Review/Build of Scibor Celtic Warriors

I have been running two Rune Priests in my Wolves army recently but using other models as proxies. GW do do a reasonable 'official' model and it wouldn't be too hard to scratch build one from spares. But Scibor also do some pretty awesome looking resin models...

Here's a few pictures and some tips on assembling Celtic Warrior and Celtic Warrior #2
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 Here's what you get in the clamshell for Warrior 2. A nice scenic base, the body is one cast, and the right arm comes in three parts.

 Its not entirely compatible with GW's range of parts and models. The Scbior figures come with this rotary fan backpack, for example.

 All it took was trimming about a millimeter off the fan with a craft knife though, and a stock marine pack fits on quite neatly.

 The arm glues together quite easily too. Its important to have an idea of orientation before going to glue though. There are no guide marks like you might get on a Privateer Press model.

 Moving on to Warrior. This guy comes in four parts - the base, the body, and a sprue each for the arms. You might want to keep the arms separate until the glue is dry though as, again, there is no guide or mark to identify otherwise which shoulder pad goes with which shoulder.

 Is it a coincidence that the rifle the model carries is the weakest part of the whole sculpt? Well, maybe, maybe not, but its coming off. I chose to cut around the hanging talisman and then through the wrist to remove the gun.

  

Then a fist with a pistol was glued on to the stump.

The small number of parts and generally high quality of the casts made building and converting the Scibor models to GW style was really really quick and easy. The whole process took about half an hour. There are a few things to look out for though.

I was generally very impressed with the quality of the minis. Once the parts were carved off their sprues there was very little trimming to be done of excess flash. Zero mold-lines. And there were almost no bubbles. Warrior 2 was in fact free of them. Warrior did have a few little holes though. One on his right thumb, one on the haft of his axe and one on the underside of the butt of the same axe. I have used glue to fill them rather than greenstuff as they were all quite small and inconspicuous.

Aside from that, it is very important to use a sharp knife and lots of care when removing parts from the blocks of resin. The shoulder pads in particular are very firmly attached to the sprues. The thick resin was quite hard to cut through. This then means lots of force which means a greater risk of over-cutting both the model's parts and your own. Frankly I'm lucky not to have cut my thumb open last night.

In summary then, the two Scibor models I built and converted last night were of very high quality. Converting them to Space Wolf models is about as simple as it could be. The casts are great quality - both artistically and in production. These models will be a great addition to my Space Wolf army. Some care is need when cutting parts though.

I have added a few purity seals and nicknacks to the models and primed them. Later on I'll post some pictures of the painting.

Thoughts on vehicles in 6th Edition 40k

The latest edition has been out a few weeks now and I've had a chance to play a half dozen games and wanted to share a few observations on one aspect of the new meta in particular - vehicles.

In 6th Ed, vehicles were pretty much king. Marine armies were often built around Land Raiders and Rhinos, Orks raced across the field in Truks and Wagons, Tau were nothing without a few Hammerheads, and so on and so on. Lets not even get started on Imperial Guard lists....

The conventional wisdom is that all this was likely to change in 6th though. The fact that glancing hits can now remove a tank in as few as three shots should make your Razorbacks and Falcons much more vulnerable, greatly reducing their lifespan. Not being able to camp in a vehicle on top of objectives also reduces the utility of these mobile boxes. But is that how the new game is playing out?

In my last six games I have played with Eldar, Space Wolves, and a mix of Space Wolves and Blood Angels. I have beaten Grey Knights (tabled them twice), a mix of Marines and Dark Eldar, Blood Angels (tabled again) and pure Eldar. Yeah, so far, I'm unbeaten in 6th Ed :) But the point I actually want to make is I've seen a fair variety of vehicles and infantry at play.

My initial verdict: vehicles are by no means done with and are still extremely valuable additions to most armies.

Take my Space Wolves list. I have a fairly aggressive and competitive list. It involves a couple of units of Long Fangs, three Lazerbacks, a las-Pred, and usually a las/missile launcher Dread'. In the three or four games I have fielded them, I have not lost more than two vehicles in the entire game. In fact, I have only ever lost two on one occasion.

Even in last night's semi-Apocalypse game of 4000 points a side, I only lost one Razorback. The other two were on one Hull Point each, true. But my side still also had two las-Preds and a Vindicator untouched by enemy fire.

My Space Wolf tanks aren't even in cover!

So far, it seems, the same principles of the 5th meta hold true for 6th. That is to say, multiple redundancies and correct threat projection will mean your enemy won't be able to target and destroy enough of your vehicles fast enough to stop you doing what you want to with them. How does this work?

1. Multiple Targets.

First, if my army has 11 missile launchers and 7 las-cannons, several being twin-linked, many of which are in cover or obscured, but all of which are pointed at you, as well as tactical marines with meltas and plasma guns running towards you, how do you choose which to shoot first? Unless you also have lots of high powered weapons, or at least weapons powerful enough to Glance from range, its  a difficult process.

