Finally back.

So the bug just hasn't been there for 40K for the last few months. I did a little bit of work on some of my Skaven for fantasy, but couldn't get much into that either. The only Warhammer I've been semi-interested in has been Warhammer Online.

But all of that has changed, from the heart of the Dark City has come a delicious new codex, finally. So that means I have lots of new things to play with, lots of amazing new models to put together and paint. I only got ahold of the codex on Saturday, and the weekend was a busy one, so I didn't have the time to pour through it that I want, but so far I am thoroughly impressed.

First and foremost, I have to comment about the models. I went light, and only picked up 2 raiders, a kabalite warrior squad, a wych squad, Lelith, and a box of Incubi. All of these kits are absolutely stupendous in the amount of detail, and customizablity for the plastic kits. These guys are gorgeous, and even though I had approx 4000 pts from the old book, I'm sure I'm going to get atleast another 2000-3000 of the new models if they keep this quality.

I'm save a full codex review for later this week once I get a better look at it, but I did cobble together a quick list to play with this past weekend. So I'll give the list and my initial impressions.

First of all, the Incubi are awesome. I was always kind of shyed away from them before because they were points prohibitive to me, for no more effectiveness than a good wych squad. But with the "Exarch"-type powers, a small points reduction, they definitely have a good kick. Drazhar is pretty close to what he was before, the Demi-klaives give him some nice boost. I think at one point he was swinging 8 str 4 power weapon, that turned into 12 hits because of Onslaught. The following turn he assaulted a killakan squad and made quick work of it with str 7(thank you pain tokens and furious charge).

Warriors and wyches weren't quite what they were before, they almost fall into the 'just troops' function that many other armies have. But a bit more playing may find me the niche for them.

The Talos and Chronos were terribly looming and caused alot of issues, especially once the Chronos made it close enough to start popping pain tokens off to other squads. In retrospect, the haywire launcher wasn't a good fit for the talos.

All the skimmers were hugely survivable with the flickerfield, I think it's standard gear for anything that can take it. The one thing I did find, was that the flickerfield caused me to play slower, "I'm going to get a 5++ at 12" and can fire" crossed my mind alot, as opposed to the flat out for the 4+ cover.

Beastmasters are never going to get Agonizer upgrades again. It was a mistake, and here is why. The razorwing flocks are quite effective, 5 Wds 5 Rending attacks. These are heavy hitters in close combat, but at T3 they are very prone to InstaDeath. So that's when a handy allocation to the beastmaster is nice, but it's a hard hit when he's 34 points because of the 20 pt Agonizer.

HQ
Drazhar
Haemonculus Ancient - Hexrifle, Liquifier, Electrocorrosive whip
Haemonculus - Hexrifle, Liquifier

Elite
5 Incubi - Klaivex, Bloodstone, Onslaught
/w Raider - Flickerfield, Chainsnares

Troops
10 Warriors - Darklance, Blaster
10 Wyches - Hekatrix, Agonizer
/w Raider - Flickerfield, Chainsnares

Fast Attack
3 Beastmasters 3 agonizers 5 Razorwing flocks

Heavy
Talos - Chainflail, TL Haywire launcher
Chronos - Spirit Bomb
Ravager - 3 lances, Flickerfield

Ard Boyz plan

So after last years disappointment, combined with the fact that the most likely place to play in Sudbury had closed, I wasn't getting my hopes up about doing Ard Boyz this year. But between myself and one of the guys at the club we did some investigating into places close by that may be running it.

Our first thought was Traverse City because they had indicated they may run it this year, and they were, the problem was they had tables for approx 12 players and 20 people signed up so far. We had also heard of a new location in Sudbury that may be participating, but after a call we found they were newly opened as a secondary revenue stream. They seemed very gun ho and positive about the event which was a huge plus, the person running it was having the event Sunday because he was getting married that weekend.

A few other calls lead to dead ends, but while doing some other travelling JP was in Flint and happened upon Gamers Sanctuary. He was very impressed by the size and setup and they generally sounded like they were experienced in running events. So the plan is to head down Friday and participate in Ard Boyz. Our biggest deciding factor was the size and experience. We don't plan on taking the whole thing, we are going for the experience, so we figured we'd go for the one that will likely give the best experience.

