This was the first run out of my O&G army at an event, I’d not had a great deal of practice and the army was pretty much designed based off a combination of netlist, models that I like and what I thought looked good on the table.  Going into it I thought it would be quite a fun army to play but also hoped to get a best painted nomination.



Game 1: Dale – Tomb Kings (Battleline)
Dale is a clubmate of mine so slightly frustrating to draw him but I didn’t think it was worth swapping as the field had a fair few ELG players there.  Dale runs a pretty solid TK list and had used the special characters slot as an excuse to get the grand hierophant into his list.  He was backed up by a couple of light mages 3 sphinx and a heap of infantry plus a tomb king.  It’s an interesting list and having seen it on the table I’m now dying to paint up some more bits for my TK to allow me to play with something similar!  No chariots and no snakes was the big difference plus a skelly deathstar.  Overall it looks like it would struggle in the current game with very little to punch through armour but that largely doesn’t matter against me. 

We’d played a month or so back as one of my practice games but at 1999pts where the Orcs ran over the top of his TK with little effort, so I was hopeful going into it.  Unfortunately I made the mistake of letting him get his necrosphinx into by savage orcs T1, he promptly beat them in combat by landing 4 killing blows on the lord (I stopped the WS10 but not the killing blow on a 5+ spell).  With my general dead the trolls went stupid the rest of the game and after killing the necrosphinx my savage orcs spectacularly failed a terror test from another sphinx charge and ran away... Oh dear.  All the time the casket was killing my artillery  and the wolf riders failed to take it out, I should have sent the wyvern in instead but he was off hunting the heirotitan, which he killed but got stuck on a sphinx after than and eventually died.  I was down about 500-600pts T6 so just threw everything into combat in the hope of getting lucky.  I didn’t and the savage orcs died horribly and got run down making it a 1-20 loss.

Game 2: Paul – Ogres (meeting engagement)
Paul hadn’t played warhammer for a year or so and let me know he was a bit rusty.  That said he was playing ogres so I still had to be a bit careful.  Army was a big unit of ironguts, big unit of bulls, 8 leadbelchers and a thundertusk (ice one if that’s the right name) and an ironblaster.  There was a tyrant, slaughtermaster and bsb who because the bulls didn’t turn up all ended up in the ironguts.  This lead to a game of his deathstar killing my army, my deathstar killing his!  It ended up my night gobbos, savage orcs and the wyvern (less rider) on his side of the board and his ironguts & characters on my side each having butchered everyting else.  Because of the wyvern not giving up it’s points I got an 11-9 win.  Skills!  Great fun game of just mashing everyting into each other, not very cerebral but jolly good fun.

Game 3 Calum – Vampires (Blood & Glory but keep playing once broken)
O&G don’t like ethereal very much and Calum had 3 spirit hosts.  This is partly what did me in, I forgot they were move 6 and let him get what I thought was a very long charge but turned out to be not that far into my trolls.  In addition I’d positioned my wyvern badly so it couldn’t fly in to help out with one of my rare magic weapons.  As a result the trolls did nothing all game, though they did eventually crumble the host through static res once I remembered 3 wide gave me 2 ranks. The wyvern did do miracles in surviving till T6 fighting black knights and warding up lots of killing blows but got screamed to death by the terrorgeist which despite the base size my artillery didn’t ever hit.  Other than that everything got into big fights and had fun but the vampire lord was basically a 1 man wrecking crew vs my savage orcs when he pulled out his sword of anti heroes and went 8S8 attacks with red fury for another 8 more or there abouts.  Combined with 3 vargheists and a varghulf that did a lot of wounds and I needed snake eyes to survive, I didn’t.  But I did butcher the vargheists and vargulf so not all bad.  Orc magic was doing nasty things sniping out all his necromancers with ‘eadbutt so I had some fun with that but knew it was never going to be enough. Overall though once the Vamp killed the savage orcs it was game over and I went down 1-20 again.

 

So overall how did my list perform?  Well the trolls were a massive liability, in 2 games my general died so they wandered about doing nothing the rest of the game.  In the other they got hit by a gutstar so didn’t stand a chance anyway! The wyvern was equally awful, largely he got thrown into monsters or cav units and eventually got ground out. It was slightly disappointing but I don’t blame him for any of my losses, I didn’t play all that well with it because of lack of experience. Savage Orcs, in 2 games got out deathstarred, the problem being I’m so character reliant and if they die then that’s basically game over for the whole army.  Perhaps I had too many eggs in 1 basket but I don’t really want to run a bunker unit just for my lord and bsb to hide in, but perhaps that’s what I should do...

I really enjoyed playing with the army, it was massively frustrating at times but still enjoyable.  Playing Dale did make me realise how much I miss my TK and I think there are some other builds out there to be found for them but the O&G are also up there as a really fun army to play.  Particularly enjoyed not being very magic reliant, often I was casting spells ‘just because’ but didn’t rely upon them at all which felt good for the army design.  I have no idea what place I came in the end, I didn’t bother checking but with 13/60bps it wasn’t going to be very high!

On the painting side I wasn’t in the top 2 for best army, those going to Neil Peckett’s Skaven (2^nd place) and Richard Payne’s Ogres (1^st).  This was Richard’s first tournament and he was a well deserved winner, I’d seen the army developing on Twitter and knew it was going to be really well received, technically I think his skin was the weakest part of the paintjob but he’d done enough with the rest of it to make the overall look carry it off regardless.

As a side note the tourney was a great success raising £1700 for charity from the 48 gamers & sundry watchers who were present, which nicely average out at about £35 a head, who says the Scottish are stingy? It’s likely that this will be my last tournament in Scotland as I’m hopeful that I’ll be moving down to Bath relatively early next year and with Ruari now a couple of months old it’s unlikely I’ll be going to any events down there in the near future, so I’ve bowed out of the tourney scene pretty much replicating my early results, but as much as I may feel like a total chump there were a few highlights to be found in the middle of that period.

What’s next for me?  Well with a fair win I’m hoping to be moved house early next year and that should allow me to get settled back into painting in my spare time around playing with my son, so the Eldar project which has kicked off should continue and after that we’ll see what most takes my fancy from the many options I’ve been working on.  I’m up against it a little in terms of achieving my 366 models in 366 days this year but I’m hoping I can put in a burst at some point to get me over the hump, currently I’m 9 models behind the run rate so need to pull my finger out as December is seldom a good month to get much done.

Giddy as a Schoolgirl

That’s right apparently they’re the benchmark of giddiness...

The reason behind this unusual mindset is I’ve nearly finished another army project.  My O&G have been a relatively quick project having really only started the bulk of it in April but are now nearing completion.

It was an army I never really thought about doing as the background fluff is totally not my thing, ‘were stupid and only want to fight, why? Just cos’.  Not really something that draws me into an army.  But then I realised they were really uncommon on the tournament scene which is always a big draw (my previous main armies being Dwarfs, TK and WE all of which are pretty rare) and the models were available off Ebay/trades pretty cheaply which again has a great appeal.  So I decided to pick them up, doing various trades to get the starter for the style of army I wanted, so I’ve ended up with tonnes of Gobbos I probably will never put on the table now I’ve begun writing lists but that doesn’t really matter as I’ll painted them all up regardless.

I decided very early on I wanted this to be a quick, but good looking, army.  The paint schemes I developed were all about churning out models at a high rate with only a few colour choices but with maximum impact.  To that end I had decided the Gobbos, Orcs and Trolls would all have different skin tones but everything else would be consistent across the range. There was one small change that occurred to vary from this, I moved to using a muted purple cloth colour on the Orcs which doesn’t appear on the Gobbos who have grey.  To contrast the muted and natural colours I wanted a brighter base colour and went for a reddish brown coloured base, but again with muted grass tones, I think that has helped bring out the models a little and avoid the issue of all blending into one big lump.

