Battle Report – Daan of War

September + October Hell Part 1

I’ve been so busy with the hobby these past months that I simply didn’t have time to blog about it! So, to make up for lost time I’m going to do a two part summary of all the amazing things that happened this autumn.

First up is the bloodstorm AoS tournament I was prepping for in the last post. Preparations mostly involved painting some characters and an abomination which you can see included in the army shot above. The games themselves were really fun and with a loss, a draw and a win I felt pretty good about my perfomance gamewise.

The first battle was against the Maggotkin of Nurgle. Basically a lot of trees, daemons, the glottkin and blightkings. Didn’t mind the loss because the battle was pretty fun and my rats held up pretty well despite the power difference in the lists.

Second battle was against someone who hadn’t played a lot of AoS before, but had a pretty fun Slaves to Darkness list with SLAMBO! of all things in it. It was fun to not worry about strategy too much and just create a bunch of cool combats. It ended up as a draw even though it was an incredible game.

Last battle was Horde VS Horde against bonesplitters. My opponent was wielding the infamous arrer boys unit of 90 shots a turn, but thanks to my stormfiends coming in from the flank, that unit didn’t quite perform to its full potential. The rest of the battle was just us slamming our lines into eachother and I won in the end mostly because our time was up. Which is kind of what you get when just moving your guys takes 20 minutes per side.

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Next on the agenda was the third Gurash Wars event. Didn’t have to do a lot of painting for it since it was a centurion event at 1500 points, so I could just take some stuff from my larger army and call it a day. The day was still pretty taxing though. Groningen is roughly around 2 hours away from where I live by car. Not really a fan of driving so any day where I spend at least 4 hours simply staring at a road is not an easy day for me. The event itself was pretty damn cool though. Lots of whacky scenarios and crazy happenings thanks to the points of interest system and the warlord progression table.

First game was against an amazingly painted Emperor’s Children army. Got pasted pretty bad even though my opponent said he was deathly afraid of my plasmagunners and terminators. In the end the terminators proved too slow and the plasma squads were easily taken out by kheres. Got some cool points of interest rolls and some nice warlord bonusses, so that was pretty nice as well.

Second game against Iron Warriors on a zone mortalis board. The zone mortalis and my infiltrate ability caused this game to become a draw (I think), but we mostly just shot at eachother a bit and tried to keep our stuff from dying too much.

This game against Thousand Sons was again a draw if I recall correctly. It all looked to be going really well, until my terminators got creamed by too many bolters and my warlord failed to kill a delegatus. On the other side of the table things evened out as my contemptor killed a sorcerer and some castelax, but the game was really fun in the end. Lots of objectives and points of interest claimed for me.

The last game was a really wierd scenario where the whole game revolved around basically whose warlord could attack the hardest. Luckilly for me my warlord was buffed pretty hard at that point with an extra toughness, extra attack, extra initiative and whatnot, so he proceeded to create so many victory points in the first couple of turns that it didn’t matter that the rest of my army got massacred.

So, that’s it right now for part 1. I’ll try to write up another blog post later this week to post some pictures of the Armies on Parade and Scale Model Challenge events that I went to in october. See you soon!

Achaia +II+

‘Rejoice, my children. For today we battle beneath the Changer’s Eye! Let your ambitions shine proudly under his eternal gaze! Behold the fate of those who in their arrogance fight against His great scheme. Though they claim themselves master over the etherium, today we will prove they are naught but dust in their shells. Go forth, my Shades, and conquer!‘

Hathos shuddered as he unleashed the spell. Since the Shadowcursed had sent the rest of the warband against the Thousans Sons, Hathos had spent the entire battle casting his magic. Spell after spell he spent augmenting his fellow renegades as well as hurling black, shadowy bolts of death at the enemy. Even between incantations Hathos was forced to chant countercurses and negate the worst of what the Thousand Sons were throwing back at them. Briefly using the short moment after the completion of his spell to savour the cracking noise of several rubricae breaking open in the distance, Hathos drew a large breath of misty webway air into his superhuman lungs.

