Warhammer 40k - I played a game and I liked it!

Got in my first game with the Astra Militarum last night. It was a lot of fun. The list I ran was the last one I posted up, so we just did 1,750 so I can test out what I have so far. Luckily I managed to snag a few Leman Russ tanks from a friend in a really good deal, so now I only lack the 2 Wyverns to actually own the full list.

My opponent ran Sisters of Battle with some Inquisition allies. That's a good army to stress test my armor - so many meltas, multi-meltas, and exorcists. Unfortunately we both had some wonky dice, and a few random Invulnerable/cover saves early game on his part ended up being a huge deal. I'm terrified of Dominion squads, particularly when playing so much heavy armor, and deployed... interestingly. To be fair it was my first game with the list and the Codex, so that inexperience was terrible. And what mission did we roll up? Contact Lost, of course. You get as many Tactical Objective cards as you control Objectives, so that was against me.

It was a great game with a lot of fun times involved, though. My list plays like my Tau list did, but less mobile ("no jetpack moves"), but it has the benefit of -NOT BEING TAU-. I didn't deploy well, as stated, and that really messed with my ability to castle-advance with a pile of Leman Russ tanks. Lesson learned, though.

He ended up Outflanking with the three Dominion Squads, and failed to bring any in on turn 2. That means I had three play turns (I went first) to get my tanks to the middle of the board, which I knew but didn't actually do. We had a lot of LoS, and I chose my side poorly and got the biggest LoS piece that was furthest in the deployment zone. Unfortunately this bottle-necked ME from the get go because of the movement and positioning I did.

In the end, I was tabled, but the VPs were actually kind of close. If I deployed correctly, I should have been able to largely forgo shooting first turn and just flat out all my tanks in to a better position with the Kabe's Herald on Pask. This was even more pronounced by being out of range with my Multi-Melta sponsons on my Vanquisher tanks, which reduced their firepower substantially (and I don't mean out of Melta range, I mean out of 24" range, uggh). I lost because I didn't play better, and that's a fate I'm very happy with. Losing without being able to figure out your mistakes is always the most annoying thing.

My MVP was my Plasma-cutioner, because he ended up killing Coteaz, about 6 melta guns, and a sizable amount of Sisters.

But I'm still short 100 points for the standard tournament point, and shy 250 points for my "for fun" games I play with non-competitive players in my area. 100 points means upgrades, and I failed to unlock the true potential of my Company Command Squad in such a list, and a few well-placed upgrades might be a really good idea. A Master of Ordnance would just add another Str 9 AP 3 attack from anywhere on the board at only 20 points? Wait, that can't be right! Another 150 points from there might just want to see another Company Command Squad, since I have points for little else (unless I add to a Leman Russ Squadron or pair up the Wyverns and grab a Basilisk, another Wyvern or two, or a Hydra - fliers being the biggest weakness of the list at the moment after meltas).

Astra Militarum - Dudesmen

     Having a very frustrating morning. Between the power going out in waves due to a downed line (or something) and the tedious nature of painting guys en masse, I'm calling it for the day. Progress is at a good point, I feel. While I'm only painting up 12 guys, it's two more than I'd like to - with one of them being a weapon team.
     But can't play Astra Militarum without some Dudes. Once I streamline the process and only do squads/lots of 10, it'll be much better. I'm basically just at painting all the black areas various shades, and just started the basecoating for that. Here's the progress on one of them, which puts them all in the same spot as far as quality. I will say I'm happy with the quality versus the time I'm spending on them, and will decide if I want to keep this standard or make it a bit more simple.
     I'll note that I'm looking towards painting tons of dudes while playing this army, so I want them all to be the same standard and not take forever to paint.

These guys will be done tomorrow at the latest, and with my three days off coming up I plan to paint up some more tanks if I can buy/get them built. The tanks will paint quickly, so I'll use any free time to just relax since I'm really feeling like I need to break and chill for a day or two to refuel (and I don't just mean for painting).