The first thing I started with was an utterly generic netlist army, I do this quite often for my armies for a few of reasons:

1.       I don’t have to think at all about what I need to buy

2.       It means if I go off the army then I’ve actually got something that I can sell which should recoup it’s cost

3.       It’s usually the netlist for a reason, it should work ok on the table and from there it’s just a case of tailoring it to the play style I like.

At the time the netlist was: lots of savage orcs, big unit of gobbos, 2 doom divers, 2 rock lobbas, 2 mangler squigs and some other junk to fill the points.  As is the way of things that appears to have moved along a bit in the intervening period, from what I’m hearing trolls are now a big thing, entirely unrelated to this I’d bought a load of trolls, why?  Because they look awesome and are totally different from an infantry horde army, the other added bonus is it cuts down the model count quite a lot too!  So I’ve ended up still sticking quite closely to the netlist, which is fine by me, just goes to show you should probably try everything out the book when building armies regardless. 

The particular list I’ve been painting was for a club tournament that happens every September, the event is called forgotten Heroes, it harks back to the previous edition where pretty much everyone maxed out their allowance of lord characters and you never saw the lowly heroes.  So Lords were banned (1999pts) but in 8^th that didn’t prevent them, so they’re specifically banned now and the hero allowance is bumped up to 35% to still enable a reasonable selection of characters to be taken. They also play that characters get a look out sir vs spells like dwellers when in a unit.

My Army was going to be:

Orc Big Boss, Great Weapon, Obsidian Lodestone

Savage Orc Shaman – Lucky Shrunken head

Black Orc BSB, banner of discipline

38 Savage Orc Big-uns, extra hand weapons, full command

5 Wolf Riders, Musician

10 Trolls

3 x 1 Orc Boar Chariots

2 x 1 Doom Divers

1 Rock Lobba

1 Snotling Pump Wagon

1 Giant

Now anyone looking at the list will realise it’s not fully optimised but it’s designed for 1 particular thing.  The characters are a delivery system, all 3 go in the savage Orcs and the combination of the lucky head and the obsidian lodestone gives a 2+ ward save vs magic and a 5+ ward vs shooting.  Combine that with the T4 means that unit will usually get across the board at close to starting unit size.

Next to them are the trolls who’re using the general and BSB to ensure those leadership tests are passed LD9 with rerolls has them moving most of the time. Those two units are designed to steamroller anything put in front of them. 

In order to ensure they reach their target destination I’ve got the chariots, pump wagon and wolf riders who are there purely to clear out chaff & skirmishers from around the big blocks so they are free to charge important targets.  Finally the war machines can help me bombard my opponent’s line as I advance towards them to soften up anything I particularly don’t want to face. 

That leaves me with the giant who is along for the ride on the basis of being painted and having some really nice anti monster ability which generally speaking the army lacks.

Not having any lord characters hurts the army a lot, it means that the general, BSB and Mage are all a bit more vulnerable than I would like, so once the trolls make combat it’s likely they’ll end up getting one good fight then probably the general will be dead if my opponents target him so the trolls become useless, but that’s a sacrifice I’ve had to make to get the LD9 into the list for the early game benefit.  If lord choices were available then the Lord is ld9 base and can get protective items on him, plus the BSB can be protected too.  That would use up all those points currently invested in the giant but removes a big vulnerability of the army.

As a painting project I’ve really enjoyed the O&G, the models are quite simple on the whole but have good clearly defined detail and my standard approach of basecoat, drybrush, wash has worked really well for quickly churning out a good number of models.  The army also has masses of variety of options and I’ve barely event touched half of what’s in the book.

I’ve got one unit of Savage Orcs but could also have Orc Boys, Black Orcs, Orcs/Savages with bows, boarboys and savage boarboys.  Then there are the squig units: squig herds, squig hoppas, mangler squigs.  And then the various other gobbo options in spider riders, arachnarocs, wolf chariots, bolt throwers and then there are 3 different types of trolls should you want more variety of which I’ve just used generic ‘trolls’.

Knowing I have a solid core of an army to work with and the ability to add a load more stuff with plenty of variety means this army has massive appeal as a painting project, something I’d simply not thought about before starting it, so can see myself working on additional units for this on a fairly regular basis whenever any other project starts to get a little stale. 

I started painting the army in April 2012 and I had a pretty consistent burn rate of models, peaking in June with 41 models painted, most of which aren’t in the army as they were gobbos.  Surprisingly the model count of the army is actually very low, only 64 figures in 1999pts, historically I’d always considered O&G a horde army but the build I’ve come up with is very much an elite army.  When I go up to 2400 I think it’s only going to increase to 80-90ish.

Anyways enough rambling on, here’s the link to my final army shot.

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c264/dafruk/Orcs%20and%20Goblins/8756735B-83F5-429B-B35D-8E50C048223A-5330-0000056FB39E72BE.jpg

Bayou Brawl - Malifaux Tournament

I attended my first Malifaux tournament at the weekend.  It was a relatively small 1 day event, held in Worlds at War in Livingston, there were 10 people playing over 3 games.  Strangely it somewhat followed the wider tendency for Neverborn to be very popular (and I took mine too) with 5/10 players bringing Neverborn.  The total breakdown was 5 Neverborn, 2 Guild, 1 Resurrectionist , 1 Arcanist and 1 Outcast crews.  The other unusual thing was the event was a brawl, so 2 masters per list if players wanted but only 30 stone lists in order to keep the game time down to a sensible length.  Rather than being fixed faction it was also fixed lists, so you picked from 2 pre-submitted lists for the 3 games.

I took 2 Zoraida list but chose not to have a second master as I didn’t want to overcomplicate things for my first tournament.  Basically 1 list was a bunch of big hitters and the other one was very manoeuvrable as the strategies were pre defined so I could tailor to fit them.  The strategies were: Shared Distract, Shared Deliver a message and shared Escape & Survive and with being a brawl there  were 3 schemes for each round and you weren’t allowed to repeat schemes either, so it really meant you used virtually all of them. 

I was really happy with how I played in the event, overall results I went 1-1-1, which was unfortunate as it was done purely on game result rather than cumulative vps as are often used and probably meant I placed lower than I would otherwise have done but I wasn’t really bothered about my result.  The three games were 8-2 win, 6-6 draw and 4-5 loss. 

The win was a bit odd in that I only got all my vps on the very final turn so until then I was 0-2 down but confident I could always get at least 4 vps out the game due to the scenario as I killed his master (Hoffman).  I got max for that but only 2 scheme (assassinate – Sonnia and framed for murder on Lelu), failing to achieve kidnap (didn’t even kill 1 of those models!). 

Game 2 I suffered a T1 deliver the message due to a mistake on my part, but then delivered the message myself the next turn, I was then able to get eye for an eye and bodyguard failing on deliver a message as I’d have had to expose Zoraida to achieve it and didn’t want to chance Levi killing her.

Game 3 was frustrating as my opponents crew had been built for this objective unlike mine.  Lilith, 1 mature, 3 young and Tuco.  My opponent also had the 4 blood counters scheme, stake a claim and frame for murder, I had stake a claim, breakthrough and grudge but killed the mature with ranged fire so couldn’t get the objectives.  I tried to deny my opponent but he got 4 blood counters in the final turn from discarding soul stones and the stake a claim, other than that we pretty much wiped out each others crews but as he started with less I couldn’t stop the 1 vp for having lost less models than me.  So I lost 4-5.  This was the most annoying game as there were loads of rules queries (all went in my favour) and his movement was incredibly sloppy, I’m pretty sure he was measuring middle of back to back of base when he moved so his combat crew was even faster than it should have been.  Only 1 time I picked him up on something was when he measured a 6” spell which was clearly way out and said ‘yup that’s fine’, it was over 7” when I checked it.  Also would have had a sports hit if such things existed. 2 poison on his mature he does his turn and afterwards I remind him of the wounds, he refused to apply them as out of sequence, at that stage his mature only had 3 wounds left so would have killed it next turn when it activated.  Somewhat shocked by that but if he’s that desperate to win...

