Two new Models for the Reclaimed

At last, the two remaining units are out, available as part of the Reclaimed Army Bundle and of course as part of the late pledges for the Full Spectrum Dominance Third Wave campaign.

The Eccentric Cores are here!

When reclaiming and reprogramming destroyed Tech cores from the battlefields, the factory-city engineers sometimes end up with some unusual results. Most of them are classified as failures and wiped clean (or destroyed), but if one shows promise... they build a unique rig for it, and that's how they got the Shepherd and the Vanguard.

PSA for what follows - Let's not forget that these are 15 meters tall giant robots made out of concrete slabs!

Adding Complexity vs Breaking the Balance

Modelling creativity aside, Full Spectrum Dominance is a game that tries to be balanced. Balance doesn't just mean having all the factions equally strong, in fact iterating adding and shaving away anything that causes inbalance in this spirit inevitably ends up equalizing everything and removing character for the asymmetric playstyle.

Instead, having factions displaying strong weaknesses and higly situational strenghts is how the balance is obtained in FSD: with different enough scenarios and with plenty of decision-making at every step of the game rounds, players need to exploit the opponent weaknesses to get the most Victory Points at the end of a game.

Needless to say, adding new units to a faction can be a very dangerous thing, that can unwillingly "patch" one of the intended weaknesses of their lists and break the balance.

Unique Characters

A way to add character to a faction of lookalikes such as the Reclaimed, is to add highly situational and unique (as in: you can only field one in your list) models. The Eccentric Cores are a perfect in-lore explaination for the scarcity of such models.

The Reclaimed are especially notable for their Cyclopes (or Cyclops? I know the naming was wrong, I wonder if I should rename them with the next update of the cards!), and for the unusual Wardens mechanism, so it seemed natural to have the two units being particular effective to slightly change the game dynamics on both.

One of the easiest ways to make unique characters it to give them a different kind of head. Luckly, Rattappoom K did sketch several ideas when we were in the concept phase for the faction!

The Shepherd

First is the Shepherd. The walking cane replaced with a 15 meters tall wrench, and shown at its best surrounded by wardens of all kinds. I am going to base mine on a 40 mm round base, larger than the other Cyclopes, and field some wardens on there.

The head light is stronger (thank you butterfingers 49 for the idea!), to attract the flocks at night (whatever that means), and there is a healthy amount of pointless chains scattered around the back. The bulgy shoulderpads fit well with the cloak on the back.

The Vanguard

I already had the Cyclops Guardian, with big shields and guns, but no unit had an equivalent of an assault rifle! Starting with the Sniper's gun as a reference, I built a more dynamic and (rightfully) cartoonish assault rifle:

With that done, and taking inspiration from the head variants above, I made a more dynamic variant, riddled with bullet holes.

A handy backpack with some ominous pipes poking out was a nice final touch for the design.
Giant concrete robots running? Well, why not!

And that's about it for today!

The profiles are still in the works, and need some testing from the community before being properly released, but... it's quite an update!

Happy printing, everyone,
Jack