Now the missions are up and they seem pretty straight forward, one objective and two kill point missions. The objective missions is 5 objectives with an odd deployment, the more you hold the better your victory. One of the kill point missions is almost straight from the main rulebook, table quarter deployment, and 1 KP per unit. With that in mind, the last one is right out to lunch. Units are worth 1 KP, except HQs which are 2 KP, and any model that has the potential to move more than 6" in a single phase is worth 3 KP. That basically means all non-walker vehicles are worth 3 KP, as are all jump infantry, bikes, and cavalry.

So my plan before the missions had come out was to play a hybrid webway/Raider rush list. Keep about half my forces in the portals, and then get them forward enough to drop the portals and hopefully rush him the next turn. In the couple test games it worked pretty good and I think I can make it work.

Once the missions came out though, my first thought was to ditch all the Raiders and go slow, but that's not what Dark Eldar do. We move, and move fast. So I pondered over this last mission a bit, and came to the conclusion that I could just play a denial game. Place most fast units in the portal and then never open one up so they never qualify for reserves. Let the foot sloggers and maybe a couple ravagers do the work from range, use the jetbike hamie with a shadow field play a game of hide and seek to prevent a wipe. If the footslogging sniper squads can each take out a vehicle or two that's 6-12+ KP from 2 KP in my list. Hopefully any Ravager can take out it's 3 KP before it dies, then I just run turns out.

It sounds pretty good, but it would be such a dirty move. I'm not sure I'll do it, depends on what I setup across from and how I'm doing. I'll let you know once everything is done.

Dark Eldar Rumors - Harlequins

I've been pretty out of touch over the last couple weeks with anything 40k, tied up with exams, and some house renovations. But that's all finishing up so I had a chance to check out some of the normal sites. Low and behold, I find more Dark Eldar rumors on BoLS.

Not alot that I'm overly surprised by, although the melta/lance weapon could be crazy, but I am kind of perturbed by the harlequin stuff. I admit, it's alot of me just being uppity, but it's because it generates concern in my mind.

So first, the acknoledgement. Harlequins have a great theme to them, and lots of people love the idea of death clowns. Are they enough to make an entire armybook out of, probably not, but you could make a PDF style army list out of them. With the current design philosophies, I doubt we'll see a PDF style armylist. So we are more likely going to see them added to an existing armybook. We saw this a little in the Eldar codex, but they almost seemed like an afterthought. They were stuck in as an elite choice in an army that was already chalked full of elites. Honestly in my mind, they fought for the same role as Banshees and Scorpions, who could arguebly do the job as good or better depending on the rest of your army. We saw a few people use them, mostly because they loved the theme, Fritz most noteably, and I can empathize with that as a Dark Eldar player.

So here's where my concern comes up. In the current game, wyches are generally on par or better than harlequins. So if that same harlie unit gets dropped into an elite slot in a new Dark Eldar book, they are immediately competing with wyches to perform the same role. Only wyches are going to be troops and a better overall selection. Harlequins fall into the same problem as the Eldar book. That's not what GW wants to see, harlequins are great models and could generate some great sales. So we'll see one of three things happen in my mind; first, harlequins are changed to be better than the Eldar equivalent, this will just further the codex creep screams and the continued one upmanship of codices; second, wyches will be nerfed to make harlequins better, this will basically turn wyches into either the current version of warriors, or worse eldar guardians; the last option that I see, is incorporate the harlequins as is, and maybe add a few other thematic units and include an HQ that makes them troops.

So the first and second options basically destroy any theme for existing players and their armies. Harlequin players are dangled a piece of hope to be dashed again, or Dark Eldar players are forced to use a very un-thematic unit to fill in the spot of nerfed wyches. The third option is probably the best, but I'm not sure that it will happen. While the Ork, and Marine books made good use of these kind of characters, the last few books have sort of left this by the wayside unfortunately.

Only time will tell at this point. But as much as I want a new codex, I've always been most afraid of them ruining the theme they currently have, even though it is very sparse.

Tyranid Battle Report

So I played a quick 1850 game today against the list my girlfriend was thinking of playing at the next tournament. We played a non-standard game out of the Battle missions book. It was actually the Space Marine surprise assault mission, we diced off to see who would act as the marines, and she won that.


So basically she starts with everything off the table, all moving on turn one, and I have to deploy so that none of my units are withing 12" of any table edge, and 6" away from any other unit. Slightly annoying setup to say the least, especially with the huge footprint a Raider provides.


