Last post left off right before I went to armies on parade. Well, I didn't win anything except the participation pin, but I was damn proud of how my army looked either way. A lot of work has gone into the Dust Vultures and having a nice board to display them on is an awesome treat. It was clear from the winners though, that if I aim to accomplish anything next year I'm definately going to need to build some big terrain pieces for the display board.
Not a lot to say about it really. Besides the fact that I'm damn proud of the achievement.
Joyce's army did a lot better than mine and came in fourth place! Rightly so, knowing the ammount of work that went into these 54 dryads, 3 tree lords, drycha, 6 kurnoth hunters and 10 tree revenants.
The week after AoP had me getting ready for another Heresy Battle again. Once again I faced Michael and his Blood Angels/Dark Angels that were proxied as Iron Warrriors. I can't even complain against the proxying anymore either as I was forced to use some proxies myself when I just couldn't get my terminator squad completed in time and had to use my chaos terminators.
Footslogging for the win!
The mission that we played was adapted from a standard HH mission which basically involved a lot of trenches, low difficult terrain and hills. Infiltrate units were not allowed to deploy via infiltrate and we earned points for claiming either deployment zones and no man's land with troops and heavy support units. Right from the start I had secretly given up on this battle seeing as I had lost my infiltrate advantage and was going to be forced to footslog my way across the board.
After turn 3 things looked a lot better I was forced to admit.
Despite my desperations before the game, things actually went surprisingly well. I made good progress along the board and, thanks to a scenario rule that gave outnumbered units rampage, the low numbers of the guys that got into combat really worked to my advantage. At the end of the battle I earned the same number of victory points as my opponent and only lost because of First Blood.
The next couple of weeks I will be concentrating on painting up as much Raven Guard marines as I can. I've done lots of assembling and have so far assembled and basecoated all the infantry that I need for the entire army. The only things I need to assemble after this are Corax and my Blackwing flyer, but hopefully I'll also have some new painted units to show when the next post comes around.
Because I'm dumb, I've decided to spend some time on a kill team unit for the local club and an Exalted Deathbringer for a painting competition as well. Will have to make up for lost time this month if I plan to finish these in time as well.
Here's a shot of the Mordheim campaign that's been going on at the GameForce. My guys got absolutely massacred in their first outing, but managed to scrounge up a wyrdstone piece all the same.
The past month I've been spending most of my time doing drop pods.
Man these things are rough. Not only are they hard to paint on the outside, but they're twice as much work on the inside as well!
They're so much work that I still didn't manage to complete my army in time for the game I had scheduled at Koen's place:
How things looked after my first turn: one plasma marine got hot and the rest of the army did nothing.
The game itself went really bad dice-wise for me and the first two turns resulted in a lot of dead marines on my side, starting me off with a big disadvantage. The turns afterwards only got worse and I only managed to take out the mortars in the end of the game. My only hope and plan to salvage the game was to destroy the two objectives in one fell strike of my deathstorm drop pod, but even that was not to be as my dice failed me again. I damaged one of the objectives with it, while my dark furies finished off another one in turn 5. In hindsight I should have used my newly assembled mor deythan to take out one of the objectives, but since I've never used snipers before I was stumbling around a lot with their deployment and usage.
At this halfway point it is evident that my army has been thoroughly chipped away. Hah!
Despite my low rolls the game was pretty fun and it was nice to play on Koen's well painted table with all the cool terrain. Koen's attic (where we played) was stuffed to the brim with 40k and 30k stuff and keeps, so far, the largest private collection of painted citadel miniatures I've ever seen in my life.
The weekend afterwards I didn't do much painting either as I spent my sunday at
the Scale Model Challenge. This is an amazing event that's practically next
door to me and definately worth checking out for any miniature fan.
Here's a video (in dutch) from the event where you can see some of the
highlights from the painting competition the event is best known for:
Then, for the last two weeks I finally got my inspiration for the title of this blog post. As I was trying to finish most of my raven guard for the Armies on Parade event I got overambitious and set my goals way too high, hoping to finish all four drop pods that are going to be in the final army. Just painting 2 of those bastards (along with my display board) almost got the best of me.
I started out trying to paint the 'pods with a drybrush technique, but this turned out to be really ugly as you can probably see in this image. I'll try and get some better pictures tomorrow, but just going with the edge highlights proved to be the better option in the end.
So, once I'm done making this post I'm going to go to sleep and prepare myself for displaying what I've got so far for my ravens at the Armies on Parade event. I'll do a proper report on it next week when I've also had my next Horus Heresy campaign battle.
