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The Decapitator wrote:Sorry for the rant but I'm getting fed up with reading about peoples attitude to GW and it's prices etc. Nobody is forcing you to participate, we are all aware that it isn't a cheap hobby either, unfortunately life is life and we don't get everything we want. GW is a buisness (which provides more it's customers than most I have to add) and not a charity.

sorry but no one is forcing you to read people's posts complaining about it either and you have the option of not participating in online forums. unfortunately, life is life and people will post things that you disagree with on the internet as you can't only read things you agree with. DakkaDakka is a discussion forum (one of the things that inevitably comes up from time to time is GW's pricing) and not a company message board toting a single message.

can we get back to discussing toy soldier battlefields now?

warboss wrote:

The Decapitator wrote:Sorry for the rant but I'm getting fed up with reading about peoples attitude to GW and it's prices etc. Nobody is forcing you to participate, we are all aware that it isn't a cheap hobby either, unfortunately life is life and we don't get everything we want. GW is a buisness (which provides more it's customers than most I have to add) and not a charity.

sorry but no one is forcing you to read people's posts complaining about it either and you have the option of not participating in online forums. unfortunately, life is life and people will post things that you disagree with on the internet as you can't only read things you agree with. DakkaDakka is a discussion forum (one of the things that inevitably comes up from time to time is GW's pricing) and not a company message board toting a single message.

can we get back to discussing toy soldier battlefields now?

But that's the point though isn't it! I don't read this forum to hear people moaning, and believe me where I can I try to avoid it completely as it's sodding boring. But it doesn't matter what the subject is it always has people moaning about how expensive GW is or such like.

I don't get wound up easily believe me, but having to sift through the endless posts of people whinging and bleeting about the 'Evil' that is Games Workshop just to find the good, informative, amusing and intelligent comments really gets on my tits.

So whilst I apologise for my rant, I don't apologise for the content which I believe is justified - agree or disagree as you will.

Seems I need to explain myself with a little more than Internet Hyperbole. *ahem*

filbert wrote:H.B.M.C , your antipathy towards GW is well known and well documented but decrying the ROB board as 'anti-imagination' is a bit strong.

...

Can we not just agree to disagree here? Posting alternatives is fine but presenting personal opinion as fact is a bit much.

My opinion is that the RoB is a great looking piece of terrain. My opinion is that, when done up really well, the RoB can be a fantastic surface to play on. But it is a fact that the RoB is exceptionally limited in what you can do and is anything but modular. Why? The hills. This is why I call it anti-imagination. Want a city? Ok, long as you have hills. What about a trench network? That's fine too, as long as you like hills with your trenches? Snow world? Long as it has hills! Desert? How 'bout some Desert Hills to go with them?

Hills! Hills! Hills! Hills! Hills!

I love terrain - I own more GW terrain than should be considered sane and I spent all last weekend building CoD buildings. I really love creating terrain, and then making cool set-ups on my tables. I get as much enjoyment from that as I often do from playing the game. Planetstrike was a God send, as now I had all these parts to make super-cool strongpoints and whatnot, and that Fortress of Redemption is one of my fav kits of all time. I like being able to create worlds, and do whatever I want, which is why I consider the best possible table to be a completely blank flat surface because it is a blank slate to work upon. It can have some details on the surface (the Ex Illis board, the Zuzzy mats, even those new airbrushed ones with the craters), but it is flat and gives you the choice over what to do and what to put where.

Do me, the hills on the RoB go completely against this line of thinking. They're are a bit like handing a painter a canvass, but you're already drawn half a face on it already and just said "Well, y'know - paint whatever you want, but the face has got to be there, ok?". It is anti-imagination because it limits what you can do because (ignoring Kan's suggestion of just buying expansion sets for a moment) no matter what sort of table you want and no matter how you paint it, it still has those hills. You can never not have them. The hills that GW sells are great because I can moved them again, or not have them at all. Why would I want the opposite of that, hills that I can't move about and can never remove? And then there's the cost. For something so expensive I would expect more than a table that has an extremely number of limited configurations. It'd be that painter again, choosing between buying a whole stack of paints that he chooses, or forking out four times as much money for some very nice and high quality paints, but there are only 2 colours.

I don't like restrictions. The RoB is a table of restrictions. What you can put on it is virtually unlimited, true, but unlimited + hills. Playing on the same terrain over and over again would drive me mad, and I just cannot see how anyone could consider the RoB a good deal when for the same money you can buy a simple sheet of MDF and spend all the money you saved on a couple of coloured mats and a heap of terrain (including GW hills, that can be moved around however you want!). With the RoB you spend all that money and still don't have any real terrain! You've just got a board (with hills!) and that's it. I just can't see how it can be a good thing.

And, on top of that, I don't like how virtually every promotional shot and battle report and everything else GW these days now takes place on a RoB, as if it was the only surface you can play on. I really do wonder where all their terrain from the past 20 years has gone. Now we ever see are those that are Official Citadel Scenery, and it's really quite bland, even if what they do with that terrain can be magnificent.

