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Old January 21st, 2018, 09:21 PM
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Re: The Book of Master Lao Xin

This guy doesn't excite me nearly as much as I had hoped that he would. I understand that the idea was to make the Monks into their own army, and there are only so many ways to do that, but I can't shake the feeling that I've seen Master Lao Xin before.

Kato Katsuro, flawed though he may have been, was a unique way of managing Order Markers for Samurai and buffing the Ashigaru, separate from the Bonding Common squads that we would typically see. If my memory serves me correctly, the closest thing to Kato that we officially saw was the Red Skull in Marvel HeroScape.

Kantono Daishi, however, took the idea behind Kato and made it work well, transforming the disparate ninjas into a 500pt army. He seemed like a strictly improved Kato to me, and since there were few other ways to help the ninjas (along with them being commonly associated with Samurai), it didn't bother me too much.

With Xin, however, I don't see as strong of a thematic link, and this is already after we have seen very similar powers before. Since the standalone Monk heroes were all (expertly) designed by C3V, I would've liked to see something else than essentially making another Kantono Daishi for the Monks. Kato, Kantono, and Lao Xin each have their own quirks, of course, but they practically fulfill the same role.

I love C3V for their creativity and dedication towards this game (units like the 8th Infantry Pathfinder and Tomoe Gozen are radically different from what we've seen before but are still able to create a functional army), but Lao Xin is the only figure so far that I haven't been a huge fan of. Admittedly, I find it hard to imagine how else a bunch of Monk heroes and a common squad can become an effective army without a very Lao Xin-like figure, but I saw a mention that the Lawmen would be getting a leader next, and I wanted to voice my concerns that all of these leaders would feel too similar to each other if they used the same types of powers.

That all said, I look forward to seeing the next release C3V has planned, and I'd like to thank everyone for the many hours that they put into each and every unit that they design.
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