Wayland

Monday, November 22, 2010




Its been a while since I've written, but that's purely down to being very busy, not to losing any interest in the hobby. That said, I've not had any time to actually play the game for weeks now. I'm a slave to my wife's schedule and if she works on club nights, I'm stuck at home. No way around it. But two things have got me excited about playing in the future: an Imperial Baneblade and Apocalypse.

I bought the tank as a joint project for me and the wife to put together in the cold winter evenings. Its a struggle for many of us to get our partners to accept our hobby, let alone join in. But my wife can be very practical and when I explained we would build and paint this big old tank together, she quickly got into the spirit. Its been great, these last few evenings, just sitting together, with something rubbish on the tv, slowly working our way through the sprues, chatting about life or whatever, and building a new toy. My wife gets the company of her husband and the chance to talk, I get a shiny new tank! When we get round to painting it I'm planning on trying some the techniques described in Imperial Armour's Masterclass book. Should be a challenge and a great way to build some skills.

Which brings me to Apocalypse. I played Epic back when it first came out so I was intrigued to learn the same level of warfare was nw being played at 'normal' scale. Thanks to ebay I got a nice cheap copy of the book and dived in. My favourite thing about Apocalypse is that you don't need to fit any force org chart or points limit. You just use your whole collection! Any imbalance between sides can be resolved by giving the weaker side extra strategic assets, and away you go. You can even mix armies - as long as you can justify some of the less likely alliances with a good backstory :)

And thats great when you've got a nice sized Space Wolf army and are wondering how to justify throwing an Imperial Guard superheavy in too. I had thought about making up some back story about the tank having been kept by the Wolves after the last war on Armageddon - the Administratum made such a mess of its relocation of the survivors the Sons of Fenris decided they didn't deserve their tank back. I mean, when your Chapter Master carries a Chaos axe, you can pretty much get away with anything, right? But now I'm thinking I'll just paint it in some nice IG camo pattern and use it as the centrepiece to perhaps build a future guard army around.

Apocalypse has really inspired me to think differently about how I'm building my army. Whereas before I might have been motivated to buy units based on what I needed to counter the FoTM on my local tables, now I can think about building an entire company of Wolves and chose models they are likely to have in their lair.

As you can see from the picture, my SW army is, so far, fairly Wolf Guard heavy. In fact, I have more WG than I do Grey Hunters :) Thats ok for a 1500/1750 point game where I can either use the all termy/all drop pod list, or a more traditional rhino based list. But for Apocalypse, unless I want to be used as either a strategic reserve to be dropped behind the lines, or an initial assault force to weaken those same lines, I probably need more troops. Much as I don't relish the idea of building and painting more marines, trying to squeeze more variations out of the same sprues again, that is probably somewhere in my near future.

I could do with some more Rune Priests as well, especially as I'm building my list as Logan Grimnar's company. I have an idea to make some wolf pelt cloaks to help them stand out but that's a few projects down the line. One or two more Land Raiders would be nice too, and I only have four rocket launchers. I would really like to use some of the new Forge World ones, perhaps with some of the older marks of armour. That would fit in well with the Grey Hunter background of them being trusted with the chapters most venerable and venerated weapons.

So, lots to do and lots to build. We should have the Baneblade built in a few more evenings and maybe even painted by Christmas. And then I need to find somewhere to play some Apocalypse - anyone know of games or opponents in the South Essex area?

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Tips for Great Painting

After painting for a few months now I've picked up a few tips and tricks and I thought might be useful to share. These are not tips specifically on painting techniques, but rather tips around how to set yourself to paint in the best way you can.

1. Make yourself comfortable. By this I mean make sure you’ve got yourself set up in a position where you can paint happily without worrying about where your paints are going to go, where your feet are going to go or your back aching after a couple of minutes. I have tried painting in my front room, feet up on the couch in front of the tv. Not great for the posture. I ended up leaning forwards all the time because it became a strain on the the arm holding the model up to my eye. It was a pain readjusting every time I needed to set up a new colour on my palette. Plus the light wasn’t too great in the evening (see below) and there was often distractions in the form of my wife. So now I pretty much only paint in my office. I have a big desk up there, plenty of space for paints and mini’s, and fewer distractions.

