2017

Time for another update!

Luckily this time a lack of posts is not an indication of a lack of hobby activity! Sadly not much progress on Raven Guard painting. I took a bit of a break from that after Armies on Parade and even though the new year has me pumped on starting on the second half of the army, I don't have much new models to show right now.

There was a november heresy battle that I forgot to take pictures of and I finished the Kill Team that I was working on in the last post:

Tried to paint them up as space sharks, but don't have the icons. I'm pretty happy with the result either way.

The holiday months were very busy did accomplish a bit of stuff by assembling all of my Raven Guard infantry, playing a lot of mordheim and painting up some giant rats and a warlock engineer that I don't have a pictures of. Pictures of black primed models aren't all that exciting either, so I'm going to save showing you the assembled army after I paint it.

2017 is going to be a Raven Guard year though, so I started it off properly by playing my december/january heresy battle against Peter Zuidgeest and his Iron Warriors. I spent all my time the week before assembling my Storm Eagle and forgot to study up on my battle plan. Another loss, but how can you be sad when you've got an awesome model like this one standing on your desk:

This is a shot from halfway in the battle when the storm eagle and the drop pods arrived.

 Then, the day after the battle I attended a cool Kill Team tournament at the local Warhammer store (Warhammer Eindhoven). We went there specifically to play against some new opponents and it worked out pretty well. Getting to battle a couple of new guys with exceptionally painted teams.

I used the opportunity to re-base a squad of chaos marines. Really happy with my choice to go with a stirland mud base.

Here's my tooled-up champion facing off a biker nob that he killed.

Here he is again killing a thousand son sorcerer (although he got shot down shortly after).

I won 3 battles and lost 1 so I ended up with silver. Michiel won gold with his orks to nobody's surprise and the Thousand Sons guy won bronze.

So there you have it! Next post will definately contain some new Raven Guard since I'm working on a new tactical squad right now. There'll also be some pics from the Kill Team campaign we're going to be doing during the coming months

Victory or Death!

Dust Vultures on Parade

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.

Victory or Death!

Summer Heresy

As I mentioned last week, Age of Sigmar wasn't the only wargame I spent time on this summer...

The Horus Heresy campaign is still going strong! Despite neglecting to report it I did indeed play a 1250 points battle and the group also celebrated reaching the halfway point with a megabattle where everyone got to bring their 1500 points armies.

The 1250 points battle was against the dreaded Sons of Horus! It was two infiltrating drop pod assault armies against eachother and my opponent decided to rob me of my advantage and give me the first turn while he himself put everything in reserve.

Perhaps the most important piece of dark age thech in the Raven Guard's arsenal are the ever elusive 'phantom stairs'.

At the start of turn 2 things were finally kicking off and not knowing where Lupercal's lackeys were coming from I decided to hug that ruin terrain for all it was worth. Turn 1 only saw my plasma guys drop as well as an enemy contemptor.

 This walking coffin of a battle brother needs a name for the heroics he pulled in this game. "Brother Aybek" I dub thee.

The Sons' contemptor took down my plasma dudes, but they got a few shots off first and killed the kharybdis. Luckily they were avenged later by my own contemptor. The contemptor then proceeded to kick traitor ass and hold up/murder the better part of a marine squad. My other units took the fight to a particularly nasty squad of volkite dudes. In the end everyone was getting into slapfights and cuddle-combats and the game ended in a draw.

So, having skipped two months with the 30k reports this time there is also the Megabattle to talk about. Megabattles to me are one of the main reasons I'm in this hobby. It's an excuse to immerse myself in exactly the type of battles that I keep reading about in the fiction for an entire day. Fielding and using your army in allied combinations and large scale battle situations is also a really cool change from the smaller engagements you usually play.

This time, although I had a great time playing the game, the strategic element didn't quite come together. The loyalist side had some troubles with army selection (we were one person short, so the rest had to conjure up some extra points) as well as having almost none of the potential bonus rules that we could have won for ourselves in the previous rounds.

Nevertheless, it was nice to see everyone's mostly painted armies out on display and we had a good time rolling dice and taking models off the table. Below are some of the few pics I shot. There wasn't a lot of time for photo sessions.

My poor tactical squad. All those alpha legion dudes coming at you and you're surrounded by iron hands in boxes.

Brother Aybek leading from the front again. Thankfully he shouldn't have to walk far to get at those Night Lords.

Wore my 'straight outta deliverance' shirt for the occasion. Don't know if I want to go full emo-style for the next outing, but you never know.

