In anticipation of the world’s first Fallout: Factions tournament at the Goonhammer Open, some of the Modiphius team have been documenting their preparations over on their site. But the Goonhammer team aren’t going to let them waltz to glory without a fight! Lenoon, Moogus, Thundercloud, Cronch and Neon are also attending the event, and hoping to come away as Fallout: Factions’ first-ever official Top Dog. Put your headbands on, blast some inspirational rock ballads, and get sweaty – it’s time for a training montage.
Lenoon
In every new system I pick up, I have a big phase of “toys not boys” so it was inevitable I’d pick up the Brotherhood of Steel. I have virtually no plans aside from “take some Knights” and “damn this Modiphius resin is crisp as hell”, but eyeing up what the developers are doing (thanks for the tips, team!) I am exercising a fabulous amount of restraint in not taking “oops five knights”.
The first stop though is a Knight Paladin. At our game testing day at Modiphius I ran into the absolute horror that is Super Mutants swinging big horrible sledgehammers, so I want something that’s as solid a rock. Enter Paladin Deborah – Power Armour, an upgraded Gatling Laser, Lifegiver Perk and almost certainly the target for whatever chems I can find. Chems are going to be the fuel that pushes Deborah’s insane damage and durability up into “this is just silly” territory.
To do chems in vast quantities unbefitting a Paladin of the Brotherhood, I need chem finders. Enter the Scribe Barbara, ready to do a little shooting with a 10mm pistol, but mainly to search for chems using the Spotter perk and bring along Fisto 2.0, a Protectron unit with the latest version of some very dodgy software.
With a staggering 149 of my 250 caps tied up in three models, I am suffering serious decision paralysis for the rest….
Josh
I am, by no means, an expert at games. I like to think I am, you know, looking across a board with a game plan flowing through my head like that one scene in Beautiful Mind and then as I go forward to execute it I’ll suddenly forget how a tape measure works.
What this means is my initial delve into a system is all about simplicity. I could have a complex force reliant on execution-heavy strategies that should always bag me a win, or close to it, but I know that it’ll fall apart as soon as I think of something funny. And it doesn’t take much for me to think something is funny.
My raiders are the simplest of them all: Point’n’Shoot until there’s nothing left to shoot, or I have nobody left to do the pointing. This meant in a world of militant technocrats, evolved super-murders, and do-gooders armed with hope, I chose the way of Point-Blank Annihilation.
Raiders, the most bastards of all bastards, armed to the teeth with things that hit hard and drugged up to the gills to hit even harder after that.
My boss, the enigmatic ‘Wonder Boy’, is armed with a simple baseball bat and a combat rifle. If there’s a person he doesn’t like, he’ll shoot it twice. If there’s a person he really doesn’t like he’ll crack their head in with a baseball bat. Both weapons can use both his actions in a single activation. (Shoot twice, and move and whack) This gives me good efficiency for the inevitable psycho-jet fuelled rampages he’ll go on.
His lieutenant, ‘Rocket Man’, has a Missile Launcher (don’t point that out to him) and woe be to anyone who gets in the way of it. It’s a Slow weapon, meaning he can only fire it once and can’t benefit from extra dice on the attack but that means he won’t be eating up Chems meant for Wonder Boy. It’s a truly wonderful relationship that makes them a great duo.
As for the rest of the crew – honestly, they’re an eclectic bunch of miscreants that I need to sort properly into an actionable crew with a game plan. I’m broadly building my list around three top dogs, getting as much value as I can out of automatic weapons while sending the dregs off to spread chaos through molotov cocktails and maiming targets I want to die when my top guys stop scrounging up Chems.
As an added bonus, I kindly got provided a Protectron kit I want to incorporate into the gang. I don’t know if it’ll be the best fit mechanically, I’m yet to truly tinker with the actual list outside of equipment, but I reckon I can make it work.
Cronch
I’m quite new to Fallout: Factions, having resisted the call of the Nuka World starter set, so beyond a couple of demos our game day at Modiphius was my first real consistent hands-on time with the game. I came away from that day with myriad crew options racing through my head. I’d cruised to efficient victory with the Operators, marvelled at the Super Mutants’ sheer hitting power, and been awed by the way Justin’s Brotherhood of Steel picked apart my gang with expert piloting (and a flamer-wielding Paladin dropping from a Vertibird).
My obsession with power armor and tendency for playing the “good” guys (gigantic asterisk required) tends to be my default, so I was initially most drawn to the Brotherhood of Steel lists. However, fortune threw a spanner in the works when I was offered the opportunity to get my hands on an early copy of the new, hard plastic Wasteland Raiders sprues. I couldn’t say no to that, so it was out with the evil fascist Brotherhood and in with the noble freedom fighters of the Wasteland Raiders.
We’ll have a full review of the Raiders sprue coming separately, so I won’t focus too much on the models here other than to say that they’re very nice and, fortunately for me, include two power armor wearers which can represent either your Boss, or the champion Butcher. It was a no-brainer for me to include both of these, and also a second Butcher whose model will be sourced from the X-01 Advanced Power Armour box. Luckily the Wasteland Raider kit comes with some spares, so I should be able to crust the third suit up easily enough.
I chose to equip each of these hulking brutes with a different heavy weapon, and so we start with a minigun, flamer, and missile launcher. I really wanted to take a power armor focused approach to fleshing out my crew, so I prioritised loading up on some upgrades for these three, starting with +1 strength on my leader to make that minigun even more lethal. I considered upgrading the minigun to have the select fire option, but decided that ultimately I’d rather keep the Pierce effect instead.
