and so on like there's there's some effort to it but come on it's not that hard folks you can do it at any rate yes there'll be videos worth coming on okay cool very good with that let's get to our main topic t t s or tabletop simulator so uh let's go ahead and shift over our picture here to a little tts screen oh and i want to start with you brother uh so what is it about you've played a lot of tts games what do you see right out of the gate right off the rip of the things you've enjoyed about tts other than like you can actually play warhammer during covid times yeah yeah that's kind of a big one that's a gimme yeah yeah um so i think yeah we all love playing this game right and and we play in all sorts of different ways so i do think that tts is just another way of of of being able to play and test lists and play with your friends whether that be uh current friends or the thousands or dozens let's say dozens of new friends that i've made all around the world uh over the course of the last 12 months i did actually get informed by steam yesterday that i've played it for 30 days the equivalent of 30 days of tts so uh yeah and there's no surprises a lovely groove in this chair because i've been uh i've been battling battling across the mortal realms from this very chair for a long time but yeah i think really you know you get into the hobby initially do you think it's like models and stuff like that and you like the hobby and painting but i think the more i went to tournaments it is more about that that that that connection with people um and and you know we need to stay connected during these times um i mean there's a lot of talk about how we're all communicating with our friends and family through zoom and and through the computer so why not play the game we love through the computer and it's a miniatures game at the bottom you know we we love the models you know there's a physicality to it and i think that's why i initially drew a lot of people away from from playing video games there's lots of stories of people that used to be really into their video games but they uh they didn't sort of you know they they wanted to get out and meet people rather than just always being behind a screen i suppose there's a certain irony to the fact that they're now all back behind a screen again but hey we'll gloss over that um but yeah i mean really and truly it is just a way of playing the game we love um i know that there are people who have had you know barriers thinking that it's not necessarily the true form of the game and they they they feel it's you know if they're going to play computer games they'd rather just play a really high quality computer game but um tts just just just keeps the fires burning you know that's what i would say it allows us all to play games test lists you know and and then they then feed into the physical hobby so you know you might have 1500 points of an army and you want to see what that last 500 points looks like you know do you want to go get some more endring rigors tom or do you want to want to put a boat in you know and and you can play and test that out so there's multiple there's multiple ways to play just like in real life um you know it doesn't always have to be that true competitive i think there's certain um not stigma but there's a there's a there's a view of of tts that it's maybe just these hardcore um players who just want to play hard lists and it's competitive all the time but there's loads of people that just want to you know throw some squigs down and blow off some steam after a day's work or something you know so it yeah it it's it's another representation of of the game we love um and in all its forms you know crazy lists crazy games you know just having a fun game or you know i'm i'm working with different teams as in like you know a national team or like a team tournament environment and your theory crafting lists and your practicing deployments and you know it's so vast in in that sense and there are elements of it which are an improvement on the physical game i would say um i don't want to just come on here and be the hype man for tts but i hope i've kind of i've kind of laid it out there it's just a way of of doing what we love right yeah um and and uh some people just like in the hobby you have some people are 90 hobby and 10 player and some people are 50 50 and some people love the law and you know uh for the gamers uh and people who sort of more lean towards wanting to game it's just that outlet that we all need and it's brought us all closer um you know playing people in australia and canada and all over europe i've got friendly with like players in russia and understanding what their met is like it's just you know it's just the community i would say it's just just just playing games with with with friends around the world yeah i think there's there's two things to hone in on there one i mean again other than the giant glaring obvious neon headline of lots of us live in places where we can't go out and play these physical games and so it lets you actually have a hobby outlet so that's great but your point is well taken of like even if you could go to physical tournaments it'd be very unlikely that you'd get to see the australians or people from the us or people from russia this regularly right and so that's fantastic too it lets people test lists at i think a quicker speed because they you know the some people will proxy test lists and stuff like that but you actually see i think in tts sort of developing army lists very fast because you don't have the hobby lag time right sometimes we don't become aware that something is bent or challenging until it showed up in tournament data which is which is a we would call that a lagging indicator in the biz right and the the reality is is that when you remove all those barriers of entry and you see these things over performing they're straight list they're not skew list they're not jank list they're just you know clearly things that are are working well right or that might be performing out of bounds you can find that fast the the last thing i'd say that is like and i'm sure we'll talk about some other positives as we go wide as we range around these topics is it's a way to do really interesting tournaments that would normally be far too inconvenient for players in real life right in a method because the bearer of entry is zero because you can just load up any model you want and play with it right now in my mind and i agree with somebody who said this is a comment