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Hello,

I've done it... I bought the CoC battle box and faction book. Put them together and I don't regret it, the models are incredible (mold lines and all) and far beyond my ability to do them justice with painting. I am curious how it plays though. From my first (inexpert) glance it seems like the box isn't designed that well. For one thing, the mitigator seems like it does nothing but kill infantry, which isn't that great since battle box games have no infantry in them. For another the cipher wants both hot shot, since it is the only thing with a boostable ranged attack; and reconstruct, since it's your biggest beatstick. So that means you just never cast hotshot or else put reconstruct on the galvinizer (I guess that is ok, since it means your opponent has to expend even more resources to kill a light vector).

I'm just curious about what people who actually know how to play the game think about it. Would I be better off buying some other models and building my own force?

Haven't played battlebox games with it yet, but I think it's solid relative to the other boxes. In battlebox games you're not using the Mitigator for the auto point of damage, you're using it for the knockdown bola. You can also put Hot Shot on Syntherion, since he has a decent gun and it's free to upkeep.

I'd buy an extra heavy kit or two to expand your options, but min-maxing your battlebox is usually poor form unless your opponent is on the same page and it's certainly better than the trollbloods battlebox.

Many battle boxes aren't optimal. I'm sure you'll be able to use those Jacks in a large force, and overall effectiveness isn't a huge concern in battle box games.

I need to play the game more...I never even thought about casting hot shot on my caster. I guess a free boosted shot per turn is kind of nice. Get the focus commitment out of the way all at once when you have it free.

With his abilities and spells syntheron could well be the most focus efficient caster in the game. To bring my force up to 15 points i've dropped the galvaniser and thrown in a monitor. The nice think about the heavies being immune to knockdown is if they're engaged the mitigator can still use it's aoe to great effect without worrying about negatively impacting on the cypher that's about to get auto hits. Auto repair is interesting, it basically forces an opponent to kill whatever it's fighting or risk it returning later, this stacks beautifully with syntherons bring it back from the dead spell. I took a look at the cards and was smitten myself.

Agreed on the focus efficiency, it seems like the only limit on the number of vectors he can run effectively is how many he can actually cram on the table (they don't all even have to fit in his control range since they can induct focus outside it).

That said, as soon as he runs into someone who can remove upkeep spells he pretty much packs up and goes home.

 dementedwombat wrote:

That said, as soon as he runs into someone who can remove upkeep spells he pretty much packs up and goes home.

I'm not so sure on that. Outside Reconstruct most of his upkeeps are offensive in nature, so losing them is annoying but not necessarily crippling.

Slightly different topic, but not different enough to make another thread. So I've been reading more through the faction book and I seriously think I'm suffering from options overload. I'm coming into this from a 40k background...theorycrafting a potential list in this game is really hard!

I think it's probably lack of familiarity with the game but also because I just love the faction so much that all our options actually look like they're good at something, with multiple choices for any given situation.

Maybe i should have started the game with the faction I am least interested in, that way I wouldn't be seeing everything as so awesome.

With everything being good, it can be tough to decide on what to do.

The key is to decide what you need, and then bring what covers that.