MiniWarGaming Down

So it seems MiniWarGaming had a bit of a computer issue, and they are likely to be down for the next couple days (as well as any associated site, such as the store, forums, and Apocalypticon site).  Obviously, they realize that they should have had a backup plan, but really MiniWarGaming started pretty small and has become a steamroller in the miniature gaming community, as evidenced by the highly successful Dark Potential fundraiser.

So I hope they get some luck and are only down for a day, it's rough for a business to loose a very large part of the revenue stream for multiple days.  It's even harder for us gamers to loose a large portion of entertainment streamm, LOL.

Tormentor Titan update 2

Just a quick update on the titan.

I added the jump jets, and protective plating, I built the guns that were supposed to be Splinter Cannons on my home brew datasheet.  The arms are to the point of complete, I'm contemplating how/if I want to make them removable.  It has sort of taken a back burner the past week because of my newest delivery. . .

So at this point, the plan is to hit Apocalypticon in Hamilton in just under a month with approx. 7500-8000 points in tow.  Hopefully I have more soon.

6th Edition planning and insights

So FINALLY, I'll get to try some 6th edition and I'm really looking forward to it.

Currently I've read the book a few times, and picked out insightful ideas to try.  First thing I'm going to do is try and modify my webway list.  This shouldn't be a huge deal for me because most of what I had coming out of the portal was shoot then assault type units, like the Talos and Cronos, and Wracks.  I'll maybe put the scourges in the webway instead of deep striking for a little more control.

One thing that I usually ran was two 10 man squads of wyches one from the webway and one from a raider.  These are getting a couple slight changes, one unit will become warriors coming out of the webway.  That second unit in the Raider though, they are going to take a single upgrade and be run in the exact same 'take on anything' role as before.  Now most people have given up on assault because of snapfire, especially for light armoured units like wyches, but I found a gotcha.

Better than a Holy Hand Grenade

That brings us to our single piece of wargear, the Phantasm Grenade Launcher.  In case you don't know what it does, it is an upgrade for the squad character, the Hekatrix in this case, and it makes the unit count as having both offensive and defensive grenades.  5th Edition = meh, who cares, 6th ed though? Portable cover save vs snapfire.  One of the new quirks to 6th is a change to Defensive Grenades.

ShootingA unit equipped with defensive grenades has the Stealth special rule against all attacks targeting them. so long as:

• They are within 8" of the unit firing at them.

• They have not gone to ground

So what does this mean? With your average assault range being about 7" with the fleet reroll, you are going to want to be within 8" anyhow, so when you declare a charge you get a 'who can get the most 6s' roll off.  So this means you could get a 6+/5+FNP for your wyches.  

I'll give it a try this weekend and report back.

My 6th Edition rant for the pile

So I got to go over the 6th edition rules and FAQ quickly, I'll give it a couple more intensive reads later.  Overall, I'm disappointed with the rules changes, but have a hard time being surprised at such bad design.

I think the thing that frustrates me the most is how every new or interesting change that seemed to add balance, was followed by a line like "except for models with and they shall know no fear", or "except for drop pods".  Just put a giant disclaimer at the front that says BUY SPACE MARINES OR DON'T PLAY!

Anyhow, I'll have to do some playtests, but I'm absolutely certain that my lists will be changing dramatically.  So I'm just going to go over a few observations that I've made for my Dark Eldar army, mixed with a few general observations and opinions I've read/heard else where.

• So lets start with the obvious, WWP Assaults are dead, FAQ double slaps us, no assault out of a WWP(no surprise), but also no allies out of a WWP.
• Assault is going to be harder to get into with random charges and overwatch
• Wyches are much less viable, slightly less threat range on average, subject to shooting if they come from WWP/reserve, and then subject to overwatch with a very real chance that they fail the charge and get shot again.  Wyches + shooting = dead wyches.
• Beasts threat range greatly reduced, and will be more vulnerable moving across the table.
• Flyers are slightly less effective shooting, no more single turn alpha strikes with all the guns and missles.
• Warlord rules don't do much for our army, most of these abilities we can get from upgrades/combat drugs/pain tokens
• FNP nerf hits us hard, with 5+ and 6+ nerf armour saves, the 4+ FNP was what most units survived on.
• Jetbikes got better, with a 4+ cover save all the time thanks to jink + skilled rider they may be viable shooting units again.
• Gunboats are back, splinter racks will become valuable now
• Raiders didn't really get as nerfed as other vehicles with Hull Points.
• DE Archons/HQ should excel at character hunting/challenges, huskblade/soul trap was made for this.
• Drazhar became very powerful with how difficult 2+ saves are
• Incubi will excel at what I'm going to dub the "Aspect Trick"
• Opinion seems to agree wound allocation slows the game down drastically, so points levels will likely fall back to 1500pts