All of that over I came 7/10 as win record was the decider over vps but did pick up something to make me not care in the least.

Warhammer Wanes, Malifaux waxes

So recently my appetite for all things Warhammer has been on a downwards spiral, this is no doubt in part driven by the fact I've spent months preparing for the Warhammer ETC being held in Poland this year but I'm not actually going.

Having become team captain at the event last year I was looking forward to it immensely but then life did it's usual thing of changing plans and with child number 1 due in September I've ended up arranging not to go myself but still doing a load of the admin work for the 8 players who are going.  Not something that particularly bothers me but now that it's all done and out the way there's nothing else for me to do other than wish the guys luck and find something to fill my time.

I briefly filled that space by churning out a unit of 40 stormvermin for my skaven army which I was lending out to Mark Wildman for the Midlands Open event, again an event I wasn't going to (due to being on holiday), seems the army performed well enough in the hands of a competent player and he came in the top 20 (80 odd player event).

The next few models I then painted were Malifaux figures.  I'd been a bit naughty and broken my own rule of only buying new figs once all the old ones were complete but I did it to get some stuff cheap so at least it was for a good reason.  But because of that I had a bit of a backlog of figures kicking around which I really don't want to happen for another game system!  So I got to painting a few of them.  Months ago I'd primed a guild guard white but then been stuck for a paint scheme, well I came back to him and hit some inspiration which allowed me to quickly bash out the model.  After that I remembered what a joy Malifaux figures were to paint.  So I dug out a couple more in this case both single piece models in the Convict Gunslinger (who I'd traded for the limited edition Miss Demeanor gunslinger as I didn't like her model) and the Doppleganger.  Again both of them flew off my brush at a  rate of knots and I was very happy with the final products.

Finally I started work on Avatar Zoraida, now the avatars are something I've not been entirely sold on.  With the game being pretty complex I've never been entirely on top of the rules interactions as it was, so adding in a model with 2 sides of rules which determine purely how you can put it on the table I felt it might be a bit of overkill.  But the model is kind of nice and apparently it's stupidly good in game!  I like the figure of the model and the tree is ok, but the swamp thing (bad Juju) doesn't really do anything for me.  So I'm part way through painting that and I'm happy with how it's going but that's got my juices going for painting up the rest of my Wyrd stuff.

Currently I've got 1 guild guard, 1 austringer, 3 wicked dolls, Lelu and Liletu sat unpainted in boxes (and yes that's my 2nd lelu&liletu because I'm a filthy power gamer!).  Plus I've also got the nightmare edition Lady J box and nightmare Teddy sat waiting but they're a bit special so I'm not sure if I'll get round to them any time soon.

All of this has me back on the Wyrd forums and taking an interest again which is pretty dangerous given we're just before Gencon and they'll be releasingt he next wave of 000's of models shortly!

40k 6th Edition Bandwagoning

So everywhere in gaming geekland there has been a bit of a buzz around the release of the new rules for Warhammer 40k.  I've not bought them, nor do I plan on, I'll pick up the box set when it drops in 3 months time.

But getting in on that buzz I did get tempted to pick up a few space marines which I'd never finished up to include in my army of old.  I'd started work on one of these guys but never got as far as highlighting him up.  The rest of the unit was just undercoated and sprayed a bone colour.  So I dug them out (discovered I'd lost one of the shield arms annoyingly) and finished them off.

Also got a few more figs kicking about, 4 guys with power weapons which were designed to be a combat command squad and a landspeeder which are in various states of preperation so might try and get them all done up too.  From the sounds of it my somewhat less mechanised army isn't too bad under the new ruleset so hopefully can enjoy this edition a bit more than last.

Realise I forgot to attach the picture to the end of that last article too, so here's a quick shot of the pump wagon in its final splendor.



Also up to 30 savage orcs painted now, just need to buy the final 10 and then I can have the unit complete, but plenty to be doing in the meantime as received my trolls from reaper miniatures, so can get to work on them along with the multitude of chariots and warmachines I've still got to do.

Scratchbuilding

This last couple of weeks have been a bit manic for me at work so not really found time to sit down and paint, I ended up working all weekend so didn't really have time to finish off the savage orcs I'm currently working on.  But because of the nature of the work I was doing I did have some downtime as things were getting pinged back and forward with a client so I put that to use constructing a pump wagon for my O&G army.

GW have only really made 2 pump wagon models, the current one which is all big spikes and massive wheels and doesn't really make any sense to me and the old 3rd ed one whith the spikey roller and 2 stories (though you could get it as just 1 level) of wooden platform.  I much prefer that model as it seems far more likely that it'd be something snotters could actually construct, it doesn't rely on anything particularly complex unlike the new one which looks like a serious bit of engineering.

The decision to scratchbuild was largely driven by the prices on EBay, the old style pump wagons kept consistently rising about £10 which given the simplicity of the model felt a little bit excessive for me.  So I pulled out some plasticard and some balsawood and started bashing one together.  A quick raid of my bits box turned up a number of wheels and I slapped these on the side and then went looking for bits to make up some shielding for the crew and also some stabby bits.  This brought me to my savage orc sprues I'd got a load off as part of some purchase (just the spares not actually any models) So I took the head of the big stabba as a nice large pointy ram and a couple of the spear heads as assitional blades.  These also have the benefit of being made of stone so felt more appropriate for the model again.  For protection there are a nice bunch of wooden shields which don't have any parts of the arms attached so I used a load of these off 2-3 sprues worth to add some protection all round the lower level of the wagon leaving the top deck open for the snotters to throw stuff off.  Possibly it could have done with a bit of something up there but this was in keeping with the origial model which was bare up top.

Yup the woodies came back out for a bit of a scrap this weekend.  As you'd expect with woodies under 8th edition there was the standard filth as follows:

Treeman Ancient, lvl 4 Life - scroll
Noble BSB MR3, Noble on Eagle 3+ ward vs non magical, dragonhelm, LA, Shield and Spear, branchwraith
3 x 5 glade riders - Musos
2 x 8 dryads
10 archers, muso
8 wardancers
2 treemen.

As I said, standard netlist filth...

What does the army do, basically runs about a lot and hides if there is any sensible terrain on the board. 

Event was a 1 dayer up in Dunfermiline with some heavy comp restrictions as follows:
You get a look out sir versus dwellers etc and if you fail it's still only 1 wound.
Battleline scenario used for all 3 games.

Yeah that's it for restrictions.

So what did I face?

G1 Russell GIfford - Empire.
Russell is a relatively new player, I faced him at his first ever tournament in November last year when he was also using Empire, but has a new book now.

His list
lvl 4 fire, lvl 2 death
3 x 11 Knights, FC all with a warrior priest in them (varying armaments)
3 x 6 pistoliers
2 cannons
1 steam tank

So basically a  wall of 1+ armour, ideal when you've got a small amount of S3 shooting...  Thankfully terrain gave me a great big hill to hide behind, so I obliged. with 2 treemen and the third was put out as cannonball bait (nowhere left to hide him)  Everything else did the skirmishy/vanguardy thing to threaten his cannons and avoid the tank.

He got T1 and pushed it forwards, 2 x 5+ ward saves later I'd taken no wounds from the cannons and nothing else did owt (fireball & something else at treemen did no wounds and dispelled one of them).