it's not a replacement for playing in person what we all want to be doing is playing in person of course like i didn't pay all these models to play a computer game right we want to be there in person we want to uh we want to be experiencing that because there's something different when you're hanging out at a tournament weekend with people for like two or three days it's just a unique thing and it's so much fun but you can do lists like the secret santa tournament that happened right which uh which uh if i'm that was darin and smorgan putting that together right uh darin and adam umford there you go sorry okay thank you and adam umford putting it together and the two of them put it together where you only got your list 24 hours before you played and it was just like they had made all the lists all bespoke so good custom list and you got it 24 hours earlier you had to like read the list learn about what it was and they just made wacky crazy list again that would be impossible in reality right even if you literally had all the armies for people to just take you couldn't get the list to them soon enough you couldn't do everything you'd have to have such a wide range whereas here they were able to do that crazy thing and what a fun weird different take on it you were involved in the fat middle tournament yeah yeah that was that was yeah that that that that was another one i think i did i put in my notes for tonight it's like in terms of the format it's a global game and we've got competitive games but also there's yeah there's this super creative element where you're absolutely right you would i think if you if you did uh make some of these uh tts format ideas uh reality they would invalidate people's model collections in the way that the fat middle basically skimmed the top off so i wouldn't be comfortable in doing that in real life but tts like you say there's no barrier to entry you know you just have to source the models there's a little bit of a marketplace going on where we've got like a little channel like can can you find these ones or can you find those ones but aside from that you know you can use anything and yeah i ran trippin triple vermin lord deceiver eshin which was uh an experience it was great i did yeah i have been threatening to run an all-eshin list for weeks every week no it's cool every week i'm gonna run against tom when he comes up in a couple weeks just tom and i are gonna hang out and play some more hammer but um the i like every time every every time my gaming group gets together we've got a couple of us that we all get together and still play physically because we can we play here and whatever whatever and everybody's responsible yada yada yada and uh the um every time like i'll make a couple lists and i don't decide what i'm gonna play until everybody shows up and everybody decides kind of what we're all gonna play i keep making that eshin list every week every week i keep threatening it and i never make it never play it i want to try it okay oh eshin why can't you just get a whole book and totally do the best thing ever uh tom what are your thoughts yeah sure sure um i i like i i like the creative alternative list building options um that to me is super exciting um because i'm like it's right in my wheelhouse of the types of things that i like to do um and so i want to embrace it for um for that type of thing and like you know i have to imagine that it would be a wonderful tool for play testers because now like models aren't an issue you don't need to proxy things and you can play other play testers exclusively right so i like i'm just thinking about from like a just a practical standpoint like it's right in the wheelhouse of um yeah anyways so uh i i i agree with you tom and i'd like there are there are times now where like between i'm currently in a in a team with um with lori uh hug it wild a silvanet player of note uh on the indian team and benjamin savard like you know we're locked down benjamin lives on the coast lori lives in the country sudden i'm here in the city but like i know what his turn one deployment is for his next game because we've talked about it uh you can screenshot things we can practice our deployments so it leads into that idea that you were talking about about list development like tts can be a real hot house you can learn a lot about a battalion or you can learn a lot about a build in a few short games or like okay let's do two turns of let's deploy let's do two turns and let's let's chat about it and then we'll go back again and even just the physicality of like removing all your models from the table and resetting everything in real life it's like you know 10 minutes okay let's go again but here delete reload the army you know there are there's that element um but also from the creative side for people that didn't know um like the fat middle people some people did query the the metric or the the way in which i i removed armies but effectively i just looked at top five finishes and there were some glaring top five like seraphon essentially for people didn't know we had 50 players and we took out top five which was seraphon by a country mile followed by lumeneth and even though they had a short amount of games because of the release they lumeneth uh did really well in my tournaments then we had fire slayers the disciples of zinch um uh ivenith deacon and um maggotkin of nergal now a lot of people queried maggotkin but those blight king lists um and it's a lot of me may yeah 45 kings is is yeah and then we saw at the weekend if you watch the monday show with rob and i two players brought 45 blight kings with a great and clean one in uh in the blight system they came fourth and fifth so you know who's to say that they weren't practicing those lists online getting the models painted and then when games are back on bosh so um you know i i think that that disproves the theory around stuff being completely different on tts than it would be in real life um but going back to that tournament it gave those i don't want to say one thing real quick on that i want i want to dig into that real quick because i think when a lot of people put like a lot of the her her like super smooth brain take that i hear people make is oh well then you know it's all just cockatrices and stuff like that like okay yes yes people do play some funny skew lists of a million of one thing or whatever and i'll say two things to that one that's not bad thing that's a good thing that's super cool that you get to play weird skew armies like