Update 5/19:

     I got some more work done, but this is all taking longer than I thought. I finished blacking out all the areas, and am closing in on home stretch. All that's left are black highlights (which should go by pretty quickly) and then some metal. I have all day at the house to myself, so I hope to finish these guys and prep some more tanks I grabbed last night (4 Leman Russ ones!).

Astra Militarum - Pask and Company

     It's been a long morning, but I finished up my tanks! Instead of posting how they all came out (pretty much the same minus camo pattern), I figured I'd just take pictures of the Pask tank after he was adorned on top of it. So here he is:

     Now I just have to paint up 10 guardsmen and a Heavy Weapon Team, play one 40k game, and get my gift certificate so I can grab more tanks!

Astra Militarum - Leman Russ

     Ahead of schedule. Started the Leman Russ tanks this morning. Just the metal, blacks, and finishing the weathering left!

Pink Horrors Complete. Finally.

Chaos Daemons Pink Horrors

     There are still some steps I could go through to make them pop even more, but I'll probably not worry too much about it for now. I own 60, so this is just a third of them. When I paint more, I'll do them in batches of 10 so I can grind them out a bit faster without tiring myself out, and that'll allow for the extra steps. But for now they are finished, which is splendid, because I have a ton of stuff coming up that's very exciting. Infinity tables, more Thousand Sons, Tohaa, Chaos Daemons Frostgrave warband, and more and more. It's already quite a busy year.

Next up we have...

... Maulerfiend number 2. I had to make this guy pretty quickly to elevate my current list to 2k points, but I'm happy with the way he came out. He's more of the "scour the battlefield collecting corpses" kind of creation. There's still a lot of sculpting and trimming and hacking and sawing to be done before he can hit the paint table, but the general form is complete. 

   I elongated the body to give him a more dog-like appearance, and used the Maggot Lord head bit that has two sacs (which make it resemeble testicles - pretty intentional). He's ready to start ripping apart the Daemonkin army I'll be facing this coming Wednesday! So look out for the companion battle report on that one!

Battle Report: Nurgle vs. LictorShame

I managed to get a game in last night and took some pictures of it! It's a start, anyways. The pictures are scarce and some were taken at odd times throughout the match. Oh well, better than nothing. I even wrote "BATTLE REPORT!" at the top of my army list. It didn't help me remember.

So this was my first go with my 1,850 Nurgle list. My opponent was trying out a LictorShame list and had some hard growning pains throughout the game. It was fun, though, and a good experience overall. That's always what you want in a game.

And the Nurgle list to rule all Nurgle lists!

Mono-Nurgle 1,850 List
-------------------------------

This is designed as a starting point, but should work well for the "upcoming" tournament in May. A little less than 2 months away means I can probably get everything painted up once it's all built. Minus some heavy greenstuff work, I should only have the Typhon Heavy Siege Tank and the Sicaran Tank (in the mail now from an ebay purchase) left to put together. I'm fine with it not being all painted, though, but no real reason I couldn't get it all done in time. Anyways:

Crimson Slaughter (Primary)
---------------------------

HQ - Chaos Lord, Mark of Nurgle, Bike, Power Fist, Lightning Claw, Melta Bombs, Sigil of Corruption, Daemonheart, The Slaughterer's Horns

Troop - Cultists x10, Flamer
Troop - Cultists x10, Flamer

Fast Attack - Chaos Spawn x5, Mark of Nurgle
Fast Attack - Heldrake, Baleflamer
Fast Attack - Hell Blade, x2 Helstorm Autocannons

Heavy Support - Maulerfiend, Lasher Tendrils
Heavy SUpport - Sicaran Tank

Lord of War - Typhon Heavy Siege Tank, Armoured Ceramite

CSM (Allied)
------------

HQ - Daemon Prince, Wings, Power Armor, Daemon of Nurgle, Spell Familier, ML 3, The Black Mace

Troop - Cultists x10, x9 Autoguns, Heavy Stubber

---------------

I bloated up the troops a bit due to lack of points to toss around. 30 objective secured guys running around will probably end up being forgotten about for awhile since the list is pretty heavy in the "deal with this NOW" category of threats. So some flamers and 24-36" shooting to help out a bit isn't horrible. Flamers help against that dreaded charge, and the Crimson Slaughter detachment grants Fear to ever unit chosen in it, so that's a bit of a plus (and the reason why they are cheap CCW guys).