There are a few others that I'm going to test a bit first, but I want to explain one thing I mentioned near the end, the "Aspect Trick".  Incubi, and all Eldar Aspect warriors for that matter, have a "character" that fights at a different initiative value than the rest of the squad, this allows your character upgrade to be the ultimate CC sniper.  This takes advantage of the new close combat wound allocation, and some sneaky charge movement, as I said, I've only read the rules once so feel free to correct me.

Aspect Trick: Move the Klaivex into B2B with high threat target, making sure not to touch any other models.  Klaivex strikes at I6, while remainder of Incubi strike at I5.  Thus when Klaivex makes attacks at I6, he should be the only one attacking at that Initiative on your side.  Wounds don at I6 can only be taken from models in base to base with models striking at I6, thus the high threat target the Klaivex maneuvered into B2B must die.  Bonus: If the Klaivex rolls a 6 to hit, he may use the Precision Strikes to allocate to another model in the combat, and still snipe his B2B target.

I expect this to be a HUGE advantage if the squad makes it into CC with anything with limited power weapons.  The problem I see arising, is a lot of units, the power weapons go to the characters, and they will get a "look out sir" roll.  But something like the grey hunter squad with a couple meltas and a power weapon, this will be gold  And don't we all expect to see more of those grey hunter squads in 6th?

Tormentor Titan update

With 2 updates in a week I've obviously gotten more done on the titan.  Legs are greenstuffed and connected to the torso, upper torso is done except weapons, back fins are on and arms are in the production phase, you can see the mock-up put on with blue tac in the pics below.  I figure it's also a nice change from the current uproar of 6th washing across the interwebs.

Tormentor head on

After I got everything together I thought the legs were a little large at first, but after it's all together they've grown on me.  One of the problems I ran into is balance and that the legs are just connected with styrene tubing and seem a little flimsy.  I believe the model could hold its weight just standing on the shelf, but I expect it would seem breakage during table play.  So I've currently put him on a small plywood base, with a 1/2" tube propping up the model(about a 1/2" off the ground currently); the plan is to replace the tube with a clear acrylic rod.

Side profile

I'm going to go back and add some additional tubing to represent hydraulics where the lower legs meet the upper legs, and possibly where the upper leg meets the torso.  The lower part of the torso still needs to be detailed with protective plates and jump jets in between the legs. I'm probably putting some sort of belt piece as well to divide the torso.

The plan for the should mounts are to make them look slightly like the new heat lances, I found some nice mechanical pencils that have a similar shape so it should make it easy to convert up.  The CCW currently is a foam board mock up.  The plan for this is probably going to be a single piece of styrene sheet for the whole shape, and then build up with smaller shapes of styrene sandwiching the main blade.

Titan update

So the I've finished the 4 legs, gotten them cleaned up and prepped to remold the tips of the legs after putting some solid pins in there.  I found the leg tips were pretty flimsy, and sparse, so I cut them back far enough to pin in the pins.  Most of the spiked fins were also pretty deformed or flimsy, so I removed most of them, I'm thinking I may just remove them all and either put individual bits on all the legs, or cast the fins by themselves.

Four legs, pinned and ready for Green stuff

While resin was curing and in between leg cleanup, I moved on to the torso piece, and upper legs.  I had originally decided that I was going to use a ball type joint on the upper leg to connect to the torso as well.  I expected to cast and mold that as well, but as I was looking a little closer at the Forgeworld Eldar titans I noticed they usually used a flat connection.  So I picked up some 7/16" Evergreen tubing and I'm just going to connect using the tubes cut to size.  The torso had holes pre-drilled to fit the ball joints, so I just expanded them slightly so the tubing will fit.