I'm sorry if I haven't made that clear prior to this (I don't think I have in this thread at least), but you were owed an explanation, so there goes.

The Decapitator wrote:@ HBMC - Well actually at least 2 people (AlexHolker and Ouze) have stated that they don't like this 'Skull Layer' and many others have too in this and similar threads, so in fact you are wrong when repremanding me for explaining that it isn't in fact a 'skull layer'. Maybe you should follow your own advice and actually read what others have posted before being quick to slam others for their comments.

Half of what you wrote above isn't even coherent. I'll try and break it down into a simple dialogue so that we might better understand whatever it is you're trying to say here:

You: HBMC you complain about the skulls all the time.
Me: No I don't.
You: But you told me it wasn't a skull layer!

No... even breaking it down doesn't help us understand it any better.

Let me try this then:

You acused me of complaining about something 'all the time' that I haven't. I called you on it, and now the best your brain can come up with is some blithering nonsense about a GW employee spilling my drink and stealing my girlfriend.

Really?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Fateweaver wrote:Decapitator wins the thread.

Why Fate? Because he's insulting me (or attempting to anyway)? Is that why? Crawl back into your OT hole Fate, or run off to Whineseer. Your presence here is... distasteful.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BloodQuest wrote:

H.B.M.C. wrote:And why do you need to stand on your RoB in the first place?

I wouldn't, my point was that 3mm MDF sounds a little too lightweight.

And I was being facetious. But even in saying that "It's really strong and you can stand on it" isn't much of a point in its favour. However...

BloodQuest wrote:On the other hand, I have actually thrown my RoB boards in the back seat of my car and taken them in to work to play there after hours. I wouldn't trust 3mm MDF to last too long being transported and yours would be so heavy I wouldn't want to have to carry it.

Transportation isn't something I had considered. But I'll explain why. Regardless of how good or bad the RoB is, you still need somewhere to put it once you get to where you're going. It isn't a table, it doesn't have legs. For me, transportation has always been about the tables themselves. A couple of the guys in our group have these 2.5'x6' trestle tables where the legs fold up and then the table itself folds in half (2.5'x3'). They're of a decent weight, but if you fold down the back seet of your car and throw 'em in the boot you can usually stack the two of them needed to make a table in most cars. Throw in some sort of surface cover (anything from a table cloth to one of GW's green mats) and, to me at least, there's your table. Maybe if the RoB were an actual table, but it's not.

I guess you could play on the floor. After all - we know it's strong enough to be stood upon.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I like being able to create worlds, and do whatever I want, which is why I consider the best possible table to be a completely blank flat surface because it is a blank slate to work upon. It can have some details on the surface (the Ex Illis board, the Zuzzy mats, even those new airbrushed ones with the craters), but it is flat and gives you the choice over what to do and what to put where.

That's why you use a modular board, so you can rearrange or swap out the different modules for different effects. Making all the modules the same completely blank flat surface removes that utility.

Of course, to make that a possibility GW would have to put more than 6 modules in their Realm of Battle set.

H.B.M.C, I take your point about the hills but what I was trying to explain, although I am aware I am not the most lucid of individuals at times, is that those of us who buy the ROB board do so because we want the hills, not because we are compromising. Personally speaking, I didnt look at the ROB board and think 'great, a ready to go board but dang, it has hills, OK well I can live with that'. I bought mine because I felt the hills added to the set up. Yes, it is limited in its config but there are only 6 tiles - basic maths will tell you there are only a small number of potential combinations, hills or no hills.

I think GW's intention is to release further tiles in the future to expand the usability - they released a couple of expansion tiles recently IIRC so there is slightly more potential there.

Personally speaking, if I wanted a blank canvas, I would have bought a sheet of MDF and painted it green. I didn't buy an ROB because I am anti-imagination, I bought one because I don't have the time, skill, or creativity to scratch build all my own terrain; the GW stuff, although pricey, is an excellent substitute. Having been in the hobby for nearly 20 years now, I am sick of making my own terrain, especially when I was never any good at it in the first place - hence my comment about carving lumps of polystyrene. Anything I ever created never looked or felt right. I have been yearning for 'official' terrain sets for years now. The trade off is that I swap my own creativity for homogeneity of lots of similar ROB boards but to be quite frank, I couldn't give a toss.

But I agree with you that GW push it too much and are trying to position it as the only solution. However, that's just GW; its what they always do, much in the same way that they try and suggest that GW and GW alone is the hobby.

What I am trying to say in a very convoluted way is that you have some good points but you really don't need to spew so much anti-GW bile to get it across. It kind of dilutes your message when people see your points as attacking them for their purchases (and I'm sure you don't intend for that to happen).

Threadnomantastic post removed and this one can go back to bed...