that how many times have we all thought of a fun wacky army that we'd love to play but like realistically you know it's just kind of a joke army you play a few times you're not going to go out and spend a thousand dollars on some model that you want to that just just to like run it a few games this gives you a chance to do that it's fun it's fun to just have fun sometimes right like that's cool uh there's nothing wrong with that and secondly uh those aren't the lists that win the tournaments those are just fun skew lists people play around with like what ends up winning in the competitive scene is the stuff that's competitive like it's not right weird janky corner shooting stuff so like you know yeah like 15 cockatrices is funny right it's hilarious to watch that game play but that's not taking home the brass ring like it's just not how the world works so you know yes maybe do you need to have the the should you have a grain of salt with with the data when we're talking about this as data sure because one of the reasons ko didn't get filtered out of your list is even though maybe in the real world it's been a very top performing army is because it seemingly there's just not a lot of people playing ko in tts for for reasons right whatever reasons those may be so there just wasn't a wealth of data like you've got such a small set tournament after tournament i see like nobody playing ko right uh okay so that can happen sometimes you might think all right well you know that tells us we can't rely on this completely but that's just it we don't look at any one set of data completely we always look at everything with some amount of like intellectual scrutiny about it right also i wanted the data to have integrity and it not just be based on my bias because i don't you know like the ko uh if you get double turned by that it can be uh for some players a bit of a negative experience um uh not necessarily i would yeah okay so i was trying to be uh sort of like i was holding back a little bit for your sensibility instead but uh yeah yeah if it could be a shit game of war excuse me it could be a bad game of war hammer sometimes excuse my uh leap there um but yeah um so i didn't i wanted the data to have integrity so i didn't want to just be like oh i know that ko are really a hard counter and it can be a bad game sometimes um but i didn't there wasn't the data to back that up so i let them in and hence the same argument with mega kill of nergal i had the nergal players contact me saying why are you banning me i was like well it's because you did so well in my tournaments i have to date it's like if you did it you did it to yourselves boys um we're data driven folks like there you go it says yeah um and then leading on from that i just uh i like to be very much like you do your surveys i like to be democratic with the way that the tournaments are created and stuff so i said i put a survey out to all the people in the discord and i said right we had a kind of fun bit of comp to start the year what would you like to do next would you like to go pure competitive like no comp there's no barriers nothing's banned or would you like to do something which is a bit more fun and the community being the community 50 50 split right down the middle there was ever a summation of war hammer it's that right so we're just doing both so that's the weekend there which um yeah which is the next two tournaments so we've got a pure competitive saturday which is hammer time seven and then on sunday we're doing titans of go which just came out of a few conversations and uh kernel cabbage and dan and supervised from honest wargamer they both made comments about every army needs a mega garden and i don't need too much encouragement to seize on a wacky idea so yeah titans of go is going to be everyone takes a mega garden and there's a there's a thematic narrative around the necro quake uh you know sort of ripping and rip the the uh the gore apart the realm of gore and all the trading routes are down and uh everyone's getting a little bit more protectionist so each town or each settlement uh has to hire a gargant to bolster their forces so there's there's there's no named characters only two of any single war scroll and everyone has to take a mega garden um so yeah there's like it's as a creative person like with tts i can just do whatever i want to a degree uh and if people are still going to come to the tournaments then then i'll keep doing them so yeah it's it's amazing in that sense that you do have the freedom to put on whatever you want and i've got uh almost a hundred players for the weekend which is pretty wild i think that's amazing yeah 60 we're at 64 for hammer time seven and there's about 30 brave souls who are gonna throw mega gardens at each other for the day you know they're just real quick this is a thing that we should return back to just very fast back in like the times here diamond times of seventh and eighth edition there was a tournament called grail quest here in the states happened down in um i think it was in north carolina anyways the the hook of that tournament was that everybody got a free monster on top of your points okay and you could choose to put any foot character and mount them on the monster okay yeah so you like it was just a great like you could have a mounted scaven on like a giant monster of some kind like it was you could take any monster from anywhere in the game right and bring it into your army um i would love to see more takes on that kind of stuff just decide and and tts is a great way to also do that so there you go uh the other thing i i think is relevant that we haven't quite mentioned and so i never talked about this but obviously tabletop simulator is just a thing you can download from it has a cost but it's a thing you can download from steam so that's where you get it from um is what i'll call the forgiving tournament schedule uh so what i mean by this is tom how often would you say as a as a parent how often would you say you're ready to take a whole weekend and play five or six games in a row you think that's something you can do often no of course right and i think a lot of people are in that situation especially now right but some of these tournaments are structured where you have like oh each round is like a week or some period of time and you can go you you know who your opponent is at the beginning of the week over the week talk to the opponent find time play a game right right and then submit your results right so it can happen over five