My T1 because I'd vanguarded forwards but went second 1 unit of glade riders charged some pistoliers, took zero wounds on S&S and butchered them, running the last couple down.  Magic I 6 diced dwellers on a unit of knights killing half but losing 3 levels in the process leaving me with awakening of the woods... Not so good. But the knights failed their LD 8 test and ran off (winner!).  Shooting killed another unit of pistoliers through concentrated fire.

T2 his tank misfired and lost all steam points which was a bonus (1/6 failed so perfectly average this game).  Knights failed to rally and ran to the table edge (1/2" on but I had an eagle rider in charge range so just shepparded him off in my turn. Mage did no wounds to treeman with medium fireball and I let off flame cage on a unit of dryads (needed to move them but worried about the death magic) cannons did 3 wounds to a treeman but that was all.

My 2 I charged 1 cannon and ran the knight unit off, dryads pushed up to threaten the other cannon but I knew they'd never make it due to a looming knight unit.  Moved my dryads only for him to roll 4+ on all 8 dice for flamecage and take the unit off!  With 1 cannon down I pulled out the 2 other treemen to threaten, magic was a double 6 phase so I did some treesinging!

T3 he faced one unit of knights at the remaining dryads and the other failed a swift reform allowing me to get a treeman in front of them to block his advance.  Magic he double 6'd bhuna on the branchwraith followed by a 3 on the 2d6 for zero wounds and took a wound of 1 priest and both mages. cannon wounded another treeman but only 1 wound.

I put 2 glade rider units into threaten his cannon and charged the dryads into the knights to kill the death mage.  3 treemen setup to trap the knight unit that failed it's reform the turn before if he charged in.  Kill the mage but nowt else and flee

T4 he charged the wounded treeman, did 2 wounds but couldn't finish him off.  I clobbered the warrior priest in return and passed the break test on my bsb reroll.  other knights ran the dryads & branchwraith off the board.

both glade riders fail their charge on the cannon only needing a 9 & 8 but both treemen charge the knights in combat with 1 tree.  I smash his lvl 4 and then he passes 7 of 8 armour saves but the unit was still testing on a 3 because he was in a wood so not steadfast.  He passed of course.

T5 tank tries to countercharge the treeman ancient but rolls 6 on the 3 dice and I get away with it.  pistoliers shoot off 1 unit of glade riders, finally the knights break from combat and I run them down.

I charge the cannon with the last unit of glade riders and everything else runs away to hide from the tank.  Kill the cannon and overrun but still in range of pistoliers who shoot them all dead in T6.

My T6, I do nothing and game ends with a 14-6 to me (200pts brackets in this event)

Really hard work with all that armour but I took the easy points where I could and suckered him into exposing his knight units piecemeal so I could deal with them (though the dwellers helped massively here).

G 2 Lizardmen - Trev Moffat (who I play all the time)

Light slann - loremaster, ruminating, becalming, cupped hands
Temple guard
2 x skrox
Engine of the gods
2 x 1 salamanders
2 x 5 chameleons
2 x 10 skinks

Think that was about it.

Basically game was 4 large parts of impassable terrain in each quarter, I was able to dance up one side and turn the game into battle for the pass!  Treemen went into the engine and I forgot one was the ancient so he challgenged and the 2nd one couldn't fight.  Light magic buffs went off but counterbalanced by my rehealing wounds with lifebloom and regrowth so eventually I won the grind.  He killed archers and 2 x units of glade riders with zaps and rocks.  I got 2 x chamos with a treeman, a unit of dons and the engine in T6.

11-9 to me.

Game 3 Tim Gronneberg - Dark Elves
Basically he had my army but better because it's DE.  Dragon, pendant BSB on Peg, noble on Peg, 3 x 6 dark riders, 2 x 6 shades, 1x5 shades, 20 ish spears, 2 x 5 harpies, hydra and a RBT.

I got my setup a bit wrong and he was able to pressure me early, I lost T1 and he shot off 2 units of glade riders and I knew I was out the shooting battle.  I then proceeded to fail pretty much every break test for the rest of the game and his dragon got into my mage bunker as a result.  Should have been pinned by T6 dryads who were stubborn in a wood but failed the test so he got right through.  Treeman ancient killed the pendant BSB over 2 rounds of combat (1 wound already taken) but then broke because of dark riders in his rear and failled his stubborn test.  I was left with only my noble on eagle who was fighting his other peggy rider in a chumpfest both down to 1 wound but couldn't kill each other!

Big loss of 19-2 (weird scottish thing that you get an extra point at 19 and 20, unless you conceed you don't score zero).

So overall 2-1 win record but only good enough for 22nd place out of 30ish due to that last result. And annoyingly the other wood elf player was on the exact same points as me but more vps having played on the bottom tables game 3 and smashed a lizards player at his first event so was bottom WE too.

But that said Trev and Tim were probably two of the better players at the event so not as though I chumped my way through it and really happy with how I played on the whole.  Could have possibly done better versus Tim if I'd been more conservative but not really much chance due to his shooting being so much better than mine. (more shots for less points and higher BS with the shades).

ETC 6 Nations 2012

And so comes to a close my stint as captain of the Scottish ETC team in any meaningful manner, from now on I'm just an admin junkie to help the guys get out there, though to be honest pretty much everything is in place.

The 6 nations was over in Northern Ireland and was one of the most fantastically well organised events I've ever been to. Similar to the EDGT which pash put on there were free drinks & snacks throughout, there was an all you can eat chinese dinner and a few other bits.  All for the cost of £29 which is cheaper than most normal UK events which won't include free drinks, nibbles and dinner.

The event itself was a great laugh, plenty of the guys have been on the teams for years and know the ropes by now so were over early on the Friday and found propping up various bars.  We caught up with the welsh & Irish on Friday evening and carried on the merriment!

Saturday saw the 'serious' side of the event kick off, though in reality it was still a pretty relaxed atmosphere.  We had the traditional favourites of England up first which was a bit disappointing as traditionally it had been us and them for 1st & 2nd so felt like the decider came too early going into the event, boy did that prove to be wrong!  We did reasonably well out the matchup process and the games were going to plann barring a couple of disasterous results we were exactly where we'd aimed for.  The disasters unfortunatley were partly due to experience and were leasons learnt in the harshest of environments.  Overall the round ended a 72-88 loss, but it was a pretty good score as I've a feeling they expected to win bigger.

Next up was Northern Ireland, the hosts with some interesting lists, but not ones we thought were that good.  This turned out to be the case as only one of our matchups was unfavourable on our pre round scoring and we ended up wining this with a maximum score 100-60.  I was the biggest loser of the round going down to a dwarf list 5-15.  It was annoying as I really felt I played it right and it was dice that cost me but thankfully not the team, at the end of the game I'd killed a master engineer and a cannon (both killed by a single terradon), his organ gun had survived an onslaught from most of my army and lived to tell the tale with a single crewman holding off several of my units.

Finally came Ireland, historically a bunch of drunken chumps but seeming to build into a good team the last couple of years they were leading the event at this stage.  Here the pairings went badly, ireland were slow to get started and that put a bit of pressure on me and think it got to me, also not helped by a very drunk team member generally shouting down the room.  So we got a middlish set of matchups but still overall probably just favourable.  Unfortunately it didn't come through in the results, 2 big disappointments lead to us giving up the round 72-88.
After that all rivalries were forgotten and off to the chinese buffet we went before then heading back to the pub for a quiet half before bed...

