Winning!

Today was the local GW store's painting comp. After two or three weeks of sitting in the cabinet,  my Getty Knights got judged - and won! Yay for me and thanks to all that voted for me. There was actually some pretty good competition this month. I would have found it hard to choose between three or four of three other entries. Apparently I won comfortably though. Very gratifying to have put in all that work and have it recognised by others :)

While standing in the store, waiting for the judging, I had a bit of time to daydream about playing 6th edition 40k, specifically combinations odd armies forallies.

If I played my Eldar, I could use Corsairs as an ally. The funny thing about Corsairs is they can include Dark Eldar, as an elite or troops choice, I think. Might be fun to have three different types of space elves on the table.

Alternatively, Eldar can have Tau as the strongest of allies. This would mean they could be targeted for friendly psychic powers. Broadsides with Guided railguns maybe...

While not such strong allies, the idea of mixing my Wraithseer and Wraithguard with some fast moving Space Wolves or Blood Angels is also intriguing.

Then there's also the obvious conjunction of Wolves and Angels. I already have a pretty strong Space Wolves list, so I'm not sure yet what ace units from the Blood Angels codex I would want to swap in. But the effective nerfing of Stormravens as a fast transport might open up a few hundred points in that list. A las-predator could be a deadly addition. Another Land Raider, some Long Fangs, or cavalry could also be a great mix. But really, I'm most excited about the fact it appears Blood Angels priests could indeed give nearby Space Wolves FNP (albeit a nerfed version).

There's definitely a whole lot to think about in the new edition of 40k. Its a nerds paradise as we go over all the new rules, combos, tactics and strategies the game now presents. Looking forward to figuring it all out :)

First Thoughts on Warhammer 40k, 6th Edition

Lucky me, I ordered the Ultimate Bundle for GW's latest Edition and it was delivered this morning. Once I had the kids squared away and a few bits of business done, I was able to casually swan into my local GW, Signals Satchel over my shoulder, and ask if anyone else would like to have a look at the new rules. Small pleasures, and all that.

I have had a few hours to go over the book since then. Here are some quick first thoughts on what I have read so far:

1. Some of the changes seem to be essentially alternatives to previous systems, rather than improvements. Wound allocation, for example. In 5th, the way it was worked out was open to manipulation - I personally took full advantage with my Wolf Gaurd terminators, making sure everyone carried a distince load out. This new system - eliminating the closest models in both shooting and assaults first - is, at first glance, complicated. I expect it will become easy enough to do with practice but really, its still open to manipulation and is not really any closer to how a 'real' combatant would choose to do things or how 'real' combat works. 

2. Its not all bad though. Some systems are brand new - flyers are a real thing now with real rules. There are also some interesting enhancements - close combat weapons with an AP value for example. This should work great for making CC units even more deadly. I'm not sure how it works when an attacker has two CC weapons, but I'm sure that will be ironed out soon enough.

3. Psychic powers could be awesome or could just really suck. The new powers are generally pretty cool. There's essentially a psychic power for giving/taking away every enhancement you can think of,  (FNP, Counter-attack, and so on), as well as some flat-out destructive monsters and a bunch of gameplay/crowd-control effects too. It might be a tough decision to give up some of the Codex powers for a random one or two replacements, but there's definitely some good reasons to take a chance. BUT - any unit having the ability to resist psychic powers, with an even greater chance if there are friendly psykers nearby could just make the whole thing really frustrating. Yeah, Grey Knights are yet again going to be a real pain in the backside. The awesomeness of Space Wolf psychic poles and even vanilla psychic hoods is also somewhat reduced by this. And it stinks that Eldar, the most psychically advanced and attuned race in existence, can only choose from two disciplines. But Guard or Marines get to choose from any. Because humans are so sensitive to this stuff or something.

4. There's generally going to be lots more shooting in this edition. Overwatch and snap-shots mean that pretty much everything can fire everything all the time. MSU's and assault heavy emphasis of 5th could really be a thing of the past.

5. The Stormraven as a transport is now almost worthless. It used to be a fast skimmer that could move at high speed, shoot a high-powered weapon, and have a cover save. Now, unless it is nominated as a flyer, it moves at the same speed as a Land Raider but without the great armour or a cover save. If it moves fast enough for a cover save - no shooting. Not even with Machine Spirit.If it moves as a flyer it is still a viable gun platform but the benefit of Machine Spirit is pretty much negated. Other parts of the book lead me to believe GW wants more people playing on 6x4 tables, and possibly at 2000 points, so there is still the chance that having the ability to go flat-out most of the way across the table, then wait a turn before disembarking its passengers, then going to full-on flyer mode could still work. But on a 4x4 - might as well pony up the extra points for a Land Raider or save them with a Rhino and Predator.