2. Have a plan. And record it. As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail. Any clown can throw three colours onto a mini and call it done. But to make a truly impacting miniature, you need to start with the end in mind. I often see the experts in White Dwarf talk about painting one or two test mini’s in the colour schemes they are considering for an army before committing an entire unit. Those of us without the same budget or staff discount might not want to go this far. But there’s no reason not to at least look at your assembled figures and figure out how you’re going to paint each component - what colours will you use for the armour, its shadow and highlights, the same for cloth, flesh, fur or whatever else your model’s have. If you can think it, you can probably write it. And if you write it down somewhere you’re going to be able to repeat it. Having a notebook will be invaluable as your collection grows as you’re going to pick up tips and colour schemes from all over. You’ll do something you think looks great and a few months down the line want to repeat an effect on another mini. Oh, except you forgot where that article was or what that guy down at the shop said he did. So figure out how you’re going to paint that gorgeous character you’ve picked up or how you’re going to make that unit of 20 warriors tie in together and write it down. There’s no prizes in this game for memorizing it.

3.Keep the paint wet. I’m painting the type pretty much always start with a slightly diluted paint. that is, I start with some games workshop paint, mixing a little bit of water, and I’m good to go. The reason to doing this is slightly watered-down paint flows better on the model, is less likely to gum up any fine details, and and layering effects work better with thinner paint. I start out then, with the best intentions. The problem is our time I’ve done a bit of painting and am keen to the end of the section am working on the paint is often dried out quite a bit, meaning the final few brushstrokes are made with an effectively thicker paint than the first ones were. At this point, with only a few minor details to go perhaps, it can seem like a pain in the backside to re-dilute the paint. Really, this is just plain laziness. I’m basically sacrificing a good quality finish of paint for a few seconds of effort. This may not make a difference if you’re painting models in bulk. But if you are working on a centrepiece model or perhaps something for a competition it really is worth taking the time to make sure that you paint is always the right thickness.

4. Get a light. When I moved my paints up to my desk in the backroom of our house it was late summer. During my best painting time, around 1 till 3 in the afternoon, the sun would be setting behind me and beautiful light streamed into the room. Perfect painting light. Funnily enough, when I tried painting in the same room in the evening - results were not nearly as good. One night I literally painted almost an entire model only to get up in the morning and not be able to recognise the colour scheme. The colours looked totally different at night than they did in the morning’s early light. So I got a lamp. Its just a standard anglepoise with a not-too-bright bulb in there. It means in the evening when I want to paint my station is nicely illuminated. I can see all the details on my models and paint looks like it oughta should.

5. Know when to stop. One of the reasons I love painting is its a chance to switch off from whatever other concerns I have during the day and just lose myself for some time creating something pretty. I love to sit with a video on in the background, my box of paints open and a couple of miniatures to work on and no other distractions. I can easily spend two or three hours like this. problem here is that it’s very difficult to maintain quality over such a long time. It starts to get really tempting to cut corners, maybe just botch a detail here and there, paint a detailed area all in one colour maybe rather than pick out individual parts or textures, that sort of thing.there comes a time when you have to know it’s time to stop. That doesn’t mean you have to stop painting completely, just take a little break. Get up and walk around and. do some stretches. go talk to your better half or just get a fresh drink and some fresh water.the important thing is you give your mind for the rest, time to refresh, and when you go back to your painting its like starting anew.

These steps can all be summarised thus: if you want a good result for your painting, put the effort into making good painting easier. There’s no substitute for skill - a you can’t buy a steady hand. But you can set yourself up to succeed by optimising your environment. So take some time to examine how you paint and where. How you treat your equipment and work. Put a little effort in at the beginning to make the outcome that much better.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

The best looking, worst playing model.


Here's a few pictures of the Eldar Phoenix Lord Baharroth I've been working on for the monthly painting comp at GW.

He is purple and yellow - not the codex colours, I know. Basically he's modelled after this version, a far superior paint job to be sure. I really liked the contrast of purple and yellow/gold (yeah, I've been a big fan of Prince in my younger days) in Shabowy's mini so I decided to give something similar a go.

The purple was simple. Undercoat black, base of 50:50 black and hormagaunt purple, mid colour of horma purple, blended highlights of mixes of the same purple with increasing amounts of white. The final edge highlight is Space Wolves Grey. Everything went down fine until I got a small chip on one of the pinions and touched it up with the Grey. Silly me, I didn't water this paint down for the patch, hence it has gone on much thicker than the other highlights. Noob mistake - I wanted to get it done quickly so I rushed and now there's an imperfection in the work.