Day 2 opened with France.  Now France have what we all consider the most unusual lists, simply their style is slightly different to the UK, they design them to work for the ETC and play them to death.  Overall they're all very good lists with good players behind them, just 'different'.  Our pairings went really well here, we had 1 unfavourable matchup, 3 close and 4 favourable per our pre event scoring.  Then the dice started.  This round saw everything that could go wrong happen.  There were two mirror matches - daemons vs Daemons and Lizards lizards.  The daemon off saw our player pressing as he had the better list in that match, the keeper of secrets got the siren song on the thirster and lost combat by 1 (about average), this was then followed up by double 11'ing his breaktest when he had a unit to charge in the flank next turn.  Gutting.  The lizard off saw a T6 failed LoS to a purple sun and dropped down a pit, our skaven player triple 6'd his bell and blew up and a string of other disasters were described.  This resulted in giving france the full 100 (uncapped the score was 101-59 making my T6 disaster all the more galling) and catapulting them into the lead.

Finally we had Wales.  Of the lot this was some of the toughest pairings, we had to sacrifice a couple of lists to get the good matchups.  Overall it worked out and we won the round 88-72 but there were a few touch and go games which could have put it back at a draw and also a mistake by the welsh TK player which resulted in him probably swinging the results by something like 10pts on the round.  Annoying to miss out due to a rules error but I wasn't about to get on a high horse over it and just accepted the game score, could have pushed for an adjustment if we'd really cared but as we won the round I just accepted it.

Overall we came 5th as a result which was rather disappointing, giving up the 100 to both France and Ireland didn't feel like justice for how we paired them up and the relative strengths on the teams but it's a dice game at the end of the day and them's the breaks.

It was a great fun weekend and it was my pleasure to captain the team through it.

Finally got back to painting something other than warhammer this week with a lovely little figure for Malifaux.  Which brough an interesting point up for me.  I'd only ever seen the model online (something that's true of every Malifaux model I've bought except my very first box) and to be honest I thought it was a bit rubbish but I went ahead and bought it because it was in a 25% off sale and the other alternative option wasn't available.  When it arrived I warmed to the figure a little, I still thought the pose was odd but with the model in hand it started to make more sense and not look quite as odd as I'd previously thought.

The figure in particular I'm talking about is the female Desperate Mercenary, the pose is an unsual one where she looks like she's just finished attacking with her sword, but at that angle you'd assume she's either missed and is dodging a blow or must have severed straight through something, so it's dynamic but without the interaction with another model it looks a bit odd.

So this lead me to wondering about the challenges facing a sculptor.  The obvious pose is to just be standing there and wielding weapons for most wargames and this is a pretty standard thing, but then people start to complain that it's not dynamic enough, there's no movement etc etc (you'll have seen it a load online particularly thrown at GW models).  So instead this sculptor has done something that is rather dynamic and when you see the model in front of you it pretty much makes sense, but seeing it in photos online I thought it was utter rubbish and the pose didn't work at all.

So I wonder how much that comes into play, there are regularly models which on release are derided for just not looking 'right' and I imagine unless their rules make them an obvious choice result in some beautiful scuplts being overlooked.  I wonder if there is a way around this, obviously photos from multiple angles help,otherwise we run the danger of models becoming quite samey because everyone goes for poses which are safe rather than something a bit out the ordinary that doesn't photograph well.

In other news I've contined to paint up the O&G army and a few more additions to other armies too. 

Lizardmen - Slann (old edition model)

Skaven - Doomwheel and Warpfire Thrower

O&G

 With that the O&G are starting to come together as an army, still need to do a load more models but I'm starting to get the feel for them with a big unit of gobbos, a couple of war machines and a chariot I think I've got my Orc and Gobbo look sorted out and settled on a consistent feel for things like the wood, fur and similar parts of their attire.

O&g update

With the gobbo scheme locked down I pushed on with a full unit of 20 to get the army started.

That was then followed by some more Orc tests. Blue tinge skin wasn't right so went more traditional and liked the look so now that's the orcs sorted too.

Enjoying painting this stuff at the moment so wanting to crack on with units before momentum dies.

Day 2

And I continued my seesaw journey!

Game 4 - rob farmer wood elves
Strange build with eternal guard, 2x5 treekin. I played it all wrong and overestimated 2 sphinx into the treekin, they killed 2 over 4 turns of combat. Should have put all 3 into the eternal guard and just ridden out the treekin counter charges. Lost 0-20

Game 5 -Joel Smith Dark Elves
Nice dragon list & cold one bus. Did my usual thing and necrosphinx goes for the Bsb and other 2 sphinx front stuff up. Chariots on shooting duty for dark riders. Basically get a bit lucky when I killed the hydra and the dragon panicked. Necrosphinx also fought of flank & rear charge from xbows and spears with a big thunder stomp followed by 2 failed break tests. Over the rest the dragon comes back and gets into the character bunker but WS10 & shems lead to a fluffed turn and the dragon flees again with me 1" behind and my turn next. I run him down for 800pts swing. I was very lucky and he wasn't being the real difference. I won 18-2

Game 6 - James knight daemons
The dice gods turned back on this one and I didn't get a stomp above 2 and the key turn he hit 6 of 9 wards for the blood letters to survive which cost my chariots and heirotitan. Then it all collapsed from there, fun game though for 1-19 in the end. Snakes surprised him when they chomped 5 fiends in 3 rounds of combat but I botched the reform and let him escape a counter charge. But snakes have done that for me every time they play fiends, so knew it was in my favour.

Overall 58/120 was disappointing as thought 60 was achievable and but for some bad play would have been a reality.

Great fun event and a nice one to finish up my month of play with.

Unless I have to play 6 nations that's me done for the year and probably going to focus on building and painting the next few armies I want.

SCGT

My TK made the big trip down and have enjoyed much Zappa fun through day 1, lots of nice squishy targets presented themselves and obligingly jumped under my sphinxes feet!

Game 1 - Dave Meechan with dark elves (17-3)
Game 2 - Matt Lee Daemons (5-15)
Game 3 - Danny Pegg high elves (17-3)

The daemons was a great unclean one who I just couldn't fight as bale sword just chopped through all my big constructs and my Mage miscast and fell down a pit to remove my last chance of doing anything.

The elves were both subject to magic missile barrages and the shooting had plenty of good targets which forces them to commit and the sphinxes started to smash things up.

Day 2 beckons.

Orcs & Goblins Progress

I'm working off second hand models (ebay for mucho cheapness),so whilst it's 'painted' in the starting pic none of the original paint remains on the finished model.

Quite happy with how the test skull pass gobbos came out, then set them aside for a while to basically have a month off painting whilst did some real life stuff and play lots of tournaments.  Now finally getting back to them and to get myself inspired I decided to do something a bit fun first.  So I cleaned the mould lines off 80 night gobbo that were in various stages of being painted but none had the lines removed first (typical 2nd hand cheapo figs).
 

That got me a bit bored so I dug out something slightly better to start with in the form of a doom diver picked up in a bit of a state, so I'd ripped it apart and removed all the excess glue and mould lines then just stuck it back together again.  Fortunately the paint on it was actually quite thin so I didn't feel the need to strip it.

And my finish point:



 


Again happy with how my scheme came out, was pretty quick to paint and I think looks nice for the level of effort. 

Of course having just listened to the latest heelanhammer episode I'm singled out as someone that just churns out armies as a basecoat & dip merchant, slightly hurtful given the fact my armies usually look better than the majority of those at tournaments, but agree that obviously no effort for those 'best painted' awards.  What I have always said I'd do is get to the point where I can put any army of my choice on the table at an event and then I'll sit down and set about improving what I've got.  Only being 32 I reckon I can achieve this quite comfortably before my eyesight goes so will have plenty of time to improve the standard of these armies at my leisure.

Edinburgh GT

Generic write up for a few forums so some blindingly obvious details in here, but will just post it all as is.

