Quick Campaign Update

A quicky this week. Purely for the purpose of updating my progress on the campaign. Last friday I battled against Imperial Guard.

The fun thing about my opponents army was that it was mostly infantry. He only had a single tank (not counting the chimera) that shot a S10 AP2 template and a forgeworld flyer. The game was mostly about objectives and I actually thought I had a chance in the beginning since most of the objectives were in my deployment zone and his army was clearly not going to be legging it across the table any time soon. I figured if I managed to kill off his troops quickly enough, I would be able to deny his objectives and my marines would be resilient enough to hold on to whatever they found. Most importantly: I wanted to take the decimator out for a test drive.

Start of turn 2. I killed a chimera, he immobilized a rhino. Everything was still looking pretty even.

I can be long and short about it, but in the end, despite the fact that my plan mostly worked, I just didn't have enough troops left at the end to keep my objectives. Once the decimator and the daemon prince were dead I only had 20 marines who were in no good position to defend themselves (cover saves having really taken a blow in the new edition). Furthermore, since I'm fairly new with the 6th edition ruleset, I was also taken by surprise by some of the additional objectives that the game has now. Having your general killed will give a point to your opponent, which I see now, drastically diminishes the usefulness of certain HQ choices that are designed for combat (...such as Daemon Princes). Also, the decimator is just a big ol' point sink and despite being awesome to look at, won't be a repeat guest in my 1000 point lists.

So there you have it. The campaign battle has been reported.

Another thing I'd like to point out is this:

...

Pretty much everything I was able to say about this when I saw it was:

"...

Why Khorne?"

Death to the False Emperor!

End of Summer Update Part 2: The Updating

Hey everyone!

You'll be glad to know that Part 2 of the End of Summer Update is now upon you. In the last post I pretty much talked about some personal stuff, the decimator and the megabattle. Now I'd like to show some stuff I've been up to for the past few weeks. First off: Games Day Germany.

Games Day Germany!

The golden daemon cabinets and viewing crowds at Games Day (Image posted at dakkadakka.com) 

Yes, yes. I went to a Games Day convention. For the first time as well, I might add. To cut right to the point: I kinda have mixed feelings about the whole experience. Looking back I feel like I had a pretty good time. I went there with a great bunch of friends and things like the Golden Daemon (painting) competition, the seminars and several of the army/store displays were absolutely fantastic. Köln is also a pretty cool city and though we didn't get to sight see much, the whole thing had a kind of 'holiday' feel to it. Getting a limited edition mini was also very nice. 

Some Golden Daemon entries were just sickeningly cool.

The world's most expensive gaming table (left) and the world's most original 'huge combined army effort' (right).

"The guys" doing what they do best: Fail at speed painting competitions (left) and more sick-ass GD entries (right).

Despite these awesome things, most of the day actually consisted of waiting for my friends to get through the forgeworld line and walking around stores that sold stuff we could buy cheaper at home. Pretty much 50% of the convention area was some sort of store and besides enabling you to look at cool stuff, a lot of the rest of the convention wasn't all that interactive. In fact, the terrain workshop and the scrap daemon (two of the most interactive things of the day) were pretty much picked clean of their bits after the first two or three hours. Also: the whole convention kinda had a Games-Workshop propaganda feel about it that I never really understood about the company. What I guess I'm saying is that the unfortunate fact that GW has a pretty close-knit inner culture, where their own products are never really criticized and ignorance of the rest of the miniatures hobby is encouraged, really leaps out to me at an all-GW convention such as this.

So, despite having had a fun day out with my gaming buddies, I doubt we'll feel the need to spend our money on more Games Day tickets any time soon. As for other recent developments:

Glimpse of the Golden Age Campaign!

Our store doesn't usually do very well in finishing campaigns (as might have been deduced by my previous attempts at campaign reports), but this one actually looks like a keeper for once!

The campaign was set up by Str10_Hurts (aka Piers) from our local club and he's reporting the campaign extrensively on warseer.

Last friday I played my first mission against Scar/Peter (the guy who painted the fortress of redemption from the last post) and his lovely Grey Knights.

Everything looked to be going well at the start of turn 2...

The battle was great fun and it was a challenge to fight Scar's twin dreadknights. I blame my loss on my lack of experience with the new edition and the unfortunate demise of my warlord/daemon prince. He basically got gunned down by random bolterfire in a single turn, which was a bit of a wierd moment for me, being forced to change my entire plan and go on the defensive.

I'll be playing another battle this friday against Jordy with his Imperial guard so I'll be sure to update the blog after that as well. In the meantime:

Death to the False Emperor!

End of Summer Update

Hello Readers! Welcome back to Daan of War!

The past couple of months have been kinda busy. Big thing was that I finally have a proper job! For about a month now I've been working as a cell culture biotechnician at a large pharmaceutical company and it's going pretty well so far.

Another cool thing was the trip to Ireland for the "Magic is Might" conference. Me and my dad (Berry Eggen) wrote a paper on magical objects in Harry Potter and how they relate to the design of intelligent, everyday technology. It's all some pretty interesting stuff when you think about it and the conference itself was a big hit as well. So big in fact that it got featured in the 9 'o clock news on one of Ireland's main TV stations along with most newspapers and radio shows: http://www.rte.ie/news/av/2012/0724/media-3351559.html

Before that we also got to present the article at the Dutch Technology Week alongside some very renowned scientists, including two Nobel prize winners! http://dutchtechnologyweek.com/nl/events/1/smart-meets-smart-kick-off-dutch-technology-week

Now, with all of that non-hobby-related stuff out of the way, let's move on to more important things:

I Finished My Decimator!

Yes people, the decimator has been painted and looking exactly like a giant daemonic dreadnought from hell should look:

Also in the background one might notice the long forgotten Fortress of Redemption: A dusty relic of an ancient time (a time when I used to volunteer for Games Workshop and didn't know what to get for all the free credits I was building up). It has recently been revitalised and painted up properly by one guys at the club. He did the entire thing free of charge on the premise that we'd keep the fortress in the Gameforce for public use. The guy's online handle is "Scar" by the way and he has a pretty cool painting service that you should check out. How come these two amazing projects have been painted all of a sudden, you ask? Well, it was mostly because...

We Had a Megabattle!

And an epic megabattle it was. Below are some pics:

Thanks go to Marcus for all the great photo's!

The whole thing was pretty epic and was mainly cool because everybody had a painted army to field. Unfortunately though, we had some issues due to a power unbalance between the two sides along with some weird deployment decisions, which caused the game to come to an end before we were even able to get started on turn four. A bit of a pity, but a lot has been learned and hopefully we'll be able to do a better one in the future, which basically everyone agreed on that we should. 

Well, for now I'll leave it at this and tip my hat to anyone who's still reading. Maybe I'll be able to post up some stuff from my more recent activities tomorrow.

Death to the False Emperor!