He was suprised, really. The ease by which the spells came and by which the energies were summoned was astounding in itself. Given that they were battling so many other warp users and in the company of two daemon princes, Hathos would’ve expected to feel some sort of resistance. As a true devotee, Hathos reasoned that it must surely be the sign of his God’s presence that the influence of the warp came so strongly in this alien dimension.

Torn from his musings by a bolter shell encased in warpflames detonating beside his location, the sorcerer decided to keep moving and start working on his next enchantment.

‘Neratafata gormanoramos!‘ he exclaimed, grasping the final energies of his prescience inducing incantation into his power-armoured fist. Just before he could unleash his latest sorcery however, Hathos was temporarily blinded and rocked backwards by a terrible flare. Regaining his composure, the renegade slowly waited for his sight to recalibrate itself. Seeing the battlefield before him once more, Hathos was reminded on how bad things were going. It seemed to be going well when the Shadowcursed took down the enemy general, but once the two giant statues started firing in earnest, everything quickly went sour for the renegades.

The Shadowcursed’s energy seemed to have disapeared from the field and now even Hubrecht Payll and his terminator guard were nowhere to be seen. It all seemed due to this new daemonic entity that wielded some sort of baleful lightsource.

‘A burning sword?’ Kretchar, one of the traitor astartes firing his bolter by Hathor’s side, openly asked. ‘Never seen one do that before’.

‘Count yourself lucky. I’ve heard of only one sword lately that shines so.’ Hathor spoke ominously from behind the firing line. ‘Thankfully for us, it is impossible that that particular sword resides in the hands of such a creature. You’re all under the effect of a blinding charm.’ Hathor lied. ‘Shake it off and focus fire!’

Gasping and panting, Hathos leapt ungraciously behind the cover of a building wall. Whichever ancient civilisation built these ruins had his thanks. Each and every renegade of the Shades of Tranquil was either destroyed, incapacitated or fleeing. Even though he was likely the last remaining warrior on the field, Hathos was not about to give up yet. All the spells, twists and turns that occured during this battle seemed to have pleased his patron deity and Hathos himself had never felt more chosen than when he personally banished the hooded daemon.

Visible as a bright blue nebula that pierced the alien mists, the energy of Tzeentch was permeating this battlefield, just waiting to be reaped. Hathos could not resist at least an attempt to harness that power for himself. He began to envision the ritual he would need to perform and the circles and diagrams he would need to prepare.

A large crack sounded above him as a piece of rockrete fell down loudly beside the sorcerer.

Yes. A grand ritual. That would be the first thing he’d do if only the statues’ guns would stop firing.

2018 So far

Finally, we’re catching up here on the new blog!

In this post I’ll spend some time discussing the stuff I’ve been up to in 2018. It’s actually been quite a busy year so far. In fact, it’s been so busy I’m attempting to take things a little easier this summer and not be swamped with events and painting deadlines every week or so.

Speaking of events: my 2018 started off in preparation for the Horus Heresy Bloodstorm tournament. This event was convieniently held at my local game store and with only 2 unpainted Raven Guard models left, I tried to bring both of them to the tournament. In the end I was only succesful in finishing my Land Raider Proteus in time (pictured below). Corax took longer than I expected and I wanted to do the primarch of my legion justice and decided against rushing him for the sake of an event.

The bloodstorm events, by the way, are worth mentioning in this blog for the amazing tables and scenery alone. Every table was provided with a gaming mat from gamemat.eu and tournament scenery from Wargames Tournaments painted by Peter from Scar’s Miniature Madness. Everything looked amazing and to me, that almost automatically makes for some awesome games. As for the actual games: I played three that day.

First one against Night Lords was a great game against a cool dude. I had a lot of trouble in that game due to bad dice rolling (failing a lot of reserve rolls and night fighting rolls) as well as my inexperience with Night Lords as a legion.

Second game was against a cool looking mechanicum force, but the fact that it had a Porphyrion made it an incredible struggle for me to fight against. The only defense I had against super heavies were my 5 man melta squads in drop pods, but my opponent had castled his Knight up to such a degree that there was simply no way to get close enough. In the end I whiffed the only melta salvo that I was able to get off and was forced to watch the rest of my army get relentlessly bombarded with templates until it was gone. At least this was a short game.