So I slightly tweaked my list again for another tournament, but largely unchanged. For the comp junkies this was UK SCGT comp which basically caps your additional power dice at +d3 (or two) plus channels. 90 shot cap and that's about it. The important thing is it's 6 battleline (so I have zero standards in the army) and a 20-0 scoring system with +150vps steps per point. (so 1500vps up = 20-0)

2 lvl 4's nehek&light, lvl 1 light - Scroll & sceptre of stability (+1d6 to a failed dispel roll)
10 archer, champ & muso
20 archers, muso
7 chariots, muso
4 snakes - champion
2 x sphinx - fiery roar
necrosphinx
heirotitan
casket


G1 John Harper (DE)
Lord – Cold One, +2S sword, pendant
BSB – ASF (maybe the unit? Dunno banner costs)
Lvl 4 shadow, lvl 2 metal, lvl 2 fire – stabby dagger, scroll +1 DD
2x10 xbows, 20xbows, 5 harpies, 2x5 dark riders.
8 CO - +1Attack banner, muso
Hydra

John is on a challenge to play a different army at every tournament and took the opportunity for a round 1 grudge with someone he knew to try and learn the DE which he’d picked out a hat! Not an entirely standard DE list but plenty of common themes, I’d actually suggested the knight bus to him (so only myself to blame!). My only tactic vs the bus was delay it and hope I could get lucky and kill off the rest of his army before it killed mine. So I threw a necrosphinx at it early to try and kill the bsb for some points early on (he failed only doing 1 wound) and let my snakes go after his archmage’s archer block. The hydra got pinned by a sphinx and they both chumped it up for ages until finally I got 1 wound to his zero and a breaktest worked out! Eventually I manged to do what I’d set out and killed off everything but the knight bus, pendant lord and 1 unit of archers but lost a fair amount of mine in return netting a 14-6.

G2 Owen Bell (Empire)
Pope, Lvl 4 fire, BSB, Engineer
48 halberds, 6 archers, 10 huntsmen,
2x5 knights, 2x5 pistoliers
2 cannons, Mortar, Steam tank

Oh dear, cannons. Actually was looking ok, I got some decent matchups in deployment, got lucky on some terror and magic early to clear out the huntsmen and a pistolier unit early. Unfortunately Owens T1 he dropped a mortar on my heirophants head and I failed the look out sir roll. 3 wound later I started my crumble tests. At that point I knew I had to commit so everything went forwards, necrosphinx at the lvl 4 in the halberds and everything else forwards. Casket decided to blow up turn 2 taking out a sphinx that had been cannoned already, then other sphinx got cannoned and necrosphinx died to combat res. Rest killed as much as they could but everything bar 2 chariots died in the end. 2-18 loss.


G3 Annie Norman (VC)
Necro lvl 4, necro lvl 2, wraith, banshee
3 x 20something zombies, 30 ghouls, 30 grave guard
2 x 6 crypt horrors, 3 x2 bats, spirit host
Mortis engine

Mega T1 magic phase saw me blow the grave guard down to 5 models, unfortunately also blew up my lvl 4 on light who fell down a pit. Stopped as much raising as I could then put the necrosphinx into the graveguard with 2 ethereals in it. After all the attacks and crumbles left the banshee on 1 wound as the only thing remaining so the sphinx was pinned, 1 more wound and that was an overrun into the lords bunker, ohhh so near! Another sphinx had gone for the combo charge and failed so it got pinned by a spirit host. So now I was in real trouble as I could do nothing about those two. Necrosnakes went on a rampage but unfortunately so did annies second unit of crypt horrors so we both ended up smashing off our respective mage bunkers but annie had split her 2 characters by then so not much crumbled end of the game I’d killed a few units of zombies, the grave guard, lvl 4 necromancer and some crypt horrors but lost most of my army with just 2 sphinxes hanging around on a couple of wounds and the snakes I could only hold on for a 6-14 loss.

G4 Jay Knight
Grey seer on bell, BSB, chieftain, warlock eng (doomrocket)
40 stormvermin
3 x 40 clanrats, 2 PWMs
2 doomwheels

Jay was hungover to hell and his army was a bad matchup against mine for him, this was further made difficult when I killed a doomwheel turn 1 with the casket. That was the start of the end really as he’d gone with plague and as a result had nothing really to deal with the sphinxes apart from an 11-12 result on the bell (he never rolled above a 7 on three dice). The snakes got into the 2nd doomwheel due to a bad distance roll putting it a bit too close and -1S&T followed by WS10 meant they chopped it up. My whole army then piled into his blocks and the stormvermin eventually killed one sphinx with blessed with filth but the rest stomped all over his army leading to a T5 concession before I could declare 3-4 charges into the bell unit. 20-0

G5 Trev Moffat (WoC)
Disc Lord, bsb horse, mage horse
18 HW&S Tzeench Warriors – rapt standard, 12 Halberd Warriors Banner of Rage
12 marauders, flails, 2x5 dogs
2 chariots, 7 knights
Hellcannon, Warshrine

Typical game between me and trev, a bit close, we’ve played countless practice games in the run up so both knew each others armies. I think trev stuffed up his deployment a bit compared to normal and isolated his knights. Therefore I went for the big risky charge with my necroserpents and a sphinx only to get a rather lucky failed fear test from the sphinx making them WS1. The knights then butchered a few and ran them down, on the otherside of the board trev was failing charges every turn despite small numbers needed so I managed to delay everything enough that my lvl 4 on light could do a runner and only had to immolate a chariot in order to get to some safety (well relative safety given he had to suck up a 2d6 S4 burning gaze on the final turn, true to form trev fluffed his dice and left me on 1 wound). I also got jammy to kill the chaos lord, he took 1 wound from the casket spell, then was in combat, but he overran into my casket who got WS10, I10 and -1 to hit on them so a guard survived to chip a wound off before dying and the explosion of the casket killed the lord! So basically I diced him up good and proper to not lose about 500vps in the last turn! 10-10

G6 Marco
Prince, lvl 4 shadow, lvl 2 high, BSB
28 Seaguard, 2 x 10 archers
5 shadow warriors, 18 white lions, 14 sword masters
2 bolt throwers

Marco should have realised this game was going to go wrong when he won the roll for the first turn (he’d not done it all tournament). 5 spells on shadow and no pit saw me a happy man! A bit of shuffling, magic (not much) some shooting and a couple of my chariots died. In return I removed 1 bolt thrower with the casket and 10 archers with banishment followed by some shooting. Marco’s dice went down from there. The lvl 4 miscast on 2 dice, blew himself up and took most of the sword masters out as he went just as they charged a sphinx which was chomping the white lions. They did enough to kill it but then got a necrosphinx in to them with only 4 guys and a bsb left. He ate the bsb, stomped the unit and overran into the 6 remaining white lions. From there it was just clean up. Apparently I cast in the region of 30 spells without miscasting (admittedly most on 2 dice, and several on 1). Again dice helped me out but it was always a reasonable matchup for me as I play the HE often and the best thing against sphinxes is lots of magic missiles which he lacked. 19-1


Overall I came 7th (of 28) tied for TPs with 6th but behind on BPs. I was 4th most vps scored at the event showing the 'smash em up' nature of the list.

Woop woop! - Skaven army complete

2400pts of skaven now complete, I started on these guys 18 months ago and in that time have now finished off 4 armies to add to my existing dwarfs!

Feb 2011 - first outing of the WE (started around 4 years before then shelved for ages)
April 2011 - first outing of the lizards (only 2000pts but scaled up to 2400 quickly, started march 2010)
Aug 2011 - Tomb Kings to the ETC (<2m start to finish)
March 2012 - Skaven (18m start to finish)

So that's me now hit 5 of the 16 Warhammer armies.  3 More to come and it's decision time again, empire are tempting me so think I'll stick with that, but there's a lot of temptataion out there!  Should maybe go for a quick fix of a smaller model count army but instead I've lined up empire, O&G and Dark Elves for the next three...