2. Cover Saves

Eventually you will prioritise a target though. First you have to roll to hit. you might miss or scatter. Then you have to roll to wound or penetrate. Then I get to make cover saves/invulnerables etc. I'm not saying you can't or I won't make any of these rolls. The point is there are lots of rolls to make to do some damage. And I'm not even using a Aegis or Skyshield yet...

3. Hull Points Aren't As Easy To Take As It Seems, Or Multiple Targets Part 2

So all hits now take hull points from vehicles. But the most common ones come with three. So my semi-mech Space Wolves have a total twelve hull points between them. Even for Necrons, who I hear can take out a tank a turn, will need a few turns of good shooting to eliminate all of them. By which time I will probably have done what I needed to do with them.

That last sentence is key to understanding vehicles, and infantry for that matter, in 6th. As much as your opponent needs to be clear on which targets they can and should attempt to take out first, you need to know what you are going to do with yours because you must assume they will get destroyed eventually.

But what about fliers?

The Eldar list I have been playing in 6th only includes three vehicles. Thats a single Wave Serpent and two fliers. In the hardest game I have played in 6th to date, I lost both the fliers and the Serpent to Orks. That said, I did misuse my Phoenix Bomber horribly, wasting its shots on an Ork Battlewagon, instead of taking out the 15 Looters that then proceeded to shoot it out of the sky. But hey ho, it was the first time I used it and I was a little panicked by the fact my opponent had two Baneblades-as-Wagons racing across a 4x4 table at my squishy Troops. A bit of an aberration then.

Against Grey Knights, the same Eldar obliterated 1750 points in four turns for the loss of two, yes two, Wraithguard...

But, for all that, flyers haven't really percolated down into the meta around here that deeply.

I shot down my Grey Knight opponent's solitary Stormraven with a lucky snapshot from a missile launcher before my Nightwing even got on the board. Last night my Dark Eldar opponent's Voidraven bomber scattered a Mine almost entirely off the board, then took a penetrating hit that removed a lance, and then failed to hit with its remaining gun in the last turn. Still, the strategy of shooting jets like that with las-cannons still seems, to me, the best alternative to a Skyfire weapon.

Until quad-cannons and Icarus lasers and flakk missiles become commonplace its probably too early to tell how deadly flyers will be in the long run. I suspect they will become fairly key in armies designed around them and taking out the aforementioned AA guns will be a high priority for controlling players though.

New(ish) Space Wolves and I'm in for Mantic

Another great sporting tournament (Euro 2012), another great opportunity to get lots of painting done. Normally I paint in my iffice, in front of the computer. The problem with that is of course there are so many distractions - FB, BBC News, Emails, etc., etc. But when there's sport on, I can stick that on the iplayer and have it running in the background, not distracting me so much I have to watch every minute, but entertaining me enough so I don't get bored. So, thank you Portugal and the Czech Republic for helping me get these guys done this evening:

Must Kill Ronaldo!

 I also took the opportunity to play a little with the camera on my new Galaxy Note, using the macro setting and a quickly set-up backdrop and strong light. Seems to work pretty well so I will think about building a more permanent one in the next few days.

These marines then are the first squad in my repainting of 15 Grey Hunters. Every squad has a melta, this one got the Forge World relic version. I love this gun, but the drum on top does look a lot like a magazine on some kind of WWII machine gun. They are from Logan Grimnar's Great Company but until I get a set of GW's decals they will just have a black left shoulder pad.

For Russ, and for Messi!

Their right pad has their pack marking though and I went for a simple black/red tooth design. Two of the marines have honour markings as well. I have left the banner blank for now, I will need to think of something suitably Fenrisian to scrawl on there at a later date.

In other news, I ordered my first 6th Edition accoutrements for 40k today. I will probably get a Gamer's Edition of the rules (it comes in a 40k satchel and probably contains dice or templates or some other optional merch), but I ordered the Psyker cards, servo-skull tape, objective dice, and, I think, munitorum dice from Wayland. Even with their discount, it still came to more than £20, so, if you've not already been sving up, expect to spend quite a bit of money just getting set up for 6th.

In other other news, I plonked down my pledge for the Mantic Kickstarter today too. Previously, fantasy wargaming has been of next to no interest to me. But Angelic Paladins...? Warrior Nuns...? I had to get behind that. I had planned to get the dwarf army and then ebay it, keeping the rules ready for when that angelic army gets released. But the dwarfs are going to be mounted on badgers! Badgers! Yeah, normally I would say, 'we don' need no steenkin' badgers!'. But these look so cool... So a difficult choice to make when the models get sent out to me next month.

Still lots more painting of Space Wolves to come though and hopefully 6th won't nerf them or do anything sily to break the game too much. Bound to be something to grumble about though :)

Building Guide: Relic Contemptor Dreadnought

The Contemptor Dreadnought has been the hot new toy for Marine players for a little while now. Being a dedicated follower of fashion, I got one for myself this past weekend and here present a guide to construction for everyone :)

It is generally a simple kit to put together as long as you have some photgraphic reference of a completed one - like at the bottom of this page :) There are a couple of pieces that must be used the right way round and the correct orientation is not always obvious. I also present a guide to constructing the CCB - this is a little more fiddly with quite a few extra pieces included in the bag and some steps that must be carried out in sequence. The kit is highly posable too - lots of ball joints and hinge joints too so it will help for you to have an idea of how you want your dread to be posed before you commit to glueing. For that same reason, the fact your dread will look how you want it too, consider this less a construction guide, than a guide to how the pieces all fit together. So, get out your glue, your clippers, and hobby knife, and lets get going!