The blue parts were basecoated with the same custom mix I use for my Space Wolves armour, shaded with shadow grey/black, and highlighted with the base colour mixed with space wolves grey. I wanted to avoid dirtying up the pieces and consequently over-diluted the shade. Its not a total disaster, but I would have liked more shadowing on the rifle parts in particular. The choice of colours for the yellow areas was more difficult than the application. I really liked the blending I had done on my wulfen's shoulder pad and figured the same effect would go well with the blending on the purple parts of the wings in particular. The complication here was that in Shabowy's pictures he appears to have used the same palette to paint NMM (on the gun and sword blade) and non-metallic materials. My NMM technique is frankly non-existent though so I had a choice to make. In order to keep with the mono-chromatic motif I could either paint all the yellow parts with metallic paints and aim for a yellow gold finish. Or go with the shoulderpad yellow. The feathers on the headdress decided the issue for me - I couldn't imagine Baharroth having metal feathers on his helmet - and I went with non-metallic paints.

The base has a resin part from the Citadel 40k basing kit, and two small rocks I picked up on holiday in Finland - the sand is from my local beach :)

Overall I'm quite pleased with the mini. The purple bits came out especially well and I did a good job on the powersword blade too. I'm not entirely pleased with how the yellow came out on parts other than the wings - I think it suffers from my lack of versatility and techniques, but, hey ho, it looks good enough to put on display.

Competition is next Saturday - here's hoping for another golden grot in my future :)

n.b. Baharroth won :)

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Basic Bits

Because I saved a huge amount of money when my friend Matt left me tonnes of sprues when he left for the States this week I splashed out on a 40k basing kit. I had been a little dubious about its worth - I can get slate off my roof, for example ;) and I live at the seaside so it seems silly to pay for sand. But Matt didn't leave me any bases and the only round ones I have spare are the useless slotted ones in the the Citadel Round Bases set. If I'm going to have to greenstuff up the slots I might as well add some detail to the base to cover the joins, I figured, so I might as well go the whole hog and check out the resin parts in the GW set. Here's what you get and my thoughts:

1. Two tubs of small resin pieces. These are, for me, the standout part of the set. I got 4 pieces (2 styles) of resin big enough to cover a terminator's base, four more big enough to cover normal infnatry size bases (2 styles again), and a couple of doxen smaller pieces designed to be fitted radomly on a model's base. These unclude features like wrecked Eldar and marine helmets, assorted emblems, grenades and shell casings, and piles of skulls. A really nice assortment, and, if used sparingly, enough to add flavour to the bases of a fair few squads.

2. One tub of 'medium' slate pieces. A good selection of 'rick' fragments to add geological features to your bases. These range from approximately 0.25cm2 to 1.5cm2 and, as I have already mentioned, while slate is generally available if you look around a few gardens or parks, its a nice convenient source.

3. One tub of 'small' slate pieces. These are really small fragments, maybe 0.25cm2 and are probably best used for filling in gaps between other features to make them look more natural. Think piles of pebbles for your mini's as opposed to boulders.

4. One empty plastic tub. Yep, empty. I had to ask if it was supposed to be this way and apparently it is. Probably intended to be used to store:

5. One sheet of brass etched features. Almost totally bogus, in my opinion. There are a few grilles, a couple of pieces that look like textured floor plates, and some cogs. Three Imperial eagles, a few of what appear to be bullet ridden panels Whose correct application I cannot imagine, and some skull tokens round out the sheet. I'm really not sure what I would do with any of these - maybe some research will make it clear.

So, there you have it. For quick and easy basig solutions this boxed set is not bad. You will still need to use artistic sense to figure out the best way to use most of the pieces but some at least are unique to the set.Worth £12? I'd say its pretty close to value for money, but I'd be happier paying less for a set without useless brass and reject pieces from a building site.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010


Last week I got a new phone - one with a decent camera too! So, to celebrate, here are some pics of my newly painted Lone Wolf/wulfen terminator.

I'm most proud of the head, of course. A friend from ym gaming club gave me a couple of metal wolf heads he had got from a french web site. I don't know what game system they came from and I can't remember the site but I could find it if anybody wanted to know.