weeks or whatever but you don't but it's a much more forgiving time everybody plays whenever their schedule is you know tom and i were opponents we could find some time in the middle of the night or something or after his kids we go into bed or whatever works we could get our game in done our results are done for that week and we're good right we turn it in which is that's exactly that's exactly what's happening Vince there was a six round international tournament run by a lovely Australian guy called Pask who's who's taken up and he's the guy behind the butchers tournaments so yeah butchers butchers buffet was six weeks one game per week and then yeah i think i had American Canadian Finnish Australian opponents and you know you figure out the times sometimes you're playing at nine in the morning and they're playing at nine at night but you make it work and and there is a lot of yeah people have got real lives right jobs kids other commitments so it is good and also the thing with tts as well is that if you're playing with a buddy and it's very much you know beer and pretzels game or not but you can stop and save the game at any point and then return to it later yeah i like to do a queens gambit thing of like they have to you have to tell them what they're going to do next they don't get a week to think about how they're going to get out of your amazing setup like you know they have to they have to commit to their next play but yeah you can save it and come back to it so but another thing that's cool with it that you don't get in real life right yeah you're right you don't need the whole two hours right at once like if you've got you can get the game going i'll also say you can actually set up pretty fast like because the battle plans can all basically be just loaded as well as the terrain and stuff can all be just loaded up so you don't need to place this stuff or measure things out like that can just be going uh we haven't talked about the advantage of like precise measurements but i think this is worth talking about tom i'm going to you here bud yep you are the most precise measure i have ever played against you are so finicky on this like and why why do you care so much about every movement and measurement from normal moves to pylons to placement etc why why why is that a thing you focus on in the in the normal physical game well i would say offensively it like it it optimizes my damage and my like success but also i want to like make sure i'm above her approach with regard to like playing people yep like i don't want to be anybody to think that i'm a cheater or anything and so like i i'm very i'm very precise to make and and transparent to make sure that like yeah there's no issues which makes total sense and keep in mind in this game that's so easy to do i want to share a picture here real quick we're gonna make up a new image this was shared by mr benjamin sava earlier today this is his luminous setup and this crazy little space image is effectively like a lot of the point is when you when you have models that have auras ranges around them holy within 12 holy within nine holy within whatever right so when they've got that kind of thing you can you can have that in there so when you select the model the unit whatever they broadcast this aura around them and you know exactly whether or not you're holy within it's not like um is that guy in it's a lit up line on the table that by the way isn't there the whole time it's not like they're an annoying right it's there when you highlight the unit and go yep boom there you go i know i'm in i'm in blind right and you can you can highlight multiple and you can see multiple overlapping auras and complicated movements when you grab the the unit you can have like you can set down little nine and three inch and sticks just like we do in reality you can also just grab a dude and you know zip out and like oh okay i've got eight inches to move you can just grab the dude the little measuring thing is going to zip out and say you've got eight inches and then you can just kind of go like this and see exactly where it is and when you drop the fig it's dropped at eight inches exactly because that's what the little precise measurement told you just happened right you don't have scoot syndrome or stuff like that right like the thing went to eight inches uh i think there's a slight downside here of like sometimes piling in can be a little annoying because you like depending on what you're fighting with if you've got big hordes squishing against each other like actually getting your guy exact like you you know you're going three inches but it's like okay here and here but i think that's almost kind of an emergent property of piling always being annoying and being a slow part of the game and i was gonna say there's a bit of give and take with that anyway right there's there's there's a little bit of uh you know you want it you can be exceptionally precise but you're still moving a physical thing so you know you can't unless you if you're piling in round a circle you unless you bend your tape measure around there still has to be a little bit of give and take with your opponent there is quite a funny thing that comes up especially with players when you play more and more is they'll come up right in the game and you'll be like oh okay fine so we're playing millimeter warhammer now are we there is an element of that especially you know turn for things to get in a bit tight maybe maybe it hasn't gone exactly how you're and then yeah everything becomes a little bit more precise but no i appreciate your comments tom in terms of the precision because that's almost like uh if you've got your system there's an element of control there that you like as well right it's like this is how i do things you know how i'm playing and um there is that transparency with with tts that uh uh i found that i do a lot of um fake measurements you know you probably do that in real life as well right yeah you know so you're broadcasting out okay my liege cavalos can go 25 inches that gives him a 13 inch move and then i know he's got his 12 inch aura to buff my catapults so i'm gonna measure it in both directions just you know so my opponent doesn't know exactly where my catapults are going on deployment but yeah there are there are technical technological elements to tts which give you more more precision um but there's just the element of goodwill that you have with your opponent like in a normal game as well so you know we everyone rubs along well and