Welcome to part 2 of my first thoughts series covering Elites (warning, this one is quite lengthy):
Today myself and Glynn teamed up in a 750 per person game at hq against Glen and Jon (on his birthday of all days).
I made sure to take some photos this time around, mostly to save me words later at the rate of 1000 to 1 inversely. The set up is below.
I tend to find battle reports in the written medium can be a little difficult to keep track of so I’ll just straight to the spoilers and concentrate in some thoughts on my 3rd game of 7th.
We played a maelstrom mission (the one where you start with 6 objectives and count back). The long and short is that Glynn and I (team fist) helped ourselves to a dose of retribution at the expense of Jon and Glen (team chaos scumbags) . Overall it was a pretty close game with team scum starting well out of the blocks and us turning it around in the final straight (in a battle as epic and as least as important as played out in similar one 10,000 years earlier).
So to keep things short(ish) of the first salient points was that vehicles seem to be a lot more reliable now. Despite having a combined 7 rhinos on the table we didn’t see first blood until the second half of turn 2. By the end of the game there were still 4 left which must have been some sort of record. Also on a related point, smoke also seems to have been given a buff as it seems like it translates into the equivalent of extra hull points for a turn rather than a Hail Mary save. It’s strange because the overall change is small but it feels like it has a big effect.
Next up the maelstrom missions are a fantastic crack. It’s the biggest shift we have seen in mission for design for as long as I have been playing the game and it does seem to make the missions much more dynamic. I do feel though that the luck of the draw can come into it a bit too often though, although I feel like some house rules along the lines of
i) you can redraw any mission which is impossible,
ii) you have to redraw duplicates
iii) 4 of the 6 objectives must be placed outside deployment zones
Would go along way towards fixing the perceived issues.
Third, biomancy is actually a pretty handy discipline. I took it on a terminator Libby with a squad snooty terminators. Admittedly I did roll iron arm (which got my Libby to s8 t7 which isn’t bad) and endurance (fnp to the squad), but there is other good spells in that discipline and the primaris isn’t half bad either. I let Glynn talk me into it before the game and I’m glad I did because I don’t think I would have considered it otherwise, but I definitely will again.
Lastly, both myself and Glynn took a unit of 5 tac terminators and a character in terminator armour, and they were absolutely fantastic. Admittedly plasma is always a worry but glen and Jon between them had probably 6 plasma guns and we managed to dodge that bullet (do plasma guns fire bullets?).
Anyway they dropped down and cleaned house and probably won us the game. I have a bit of a soft spot for the cyclone missile launcher. Take half a devastator squad on your back for 25 points? Why wouldn’t you?! I dropped them into the list at the last minute and it turned out to be a good choice – good job I didn’t run into any grab guns though.
So there it is. That’s to Glynn, Glen and Jon for a great game and Jon especially for the kind bits donation.
I’ve been wanting to restart the blog for a while now, but things have picked up at work a bit and it transpires that my best source of free time away from home (where let’s face it, I would rather be hobbling) has disappeared. However, as I sat in the self same seat (the one uncomfortably near the toilets as I am oft late making the train) at 21 minutes past 5 o’clock yesterday, I realised that I do indeed have a spare 20 mins in the day to bash out a quick blog post.
So the blog can re-start with a gusto (at least that is the intention).
So an update on my hobby life as it stands: the imperial fists stand at about a 1800 points, maybe slightly more depending on loaf out, level. This includes a unit of stern guard come deathwatch unit which was something I just needed to do after painting yellow for so long.
The fists have been absolutely fantastic. If I had to choose a single army to do me for the rest of my days then they would be it. They have great short range firepower (which I have found is my sweet spot)m a good variety of units and tend to win or lose by inches, which is by far the best way for a game to go. Added to that they look the bees knees which is never a bad thing.
Unfortunately, the thought go putting yellow paint brush to model makes me feel violently nauseous and so, as they inevitably do, thoughts turn to the latest hobby project.
So, strangely, rather than discussing what my next project will be, I’m going to talk about what I almost went with, why I did and then didn’t and come back next time to talk about where I am going next.