6. Allies will be fun, buildings not so much. Well, maybe buildings, sorry, fortifications, aren't so stupid. I guess its just like having an extra vehicle or something with a big gun on top. My real objection is its a transparent attempt by GW to get us to hand over more cash for more plastic crap. And I swear, when some kid turns up with a f***ing ice cream tub he's not even bothered to spray black and tells me its a f***ing Fortress of Redemption, I'm going to ruin his life for him. Not his hobby. His life.

The inclusion of Allies, likewise, is a transparent attempt to get we poor fools to throw more money at Nottingham. 'Can't have Stormtalons in your Space Wolves/Blood Angels/Eldar army? No problemo - £27.50, thankyou very much! Codex balancing? F*** no! I work with Matt Ward!' Meh, well I have enough GW product to come up with dozens of interesting permutations before I need to fork out more cash.

So there are some very very early thoughts on the new game. I'm looking forward to limping my way through the first few games as we all get to grips with the new stuff and figure out what's broken from the old stuff.

On a side-note, the freebies that came with the Ultimate Bundle are awesome! The stachel from the Gamer's Edition is suprisiingly good - and it looks even better with my Purity Seal pin attached!  Plus, my coffee tastes great from my Aquila mug! I'm looking forward to framing and mounting the print of the cover art and may even find a way to display the postcard prints of every cover art from every edition of the game! I am really not sure, however, what I am going to do with the certificate, thanking me for buying tons of GW stuff, signed by - a GW Marketing Executive I have never heard of!

I'm also not sure the guys at my GW store really appreciated me bringing all this stuff into the shop to show them, carrying it all in a Mantic satchel...

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 :)

Mantic Gathering Pace, Warmachine Stalled

Todays plan had been to get my first game of Warmachine in this evening at a local club. It was all set up -until I remembered tonight is England's last group game at Euro 2012. So Warmachine is postponed for a week. Unless England have another game next Tuesday evening...

Another plan I had was to not back Mantic's Kickstarter campaign. Until they announced the next stretch goal - Angelic paladins.

Mantic has always been great value. They almost throw minis at you as they try to build momentum and support for their nascent systems and company. My problem had been they don't seen different enough from other established companies, well, from one company in particular, to be worth getting involved with. That and I don't play a fantasy battles game.

Angelic armies look pretty unique though. It also sends likely they are an elite army, i.e. small, making them quick to build and paint. Short attention span plus desire to get every model looking awesome over here.

There is only five days left to go on the Kickstarter at the time of writing and it has really picked up speed in the last week or so. At one point it seemed stalled at 60k forever. But, perhaps because of some fairly interesting looking new units (dwarf cavalry!), the funds us really picking up steam new. Even lurkers like me are nearly falling off our fence...

Why Overcomplicate Things?

Believe it or not, I am still a fan of Space Wolves. True, I have built several thousand points of Blood Angels, based around a love of the Stormraven, and a smaller force of Eldar, simply because they look cool. But I painted my first Space Wolf nearly three decades ago and they are the army I started with when I got back into the hobby a couple of years ago.

So, time then to write a new SW list.

I had a yearning to include Bjorn in my list (using the FW Venerable Dread - looks a bit cooler than the old Citadel model I think). He is like an uber-venerable dread. Wicked BS and WS and S. Can basically be a plasma cannon that never misses. He is an inspiring presence - but a possible millstone too. If he goes down and you don't have a model in base contact at the end of the game, big penalty in kill points games.

Lots of units then are needed to help avoid this potential kick in the nuts after the final whistle so I first went with using lots of units of Grey Hunters. I have run a nasty list with several small units of hunters before. The thing about that list is it has a dozen rockets, seven las-cannons, and a few meltas (just in case). The result of this has been I have never ever had to get my Grey Hunters out of their transports. All that long-range shooting has meant noone has gotten close enough or had the firepower to spare to schwack them. So, when I was going through my armies to pick a force for a recent Apocalypse game, I was actually pretty shocked to see how awful my Grey Hunters look.

I'm not a bad painter - now. I have spent the last couple of years learning techniques and practising and basically figuring out how to hold a brush straight. But two years ago -  not so much. Its not that they are really terribly painted. But they're not great and some aren't even really finished.

At first I figured I would simply ebay them ('reasonable paint quality, going cheap to a good home') and replace them with a new battleforce, also ebaying the surplus from that. A friend had passed on a couple of spare fantasy parts sprues with some cool looking hammers, pelts, and heads on them and I gifugred I could incorporate them into the new models.

Then, suddenly, it hit me - I have an airbrush. How much easier would it be to just spray my old wolves and repaint them? Derp...

So today I began the great repaint project. I have started with fifteen Hunters - three squads with a melta each. One has a Forge World melta that looks really cool. It has a little drum shape on the top and looks a bit like a WWII Bren gun or something. I figure I will paint them a squad at a time now the spraying is out of the way and hopefully get some painting done this evening.