It scales up to 2,000 pretty well, but since there was a mention of the next tournament sitting around 1,850 points I didn't see the real need to go up that high for now. It's basically just adding in a Maulerfiend and then downgrading troops and taking the melta bomb off the Chaos Lord to fit Heavy Bolter sponsons on the Sicaran.

Right now the biggest consideration is making the CSM detachment a Daemons detachment and getting a cheaper Daemon Prince that can easily deal with every multi-wound model with an instant death Balesword. It'd use the same model, so it's not a huge deal and I'll just do playtesting to determine that. The Black Mace is good at raping Invisible units, though.

So that leaves the deadly Lord of War - Typhon the Siege Engine. As far as "cheap" LoW go, an AV 14 all-around 6HP vehicle that's immune to Melta is pretty crazy. It moves 12" in the movement phase without worry, gets to do the amazing Thunderblitz table (and at a +1 due to it's rules), so can actually hurt/destroy non-vehicle units by just pushing into them with a Tank Shock. I'm also under the impression you can Tank Shock and still shoot, but Ramming says you can't fire (but not sure how that interacts with the "Super-heavy vehicles always act as having been stationary for their shooting" rule). If I can Ram on top of Tank SHock and still get to shoot, even with just 1 gun we're talking about a killer vehicle roaming around the battlefield. Even with 1 BS 4 Str 10 AP 1 ignore cover 7" blast, it's doing damage somewhere. At 370 points with ceramite armour, it feels like a steal. It's just hard to deal with and has a gun that will slowly (or quickly if there are lucky penetrate rolls) deal with an entire army on it's own. The only real threat to it is Str D in close Combat. My only concern with it is what to do if Lords of War aren't allowed in the next tournament. It's something that'd be great to know ahead of time. 370 points is an Imperial Knight that would fill the same role, but then I have to worry about CtA allying. Oh well, I'll wait and worry about it later. I still have plenty of open slots to fill my current Force Orgs.

Some more Nurgle conversions, and a "studio" update.

     I managed to secure a good section of one of my rooms recently. It took some bargaining with the Other, but I'm trying to set up some good lighting to try to stream and have a better work area in general. It's pretty exciting!
     I'm forming an 1,850 Nurgle list since I have enough stuff to create one from pretty much scratch. There's a bit of a stand-off between whether or not I want to include a Typhon Heavy Siege Tank or not. Obviously there will be quite a few more points available for fun times if I don't, but I really like the idea and backbone of 1 sure-shot that can annihilate serious issues from an opponent's list (while having the caveat of being a serious issue itself). But anyways. I was planning to run two Maulerfiends, but having recently won an auction for a Sicaran Battle Tank - it's likely I'll be using that bad boy instead. I'll post a refine list later on when I've had more time to think things through.
     In the meantime I've put together some more heavy conversions.

Maulerfiend:

Nurgle Maulerfiend WIP

Hell Blade:

Nurgle Hell Blade WIP

Both need green stuff, and the Hell Blade still requires a bit of additions before it's at the green stuff stage of the conversion. It worked out that I hate the Hell Blade model, and creating crazy conversions is a huge plus to playing Chaos.

150 Posts, Draigo, Tournament Recap, and Chaos!

It's been quite the busy week. The tournament on Saturday went well, and I managed to paint up a good handful of things to play completely painted for it. Sunday was a long work day filled with tons of moving furniture and filling up a storage unit, and today will mark steps forward in powering through a very busy month.

