Khador 2015, Part 03 - To the Victor, the spoils...

...and to the rest, death!

Before you read this article, I highly suggest you go and watch this:
TempleCon Keynote Excerpt

Otherwise, you may consider me nuts when going on beyond the break. Short spoilers: We now can light the Sea Witch on Fire, and that'll be glorious whenever it happens.
So, you're still here. Good.

So, uh, more Colossals this year. At first I was like "oh, really? That's their big thing?" and seriously disappointed. But after having actually watched the video, I'm warming up to the idea. You should know that part of my following opinions rise from my Conquest still being in it's box.

So let's go through the keynote part relevant to Khador, statement by statement.

The Victor is a new Khadoran Colossal, that's intended to be something of a walking siege engine. The prime focal point is just this massive gun that's really - it's the size of a Juggernaut, right, it's so big.

I can't recall the description of the Conquest off the top of my head, but that "Walking Siege Engine" (WSE) bit sounded familiar - but possibly not from WM/H. Still, if the Victor is a WSE, then what does that make the Conquest, who has an equally massive gun, supposedly taken from a ship. Maybe something more like a walking tank.

Instead of the Conquest's main guns, we now have the siege mortar, a large, very long-range, but inaccurate weapon, that has a variety of attack types. So if you wanna make a 5" rough terrain feature, you can do that. If you wanna take down the defense of enemy models hit by the template, you can do that, too. And last, but not least, if you wanna set everything under that template on fire, you can choose that as well.

Oooh, this is the good bit. Let's break it down:
• Siege Mortar: Fingers crossed for Arcing Fire.
• Large: Probably Pow 16.
• Very long range: PPish for 14+ inches. My bet is 16", and I had to look up the Conquest's Rng to compare, actually.
• Inaccurate: Just what it says on the tin. The Victor will be firing at an effective RAT of 0 (zero) with this gun. Not with the secondaries, though, see below, too, for more on that. I actually think that this is really not relevant, RAT 4 has been crappy all the time, all it does is save you focus because you will have a hard time hitting anything anyway, and all of the gun's effects don't require direct hits anyway.
• 5" AoE: That's a serious boon over all the 4"ers we have already. Anything else would've been saaaad times.
• Attack types: Crater, Flare, and Continous Effect: Fire. Guess we took a CoC Cipher and stole the ammo, which is good. Broadsides loves this kind of stuff. Personally, I like the option to set obnoxious stuff (Zealots) on fire the most, though many good things can be said about lowering defense (which generally means -2). And, nailing a heavy with 5" of rough terrain means he's not getting out of that by walking...

Siege Mortar. Victor blow stuff up real good.

 I don't want to spend too much time and words on it, but man, something about that statement - or rather, the way that statement has been given - by Ed Bourelle tastes like sour grapes. What exactly that is to you, I leave up to you, but I, personally, am not fond of those last few seconds in the context of Khador, the Victor, and/or the perceived state of the game as a whole. End of Line.

What's not said, but shown:
• The secondary guns look like machine guns, so they are probably single shot, no AoE, and probably no defensive tech like the Conquest has. But how do you like the prospect of RAT 4 non-AoEs? Right, me neither. So it'll be either a lot of shots, so *Strafe at worst (could come with covering fire, though), and Auto-Fire at best. My guess is RnG 10, RoF 1, Rapid Fire d3.
Edit: What we do know is that they'll have a special rule hitherto not found on any model. That'll be... interesting...

Expanding the view - 'Casters to go with him?
• It's a colossal, so it's not reinventing the wheel like the Conquest was. All the good that the Conquest brought courtesy of being a Colossal also apply to the Victor.
• Harkevich might like him more than the Conquest because there's less need to hit. Strakhov's Sentry can get quite harmful when lobbing 5" napalm AoEs, the same can apply to Zerkova's Watcher. For all the others, well... pSorscha Mortar Combat might return to being a thing. Fire for Effect might be a beautiful sight, too, but I'm not totally sold on that.

So, those are my "gush-of-the-moment" thoughts. Any comments or further thought? Then leave them below! (Or pester me on the site you found a link to this, however you please).

Until next time, farewell!