Eldar D-cannons, the Dead Walk, and Fast Vehicles FTW

I actually had a really fun game of 40k using Eldar this evening! Since getting hold of a bargain bunch of wraithguard a few weeks ago on Ebay i have been fielding a list based around them, and a Wraithseer. This has made me able to largely get around the major drawbacks of playing the prettiest race in the game - S3 and T3.
Eldar look great. Even though the sculpts are generally several years old and the tanks are all identical chassis, they can still look great. But they really suffer, particularly on 4x4 boards from being physically weak.

Bark > Bite

You have to plan on getting into a fist fight on a smaller board. Orks, Marines (all flavours), and 'nids are all very strong on the assault and won't have far to go to get at your skinny space elves. But wraithguard, while not having bags of killing power up close, are at the very least a formidable roadblock with their high toughness. And, when you field a full squad, particularly with a warlock giving Enhance, they have a good chance of just wearing you down. Over a couple of rounds of combat this evening my guard were able to take out Korsarro Khan and go on to hold up a squad of hammernators for another two rounds. This after obliterating that same squad's Land Raider.
I also have a Wraithseer in this list and, although he had been very useful in previous games, tonight he was only so-so. After destroying a Rhino and pinning the tactical marines inside he got such in combat with the hammernators. Taking a wound reduced his initiative to the same as theirs, while his invulnerable save was actually worse. It took then a couple of turns but eventually they were able to dispatch him for the loss of only two marines.
When we set upthe game I was really expecting to get tabled. My opponent had built a White Scars list, using one of the new Stormtalons, a squadron of Typhoons, a biker squad, and the aforementioned hammernators. Playing Capture and Control, with him going first, I figured he would use Outflank to quickly assault me at my 'base' while protecting his with a tactical squad. To combat this, I kept all my force in reserve, thus denying him a turn of shooting if he deployed stuff early. Despite my army coming on in a rather piecemeal fashion, this tactic worked out for me. When my Fire Prisms and Wraithguard cane on, for examples, they were both immediately presented with convenient targets to destroy (a Land Raider) or force to flee (bye bye, bike squadron).
In the end I was able to Forrest Gump my way to a win. I had planned to use a Wave Serpent, carrying Dire Avengers, to go flat-out at his objective, dismount, then assault him, forcing his troops to move off the objective as they piled in making the game a draw as my objective was unheld. But, at the last minute, it occurred to me that the Pathfinders I had had sitting across the table from my objective were troops! And that the Falcon right next to them was a transport! So a quick embarkation and flight across the board later, plus that assault at the other end, and hey presto - a win for the Eldar!
Funnily enough, my opponent had also forgotten Eldar scouts are troops, so he had not seriously tried to destroy them during the game. So my win was probably even more of a shock to him than it was to me. Full credit to him though, he took it like a champ.
A good time then, as they say, was had by all.
Its always nice to get a win, but its even better to have a fun game. We both had good fortune and bad, we both made mistakes as well as having some things go our way. I'm sure we will both learn from those mistakes too.

Cryx: Complete

Wow, I can't believe how easy that was! I only started my Cryx Battlegroup at the weekend and now, just five days later, I'm done! With scenic bases and everything!

If I ever get round to building a white-room, I'll put some better quality images up

 I was helped by my paint scheme being really quick and simple and hindered by the fact I needed to remove most of the figures from their bases in Monday night in order to build proper swampy bases for them. Inspired by the bases at Terrainthralls, I used Citadel's textured paints to build up parts of some of the bases, leaving other parts clear for water effects. I have used some of GW's grass clumps as well as some home-made ones using modeller's synthetic grass.

I was actually a bit worried about using the water effects, what with it being a new thing and all. But it turns out it is really simple and easy to use. You just our on a blob - its got a similar consistency to PVA glue - then tease it out to fill the area you want to look wet with an old brush or toothpick or something. Leave it for around 8 hours in a dust-free area, then repeat. This is because it tends to shrink as it dries. So what looked like an awesome puddle when you poured it will just look like a wet layer after it cures. The PP bases don't have very high lips though so I was happy to just put two layers down.

Simple as all this was though, yet another aspect of my complete failure to plan was revealed when I went to replace my models on their new awesome bases - some of them had nowhere to stand >< I figured out ways to shoehorn them all back on though without it looking too bad. But, lesson learned: build bases before sticking models down but make sure models have somewhere to stand! (This actually night not have been so much of a problem where I using, say, terminators. But, as it happens, Cryx bonejacks have big footprints and large, low slung bodies so terrain features can get in the way somewhat)

The only thing about my Cryx I'm not really happy with is their furnaces. The original No Quarter article I got my inspiration for the colour scheme from laid out  basically a series of glazes as a way of getting the OSL-type look. It kind of works. But the fiery bits don't really have that necrotite-green look I was expecting. They look a bit messy, really, so I will have to keep an eye out for suggestions on how to paint a more authentic deathly glow.

Still, I now have a fully painted and based Cryx army - just need to learn the game now!