I ran the following:

2 Haemculus(1 on jetbike with shadowfield)
2 squads of 8 wyches w/ succubus and raider
dracon with tormentor helm/punisher
w/ 4 incubi + Drazhar in Raider
5 warpbeasts + beastmaster
2 squads of 10 warriors w/ 2 darklances
2 squads of 8 warriors w/ sybarite, raider, blaster, splinter cannon
5 reavers w/ 2 blasters, succubus w/ punisher
2 Ravagers w/ 3 disentegrators


Her list consisted of:

Swarmlord w/ 2 HiveGuard
Parasite of Mortrex
2 single Zoanthropes
18 termagaunts
1 tervigon
10 genestealers w/ toxin sacs, broodlord
6 warriors w/ deathspitters, venomcannon
3 groups of 4 sporemines
2 broods of 3 biovores

After the spores dropped onto the table, I deployed a mostly vehicle wall towards the outside, with most of my infantry on the far left of the table. She went first, and since I was so spread out it made it tough for her to focus on one area.

She ended up immoblizing the lord's transport with a zoanthrope, she would later wreck it from the assaulting parasite, and wiped out an entire squad of warriors thanks to some lucky hit rolls from her biovores. On the other end of the table she couldn't manage to take out the raider there, so turned most of her attention onto the warpbeasts in cover. All but the beastmaster and a lone warpbeast were killed, then to add insult to injury the swarmlord reduced their WS to 1. The warriors laid down a hail of fire on the haemonculus on the jetbike, and after 5 wound rolls, he failed one shadowfield save. Not as bad as I had expected on my vehicles, but the wholesale annihilation of the warrior squad was worrisome.


My first priority was to take out those biovores. 2 wounds, move and shoot ordanance barrage is a great big pain, especially when it just adds more spores to the table if it misses. One ravager let loose on one brood, scoring 7 wounds, 5 of which were negated by cover saves(so close). The other ravager turned and dealt some wholesale death to the termagaunts, with some support from a raidersquad that popped over a hill only a single termagaunt was left. The other 10 man warrior squad lined up one of the zoanthropes looking for vengence for their fallen allies, 1 hit, 1 wound, 1 failed invulnerable save meant one less zoanthrope. One squad of wyches had rolled always strike first, so they made a line to the Parasite and successfully neutralized it before it could cause more havoc with rippers as well. The other squad of wyches assaulted the warriors who weren't quite softened up by the haemonculus' destructor. This combat ended up bogging down in a tie repeatedly. The Incubi and Drazhar viciously tore through the other brood of biovores, wiping them all out. The poor warpbeast and beastmaster sacrificed themselves to the tervigon taking off two wounds in the process.

The second turn saw the genestealers come in and assault my bikes, after the broodlord caused one bike to sit out of the combat, the quickly dispatch the bikes, with only 2 genestealers falling. The remaining biovores and zoanthrope both gunned for the incubi in the open, but a good scatter from the biovores meant I only lost one to the zoanthrope. I responded by having one ravager gunning down genestealers, and had they not gone to ground and rolled extremely well, they would have been less than half their number. The other ravager managed to down the other Zoanthrope to a wonderful snake-eyes roll. The wyches then moved in to mop up the last biovores.

As we moved into the third turn, the warriors finally finished off the wyches there, and the swarmlord ponderously advanced on a Raider, while the Tervigon swung madly at another removing the darklance and stunning the crew. By the beginning of my turn the kill points were close, but she gave me the game knowing that what she had left was going to be too slow to catch up to the large number of skimmers left on the table.

The game was mostly to test how the new bugs played for her, and as much as she loves the way they look, the concepts, and ideas behind them, her eldar suit her playstyle better. So that's what she'll likely fall back upon, her fire prisms, d-cannons and wraithguard and feast upon the monsterous creatures of any Nid lists that do show up.

Necromunda 40K?

If you haven't already gotten to take a look at the new Battle Missions book, go to your local store and flip right to the back, there you will find the "special missions". Disregard Linebreaker, and quietly laugh as you realize Vect would dominate Clash of Heroes, then when you read Kill Team, marvel in the simplicity and read it again.

The long and short is you have 200 points to build an army list with 0-1 elite, 0-2 troops, 0-1 fast attack. Then you jam a 4x4 table full of terrain and play a game, the catch is each model functions individually, not as a unit. So the heavy weapon guy can stand still and fire while the special weapon guy moves forward. The almost required optional rule allows you to 'upgrade' 3 models to specialists, and each can take one USR from the main book, with the exception that no model may have the same USR, and no model may be upgraded more than once.

I'd say that the Kill Team mission has gotten the most praise from anyone I've shown the book to, and many have come to the same conclusion I have. We could play this like Necromunda!