Supergluing the metal head onto a plastic body was pretty easy although I needed to cut quite a bit of plastic out to make space (the head isn't perfect scale for the model but it works with whole wulfen thing) and shave off some of the metal. I green-stuffed up the gap and sculpted it into fur, let it dry overnight and voila.

Since I have a wolf-wing army, my guys should really be part of Logan Grimnar's Great Company. But I guess this guy didn't get the new shoulder pad. Or maybe he's too concerned with dying gloriously to bother getting it updated. Either way, the moon is based with bubonic brown, washed with ogryn flesh/gryphonne sepia (drawn into the outline of the wolf's head), then highlighted with layers of bubo brown mixed with increasing amounts of bleached bone. Pretty pleased with how it turned out. It does appear to 'glow' when seen from a short distance.



I will probably play this guy as a Lone Wolf, accompanied by a pack of Fenris wolves. I would love to play this guy against 'nids and see him hunt down some monstrous beastie and rip it up with those claws :) I doubt I'll actually play him as having the Mark - it seems a shame to waste the twin claws, but I reckon its still pretty cool to have him look this way. Maybe he doesn't have the Mark per se, but is so grief-stricken at the loss of his pack the wolf inside him is manifesting itself enough to be seen, yet still controlled, on the battlefield. Either way he will be fun to have on the table.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Rushed Update

Time flies when you're having fun. Maybe its just that there have been so many things competing for my attention in the last couple of months I've barely noticed the time going. Here's what I've been up to, in brief:

Went to Triple Crown at Warhammer World with my Space Wolf Logan-wing army. The boys performed surprisingly well given their lack of mobility. Lost the first game, barely, due to a misunderstanding of the rules governing deployment of reserves. Only one combat in the entire five turns, lost one squad and therefore the game. Officially game 2 was a draw against 'nids. Going over it in my head afterwards though I realised it was actually a win for me but its too late to do anythingabout it now. The game was fun and thats the main thing. Wiped the floor with my third opponent though. Poor lad thought his demons were going to beat me up but it went the other way. Go-go-gadget-JOTW! Bye bye Souldgrinder and Demon Prince :) A good day out but exhausting. Next time I'm going up the night before and staying in a hotel.
Won another painting comp at the local GW. This time with a new Eldar Fire Prism. It was looking great all green and white with red jewels. But the addition of highlighted vines all over made the thing pure win. Still haven't been given my Golden Grot trophy though - slacker GW staff!
Bought several Eldar battleforces and am working my way through assembling and painting them upo. I'm only keeping the Dire Avengers and Fire Prisms though and selling off the Guardians and War Walkers. I plan on fielding at least two Fire Prisms and maybe a Falcon as heavy support in my Eldar army and I can't stomach the transition from terminator marines down to Guardians as troops!

All in all, lots going on. I don't have time to start learning WHFB as well so I'm going to wait till the new boxed set comes out to begin a Skaven army in the Autumn. Till then I've got my SW vernerable dread to finish and boxes of Eldar to get on with.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

A Qick Break - Eldar Falcon


I have been struggling with a little bit of SW-fatigue this past week. Although I am still excited about playing them I have frankly gotten a little bit tired of painting more or less the same paint scheme over and over again. I recently started my Wolf Guard army and built nearly a dozen new terminators that needed painting. This on top of two more drop pods and thirty or forty previous SW models I have painted recently. Time for something a little different - my second love: Eldar.

I butchered paint jobs on more than my fair share of Eldar as a boy, time to see if I can do them any better as an adult. I popped into my local GW - pure impulse this as I would normally never pay their prices - and after enduring a moderately soft sell I came out with a Falcon Grav-tank kit. It was a toss up between that and a Wraithlord and I chose the tank simply because I thought it looked cooler as designed, not needing reposing to achieve a dramatic effect.

First tip of the post then - if you're feeling bored with your army, try something different. It could be another 40k race, it could even be fantasy. It could even not be a GW product! Just pick something you think looks cool. There's too much emphasis these days on competition what with all the 'tournaments' going on. Don't worry about whether what you really like the look of is competitive or even whether you'll use it in battle at all. I really don't know how big a place my tank will have in any future Eldar army list. It just looks nice, was fun to build, and presents a new challenge to paint. Bright and artistic, rather than the rather rough and industrial look of SW gear. If it wasn't for the extra cost GW tag onto it I might just as easily have chosen a Skaven Screaming Bell. Totally useless in gaming terms - I don't even have a copy of Fantasy rules - but it still looks fun.