The third game was against mechanicum (Again!), but this time the player had a much nicer list and I had seen the guy before at the Armies on Parade competition. This was probably the most fun as I actually had somewhat of a chance at winning for a while. In the final turns I was in a pretty good position to grab some vital objectives. However, as fate would have it, I whiffed some crucial run and save rolls, leaving me on the short end of a close victory point tally.

The next few weeks were spent painting Corax and thereby finally finishing the last of my Raven Guard models. I am super proud on how he turned out and can honestly say that it’s the best model I’ve ever painted. Also, with Corax done, I felt like a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders as I did not have a single unfinished Raven Guard model on my shelf since at least 2 years. On to new projects!

The next few months saw me playing some more AoS with my fledgling Skaven force as more people in the store got interested in the game and I let myself get caught up in the Malign Portents hype by building and painting a Darkoath Warqueen:

I really love this model and it was a lot of fun to not paint a space marine for once. She did very well on her first outing as well. Putting down an opposing Skaven Warlord right before staring down a Stormfiend and keeping it occupied for a good while.

The next thing on the agenda was the “Impact” miniature wargaming event which was also held in my home city.

Above you can see our display stand as it we set it up for the convention and below is a piece of background that I wrote the night before, along with some detail shots of the table itself. I’m really happy that I was able to rely on Peter being there with his Iron Warriors as well as Joyce and Dirk for being able to lend their armies to the cause. Compared to the Scale Model Challenge there were a bunch of people who couldn’t make it this time, but I’m glad we were still able to put on a good showing.

Impact itself was a really cool convention and although it was relatively small compared to the SMC, it seems to be growing each year and where the SMC was more of a miniature painting convention, this one was more focussed on the gaming aspect. For next year it’s likely we won’t be taking a display to Impact and try to arrange a more interactive presence instead.

After Impact I kept busy preparing for 2 other insanely cool events. Both planned together in the same weekend; I was fully aware that it was going to be incredibly exhausting, but probably worth it.

The first event was a second Bloodstorm tournament. 40k this time and I took a revamped Chaos list as a last ditch attempt to get the army working.

1st game was against Blood Angels. A fun game against a fairly balanced BA list. I made a bunch of mistakes that cost me a lot, but that’s down to my inexperience with the game. I felt like I could’ve won if I did some other things differently. The Knight pulled off some amazing stunts that game.

The second game was against another Chaos army that looked very nice and different at the start, but turned out to be a bit gamey in the end. His list was set up to (ab)use as much of the shooting of his Rubric Marines and Obliterators as possible, which resulted in some unfluffy choices IMO, but fair ‘nuff. At least when the good old 40k tournament mentality reared it’s ugly head that day it could’ve been a lot worse.

The final game was against the Imperial Fists of Rob (who I see regularly at the GameForce). Despite seeing eachother almost every friday we’ve never played a game of 40k. This was the most fun game of the day and also the closest. Rob’s army is by nature a bit of a gunline, but I had fun butting my head against it and despite Rob focussing all his shooting on my Knight in the first turn, the rest of my army made good progress and thanks to some lucky maelstrom objective cards and my army’s good maneuverability Rob was only able to outscore me by a single victory point.

I was also really happy to take home the award for Most Sporting Player. Really happy with it and also that, despite losing all my games (again), I came close on a couple of occasions and the addition of a Knight as well as having some retooled units really amped up the power level of my army. Against casual opponents I might even be able to win some games (if I practice the rules a bit more).

The next day and the final event of 2018 so far was the second Gurash Wars event.

It was fun to meet the guys from Groningen again. I absolutely love the fact that they’re so dedicated to organising true narrative Heresy events. The best thing about the Horus Heresy is the fact that you get to imagine your army in these massive war scenarios and that is exactly what I was getting with the Gurash Wars.

First game was against Sons of Horus. It was a short game due to the scenario being a bit stacked against me. I was allowed to bring fortifications but they didn’t help against the free bombardment that the traitors were given before the game began. I felt relieved that I was able to cause some damage regardless and though I lost the game resoundly, I didn’t leave my opponent unbloodied.

