Shhh... did you hear that? That was the sound of your post slicing my heart in two... *sigh*

I don't want to rain on your parade, but, as someone who has worked with photorealistic textures in the past... This statement drives me nuts! You are confusing talent/ability with effortlessness. Just because a process to create something is straightforward for someone who has the training or talent to do it does not mean that the creation that is made with that process is not labor intensive or difficult. For example "I have no skills in music composition and want to write an upbeat pop song. I'm led to belive that for the people with the right skillset it's relatively easy, so can anyone here help me?" or "I have no skills painting miniatures and want to paint a Runewars army to a high standard. I'm led to belive that for the people with the right skillset it's relatively easy, so can anyone here help me?" Ugh. This is a huge task. Absolutely do-able, but here's what you'd be looking at: Amassing base textures ... a large series of high res photos of the required terrain at the correct representative scale. For the best results these will be taken by the creator as with the size (and scale) you are after, you will need a lot of variation of the particular terrain. These base textures/images are then seamlessly woven into a (very) large image. This means no repeating textures - the mat should look like a single photo of a given slice of terrain (if you google around you'll see a lot of the lesser companies have repeating textures on their mats, which is really distracting, ugly and videogamey) If done right, you are looking at a very long, tedious and involved process on the creation alone (let alone potential treks to obtain the base images). I have the necessary skills to do this, but I'm buying a DeepCut mat ... for me, to be worth the time and effort I'd want to be running a gaming mat business.

So ozgameshop.com (a UK based company) is listing wave 1 (core units expansions, command expansions, and heroes) as being available 26th May... They had the release date right for the core, so... e.g.: http://www.ozgameshop.com/board-game-expansions/runewars-miniatures-game-lord-hawthorne-expansion-pack Hold onto your wallets kids!

F*** YEAH!

IMHO it's waaaay to early to say that Waiqar is underpowered, right now. Fun to speculate on upcoming upgrades and the benefits they will bring to Waiqar, but I don't see these as "fixes" for a sub-optimal faction.

So in a previous game in a store my Waiqar managed to proc Betrayal on a 3 x 3 unit of Spearmen with a Front Line Rune Golem... Betrayal causes a unit to melee attack itself, ignoring all dice symbols apart from hits and having no re-rolls. The issue raised was did the Golem's Brutal ability proc, increasing the threat from 3. I felt it would as Brutal is not worded optionally with a 'may' and specifically increases Threat. My opponent was happy to go with it, but the peanut gallery were not so sure and felt this was open for debate. Was I wrong to thing Brutal applied? (FWIW it ended up being a moot point as he rolled blanks - D'Oh!)

How large is the Siege Golem in BattleLore relative to the Golem?

I love these - the shading on the metal, particularly the sword hilts is amazing!

double post

While I'm sure there will be future melee only units - I suspect one of the defining qualities of this faction will be that their "infantry" are archers...

Why is there no double-like button!

My biggest complaint is the range 1 end has the two tails/spikes that are very prone to wear ... at least more so than the square edged other end at range 5. We need acrylics stat.

Yeah the archers were/are a nightmare! * 3 of the sculpts anyway - Mr "laid back pulling an arrow out" (the one where you're attaching his chest and head) was suuuuper easy.

A good friend of mine fixed me up with some actual rocks that fit on the terrain templates and work a treat!

Dispatch Runner from the core is a perfect example of this.

Yep.

I'd say it's aesthetics. For me personally, I can't stand to have more than one of each sculpt in each tray, and I need the sculpts to change position from tray to tray to make a mass of troops appear as non-uniform as possible.

I would agree with this wholeheartedly if you were talking about the game in the early waves, however, X-Wing has been slowly and inexorably moving towards removing this (to the games detriment IMHO). What started as a light hearted, fun game of arc dodging star fighters with lucky (and unlucky) shots has become a grim LCG where a battle is more often than not decided in list building rather than performance on the table. I assume by initiative system in X-Wing you're actually referring to Pilot Skill (PS). If that is the case, then I'd have to beg to differ... The fixed nature of PS in X-Wing tends to emphasise either really low PS (for blocking) or high PS (for first shot and adapting to the movements of others). While it works great as a representation of the skill and/or "heroicness" of the pilots, it doesn't necessarily make for good gameplay. The tactical depth provided by the Runewars system would be superb in X-wing (not to mention the responsiveness of choosing manoeuvre directions on the fly). If it existed in X-Wing it wouldn't prevent the representation of skilled/heroic pilots any more than it prevents Runewars representing mighty heroes.

Very nice!

To each their own. I admire your willpower!

Eh... that depends... Miniatures in Descent have changed over the course of the game, going from 25/28mm to 28mm/32mm Heroic, much to the chagrin of Descent players. Non-humanoid monsters - "right size" isn't really an issue. Humanoid monsters and heroes - the later in the release cycle they are, the closer they will be in scale.

Thank you so much!

Hey Zetan - any chance you could provide an equally high quality scan of the back of the terrain cards? And thank you so much for your work on the blank!

Agreed. The symbols and the colours are not hard to interpret - that isn't the issue. It's looking at a unit card and being unable to distinguish what the squiggly blog printed in the body of the text is. Standing at a playing table and looking down on a unit card, I can read every bit of text, but I cannot tell what the runes in the text are. I can read and understand the tossed runes. I know the symbols. I know the colours. I know what they represent. I just can't read the small squiggly blobs of ink on the unit cards. At any rate, after a few games I've memorised what the relevant units in my army use/need in the rune department, but it seems like a missed opportunity/dropped ball by the design department.