Now. For one of the first times ever I did more painting these months than blogging about it, so here are some army shots for the Dust Vultures so far. And also something I just finished yesterday.

This is everything that is completely finished so far.

Master of Signal in the house!

I changed the spear into a sword after some thought on the matter. Playing wysiwyg is something I really care about and it caught me completely off guard that there are no power spears in 30k. Oh well.

Dark Furies bitches. Damn proud of this unit.

Victory or Death!

Raven Guard Wins and Clan Thikket!

Suddenly, out of nothing, I seem to be totally on the ball with the hobby again.

First thing I did this week was go out of my way to paint this experiential revelation:

Perfection.

"The other side."

Please, please, please people! Don't all pull down your pants at once! This is but the first of the gimongous Skaven army that is currently in the works and shall soon flood like a swarming tide the great gaming tables of the known world!

In all seriousness, I'm really glad I got this out of my system. I've been putting off painting a clanrat because I wasn't sure about it tying me down on a colour scheme, I wasn't sure how to do fur right and I didn't have a plan for the skin either, and all sorts of silly excuses. I finally did it and it was amazing fun. I'm happy with my choice to go for a dark green with blue accent and although the skin took me a couple of tries, I'm really happy with the end result. The base is not done yet obviously and I plan to add some high summer grass tufts to get a sort of 'forest' look for my rats. Asuming I'm going on with the dark green/forest rat theme I've also decided on a name for the clan: Clan Thikket. Maybe it sound dumb but somehow this is the stuff that get's me inspired for an army.

Then, on friday, I finally had the 750 points battle for the ongoing Horus Heresy campaign and boy was it a good one. I was playing against Michael who had a combination of Blood and Dark Angels but was using them as Iron Warriors (because there weren't enough traitor armies in the campaign). He had 6 special terminators with cyclone launchers, a unit of 20 marines and a unit of dakka predators. I had a land speeder with multi melta and grav gun, a close combat contemptor, 2 units of marines and a chaplain. We had to claim objectives and were under raging inferno rules which meant we each had a 40mm, 3d6 scattering, S5 within 6" inferno bomb to drop on eachother. These rules were insane and almost all casualties suffered were due to inferno hits.

Turn one had me infiltrating and advancing in an attempt to go for the throat. This plan immediately backfired when one of the inferno bombs landed right in front of my path.

Due to the nature and 40mm + 6" radius of the inferno templates (we used Naut's half-painted terminators), both our plans fell apart quite fast and by turn 5 we were reduced to simply trying to claim an objective and stay alive with the models we had left.

One of the last turns my second squad had arrived from outflank in turn 3 to claim an objective while the first squad was reduced to the chaplain and the sergeant. Contemtor was long gone and the land speeder arrived in turn 4.

In the end we both managed to hold on to two objectives and it came down to the special victory conditions. Due to my chaplain and sergeant surviving and managing to wreck his tanks, Michael only had First Blood, while I could claim Last Man Standing and Slay The Warlord. Basically pulling this victory right out of my ass on the last turn. It was a great game though and every dice roll we made felt like a make or break situation. Battles like these make me curious to see what's going to happen at the 1000 point level. Winning this battle was pretty critical as well because a loss for me would have meant that this round would have went to the traitor side. 750 is now the first time the loyalists came out ahead which was nice to see for a change.

So, that's about it for this week. Now on to the next batch of rats and ravens!

Victory or Death!

I'm Actually Gaming!

Wow. I totally forgot to publish the last post..

That's embarrassing and basically means this one is going to be a long one. I also don't feel like retyping the whole thing, so you'll have to imagine a bit of a timeskip in between. Anyhow!

I played a game of Ninth Age recently. I got out my old Empire army for it, which had been gathering dust ever since the release of 8th edition made it obsolete. What is pretty cool is that it seems that the army has now become really poweful in the Ninth Age system. Check it out in the pics below:

Turn two. The first important combats are starting to erupt.

The game was against Dirk and his yellow Orc army (lovingly named the "Pizzkidzz"). The game was pretty fun as we quickly found out that the game is very, very much like old Warhammer Fantasy. The downside however, was that we spent so much time flipping through the pdf's that we weren't able to properly finish the game. Also, my detachments formations are still not legal (I have them in 3 by 3 blocks). All in all I can't give the game a good verdict yet other than that it's an admittedly more balanced version of Warhammer Fantasy that you can get for free and will probably remain relevant for a couple of years. Good for anyone with an old fantasy army, not so good for introducing new people to the hobby. Then again, the game itself is in a self-declared Beta stage right now so comparing it to fully supported games such as AoS and KoW may still be premature.