it's like anything as long as you feel like you're playing the same game then then it's all good yeah it's cool and there's also just the element of like taking objectives and stuff like that like to return back to our other picture here you know your objectives have very clear rings around them so you know exactly where you're standing you know you're never getting a fight of like well exactly how many are on that thing and yes i know there's a wonderful game aid of like little clear plastic circles but a lot of people don't have those for their tables right whereas with this it's like well how many people are on that objective well one two three four because i can just see because the line is drawn under four models so done and dusted right like easy peasy i got this uh and so it just like there is a precision capability that you have here when you're playing with it that you often don't have and you know it's funny because that's why i i really wonder about the ko thing because it's such a it would seem like such an easy army to play since they're not often dealing with the minute pylons and you can check ranges so simply in tts just like zip okay that's that thing's 24 inches away that thing's 20 like you're looking really just zoom around with your stick and you have this exact measurement of knowing exactly what's in range at all points in time it feels like that's a ko dream come true because your measurements are so simple they don't need to measure anything today they just lift the model up and put it nine in quick away from something else there you go is that the way it works that's the way it works yes exactly uh one note on the aura as i would say vince is that there's some players that you see playing very uh synergistic armies where there's a multitude of auras and i kind of think to myself that's super cool but i would the more i play the army i would remove the auras because when you come to playing in real life it's like you haven't got laser vision anymore it's not wrong you know you can't yeah yeah you gotta it's good to have the uh the feel still you know the eye uh knowing kind of roughly where things are in and stuff like that but it is a very cool element and it's super easy to do um i run uh tts introduction lessons every saturday in my discord and we one of the things we cover is is auras everyone loves you can color code them so the color matches your army and you can i have seen some players and they even have the name of the ability which then animated kind of goes around the ring when they deploy it um so yeah this yeah as as i said previously this this this real benefits to playing on tts um can i can i mention one more speed adding thing that i absolutely love in tts this is gonna sound so silly but it's one of the things that drives me the most crazy of time sinks in the real game i would love to do a time in motion study sometime on like warhammer players at a tournament because i have this sneaking feeling that one of the things like that we spend way more time than we think just rolling and resolving dice okay and in tts it is as easy as going okay how many text do i have 40 10 10 10 10 or whatever whatever you whatever multiple you happen to be counting by or factor you have been counting by it gives you 40 dice you drop them in a little box boop it spits out all the results all stacked you know how many ones you rolled twos threes fours fives sixes all in a straight stacked line you and your opponent can both exactly see it everything's organized it's not a flippy-dippy mix of dice and then literally you just go okay i hit on threes you grab the bottom section you know you scoot the other ones out of the way grab the bottom section drop them back in the thing wound on threes boop new list comes up it's so fast right it's very satisfying incredibly satisfying because it's so easy it's just like drop in there i generated 40 dice and i know exactly how many hit drop it back in i know exactly how many won't it takes two seconds it's the most anti-covid thing as well because you can share dice with your opponent you're just constantly picking up and re-rolling the same dice uh often you find the more you play that you end up just playing on one sort of dice rolling mat um and you've got faction specific dice in there for the important rolls quite a few of the games between me and my friends were like ooh okay so the bone reaper's dice is going to come in big for me here and your opponent's like no it's going to be slin actually it always rolls a six so you don't have and on the dice rolling thing i would say for anyone who hasn't played and they feel like it's too much of a departure from the real game let's call it the real game bunnies like when you roll triple six on a gristle gore terror guys small and you blow up a lariel love you lariel sorry then that feels just as awesome as when you do it and you roll the dice in real life right that that element of because it's still you know there's an algorithm there to obviously make sure the dice roll correctly or whatever so it's still a very um you know it's not something that happens very often that you're going to roll triple six on three dice right so it still feels awesome and that that double six charge on on turn five still feels awesome so even though the dice rolling is isn't physical it still feels like your role yeah you know yeah yeah absolutely so somebody had asked george gabriel could you play war cry in tts i mean the answer would certainly be yes like because it as a simulator is just meant to play these games but i don't know if anybody's made war cry yeah they have yeah yeah they have yeah you've got like every war band in a little bag and you can pull them out hey i found this one the other day vince you'd like this there's a hero quest mod and it's all scaven everything is scavenified it's got music and lighting all the furniture and someone's modded in all the scaven figures for all the all the characters and everything that's amazing this this loads out there this i found some amazing um like narrative themed boards like a warp stone mine with a mist effect like there's people doing some crazy stuff where you can have lighting effects and sound effects there's a little fan on the side of every board if you hit then all the trees like sway and and the grass sways in the breeze it's pretty it's pretty cool man it's pretty cool yeah i mean what's cool is that when people are making these assets they then get shared around right and so you you have access