Without further preamble, I very almost started a chaos daemons army, mono slaanesh to be specific. It seemed a good choice to fill the first criteria which was a change of direction in play style, which admittedly I interpreted rather radically as slaanesh has almost no resilience and only the most token of shooting attacks other than of the psychic variety. It’s also about as fast as they come without wings aplenty.
Criteria 2 was that it should be easy(er) to paint, I was hoping that I could knock together a simple scheme using pink and purple washers which would tick this box.
Lastly it needed to be malleable with regards to story telling. I’ve been quite keen to have an army that will let me mould a storyline around their tabletop adventures, blog ammunition if you like. Obviously this is pretty hard to do with a first founding chapter as so much is a known quantity.
Checklist review:
1. soo different – massive tick
2. potential tick
3 – tick, especially with a small contingent of csm as the common denominator.
But I had a change of heart. And it came from a quarter I didn’t consider at first, and I think the reason for this is that it is something that he fists have in abundance rather than something different that I was looking for.
In a roundabout way this came up because of a game that wasn’t so fun to play. The long and short is that in a game my opponent, in a 1500 game, took a unit totalling about 800 points (biding a storm raven, death company, inquisitor, dreadnought and chaplain). I identified that if I could shoot it down before it dropped off its goods, I was looking pretty good for the win, and if I couldn’t then things were going to go south pretty quickly. I didn’t shoot it down which was probably about 50-50, but it just seemed like the game rode a bit too much on that one incident to be a truly fun game. Not that my opponent wasn’t a good guy, but i did feel a bit like I could have played that game in 2 minutes rather than 2 hours.
And I thought, is the slaanesh army too hit or miss to be a truly fun? Slaanesh daemons are quick but they are the flimsiest of flimsy units and my potential list was too reliant on psychic powers and gimmicks like the grimoire. I worried that if things went well I would steamroller my opponent, and if it went badly I would get blown away. Either way not a recipe for a fun game.
So that’s where I’m going to leave off for today. More tomorrow (ish)
Big news for the new year.. The overlords have started an escalation league, starting at 500pts and working its way up to 2500 by the end of the year. Finally I have a roundabout way preventing any race choice deviance. I won’t go too much into the rules as it’s a pretty standard affair, we play two games a month that count towards the league and we can change out 10% of the list when moving up between the points levels which allows us to find extra points for any really big units or change out an element that we don’t think is working well.
So I will be using the imperial fists I’ve been working on over the past few months, more specifically using the sentinels of terra codex. When the supplement first came out, I didn’t really give it much thought, generally I’m not entirely for the company specific supplements. I would prefer that the supplements were directed towards entire non-first founding chapters who don’t get too much attention in the main codex, giving us a bit more in the way of background and probably some more relevant chapter tactics in the same way that forgeworld has done for the red scorpions et al. Personally I think that certain chapters such as the Blood Ravens and Silver Skulls would gain a lot from this treatment, but I digress….
A little while ago a read a post by Ciaran (he of many podcasts) about how he was looking at the clan raukaan supplement as a more general Iron Hands one as the added flavour didn’t appear to be particularly raukaan exclusive. So that got me thinking that the same is probably true for the Sentinels, the only real changes are the chapter relics (of which I planned to use none in any case), the fact you can take centurions are elites (which will probably be useful at larger points levels) and the slight change to the bolter drill (being now twin linked within half range rather than reroll 1s at all range) and as I was quite keen on the idea of rolling a couple of tac squads in rhinos and blasting (or at least trying to) away a unit at short range. So all in all the codex is pretty well set up for what I need from it at this point in time.
So the first month (being January due to the linear nature of time) is 500points, which also happens to be an bit of a b to build a list for, as there is no way you will be able to a genuinely all comers list (to give you a feel, the other lists notably include a vendetta and one even has 2 tervigons and conversely a more or less fully foot daemon list), but here is what I have come up with.
Librarian with force axe.