I think I'll keep doing what I did with most of the last few armies and paint a few units from each overlapping each other as I'm in no real requirement to get them finished to give me a playable army now I've got 5 to pick from already.

ETC Comp

I see the ETC second pack and I wonder what people actually play in some countries, it certainly doesn't seem to be the same game as other parts of the world.  In the UK we started out with zero comp and then 6 months in we setup a number of restrictions. Following on these have generally been slackened off every so slightly but no major changes.  Pretty much the only thing that matters is the max 12 dice in a magic phase, only adding 2-3 dice to the phase, max unit size of 450pts and look out sir on all spells unless they say otherwise.  Compare that to what is appearing out of a number of the european countries where it's 4 dice max, no irresistable on certain lores and a tonne of restrictions on individual armies.

To me that seems to be excessively unnecessary.  The UK has seen all the top players continue to be the top players, clearly the '6 dice monkey' terminology exists for a reason but not to the extent where it decides tournament winners.  So we're looking at restrictions in the UK which knock out a number of the irritating excesses of some lists, but still leaves virtually all options available.  The european teams talking about heavy comp seem to prevent vast number of build options from being used completely so part of the sacrifice of playing in there scene would appear to be far lower diversity.  As a player that doesn't like playing the 'optimum' builds this seems like a rather daft way of going about promoting enjoyment, it seems that 'balance' is achieved by striping out a lot of the uniqueness of the armies.

I'll be voting against harsher restrictions but to be honest I'm amazed that we've got here on the second year of the tournament using 8th edition it seems people really don't like playing the game as the designers appear to have intended.

Painting Update

So I've not really kept the painting side of this blog up to date.  Not really sure what the best approach to take is.  Generally I post all my figs onto a number of forums for general feedback so adding them on here (where I don't even know if anyone really looks) is worth it.

On a separate issue around the look of my blog, it is intentionally utterly minimalist and intended to look as close to a boring work document as possibly purely because I spend most of my time writing these things during work hours, even if it is lunchtime I don't particularly want to splash massed images and colours across my screen to draw attention to what I'm doing not being work.  But I might have a go at slightly improving the utterly minimalist approach I've taken.

So purely because I'm talking about my painted figs I'll firstly plug my favourite painting site: www. thepainteddragon.co.uk/forum/
As I say all my figs tend to get put on this page and they're a brilliant friendly bunch who'll give you genuinely helpful feedback but with very little of the negativity that tends to permeate the Internet.

As a final sign off here's my latest couple of additions to the Skaven all painted up
Skaven Hellpit Abomination

Skaven Plague Furnace

Hobby Stats - Scary Reading

I've been tracing an increased number of hobby stats this year, last year I just did the number of painted models and tournament games, this year I've been tracking all games, painted models and hobby expenditure.

Can you guess which of those three items has proved to be the scary reading?  No prize for guessing I'm afraid but so far this year I've spent >£700 on toy soldiers, terrain, rulebooks, paints & accessories and tournament fees.

Looking back at this objectively I do have more or less 3 new armies to show for that spend, so not entirely wasted but I've not really started painting much of it yet.  So think I'll try and put all purchasing on hold until I get this lot painted up.  I'll probably allow myself the occasional purchase for models to round out the armies as and when I get what I have of armies finished up (I just did this with my Skaven but admittedly the purchases were an abomination and a furnace so £60 worth of 'rounding out').

This all feeds back into my intent to own a painted version of every single army for WFB.  The Skaven (which aren't quite done yet but very close) takes me to 5.  I've then purchased my next 3 - DE, Empire and Orcs & Goblins.  I think I'm going to do Empire first and hopefully get a chunk done before the army book gets released though current rumours seem to suggest April, so don't imagine I'll get close to an armies worth being done by then.

My ambitious project is therefore continuing well so I'm quite happy with that.  My one concern is will I actually enjoy playing these armies!  Skaven having put all this effort into painting them up don't actually interest me that much to play on the table in the normal build people use at tournaments.  But that's what I've painted largely driven by my ETC commitment. In the middle of last year it was looking like we wouldn't have a Skaven player so I thought I'd best cover that base, we now have 3 available!

A Slow few weeks

Hit another hobby slowdown period, it was called February! In total I managed to get through 11 figures but that was all bigger stuff so not too shabby I suppose.  Slightly rushed my Collodi Crew so could be going back there at a later date but will do for now, still not put them on the table yet though.

March is looking like it'll be a more productive month as I've got a furnace built and the wood painted, I've built an Abomination and have plans of how I want to paint it, I've also build and undercoated 28 empire knights and constructed a load of other empire stuff.

The Empire was a bit of a surprise project, they were something that never massively appealed to me but as I always wanted to do all the armies I'd obviously have to pick them up at some stage.  As it happens I got a few bits in a sale pre christmas time which set me down the route of looking into them and with rumours of a new book on the horizon what better time to start buying stuff up.

So I've now got:
Wizards x 3
Priests x 2
Engineer
Archlector on alter
25 Knights
3 mounted chatacters - BSB, hero and Priest (bits bash knights kit)
10 Pistoliers
2 cannons
2 Mortars (same kit just builit the frame part required from balsa wood)
Hellstorm Rocket Battery

Basically all I need are the compulsory core halberds & swordsmen and I'll be good to go with a complete army, well barring the steam tank, flagellants and other fun bits.

So this seems to have jumped the queue ahead of the O&G army I was planning.  Not a bad thing as it should get me up and running again with painting, similarly it's jumpstarted my urge to do the skaven again.  Having got so close to a working army I really should finish them off, at present it's 260 troops and nothing to go with them, well I'm working up 10 giant rats for the complusory rat dart deployment drops, add the furnace, Abom and I'd best do a WLC to complete the absoultely TM tournament army other than characters.  From there I'll be able to paint things at my leisure though there are 40 stormvermin that I really wnat to get built up but we'll see!

On the gaming front Feb saw the Falkirk Free for All tournament where I rocked out the TK to much enjoyment and mediocre success, but had such a good time playing them I just wish I could flex the list a little more, points are just too tight so can't quite squeeze in what I want at 2400 (basically min core & all the big beasties prevents me shuffling points around much).

Also played a couple of games of malifaux - Zoraida vs Von Schill, sat at 1:1 but just realised we played the scenario wrong on the one I lost so claiming a moral victory...  The game I won I finally rocked out the twins to give Z some hitting threat, and wow is it good.  Until now I've been forced to mess with my opponents crew because obeying my guys didn't achieve much but with Schill doing his WP bubble it generally meant either burning stones or winning initiative and going first with Z.  Not idea.  The twins make a seriously big impact on the playstyle so really enjoyed throwing them out there.

Next up for the neverborn I'll really need to send Dreamer or Collodi out for a test run, but still not picked up any daydreams so guess Dreamer is on the shelf till then.

Anyways here's to hoping the painting picks back up again and the next tournament is 31 March in Edin so nice local WFB goodness to come.

New Blood

Got a chance to do one of my favourite things down the club on Wed, a game in against a new player.  He'd played Warhammer back in 4th Ed days and had just come back, at the time of our game had played 3 times.

I love these games for a few reasons, firstly the pressure is right off, no massively tactical thinking, no pressure situation before calling my movement phase at an end and you can actually just relax into the game.  Secondly I get to show off my rather encyclopedic rules knowledge, sad and geeky it may be but I'm pretty good with the rules and seldom come up with a wrong answer, though the occassional blank!

Anyway game was great fun.  He had a semi nasty skaven army but with a couple of soft options that I could take advantage of, plus he didn't know the army very well so made a few rookie mistakes.  Ended up a draw due to a rather massive brainfart on my behalf.  I forgot that a doomwheel can still shoot when it rallies and had my dragon as the closes thing at that point.  3 S8 zaps later and one dead dragon and rider, oops!

