They don't make them like they used to

Posted by gbprime on 17. October 2008 00:39

I'm talking of course about Titans.

With the re-invention of mass battles under the Apocalypse system, we've seen a tremendous effort of modelling on behalf of some brilliant gamers in our area (gargants, silver towers, tupperware titans) and we've also seen the re-emergence of a lot of the old armorcast superheavy models.  The first Apoc game run at Armoury Games here in town featured a truly vast chaos horde approaching a dug in imperial force.  I brought my old Reaver titan, who had LITERALLY not seen a game in ten years, and it paired up with Ranillon's classic warhound titan and a few shadowswords for our heavy firepower.  Old Nobilis Indomitus was fielded with rules from the Bell of Lost Souls and literally towered over the battlefield, pattering fire off it's adamantine hull. 

By the third game, however, titan fever had spread.  The forces of order were fielding no less than two eldar titans and FIVE imperial titans, including a warlord titan someone had scratchbuilt out of power ranger bits and a rubbermaid storage tub.  My reaver titan was no longer doing the towering.  In fact, from it's position in front of the primer-black tupperware warlord, it looked rather diminuative by comparison.  It still managed to steal the show though... by dying.  The reaver got dragged down in HTH combat by a dozen greater daemons, and it's plasma reactor overloaded inflicting a strength D hit on everything within 31 inches.  That 62" blast template wiped clean all the chaos models that were overrunning our lines, and pyrric victory never tasted so good.

But the genie was out of the bag (to mangle a metaphor).  The old armorcast models were virtually unobtainable due to the prices they were commanding on eBay, making the new Forgeworld models seem almost sane by comparison.  And the new reaver rules out of Apocalypse Reloaded were even more deadly than the ones the fanbase had published over at Lost Souls!  Bigger is now better, and machines that tower over my old reaver titan are becoming commonplace.  Once the grandest thing on the board, the old armorcast models are starting to look their age, as the scale and even the rules themselves are passing them by as being too small.