For those of you unfamiliar with Necromunda, or my favorite GorkaMorka. These games are based upon the Warhammer 40K universe and instead of a whole army, you take control of a gang of models. A gang can normally be between 5-10 models depending on the system. Both have rules for campaigns that allow you to upgrade your gangs and have them grow as you fight battles, it's actually the encouraged way to play.

Both are great systems, but they just don't quite get the following from people that they deserve. I think this stems from two problems. First the rules are based on the old second edition rules, so they are a bit more complex and foreign, in that somehow familiar sort of way. The compounds rules confusion when you switch back and forth between systems. The other reason is that for the most parts, both games happen outside of the normal 40K metagame involving the basic races. So you can't use your masterfully painted Firedragons, or your magnetized Rhino. People don't want to have to buy new models, that are metal, and special order for one little game. Because of this alot of people that are introduced to the game have a hard time commiting to it. I was definitely that way at first, but was slowly won over by GorkaMorka, and then Necromunda somewhat as well.

So that leads us back to the Kill Team rules. They aren't much in terms of objectives or anything, but they definitely give us a way to play games at small squad based levels. So now all we need to do is add a way to track a campaign. I think from an army perspective this will give you a great reason to stop and convert/paint up that rank and file troopers to look like specialists, while having a blast as well.

I haven't gone searching to see if anyone has done it yet, but I suspect there will be many out there in a short amount of time. I plan on adding my own interpretation to that list with some playtesting and tweaking at the local club over the course of the spring and summer. So keep an eye out, I'll post test rules as I finish them.


My first thought is, someone will come out with a Necromunda type ruleset in the next couple months and I can just change it from there. Then I realized, school is almost done, and there isn't much lined up for the summer at the club, so why don't I run some test games with a couple guys at the club and cook up the rules my

Project Log: Silver Tower of Tzeentch

As promised, here are some pictures of my version of the Silver Tower of Tzeentch. It's still in progress, but I'm liking the look so far. The stompa on the left and the Fire Prism on the right give some idea of size. Without any type of base yet, from bottom to top of the crystal is slightly more than 12".

When I scrapped my original idea, I sat down and was talking to my girlfriend about what I wanted to do with it. The comment was made that I'd like to use some sort of twisting tentacles to maybe hold up the center gem. She then had the idea to use masking tape to make twisting tentacles up the sides of the building. This was then incorporated to look like they are thrusting out of the ground.

After a visit to the local game store, I managed a good score with the tyranid bit that is currently holding the crystal, and it got incorporated in. A few left over spikes from some Chaos Terminator Lord kits, and a Possessed kit helped to adorn the top, and some of the many tentacles and spikes left over from the Chaos Spawn kit work around the bottom.

I still want to get some Tzeentch symbols on there, and will likely be doing some more scratch work for those. But for right now it's going to look pretty as is on the shelf until school is done in a month.

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

image courtesy of Riders of the Cosmic Serpent

So I'm organizing another Apocalypse battle this Sunday at the local club. Everyone had a blast last time, which was about 8 months ago, we saw lots of formations but we only had a couple big guns. Just one Baneblade and one Phantom Titan, pictured above. The titan ended up deciding the game fairly early by destroying to objective bunkers that had become over run with genestealers with no chance or getting them out.

This time it's been requested that I play as well, so the original plan was to scratch build a Raven and join in . . . that is until a dirty ork mek procured my bits to build her Big Mek Stompa. So I went to my fallback, my Thousand Sons/Emperor's Children chaos marines. I switch my scratch build planning over to two ideas, Silver Tower of Tzeentch, and Slaanesh Subjugator, each of which would be accompanied by the associated Warband formation.

The Subjugator idea kinda fell flat, I just haven't decided how I want it to look, I just haven't been struck with the right inspiration yet. So the Subjugator is out, and will be replaced by a Doomsday Device, mostly because I just love the idea of it.

The Silver Tower was looking equally bad for a while(mostly from intimidation from the pair on Warseer). I finally decided I was going to build a 9 sided mages tower with 3 levels, allowing a parapet that I could put sorcerors on and a large all seeing eye at the top to represent to main weapon. However, once I started cutting foamcore to build the basic structure for the first level it became apparent that I have over calculated my size, it was going to be gigantic and unwieldy. So I tried to salvage it, after shedding a third of the sides, I had it to a decent enough size and slope to make a good tower.

With a little more work it should be playable for tommorow, and I'll finish the project after that. Expect pics after Sunday I'll get the Tower for sure, as well as much other fun stuff as I can.