to these same assets and can use them so yes you're able to change the table you're playing on the other stuff you're doing all this kind of stuff that's great that all the work right stuff's in there i didn't know if anybody made that but that's that's such a like work right would be such a great game in tts when you're dealing with that number of figures and being able to like move around and have your your your guys coming on the board edge like that is really really good uh that's fantastic oh charles hollum said there's also a soul bound table which would be cool for just doing like zones and stuff like that in soul bound yeah nice nice i like that all right uh what haven't we what haven't we touched on yet uh with um i mean we could talk about the the the the slight differences with with with running tournaments on on tts as opposed to running tournaments in real life because it does throw up its own sets of issues it's very there's a lot of similarities i'll be fair so obviously i've run eight now so once the weekend they're on the sixth and seventh is done that'll be 10 so i've kind of seen quite a few things and but fundamentally um it's a discord server which you can create chat channels in so like there's a lot like a os coach's got a antony's got a great discord server and you've got dozens of different channels in there so much like that my discord server have you know there's a there's a channel a voice channel called the general one so it's very much like you know how when you turn up at a tournament and everyone has a mill around has a chat about what they bring in and you look you know you'd often be looking at armies and stuff there's a little meeting point in the general voice channel where in the packet it'll say we all meet there at 10 minutes before the round starts and you have a chin wag do some general announcements and then it's all run on tabletop to so like a best coast pairings kind of app so it's all run through the traditional software that you would use for running a an age of sigma tournament and then when you're directed normally you'd be directed to table 12 or table 14 there is a voice channel for every table so you just go to voice channel 12 and hopefully your opponent will be waiting there for you at that point it'll be like who would like to host the game because whenever you play a game of tts one person's the host and then they invite people in to join so often it'll be the person who's got the best internet connection will be the host and then they will have all of their own you know that yeah then they will invite their opponent in they will join a development I've done for the hammer time events is that I and another thing you can't do in real life is I create a map pack for every tournament so everyone plays on exactly the same map with the same terrain layout the same scenery effects you know mystical commanding arcane whatever and I just roll for those randomly and that gets rid of in the early tournaments I felt that the people who are hosting perhaps had it's like oh you're playing i'dnith deacon and everything you've got flies and the board is a sea of terrain and my foot stomping army can't get through this so to avoid that I came up with these map packs so yeah the players will all be playing on the same map pack you know you'll play for your two and a half I do three hour rounds so a little bit just because of the you know with the technology and stuff sometimes things can be a bit slower whilst dice rolling is faster there are elements which are a bit slower so you know you have to work around that so you play a game with your opponent and then you submit your result much like you would hand in a physical piece of paper or you'd go to the booth or the to desk in a tournament you post your result up and your opponent sort of signs it off and we roll on to the next battle it's pretty simple the only one issue I've had is where you have people that for one reason or another can't hear each other through discord so I did have a three hour game where I phoned I knew one of the players personally so I phoned him on my phone and then had a three hour phone call with my phone next to my computer where he could converse with his opponent in Australia which was a little quirk that wouldn't come up normally but really and truly we all just rub along well there's a sort of general ethos you know like with normal tournaments the to tends to set the tone and you know you want players to be civil with each other and I think that's a real shout out to the whole tts community and that with a screen behind you you know you get you know keyboard warriors or whatever it'd be very easy for someone to just be like screw this I you know I've lost on deployment and just you know pull the plug on their mat on their computer and clear off but everyone sticks there plays the games we all have a great time and we have favorite opponent awards I have a list whisperer award which Darren Watson looks at all the lists and then chooses a favorite sort of left field list I'm even thinking of doing like a painting prize where people get to you know show what they've painted since the last hammer time and we do something and then yeah we've got prize support for the first time ever so if I could shout out we've got the bad moon cafe in London and also the priority role podcast have put their hands in their pockets so you have a the winner of Titans of Go wins a mega gargant so you bring a mega gargant and you bring a gargant so it's pretty and then a start collecting box anywhere in the world for the winner of hammer time so yeah it's just just like a normal tournament we all have a good time we all have a chat afterwards and pick through the bones of our losses or wins and yeah think about the next list it's it's really great I mean I don't think I'd get 30 40 50 60 players each time if we weren't all having a great time together so um sure and yeah let me answer something that's going on in the chat right now yes you can't post links in the chat like when you post them you'll still see them but nobody else will that's what happens so you think you're sharing a link but you're not it's on your screen it's on not on anyone else's just so you know uh but there you go anyways uh like I think I think uh uh so tech that um coach will hit you up directly so who gets y'all taking care for that for that discord okay uh that's I could see the confusion of people going no here I just posted the thing see it's right there and then there's nobody