Close-up of the big savage orc unit. Tough to kill units all around.

In more recent news I've played the second game of the 30k campaign that's still going on at the GameForce. Incidentally this game was also against Dirk.

The mission however, was not quite a success as we had to place objectives which one of us had to destroy and the other had to protect. I was assigned the protecting role, but was also informed that objectives had to be deployed before we were allowed to choose sides. This made setting up the objectives very difficult and I ended up placing them somewhere in the middle. When I then lost both rolls to pick a side as well as the roll for first turn I could only watch helplessly as 2 objectives got immediately taken out in turn 1. Dirk's army spent the rest of the game running away. What also didn't help is that I had chosen to field a contemptor while the boards we used had passages that were consistently too small for a dreadnought to pass through. Nevertheless, it was a short game and I still had fun throwing dice against Dirk's nicely painted Death Guard.

Seriously though. I'm glad we're not doing zone mortalis anymore next game.

 Now! For the painting part of the blog post.

Two weeks ago I had this standing on my painting table:

It's going to be a busy month.

Here's what I managed to complete:

Can you read the text I wrote on his chest flag things? Pretty pleased with myself that I kinda pulled that one off.

Chaplain dude. Is this the time to start naming things? Maybe flesh out the fluff a bit?

And the first of the Skaven!! Unspectacularly they are rat swarms. Still took me long enough to paint up though. Warlock engineer is next on the list.

So that's all for this post. I tried not to keep it too long this time. There's a big forge world order coming in this week and I also finished the Legends of the Age of Sigmar: Pestilens novel which I kinda wanna do a book review for. I already talked about the latter on the latest episode of Skavenblight Radio, but a more thorough review on here would probably be a good idea also. So! Fingers crossed for next week guys!

Victory or Death!

Warmachine Battrep!

Haven't been painting or playing much recently. Between halloween and an inconveniently placed company event, I haven't been able to go to my local game store as much. I did go again last friday, which means I have another battle to blog about, and some upcoming painting projects to present.

I played a 50pts Warmachine Battle friday against Niek and his "Ocean's" list. It's a list that uses pSorcha, a Behemoth and a whole bu 1nch of mercenaries. The original creator of the list called it Ocean's 18 as it used exactly 18 models at the time, but Niek's version has since made various alterations to the lineup. Aside from pSorcha and the Behemoth he used Cylena Reafyll & Nyss Hunters, eAlexia, pEiryss, Gorman, Dougal MacNaile, Rorsh and Brine and a unit of Greylord Outriders. It's a really tough list to beat for the ammount of high damage output models that are coming at you at the same time. It's a list he's taken to tournaments before and this time he'd be using it against my most recent pMagnus list.

Because I wanted to use my new Galleon and I have a fairly limited mercenary collection, I used the following: pMagnus, 2 Renegades, a Galleon, Gorman, Dougal MacNaile, Orin Midwinter, Stannis Brocker, a full unit of Croe's Cutthroats and a full unit of Steelhead Halberdiers.

After deployment our set-up looked something like this:

Start of Turn 1

We were playing a steamroller scenario with objectives (the blue markers), but neither of us paid much attention to it, so I won't bother anyone with the details here. The first turns started out ok, with Niek mostly just moving forward and me making some early game mistakes. After Niek's advance deployments of Eiryss I wasn't happy with the positioning of my solo's, so I decided to do some run moves in a couple of wierd directions. In hindsight I should've just stuck to my original plan for the solo's as in turn 2, none of them were where I wanted them to be either.

Start of Turn 2.

During turn 2, Niek made some aggressive moves with his Greylords to take out most of my Halberdiers and used Rorsh and Brine to take out Stannis. His Nyss Hunters and Eyriss took out a couple of my Cutthroats, but nothing else major was accomplished. Things looked to be getting tough for me in turn 3 though, unless I managed to pull of something genius. In an effort to take out the Greylords (I've become very afraid of stationary effects), I decided to use the Galleon in melee. In hindsight, this was also a mistake.

After this game I need to remember that the Galleon is much better used for shooting and taking damage in the early turns. Even if it's the only thing that can kill a certain enemy unit. I tried to use what remained of my Cutthroats and Halberdiers to damage Rorsh and the Nyss Hunters, but bad dice put a stop to that rather quickly. I fired off my obliterator missiles at the Behemoth (which was useful at least) and at Alexia, who I almost boxed. Long story short: turn 2 should have been a critical turn for me, but due to some bad strategy and bad luck I was not prepared for the turn 3 that was to come.