10 Tac Marines w/ Rhino, flamer and missile launcher
8 Tac Marines w/Rhino and plasma gun
Landspeer typhoon
Certainly not world beating but hopefully enough to do a job. Obviously its pretty difficult to discuss and overall plan with no reference to the mission type, but the strengths and weaknesses would appear fairly self evident.
There are 3 scoring units if that if I need to split the large tac squad in an objective game, moreover, these units are fairly hardy – at least when compared to guard units and chaos cultists which I expect I will be seeing quite a lot of. Alternatively in games of kill points I can keep the units together, and if I am able to get within 12 inches I would back the rerolling bolters to put a sizeable dent in most infantry units.
The landspeeder gets in by virtue of being the cheapest way to get in a bit of anti tank which is happily also pretty mobile.
Now to the weaknesses (at least the ones I have spotted – which isn’t to say there isn’t a plethora of ones I haven’t). Firstly even with 3 missiles I am slightly concerned by the lack of anti tank/monstrous creature firepower. 3 Missiles will struggle to put a dent in a 6 wound tervigon (although with the change to the nid codex in a couple of days we may see the list become impossible to build at any rate). Furthermore, a couple of the guard players are bringing a couple of chimeras which, with only AP3, I will be looking to hull point strip. The sooner I can find the points in the list for some lascannon devs the better! Although based on current plans this may not happen until the 1000 point stage.
Enough for now, I will report back after the first round of games on Sunday. Ciao.
So its been a while, for which I offer myself my sincerest apologies as its pretty unlikely anyone else has been on the edge of their seat waiting for my return for the best part of a standard Terran year.
So today the blog is a sounding board for a couple of fluff ideas I have running around in the old head. I’m hoping that if I get some of them down in an ordered manner the best will pop out. You could say I’m going to throw some ideas at the wall and see what sticks (avoiding the fan as we all know what tends to hit that).
I should probably spare a few characters for where I’ve been these past many moons. Well, work has picked up and I’ve actually found myself to be a bit busier than I was back in my student days. Unfortunately, the exams haven’t stopped and what which a house move on top of everything else I’ve been pretty snowed under.
But fear not, I have still managed to get a little bit of hobbying done in that period. The chaos marines have been exiled to the eye of ebay, leaving behind either a small profit or a small loss (failure to keep adequate accounting records is luckily only an offense for a company). At either rate, the paypal account is looking rather healthy currently and some of the funds were reinvested into a the next project – Imperial Fists (hence the slightly risque title.)
I hope to get some pictures up in due course, as I’m pretty pleased with how they’ve turned out. Although I think that when I am finished the yellow paint will be relegated to the darkest corner of the gaming cupboard for the foreseeable (and seeing as the IF have yet to master the art of divination – the unforeseeable future).
So I am mid project – and in these dangerous times the 7 hundred-point itch i generally find my thoughts wandering to the next project.
I should also point out that (outrageously inconsiderately), the good inquisitor, STEVE, returned from his self imposed hiatus from the hobby and has brought back with him an unrivaled eagerness for the narrative game. Being the weak willed creature that I am, this sounds like the best thing since sliced bread.
Unfortunately, its rather more difficult to get a good character driven narrative story going when your collecting a first founding chapter, and particularly one of the two companies which are only even seen (being either one of black or red trims on the shoulder pads). Perhaps even more specifically the one company which, according to a rather biased piece of script writing, was publicly wiped out so that a rather uppity ultramarine initiate could have do battle with a daemon prince in a well known animated movie.
Horses for courses, as they say. And unfortunately this shire horse doesn’t have the legs for the narrative race. Although what I have hoped would be a launch into a feast of fluff has fizzled out into a rather circuitous ramble.
So next time you hear from me will either be on the date of the next leap year when I will proclaim that all my previous ideas were nonsense and I have sold my sole to the privateer press devil. Or perhaps tomorrow, when I will try to spend less words saying the words I was supposed to say today.
So long then.
4 havocs with autocannons and champion:
5 converter spawn;
5 havocs:
A pair of chaos rhinos:
Second set of marines with plasma guns:
predictablyunconventional 