The second game was against an amazing massed assault of World Eaters. It was really fluffy to play against a massed line of berzerkers doing nothing but running and assaulting and screaming like madmen. I’m glad I took the time to be a bit more careful with my model placement this battle. This paid off pretty nicely as I managed to force at least one unit of World Eaters to retreat in the face of rapid firing Ravens. I forget if I lost this game or if it was a draw on scenario points, but I definately felt wiped.

The last game was against Thousand Sons. There were a lot of Sehkmet Terminators deepstriking on the table, so I was prepared for the worst, but due to some succesful maneuvering and a lucky fight between my Contemptor and a Thousand Sons Praetor I was actually able to pull out a win on the objective! It was also good to see the loyalists win a Gurash Wars event for once and I was also very surprised and grateful to win the Best Painted Model award for my Raven Guard Praetor.

So, that’s all for 2018 so far. Next post will contain more of the stuff I’m working on currently and I’ll hopefully be able to stop writing these massive summarised posts and actually go into some detail again.

If you’ve been reading all of this rambling so far: Impressive! Kudos to you! These last 3 posts are no doubt the longest I’ve posted so far. Until next time!

Victory or Death!

Migration + 2017 In Review Part 1

Hello and welcome to my brand new WordPress site!

I’ve decided to start blogging again after a year away from my old blog (daan-of-war.blogspot.com). Making the transfer from Blogger to WordPress has been in my mind for a lot longer, but converting all my old posts had always seemed way too much work. Not any more though and I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to save my 7 years of sporadic content!

The last post I made on the blogger blog left me at the cusp of 2017 which I had declared to be the year of my Raven Guard. I also mentioned my Chaos Space Marines and how I was in the process of rebasing them. So, for the sake of keeping track of my hobby, I’ll kick off this new blog with a 2 part report of what I’ve been up to for 2017 and the first part of 2018. So pour yourself some tea and kick back because it’s going to be a long one.

I’ll start off by mentioning briefly that, outside of the hobby, 2017 has been defined for me by getting married halfway through (30th June). This meant that I spent most of the first half of the year in preparation of this outrageous event and didn’t always get much hobby done.

To compensate for lack of hobby we had a wedding invitation image made that at least implies that we spend time painting.

Despite the stressful times, I did manage to see through the Horus Heresy campaign we had going; playing the final few games and culminating the year-long event in a second megabattle:

This was my final regular heresy game (2750 points I guess) against Naut’s fantastic Alpha Legion. Don’t remember much of it, but I most likely lost this battle. You can see that my Mor Deythan were not even painted at this time.

Here are my Ravens during the final 3k per person megabattle. Due to the arangement of tables and sides, the megabattle wound up mainly pitting me against Naut (again) while we had minimal dealings with the world eaters and mechanicum to our left. This was a bit of a pity, but since Joyce couldn’t be around for the whole day I got to control her awesome Word Eaters for a while.

I really like this picture of Joyce’s World Eater force with her awesomely commisioned Legio Audax warhound titan forming up the center. Props to Scar’s Miniature Madness for this amazing piece (not to mention Joyce’s own amazing work on her 45 assault marines!).

Here’s Naut’s cool Alpharius Conversion that I just had to take a picture of.

Overview of the entire megabattle. It was pretty epic.

After the megabattle, I spent the next few months focussed on the impending wedding and getting into rumour arguments with people about the launch of 8th edition Warhammer 40k. Speaking of which: It’s almost been an entire year and I still don’t really know how to feel about it. More on 8th ed in the next post, but around the time of release I wasn’t truly captured by the hype, yet also not as down and out about it either. I was also really glad that they kept the Heresy in 7th after the death of Alan Bligh (long shall he be remembered and his absence felt). To distract myself from buying new stuff in the preparation of a costly wedding I spent the time I had painting and playing my Ravens.

This is a shot from a pick-up game I played against Dirk. Dirk was bummed about his army’s performance in the campaign, but somehow managed to wipe me clean off the table when it appeared my army was no match for an Acastus Knight Titan, Quad Mortars and a Medusa.

And this is what I was left with right before the wedding. My 3k army almost completely painted. Only 2 Drop Pods, A Storm Eagle and Corax himself left to go.

It feels good to be blogging again and I hope the new WordPress website works out. I have a lot more images for the next post so hopefully until then!

Victory or Death!

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. Contemptor 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 Legend

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.