Still my army did pretty much what it does and cleared up his flanks (2 x doomwheels, 2 x 3 ratogres, 2 WFTs and the treekin did a number on his characters.  He didn't see me throwing a longish charge into the front of his stormvermin block with greyseer and engineer in the front.  3 attacks on the engineer failed to kill him but the 6 took out the grey seer netting me magical parity and a lot of points! Treekin then ground the stormvermin till T6 due to passing 3 breaktests needing a 5 or less (a tad lucky but the bsb was giving rerolls each time to help out a little).

Anyway great game, great guy and hopefully will be back for more as always nice to get fresh people involved.

Finally painted something worthy of putting on the blog.

My last few months have been all about batch painting vast numbers of models.  Whilst this is great for getting things done, it doesn't really give me much to show off about.  Sure you painted 240 models but they all look a bit meh, nobody really cares.

So when I burned out painting them I fell back on my Woodies, this also fits nicely with an upcoming tournament where I'll be able to run them out for a bit of fun with a nice fluffy build using all the stuff people normally avoid and refusing to use any glade guards.

The one thing I wanted to do more than anything was run my Dragon, but that build also requires a BSB on an Eagle which I've never painted, and also requires my rider for the dragon to be painted!

So I painted one!

The original model is standing and has 2 swords in his hand and comes from the Skarloc's WE archer box (from 3rd edition times).  I bent the legs (model is 20ish years old so nice soft metal with plenty of lead in it), then snipped off the 2 swords and drilled through the hands.  The BSB banner pole is a paperclip with a couple of layers of liquid green stuff on top to bulk it out and give it some definition and then the banner top from the glade guard box. 

The spear is from the glade rider/glade guard kit.  The spear had the tip snapped off and fed through the hand which I'd drilled out, then I attached a sword from a champion hand from one of the gladerider/glade guard boxsets as the tip.  Eagle is just a warhawk with the standing hole greenstuffed up.

Super happy with how he came out.

Bang! Ouch that's my head.

Yup that bang was the sound of me hitting the wall hard.  Since turning out my first 10 gutter runners on the 12th I've managed to paint the basecoat grey on 10 more and base the flesh on 5 of those.  If you could hear the sound of the gears grinding to a halt it wasn't good.

So what has caused this stop?  Hard to say really, just motivation doing it's usual thing.  I've written about this before and it really does come down to the desire to paint.  But as one door closes another door opens.  I built up my terraclips terrain for the first time over the weekend and I went back to my WE and built a couple of treemen and am also putting together 4 treekin.  These are models I've had kicking around for ages so was just a random spur that made me decide they were where I wanted to focus.  To go with them I've also picked up a couple of projects that had sat unloved for a while, so the WE BSB on an eagle also went back on the table and I converted up a rider model with a flag and a spear as I'm planning to run him with that build.

Interestingly exactly as this happened to me I noticed another gamer on Twitter having exactly the same issue with a skaven army but he's trying to push through it and was complaining about really just not liking the army as a result.  That is exactly why I didn't want to try and force it.  I did it with the WE a couple of years back and it resulted in me dropping them for over a year as I just couldn't face them.  Since then I've always targetted multiple projects rather than trying to push through with one which I was losing interest in.

On the buying front I've picked up my first purchases of 2012.  Not stuff I really need but some offers I saw going to get the bulk of an Orc army together for pretty cheap so I just jumped in.  £90 later I have the pretty solid basis of what most tournament orc armies seem to be running. 30 savage orcs, a buttload of night gobbo archers, a rock lobber and a couple of shamen. Just need to get a couple of doom divers, a mangler or two and a couple of chariots & wolf riders.

Also priced up the rest of what I fancied for the generic tournament DE build.  Not that it's what I want to run, but just to see the cost!

Terraclips - what a fantastic product.

So I've had 2 boxes of terraclips sat in my cupboard for about 3-4 months and finally got round to cracking them out for a game over the weekend.  I used the sewers set just to make a bit of a building. Stuff works really well, it's incredibly simple to put together structures and they're good and sturdy.  Plenty of options for walkways and doorways which allows plenty of options to break up line of sight but not just end up with cordoned off rooms.

The stuff to the right of the area is the leftover bits.  From the tapemeasure you can see it's 18" across so those of you who know malifaux can quickly work out 4 x the structure I've built will give you a completely covered board.  Which is kinda impressive.  So to go multi level and cover a whole board probably takes 3 kits, but 2 should give coverage and a couple of structures.

Onto the game itself I played Zoraida vs Von Schill on a shared line in the sand.  I was attacker and took 3 silurids, 1 stiched and a wicked doll on the basis of they're generally what I had to hand and were painted so fitted well into 25 SS with 2 SS left.  Opposite was VS, 2 Freidcorps, Trapper, specialist and Librarian giving 4 SS.  Rather than taking simple schemes I was trying mixing it up to see how I'd do at some of the others.  I discoverd that vs Von Schill I really don't want requirements to kill his crew, with him and the librarian kicking around they are a tad difficult, particularly vs Willpower requirements as he kept bubbling the +4WP.  I had kill the 2 FK and the trapper and get into his deployment zone (announced).  He had Bodyguard (snore) and holdout (unannounced). 

First flip of the game I got initiative and first query came up.  Are henchment when used instead of masters able to be targetted by Zoraida's Obey? We decided for simplicity I couldn't so I had LoS to his trapper and had him ding VS for 4 wounds, nice start!  Then the librarian healed him straight back up by a couple of wounds (boo).   [have now looked it up on the wyrd site and we played it correctly, henchmen as masters count as masters so can't be obeyed].

That was followed by a couple of turns of him shooting me and me activating dynamite.  A miscommunication lead to me moving my stitched into range of his trapper so I lost him a bit cheaply and as he had the +4WP bubble it was never going to achieve much anyway but the LoS block would have been nice.

Game went on and my silurids were forced into the open because the terrain layout and I want to try and put pressure on him, unfortunately the guns coming back the otherway overpowered me and all three died for the loss of only his specialist, at this point I had zoraida and 2 dolls. with 2 turns left.  I succeeded in killing the specialist and the librarian (neither of whom got me VPs) and he was able to move onto all my markers and disarm in the last turn.

A frustrating game but I know how I'd play it differently now.  I thought I'd put the kill minions mission on his weaker stuff, but then focussed all my attacks on his specials because they were doing the damage to me, so if you need to kill someone anyway you might as well focus on them! Other than that I should have just ignored the fight, kept up my soft cover from shooting defense on the silurids and kept arming tokens.  That would have stretched him towards the open ground where zoraida could control him.  Admittedly testing for obey on an average -4 was costing me dearly on soulstones.

Game ended up 0-6 and a big loss. (sadface!).

Happy New Year

Ok it's a few days late but I've finally gotten round to writing something!

In typical fashion lets open with a review of last year:
Gaming
Played 10 tournaments (51 games) with a 22-5-24 record, every army except lizards was a losing record but only by small margins so given I was using Dwarfs, TK and WE I'm quite happy with that.

Painted 537 models, a ridiculous tally that saw me complete 3 armies and get most way through a 4th one.

Last years resolutions:
Paint my WE and use in tournaments - Success
Paint my malifaux crew, Now have 4 painted - Success
Avoid buying any more armies until I'd finished the ones I had - Spectacular fail, model collection went through the roof with the skaven purchases I made and have loads of spares I'm never likely to use left over.
Some other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head.

This years resolutions:
Finish painting another 3 warhammer armies - Skaven & 2 others (likely to be an all plastic army - daemons, Empire, Ogres all possibles).
Fully paint all remaining Malifaux figures (remains of 1 crew and ~6 other figs)
Avoid playing netlist armies - probably requires expanding my TK.