This is my 150th post. I was trying to plan something exciting, but then realized it's a bit odd to put a milestone on posts. I could write 10 in a day and "speed up" to a high post count. So I'll just wait for my year anniversary, which I...think is in May?

As planned, I've tossed the Bloodthirster, Wraithknight, and Wave Serpents on eBay. In less than 24 hours the Bloodthirster was sold, so maybe I should have put a bit more on him? Heh. Considering he and the Wraithknight were painted side-by-side on the same day, it was still a pretty good profit and one of my better commission earnings so far. That's exciting. I finished up Draigo's base and he went flying off eBay, too.

And what did the end Draigo product look like?

Uggh. No where near enough time for absolutely anything.

Trying to rock through a ton of models. My local area is hosting a 2,000 point tournament this weekend and I have a pretty silly plan. Not overpowered silly, just...silly. I want to play painted (before turning around and selling a lot of it), so it's leaving my options very -not- open. So my list is bad. As of Wednesday my paint table had:

- x5 Chaos Spawn
- x2 Wave Serpents
- x1 Wraithknight

Not anywhere near enough points, I impulsed purchases something yesterday while at my game store. Adding:

- x1 Bloodthirster (new kit)

Beautiful models, and the army should look really nice. But it doesn't really do much, and it doesn't really work well with itself. But that's a lot of stuff to paint to a high tabletop quality by a tournament on Saturday. On the plus side I can mark off the Chaos Spawn and the Wave Serpents. Already done. Can't get much more finished up today, though, since I have a dinner party thing I'm attending. But tomorrow will be busy painting up:

Nurgle Lord is finished.

Pretty happy with the way he came out, especially considering painting him with a cold. My sickness is almost gone, though, so getting closer to being able to start pumping through all the paintings that need doing.

Nurgle Chaos Lord.

Nurgle Chaos Lord on that bitchin' bike.

Slimy as all hell.

Tonight and tomorrow.

Working on some Infinity stuff, but that'll be a slow progress. I plan to set up a demo day towards the end of next month, which will segway into my three months of Infinity pretty well. I'll need to lay some paint layers on some miniatures in preparation of that, though, because unpainted isn't great, and it'll be easier to get people into a game with better looking models without them sitting either just primed or still metal looking.

I have a campaign game tonight, which will mark my second campaign game in the month and a half it's been running. And this time I get to play with some painted models! Which, speaking of, my Venoms are completed - although I rushed the extra riders and gunner a bit. But they came out fine and I can do touch-ups later if I feel the need. I'm off work tomorrow, so my day will consist of writing up a battle report for the game, flocking and painting the Venom bases, and getting some pictures on here. There should be plenty of opportunity for napping.

Harlequins.

I feel like they are a bit of a let-down so far. The rules for the Harlequins, Solitaire, and Skyweavers have been released and...meh? Harlequins themselves feel a bit like Wyches, but with some better (and more expensive) upgrades - how good/useful the unit would be allied with Dark Eldar will completely depend on what the Transport ends up like. If it's a mini-Wave Serpent with assault then they may have some merit. The Skyweavers have good rules for a massive price. 50 points a model for a 2 wound, 4+/5++ half assault, half shooting platform seems a bit too much. Each model can take a Haywire Cannon (24" haywire with a blast) for 5 points, which is cheap, but...meh? They're just too expensive at T4... I think I'd rather have Reavers. I can get as many Haywire Blasters I want into a list already, and more than 4 feels like it'd be pushing it (your left in a sore sport sitting with Str 4 AP 4 shots if you're up against non-Mech/Tyranids/White Scars/Whatever).

I was really hoping the rules would be a great complement to Dark Eldar, but it's just not looking that way. Even if Eldar gets a nerf with some toned down rules they still have a lot more going for them (even though the Harlequins are some of the best models GW has had to date).