That said, let me share a quick tip about putting together my getawayfromitall model. Maybe its because its an old kit, but I found the included instructions not entirely illuminating when it came to the order of putting together cockpit interiors and the canopy.

First off, let me suggest, if you're planning on spraying your model at all, do it before you glue the pieces together. I say this simply because the canopy is clear and if you spray the model after gluing you're going to need to mask the canopy somehow. Not a technically demanding task, but possibly a little awkward. Spraying first could just save you some time-consuming labour later on.

Secondly, the canopy assembly is not, to my eyes at least, clearly explained in the diagrams at all. When I did a dry-fit of all the pieces for the turret and driver's seats I found I had one piece left over. Its very small, y-shaped in cross-section and appeared in the instructions to go on the back of the cockpit piece itself. The dotted line in the diagram clearly ends at the top of the drivers backrest, indicating the piece goes the other side from the drivers body. This made no sense- it would not do anything back there once all the pieces were glued together. It was only after I had glued everything and tried to insert the canopy I realised my mistake. That little y fits between the drivers head and the back wall of his cockpit. the hook in the the y is where the cross bar of the canopy sits. Grrrr. I had to prise open the parts that had now fairly well set to get the canopy in. Its a mistake I'll only make once and maybe writing this can help you not make the same mistake.

Anyway, the model is pretty much finished now. I've gone with magnetising everything for the sake of future flexibility. The turret is magnetically attached to the body, as is the shuriken launcher on the belly. I magnetised the optional weapon mount too with a bright lance as its first mate and will be putting magnets on the other choices later on as well. I still need to magnetise the passenger bay door - it has a nasty habit of falling open unless its glued shut - and I might build a magnetised base as the GW clear plastic one feels a little flimsy and unstable to use on a battlefield.

So thats my little holiday from Space Wolves. Its always good to take a break when you're feeling tired. Just because you're sick of whatever army you've invested a lot of time in, this doesn't mean you should quit the hobby completely or just abandon whatever you've been doing. Just try something different, something that just catches your eye and looks fun. And don't trust GW instructions!

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Kill Teams

Strange night at my local gaming club. We only had three players to begin with so we went for a slightly modifed version of the Kill Teams mission from Battle Missions. We stuck with 200 points but allowed individual models from units that would otherwise be too large. So one guy took a single terminator armed with an assault cannon to count as his elite troops for example.

I went with a lone wolf armed with hammer and shield and five Grey Hunters plus Wulfen and Powerfist for my 200. They were up against a handful of marines and a small squad of IG, complete with Chimera. Taking the opportunity to roleplay my Lone Wolf a bit I singled out the tank as the closest thing to a monstrous creature and was able to disable it before he fled the table anyway. No true kill there, but instead my guy met his end in a one-round duel with the other terminator. Fittingly, both termies died together, crushing each other's skulls and bodies with hammer and power fist. Mine is the only one whose saga now includes the tale of his final heroic battle though :) The 3+ invulnerable save and Feel No Pain were awesome for allowing him to cover quite some distance in between combats. Game ended in a draw after my last remaining Grey Hunter duelled in close combat with an enemy scout for around 10 rounds. Yes, 10. The combat was easy - it was the continual leadership tests we were having to take before each round that was nail-biting!

Second game had four players as we were joined in combat by a collection of tau gun drones, battlesuits and fire warriors. Unfortunately my Lone Wolf got a little ping-ponged this time around though. He chose the tank again as his primary target, then altered course for the marine's terminator when it looked like the Tau were going to do for the tank, then had to turn around again when the guard actually managed to force the Tau to flee, meaning I now had to guard my rear. Our menage a trois gave the other marine player time enough to move his plasma gun and assault cannon into position to finish off my grey hunters and my Loner failed his leadership test and was removed. As I type that though I do begin to wonder whether Lone Wolf's have some protection against this happening. But then maybe thats just the way Kill Teams work. Short, messy, and violent, and all a bit of a laugh.

Sprayaway!


Got a new spray gun from GW in the post this morning and, hold your breath, the parts all fit together! This meant I was able to spend some time spraying up the remainder of my Wolf Guard army and a few normal marines as well. A quick write-up on the spray gun then.