I followed this up with Strong Back on the missile launcher Butcher – given that the weapon is Slow and can only fire once per round, this should mean he has the activation free to get to potential loot tokens and Rummage for extra chems. This pairs fantastically well his his innate Sticky Fingers perk, which means he can grab chems twice per Rummage. Meanwhile, my flamer Butcher picked up Sprint, to get that flamer into position as quickly as possible, and Steady Aim to make it more effective once it’s there.
From here on it was a simple task to fit in some unarmored Raiders with my remaining Rating. I opted for a pair each of Pyschos and Scavvers, with a mix of weapons. The Scavvers step into battle with a short hunting rifle and a sawn-off shotgun for some fire support, while the Pyschos both wield a melee weapon alongside a pistol or a molotov. Being able to pin enemy models down in combat feels quite important in the games of Factions I’ve played so far, and I’m a little worried that I still don’t have enough reliable melee to do this effectively, but it’s too late to go back now.
This left me with four points left to spend. At first I chose Hidden on my molotov-toting Pyscho, which would let him pop up close to the enemy at the start of round 1 and hopefully get a melee charge or a molotov throw off before his inevitable demise. Ultimately though I decided to invest in a bit of that Fallout silliness and instead chose Ricochet on my leader, meaning that if a ranged attack fails to hit him it might instead bounce off and hit somebody else nearby. I reckon that minigun is going to attract a lot of attention, so this seems like an investment in fun!
Finally, I chose my chem doses. I should have no problem scavenging up plentiful supplies in-game, so I opted for a spread. Psycho seems important to really amp up the power of my high-cost models and get my investment back, so two doses of that joined a Jet (the clearing of fatigue is just too tempting), with the final caps spent on a Rad-X in lieu of any other affordable option. I’m benefiting massively from my leader’s Personal Stash perk here, making every chem dose 3 creds cheaper.
So there we have it, a Wasteland Raiders list that’s big on chems, big on big guns, and big on power armor! Next week I’ll be getting models built, and starting to think of some colour schemes – I’ve already got some ideas.I must admit though, those other two X-01 models keep catching my eye. Perhaps I won’t be able to resist the idea of an entirely power armored crew…(edit: I just checked, the C.O.M.P. Kit sets all crews at tier 1, so that would break my Champion limit. Drat!)
Neon
Modiphius was very kind to provide me with the Wasteland Raiders kit, putting me on the path of hard drugs, rock n’ roll and skull-based decor. Join me over the next few weeks as I attempt to reach peak Raider Mindset, with most mindlessly brutal approach to the game that I can muster.
But it wasn’t always this way, no no. When I first windmill slammed that mfin’ buy tickets button for the GHO I was gonna play Super Mutants or Disciples, the thinking gamer’s sadistic murderers. But as I got reading the Wasteland Raiders rules it slowly dawned on me that this was the kind of gang I wanted to play. Fast, furious and bloody.
So I started drafting lists. With one box at my disposal I couldn’t go for the full min/max powergaming sweatlord that Reddit thinks Goonhammer is known for. But my initial drafts were pretty promising attempts to squeeze every drop of value I could out of the limited roster. Going tall with the Power Armoured Raiders, going wide by filling in slots with Mr Handy companions. But something felt missing, this was THINKING, this wasn’t Raider Mindset. I needed something bigger, stupider, scarier.
I’ve had this figure on my desk for a while now, and I can’t think of any better place for its first outing than at the GHO. This gang is gonna be all drugs, all Deathclaw. Its gonna own.
Thundercloud
I started early in January with purchases of the Super Mutants Core box and some critters and added them to the Protectron Workers I’d purchased before Christmas.
I got the Protectrons done first, with drybrushing of the metals and layered painting of the colour sectrions to give a nice worn metal tone on the metal sections and a solid body of colour to chip and scratch for the painted sections. The models are good and look good painted up. In Factions they’re a solid extra unit, with Robot lasers being fast weapons on an expendable unit that no one panics over if it get’s killed.
I really just love the little Robby the Robot figures and picked up some more robots so if a robot gang is added in the future I have all the figures I need to field one.
The Super Mutant Core box was the bread and butter of my first gang. Unfortunately I couldn’t source any other super mutants, and with only 5 mutants and 2 doggos it would leave a substantial chunk of the force being made up of robots or creatures.
The mutants I found much more enjoyable to paint than the doggos. The doggos I contrasted and I just didn’t like the finish, which the mutants, when they were enamel washed, really came together.
Essentially for a proper Super Mutant force I’m waiting on the plastic set to come out so I have a lot more options to field. The Super Mutant Hounds are really good for 10 points, and Super Mutants are pretty tough if lacking the firepower of some teams.
The creatures I painted up were 2 bears (though I’d recommend against taking two bears in a list, one does make an incredible threat) and 6 mongrels. They painted up quickly with mainly contrast paints, and suddenly I can make a 250 point force with what I’ve got.
Unfortunately I now have commitments on the day of the event, and won’t be able to make it, but will come back and paint up some more Fallout figures so that I’ve got enough for future events.
Signing Off
That’s it from us for this week. Check back in on the next couple of Fridays as we try to blast through getting our crews ready in time for the GHO! And keep an eye out for updates from Modiphius too. If you’d like to join us at the Goonhammer Open on Saturday March 22nd, tickets are still available here.
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