Start of turn 3.

Niek's turn 3 was suprisingly light on the damage part. He mopped up the last of the halberdiers and did a lot of damage to my Galleon, but I didn't lose a lot of actual models. Despite all of this his board position was very strong by the end of the turn and there were almost no positions in which I could keep Magnus safe if I didn't somehow kill a lot of very tough models. In my turn I decided to go for broke and try an attempt at killing Sorcha. The only way to do it (we found after much discussion and calculation) was to roll consistently above average with my Galleon's cannons. It only took me two dice rolls to crush these feeble hopes. After that, turn 4 saw the end of the Traitor.

What was good about this battle is that I learned a lot about how to use the Galleon as well as that I need more units that are either very good on their own, or have actually useful combo's going on between them. An Ocean's list is very much about the points-efficiency and individual power of each model. If I ever plan to counter that I'll need to either have a lists that works together or has equally efficient units/solo's.

What's next?

Next week I'm going to help a friend start up a new 40k campaign at our local gamestore and make an attempt at finishing my UE.net's painting vows for this month. Hopefully I can stay committed and not get distracted by all the fantastic games coming out this month. Assassin's Creed Unity, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Pokémon Alpha Saphire are all looking to be competing for my free time these weeks.

Speaking of Pokémon: I'm also attempting to finish White 2 in time for the new games since I've never gotten around to doing so. Anyway, so far I've found that warmachine casters make some of the best nicknames ever!

My team so far.

Death to the False Emperor.

Butchered

So yeah, I went and had myself an actual warmachine battle yesterday. Considering how infrequently I play the game I'm actually kind of proud of how I did. It was me and my Magnus theme force against Niek and his Khador. We went for a killbox scenario with 2 objectives.

The deployment. Niek's Khador (above) vs my Mercenaries (below).

I've mentioned Niek in a post from august back when we were having a couple of games for a Journeyman League. Niek's brilliant Butcher army is one I've faced before. So far I've never quite been able to win. I've come close a couple of times, but the raw power that is The Butcher Unleashed (the third and most powerful incarnation) keeps catching me off guard. 

The army he used yesterday was something new he was testing. It used a group of 2 devastators and 2 demolishers to block LOS to the Butcher and serve as a very literal wall to his opponent's troops. He also took some pikemen, orrick, corbeau, a wardog, a greylord solo and a gobber tinker (if I recall correctly).

The Butcher stands behind his Clam Wall and some Iron Fang Pikemen.

I was using my old Magnus army. It's a cool feeling to be able to use models that you painted at least 2 or 3 years ago and still have them (kinda) work on the tabletop. True, this army definately needs some extra love and care before it's tournament worthy, but for a casual pickup game in the local store? Why the heck not?

Cuthroats/Saxon Orrick in the woods, a line of Long Gunners, Magnus, Gorman, Jacks and an assortment of Steelheads.

Since we were sort of pressed for time, we went fast into the game. Niek moving his stuff forward almost immediately and after his turn 2, we already had a couple of dead long gunners and halberdiers. I spent my first turn moving forward, setting up and used my cuthroats to take some potshots at one of the butcher's dogs, hoping to take one out early. Unfortunately that didn't work. 

I needed a very good turn 2 to turn things around in my favor and get his caster in a vulnerable position. Which, when you're talking about the Butcher Unleashed behind a wall of devastators, is not an easy thing to do.

End of Niek's Turn 2.

My turn 2 went pretty well despite a couple mistakes in activation order. I'm incredibly rusty after all and still unclear on some of the basic warmachine rules. I wasted a lot of time trying to kill corbeau, while I could've just been killing pikemen. 

Completely forgot about Gorman DiWulfe, who could've made my Mangler's job of denting the clam wall a lot easier. I had a good plan though and with a little luck from the dice I was able to silence the Butcher with Croe and get Magnus behind a wall of his own Jacks, not giving any points away for the scenario.

Oops.

Alas! Once again I underestimated the maelstrom of destruction that is the Butcher Unleashed. Apparently this guy is able to march through his own wall, completely smash a temper metal boosted renegade and hack Magnus apart with focus to spare. 

To be fair, we were pressed for time at that point and with a little more thinking and planning I probably could've foreseen this and positioned Magnus a bit better. At least far enough back that the Butcher wouldn't have been able to reach him after hacking appart one of my jacks. Oh well... Maybe next time. 

All in all it was a great game. I learned a lot and we finished the whole thing just in time for me to make my night shift.

Death to the False Emperor!