I wish I had known how quickly this thing applies paint before I did three drop-pods, a LRC and a rhino by hand! Honestly - between five and ten minutes to coat 8 terminators in a nice even colour that dries to a smooth finish, ready for shading and highlighting. The finished coat looks like the plastic itself is coloured, its that smooth.

Its not quite as simple as lining up the figures and spraying them in smooth side-to-side motions though. The intricate nature of the sculpts and the model's poses meant I could not get away without picking each one up to angle them so as to let the paint jet get into some of the nooks and crannies. As a result I now have Space Wolves grey fingers and thumb so everyone I meet at the club tonight will instantly know what I've been doing. Caught blue-handed.

The setup of the gun is a little finicky too. The adapter that attaches to the propellant can is a little looser than I would like - I could hear a little hiss of escaping gas when I changed cans halfway through the session, even though the adapter was tightly screwed on. The hiss did stop though so I guess this could just be a consequence of all the pars taking a second to expand or contract into place.

Judging the quantity of paint going into the jar could be more an art than a science too. The marks the jar has on it are designed for foundation paints only so one has to use slightly less water for normal colours. When you're using a homemade mixture like I do for Wolves base coat that already has had a little water added to dilute there's no way of knowing in advance what consistency you want the spray mix to be. I'm a little surprised GW haven't included a guide for non-foundation paint mixtures, but hey-ho. I seemed to have got the right thickness in the end and I guess there's always going to be an element of experimentation involved anyway.

Its hard to say how efficient the spray gun is. As I considered the amount of wastage involved in transfering my paint mix into the gun's canister and then returning the excess back to the original jar I began to wonder if this wasn't just another way for GW to make me buy more of their paints! Naturally a lot of paint in the spray you fire is going to miss the model completely and I can life with that. But I hate the thought of leaving paint in the gun's jar just to be washed away duing the rinse! Surely GW could have come up with an adapter that fitted directly onto the plastic pots the paints come in? Maybe not, maybe I'm asking too much. I guess its really not that much wastage in the grand scheme of things and, after all, the spray gun's greatest economy is in time spent, not paint.

All in all I'm positive about Citadel's little melta-themed effort. I'm looking forward to the next time I need to paint vehicles or buildings and wondering what magic I can perform with stencils and camo patterns. No doubt this pray gun is not the greatest of its kind - I'm sure you can find more high tech tools with more bells and whitles on out there. But for a beginner hobbyist like myself without too much spare time or cash to spend, this one is more than adequate.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Getting Started

Well, I had planned to kick off this Space Wolves blog with a look at using the Citadel spray gun to base coat my brand new wolf guard terminators. Sadly the process didn't turn out as smoothly as I'd hoped for.

Turns out I got a duff gun from the local GW store. The pipe from the paint bottle didn't fit into the one on the gun itself without some severe brute-forcing. I managed to get enough paint out to coat three models before I decided this just couldn't be working as intended. My store's manager confirmed this and was happy to replace the gun. Unluckily for me they had no more guns in stock so I had to order one from the web. Should arrive tomorrow.

I did get on with painting the termies I had sprayed though. They're nearly finished - I took pictures to prove it. But it turns out my camera phone really isn't that good at close up stills, even with macro setting enabled, so the pictures are all blurry. Gonna work on that tonight and tomorrow and see if I can't come up with a solution.

In the meantime, a little background on the wolf guard I'm painting. A tip I picked up from a friend was that Space Wolves tend to do well at larger points limits because they have access to some powerful special characters. When I looked at the most powerful and special of their characters, Logan Grimnar, I saw his inclusion in an army made Wolf Guard count as troops. So I decided to put together an all-Wolf Guard, all terminator army list. I'll put the full list up later, but for now at 1500 points I have Logan and 19 brothers in 3 drop pods. For 1750 I stay with Logan and 18 guards but add in Njal Stormcaller. I'm gonna play around with subbing Njal out for a Land Raider, but at this stage I really like the impact Njal has on enemy infantry.

All this leaves me with lots of termies to paint and needing lots of games to practise before the Triple Crown Tournament at GW Headquarters in June. Yeah, I know - an all-terminator army is not going to win a tournament. But as I've only been playing the game since December I don't expect to win. This tournament is going to be mostly about fun, meeting people, and checking out Warhammer World. And hey, I have won three of my last four games locally with the all-termie funtime explosion force (and drawn once), so hey, who knows what might happen?