I'm inclined to agree. The one thing this game doesn't need more of is extra components!

That's sad, but he made a good impact with his life.

The use of White Knight is actually substantially older than 2010. It has a long history in advertising and finance. In finance, it refers to a well-intentioned takeover of one company by another. In advertising, it was the subject of a very successful ad campaign for Ajax from the 1960s (i.e., coming to the rescue of housewives). In recent media sources, it has been used in print to refer to an individual championing a cause. Cross-referencing multiple UK English and US English definitions of the word as in Merriam-Webster and Collins, for example, will show multiple instances of its accepted use outside of the loathsome MRA movement in multiple contexts, including 'one that champions a cause' (Merriam-Webster). Out of curiosity, I checked both online and print versions of these definitions. Anecdotally, I remember it being a long staple of forum arguments to denigrate someone's seemingly fan-motivated defense of a company or product. Although I generally agree that one should avoid the use of such phrases which become better known as catch calls of antagonistic or offensive cliques, it is also important to not let such groups claim ownership of perfectly serviceable language.

I completely agree.

Are people seriously bothered that Disney, a company with an appalling record for how it has treated its artists is maybe, occasionally denied a pittance for models it is not producing?

I've had the opposite impression. Used correctly, they are an incredible unit. I mostly play Imperial but consider pathfinders close to an auto-include when I play Rebel. They are very dependable and take a lot of effort for your enemy to shift. Back them up with a unit of regular troopers and a med-droid and they are first rate. I deploy them in good cover as far up the board as I can get them unless something like Vader is about.

A properly-based model elevates the paint scheme immeasurably and is just as important as the painting of the miniature itself in my opinion. Temperate or arid basing rarely looks out of place but, in truth, the basing scheme of a model not matching the terrain or mat is negligible. Watch a bunch of battle reports and you'll note this pretty quickly. To me, an unbased miniature looks incomplete and, for display purposes, not nearly as interesting.

From what I understand, the starter kits don't come with the command upgrade sprues, which no doubt helps them to drop those costs, but is a good reason I'll likely get just one starter.

I think there's no good reason to conclude that there wouldn't be captains who didn't hold on to their kama when jumping rank. It's a pretty practical thing to have in a tropical environment. Von Rundstedt still wore his colonel's uniform when he became a general because he felt the general's uniform was pretentious, for example. But I won't paint any captain schemes personally, as it seems odd that you'd need a captain to lead a squad. As for the heavy weapons trooper, it's an invention for the game, so there's nothing to tell you they don't also wear kama. I'll paint mine as a regular trooper who happens to wear one.

I never actually got into Runewars. The rules seemed very interesting, but the factions and lore didn't really grab me. Conquest, however, I have been very keen on.

One single bottle goes a long way, especially if you are watering paints down on a palette (as you should!). I would only ever double up on white or black (as long as it's pure white or pure black) as you will likely want to mix that more often than not. I honestly cannot remember the last time I threw a bottle away. If they are properly stored, they will last years. I did recently replace some Secret Weapon Dark Sepia, but that's because I use it as a wash for the bases, which tends to take a lot.

Lucky for me, I have no interest in Clone Wars! But, yeah, your assessment of the game's scale is spot on. Even in RoTJ, where that infamous legion was deployed, maybe 50 of them were in the actual battle. That's still more than Legion would deploy.

And the most important thing about the shoretrooper release, no stupid chest laser.

The models looks fantastic, and it's one of the more aesthetically pleasing of the new stormtroopers. I'm really happy it was these guys instead of the Pimptroopers from Solo. I would have preferred Navy troopers, but I wanted to see shoretroopers eventually. Given the other Rogue One content, this release makes for a nice, thematic distribution. I see no problem at all with these troops being corps. In a game in which large battles don't even feature a platoon of soldiers, whether or not one side had more of one kind of trooper than another is not particularly relevant. It is believable that, where these troops were deployed, they were probably in roughly equivalent numbers to regular stormtroopers. I wholeheartedly agree with the poster who said that a strength of this game is its sandbox quality.

KR Multicase. Besides being a good, affordable storage system, I especially appreciate that their logo is discreet and doesn't advertise 'massive nerd'.