First off we can start with the main torso and power plant. Nothing too hard about this bit, just make sure you clean all the flash off the engine and align it with the tabs on the back of the dread.


Next we can put the head in the cavity at the top of the torso. It is found on this sprue alongside the two kneeguards. The guards are, as far as I can tell, universal - you can put either on either knee - but leave them on the sprue for now.


The abdominals come next. This is a two-piece section. The piece on the left is the top part. That big plate with the grills goes towards the front. You glue the other piece underneath it with the arrow-like pointy bit pointing up. This is your dread's codpiece, if you like. Both these parts attach to others via ball joints - so make sure you;ve got them lined up with how you want your dread to be standing when you've finished the model before gluing.


Next block of resin has your dread's upper legs. At first glance these are identical but there is a right way to use them. The key is the little plastic tab you can see sticking up at the top of the pieces. Essentially this picture shows the parts upside down, as those tabs need to be orientated so the flat section faces to the front of your dread. The top of these thigh sections is ball jointed, the bottom fits into the calves by a tongue and groove joint. Bear posing in mind again before applying glue.

We're almost finished now, and its the turn of the calf-pieces. These too must be orientated the right way round. The piece at the bottom of the picture is your dread's left calf, the other goes on his right.

And last but not least, the feet. Now, for some unknown, undisclosed reason, Forge World saw fit to label these, and only these parts. And provide pretty-much identical multiples. Yes, there is a L1, L2, R1, and R2. I'm not sure there is any difference at all between the the two left or two right feet. If there is any, it is marginal. If there are two feet to help the dread pose in two different positions, well, the advantage is nothing compared to that provided by all the other definable joints in the model. But hey, I'm sure those great big beautiful feet will be useful in some other project, some day.

Now, if you've done it all right, your dread should look something like this:

I have left the kneeguards off so you can see how the tabs on the thighs should be orientated. This is highly important as the kneeguards simply will not properly fit to the other side of the knee joint. I speak from experience ><



There we go - all parts present and accounted for. I have added the shoulders in this picture as we are going to look at building the CCB's next. Note the orientation and, sadly, the damage done to the top of both pieces during removal from the frame. Each shoulder was pretty solidly attached and I recommend caution when you remove yours.

The Contemptor CCB baggie contains what may at first glance be a bewildering selection of pieces:

I have labeled them, for your convenience, starting with the first piece to attach to the shoulder piece:

Note that parts 4 and 4b are optional weapons to be contained within the fist, Iron man style. You have a choice here of plasma gun and flamer. Make sure you choose one and glue it in before adding part 5 - the 'hand'.

Bear in mind here that part 5 is designed so the 'thumb' goes opposite the three 'fingers' of the fist. that is, it will be oriented differently depending on whether this is a right hand weapon, or left. If you're not sure, try putting your own arm in the pose you want your dread's arm to end up in before attaching this, or any, parts.

On the same block as the projectile weapons are two optional power pack type pieces that attach to the underside of the fist(look for a little raised tab to site the pieces) and guard for the rear of the elbow.

Then you get two sets of digits to go in your fist - traditional stubby ones or more wicked looking claws. Being that I am building a Space Wolves Contemptor I, of course, went with the claws, leaving me a model looking a little like this:


Note that the digits are not universal - each is designed for a specific slot in the fist. You can tell which is which by checking the sides of each at the point where the digit attaches to the hand. You will see each has a drum-shape t enable it to slot into the fist and be posed anywhere from clenched shut to extended (yes, your dread can be giving the finger to his enemies!). Now look at the sides of these drums. You will see that two of them have a rivet-like detail on one side only - you want to be able to see this rivet when you glue the fingers down. One of the digits will be blank in both sides, this is that all important middle finger :)

As with most Forge World kits then, the Contemptor Dreadnought's construction relies on a large amount of dry-fitting and a little bit of flash-trimming and mold-line removal to be successful. Putting things in the right place in the right order is also vital and I hope this guide will help you do that. Please learn from my mistakes!

The versatility of the kit is really really good. No two Contemptors need ever look the same - hopefully you can see I have tried to capture some of the feral nature of Space Wolves in mine, something more or less impossible in the more traditional dreadnought models. But this too does not come without effort and forethought. Attaching all the leg joints simultaneously and achieving a naturalistic pose was not childs-play and required quite a few re-poses and reattachments of certain joints.

Its well worth the effort though to have such a unique and attractive model to the further customise and paint though and I encourage you to give it a go too. Feel free to leave any comments or questions and also check the post on greenstuffing and further customization of my Contemptor.

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?

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.

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.

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?