else is seeing anything I didn't hear a word why I just said did they think I need to get my information everybody was trying to do you had a call to action to join coach's discord and he was like and everybody wanted to do it all of a sudden they're listening um yeah no I think it's good the you know and this is why I say overall why I think this is one obviously it's a valid way to play warhammer I hope we've all moved past that yeah to why the data is still perfectly valid when you have these these events that are honestly bigger than most of than most anybody's doing in person now right right like we had gold coast last week last weekend whatever you say and that was what 50x people 50 some people right and that was like we were all like wow that's a big event back on the table like that is exciting you know what I mean now that happened the same weekend that can con should have happened but couldn't for obvious reasons and that would have been that normally is 220 230 who knows how many people 250 we would have had this year you know whereas these tts terms we you do get a lot of them where you've got 60 people in on the reg right uh so there you go 52 rob coming in with 52 I knew it was 50 something uh so the um what what map is being pictured this is a map that Tyler Emerson sent me of his him playing his uh Cobra Kai against a slaves darkness list and with a lot of marauders so many marauders there is there is one other element I'd like to touch on if that's okay I know I'm talking a lot but um there's a real community now building within these discord channels so uh like I mentioned coaches there's my hammer time discord there's also the butchers discord um like we're not only all playing in there but there's a real um a real sort of element of of of watching games so because people are streaming we're what you're playing on discord and you can just screen share so you can if you if you're comfortable with people jumping in and watching then anyone can go into the discord and if there's a little live red button you'll know that there's two players playing and they're happy for spectators so if you you can the traditional etiquette is you just mute your microphone so when you're having a conversation with somebody they the players can't hear and you can just sit there and watch so it could be doing a bit of hobby or I don't really watch telly anymore rob rob call I don't watch tv rob calls me online own because literally all I'm doing is I'm scouting I'm out there in the field checking out games and like uh in especially in this butchers tribe team tournament you've got all the teammates watching each other or perhaps right from the different clubs you've got like 25 30 people all sat there viewing a game and you're hearing all the audio from the players so you're getting an insight into the way in which they're implementing this strategy so like we're all learning together and and that element of of of being able to watch games again is a is a huge part of it I think no that's fantastic because oftentimes it like look if you've ever stood next to somebody at a tournament and watch their game which we all probably have at some point we finished early we wandered around it's really weird for you to sit there and just sit over their shoulder for two hours and watch their whole game go down right but on this yes it's just like having tv on like every time Rob's done his breakfast battle stuff which he's been doing it on his channel some uh he he played you when you ran a smash bat list uh and I like I love watching those and it's great too because you you like people are zooming in and you know you can focus in on the action and stuff like that so it's uh it's legitimately just a really nice way to watch Warhammer and to see the decisions people are making in a way that you wouldn't often get uh if you even if you were in reality or people would be like hey can you not maybe stand in I need to move over there can you not maybe you're right next to me here exactly like I am way in your personal space but I'm going to watch this game uh yeah that's I think that's a good one I hear you as well as somebody like I I I met Rob through being recommended as a roving reporter so I've been I've gone around a lot of uh physical tournaments with my notepad and just trying to figure out the game state and not interrupt the players is quite a thing but in tts you've got counters how many cp how many victory points what turn they're on and you have the and obviously you're hearing the player's audio so you you have an opportunity to understand the game state relatively quickly as well and you know those classic games when they go like three four hours like it's a real roller coaster and often both players or at least one of the players will then you end up you'll just have like a half hour chat about how the game went and what they'd have done differently and how did the start of the game go and I just think that it's a real opportunity to learn more about the game and talk to more players as well so it's it's kind of multifaceted in that sense um and and as you said there's there's things you can do with it that you can't do in real life because you'd be really annoying you know interrupting I don't want to I want to answer chaos here you said I haven't played any war games in 15 years but got back into painting aos and wanting to play during lockdown would would uh would you know the tts discords welcome a noob and I think the answer is absolutely yes like this is actually one of the great advantages because if you're if you're looking to have a game in person you go to your local store maybe there's people there who are welcoming of you know being more a new maybe there's not if you're if you're lucky and you get a good store there's people there who're going to help you but in a lot of these in a lot of these discord servers there's absolutely people who are also newer or who you know are going to give you a good game and be like oh you're new cool no problem totally got it and like these are experienced great really like quality players who are used to playing people all up and down the skill ladder and who are not looking to just like smash face for a good time right yeah yeah yeah there's there's none of those guys yeah there's none of that that guy thing definitely uh again I don't want to hype coach too much but uh because he can do that himself but he's got dedicated he's got dedicated teachers I believe there's a couple of guys lacky and also Rocco they