So the fate of the Harlequins will be completely left up to their transport. If it's a great transport that also sits in the Fast Attack slot then some great times will be had with Dark Eldar allying. If it ends up being an expensive, but beautiful and rules heavy model, then it just won't fit. I'm hoping it's not open-topped - because that'd be the start of a beautiful friendship (not open-topped, but would still absolutely need assault).

Dark Eldar Battle Report #2: vs. Imperial Knights (and friends)

I did get in my 1,500 game this Thursday evening, and my opponent had a variety of lists to choose from. He said he's been itching to play his Imperial Knights, so I told to him to break them out and we can rumble a bit. My list is hardly optimal in any sense, especially with such a hard armor skew of Imperial Knights, but why would the Dark Eldar ever back down from a chance to salvage all the resources multiple Imperial Knights would have (or would be guarding)?
*I'll not that this time I didn't forget pictures, it's just that my phone was out of juice since my charger recently was destroyed by a rogue vacuum cleaner (or something, my girlfriend didn't exactly explain herself).

40k Tournament: 2,000 Point List

My local gaming store is holding a 2,000 point tournament next Saturday that is allowing pretty much anything. Forgeworld is fine, any amount of Detachments is okay, and Lords of War are in. The only real stipulation is that armies must be Battle-Forged. Since I'm working with a bit of limited inventory, I'm thinking of fielding something like...

Dark Eldar List Building: Flying Death

I'd like to put my thoughts down on the Dark Eldar fliers, and how they compete against each other and with others in their Force Org slots. With few exceptions, a unit isn't a list and how a unit works with the army is always a pretty large factor in how, and if, you want to bring something along. There's always the "for fun" factor, but that doesn't mean we can't still try to make it work. I find it hard to analyze something without considering quite a few different elements, most of which is how it functions, how it compares to other selections, if it's worth it's points for what it brings, and what am I hoping it'll achieve. There are other variables, of course, but as a general guideline every review or tactic can't really be considered until serious playtesting is complete.

Dark Eldar Battle Report #1: vs. Adeptus Sororitas

A little bit of splurging and a major Dark Eldar force has been purchased. I'm still in a comfortable stage where my hobby is able to support my hobby (relatively), so luckily I'm not pulling a lot out of my paychecks for this stuff. I managed to sell off a few armies/collections pretty quickly for games I picked up but have lost interest in. Minus my ton of Cryx stuff, everything I currently own is a part of my personal collection and I have no interest in the foresee-able future to part with any of it.

Once I get done painting a lagging commission, I'll be able to attend to my new forces and hopefully get enough built for a 1,500 game next week. In the meantime I was able to borrow my friend's Dark Eldar collection to play a 2,000 point game that took place in the local campaign being run. The lists looked like:

40k Campaign Faction Switch: Dark Eldar

With reasons described below, I've decided to switch up a bit and have another army as a part of how I play my wargames. Dark Eldar don't seem too competitive on the surface, but they should be fun to play and wicked fun to build and paint. If they end up being competitive later on, then awesome, but I'm just in it for a relaxed Faction to just enjoy and bounce off the playstyle of the Grey Knights/Inquisition.

Happy Holidays! ... and a return to normal.

I've had a decent painting break, and once I finish a bulk of 40ish chaos cultists I'm grinding out for a friend I'll be ready to start back pretty hardcore on some painting this year. I'm hoping by the end of the year I've purchased little and painted quite a bit, so look forward to that to make the short list for my resolutions for 2015.

I had a great holiday vacation, and hope you have as well. I got some cool board games and some other nifty stuff, but the biggest gift I got was the opportunity to shop at some gaming stores in an area that is a bit repelled by 40k and Fantasy. So the stores had some pretty old stock, including Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Epic, and other delights. I knew these stores would have some cool stuff, so I brought the money. Now that I'm broke, my collection has grown drastically. So I'm anxious to get some serious building time to get things together.