Torso with a small mistake

I had used a series of PVC pike connectors to build the torso, it is a larger 1" piece, with a smaller connector fit inside, and half of a third smaller connector within the second one.  You can see the second connector with the leg holes, and you can see the third connector through the holes, and the small stop piece at the bottom.  This gave a nice little tapering effect towards the bottom, I just needed to expand the top a bit so I could make it resemble the Kabalite Warrior torso.  So as I was cleaning up, I found an old Tylenol bottle that was the right size, I had to expand the opening, and then slipped it on the top of the PVC connector.  This gave me a nice thickness for the torso, as well as a flat top with a slight indent to attach the head at a later point.  A short set of 1/2" tubing was added to either side of the medicine bottle to give the torso the width I wanted from shoulder to shoulder.  Now it was ready to be built up and get some definition going.

The first though was going to be heat and mold styrene around the frame until I got the shape I wanted, and then add detail to it until it was passable.  But since the gaming table doubles as the work area and is shared by my girlfriend and her daughter there are often lots of odds and ends kicking around for inspiration.  So the kid was working on trying to build items with the intent of going larger and larger to an eventual cosplay outfit.  One of the materials that she was using extensively was the sheets of flexible craft foam.  I was moving it out of the way and noticed how it flexed nicely, was of a decent thickness, and was easy to work with, so I asked to borrow a couple sheets.

Torso back with spinal plates

The torso plates were laid down from bottom up using the foam, because of the natural stepping nature of the frame I didn't have to do all the way to the top each time.  The one problem I had, is I got a little too anxious with foam and started forming the torso before I remembered that each band was supposed to taper up in the center where the hole was.  Still, the foam has worked great, it's given me a nice light frame that has been easy to work with.  The only real problem I've had is some shaping problems with edges, and stray bits and bobs can leave impressions in the foam.  After the torso was built, I cut away a section down the middle of the back and inserted the layered spinal plates, and guards on either side of that.  I think it came out quite nicely.

So the next step is going to be building the back fins, and deciding on what I want to do with the torso piece.  I had originally thought of casting the torso as well, but I realize that it may be too heavy to sit properly on the legs once everything is assembled.  So I've been throwing around a couple of ideas.  The other problem is how to prepare the foam for detail and paint.  I should be able to use a glue/water mixture to seal it like a foam terrain piece, or maybe even a sealer, but one of the things I've noticed when I get some resin spill over onto any newspaper is it soaks in and hardens almost like a fibreglass (which it should since it is basically the same product); so I may mix up some resin, and paint it onto the foam to harden it.  This may also be revisited for the flyer build as well.

On a seperate note, I may be moving soon, and I've heard there is a decent sized Apocalypse game being planned for the middle of this month, so I may try and hurry this to a standing frame with temporary weapons to try out.  As far as the MiniWarGaming Apocalypticon event, as I expected, they don't want to sent a precedent of having to manage house built rules, so if I get it built and am able to attend it will likely proxy as a Chaos Reaver.

A little more success, and some hope.

So I did some work to put together a slightly better rig to hold my leg molds, a pair of leftover pressboard shelves cut to size with a series of clamps along the out edges.  With that done, I mixed up another batch of resin, and set to work trying again.

This time the leg came out much better, and overall the part came out looking more like I expected.  The sharp edge of the leg was a little dull and jagged, this is in part because this is where the split for the mold was made.Also, the blades along the outer side of the leg didn't get as much definition.  The blades were very much expected, I didn't put in the proper venting for them when I made the mold.  I figured I could always just add those pieces on later if I needed, with the number of extra bits in the Raider and Ravager kit I should have enough to finish one titan at the very least.

Titan Leg V2

The bottom tip of the leg saw a little air get captured, so it resulted in a bit of deformity; no big loss though, because one of the things I had wanted to try was putting a metal rod into the leg when I was pouring the resin so there was a little more rigid structure for the titan to stand on, I can insert the rod where the deformity is and the green stuff over top.

The next leg is in the block curing now, I had did a little more research and it was suggested that putting talc powder on the inside of the mold helped the resin reach all the nooks and crannies, so that is the experiment this time, hopefully it will help show an improved result.

If I can get 3 more legs of the above quality, then I'll play with adding the rod for the next 4.  But first, time to get the body finished and get some more silicone rubber to cast the part.  I'd say to expect more updates, but I'm sure we all know I'm lazy and they may be not come soon.