are like they're they're listed in there as TTS teachers they will pick up give somebody like their first ever game of war hammer and then again in my discord I'm doing weekly intro sessions so there's like six to eight players and rather than playing a full game we just do an hour where I go through this is how to move models this is how to find models this is how to set up a game these are their intricacies these are all the controls so I did actually have somebody contact me saying oh it's hammer time like just for competitive players and it's like no it's just like anything uh TTS war hammer is the same broad church as regular war hammer right so if you want to get a game in you'll you'll find anybody at your level people will train you it's it's just as democratic as a normal sort of warhammer community yeah that's great is there anything you think that you've seen in TTS that you think speaks to the broader like meta like stuff you've been able to see watching like you know armies or things like that yes I think going back to the wild west days when you could do anything you did see your you know 15 gun haulers or 13 cockatrices or all the pre-nerfs seraphon salamander spam but that's all calmed down and I think I have actually written down a couple of lists that that I feel have been tested and are now going to come out like the amount of people that I know that are buying varingard to play knights of the empty throne play touch varingard that's definitely something also the the triple battalion one drop shoot cast I think that's one that you've seen a lot especially Rob and I covered a team tournament that's happening in real life in in Russia at the weekend the Russian I think it's called the Russian ETC tournament because they often it's where they pick their team from and there are three of those shoot cast lists so that kind of you do find there are lists coming out I think even blight kings didn't really have a chance to shine did they because the changes came in and then we all got mocked in so I think that 45 blight king blights list list is definitely something that's been tried and tested on TTS as well and probably one that came up a lot at the start and you still see people playing is the Legion of Chaos Ascendant with your Corruptor and the Kadai you know with like a block of 12 Kadai that can fight on death and perhaps 30 plague bearers those sorts of lists but who knows I mean there's there's loads of people testing all sorts of interesting stuff yeah I'd say like the the zinch of various flavors especially Archeon zinch host Arcanum Zinch 2 seen a lot of that one of my favorite plays I've ever watched on TTS was a host Arcanum Zinch when I don't remember who was playing this game so I do apologize to to them whoever they were but the Archeon was almost in the position here but the bottom of the table was all was two big blocks skinks and Archeon you know pregame moves and host Arcanum and then the they channeled the somebody channeled out the evolve spell like spell portal and then channeled out that devolve not evolve sorry devolve spell and pulled forward the unit of skinks so it was basically in line because it had been one unit of skinks and the other one underneath it devolved them to pull them forward and then Archeon moved and charged into both units of skinks and just cleared like you know 20 plus skinks out of both units and this is like turn one and there was no the Seraphon player had no command points and it was just like or no they had one and they had used to try to shoot and run and failed there it was so they had zero at the time it came to battle shock and both those units of skinks just exploded and I was like yes this is the victory I want to see I love that devolve was used to do it originating like from a abrasion when you would provide the spell that then got taken and I love that it was used to like slingshot effectively in this reverse way Archeon up into destroying skinks every time I see a dead skink I'm happy let me just say yeah that was uh that was Casper I played that list a Danish player of note that I've got to know through through tts yeah so that was Casper's play and then he went on to then uh destiny dice double six croak into the sword if you'll remember the frog and the sword oh I remember that's the thing like it's still dramatic moments right oh yeah yeah yeah super cool that seemed like it was going to be an epic showdown right zinch against uh against so-tech croak led seraphon right like busted one against busted two and uh nope nope done an hour don't doubt the grand marshal of the apocalypse that's what we'll say there he uh he he got it done yeah so uh I don't know anything else we want to close out on I think we covered most of it about everything I think so yeah I think um tts is warhammer I'll finish on that really I just think I know it's not for everybody but just in the same way as like slanesh isn't it for everybody or orcs aren't for everybody or do you know what I mean like yeah yeah I think we all play the game for different reasons and if you're looking to actually you know you want to get some games in you don't have another way to do it or you want to play more maybe you can play but you want to play more if you want to be part of a bigger community meet people who are other players in other countries here's an easy way to do it like it's this is as low no cost almost as you can get right like I mean 15 bucks and you're you're rocking and rolling that's about what it boils down to us wise I have no idea what it costs other places I assume whatever the local equivalent is uh there you go Owen absolute pleasure buddy thank you very much oh thank you for having me on my the pleasure is mine I have to say um you guys are like a cornerstone so um yeah really proud to be on the show with you best thank you we're we're glad to have you and uh we'll have you back again I'm sure and hopefully I'll see you in person at some event when I'm actually able to come back to England so there you go um for all of you out there watching thank you so much we appreciate it we hope you liked this thank you everybody who was talking in the chat whoever is sharing stuff and answering other questions uh if you didn't already hey give this show a like it really helps just click that little button it's as easy as moving your mouse along and clicking one button it couldn't be easier uh also subscribe if you haven't but as always we thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next Wednesday