Winter Incursion

So I took my filthy Lizards to Winter Incursion which ended up being a 108 player event held at Maelstrom Games in Mansfield, England.   A bit of a treck to get to but thankfully Will had offered to do the 6 hour drive.

Dirty death magic lizards as I'd been using for the last while, this was my first real chance to show just exactly how horrible they are and true to form they didn't disappoint.  I ended up coming 18th of 108 players which was by far my best result and has to be attributed to the army power.

My 6 games were:
Ogres, DE, WoC, Daemons, Lizards and Lizards

After round 1 I was playing on the top 20 tables all weekend and went 4-1-1 with my loss being to the WoC.  The scoring system was 5000vps with your total score being determined by the vp difference deciding on a W/l/d total (big win was 2500) to which you added your vps scored.  So the loss I decided to try something risky, made a stupid mistake but ended up scoring as many points as had I just sat back and it been a draw.

6 new opponents including finally getting in a game vs Andy Potter, one of my fellow team scotland players from the last couple of years, he was the one with the WoC army too.  I'm glad I got the chance to play him as he's off travelling for a few months so not likely to see him for quite some time.

All in all a good event that was only slightly soured by my final game which only made it to T4 and was a bit niggly, opponent was very focussed on trying to get a good result rather than just having a good game so wasn't as much fun as could have been.

ELG Campaign Round 3

So round 1 was a beatdown by warriors army after my shooting and magic achieved epic fail

Round 2 was a beadown by Ogres after my shooting and magic achieved epic fail

Round 3 I decided to drop all the shooting and went with the beatstick options from my book

lvl 3 Deepwood sphere, Stone of Rebirth
10 Glade Guard
8 Dryads
8 Dryads
4 Treekin
1 Treeman

My opponent was HE with
lvl 2 +1 spell, heavens
BSB - Horsie 2+ AS, Magic sword of +2S and D3 wounds vs anything other than infantry, luckstone
3x10 archers
15 White lions
2 eagles
Bolt Thrower

So the BSB was optimised to kill my army, which I only discovered when he solo charged my treekin and ripped 2 off them up with his hits and then ran the other two down.  My mage lord & archers got run down by an eagle in the flank causing no wounds either side and an 11 on my breaktest.  But that was after he buffed up a unit of dryads with +2 toughness and they raged on the white lions, I6, T6 meant that the WLs weren't doing much and I tore up 5-6 per turn.  The treeman's strangle root accounted for about 10 archers, the BSB and the made and he killed the bolt thrower in combat.

All in all it ended up a 104pts victory to me, so woot!

Then got in another intro game of Malifaux, this time it was Victoria with her obvious crew choice of the Victoria's.  Her first game so we ignored scenarios and went with the option of just doing a big fight.  24 stones each side had the Vics box set vs Sonnia 2 x witchlings, 1 x judge, 1 x deathmarshall & 1 austinger.  Basically because that showed a variety of abilities and they specifically wanted the austinger on the board because it looks cool!

Sword Vikki went into combat first after a few pistol shots off each side but we'd missed the better tricks of how to combo the vics up so she did a load of damage to the judge but he was left standing (vics with no stones so couldn't push through the damage), he flurried back and managed to kill her, I'd not realised just how fragile the Vics are.

We then traded various models until finally Sonnia went overkilll with her spells blowing 2 crew members off the board and turning gun vic into a witchling.  I then threw her into combat with the last crew member to let him cut me down but some bad flips resulted in her surviving so I just put up inferno and ended the turn with the 3 wounds being enough to drop the last player leaving me with Sonnia and the witchling which I summoned from Gun Vic.

All in all I think it went quite well as a demo, Victoria took to the game mechanic instantly and got the rules down quickly, so a bit more familiarity with the crew and the abilities and I'd have been smashed I reckon.  I think we've got another regular player likely to be available.  The other thing is Victoria is an amazing painter and her crew looks beautiful.  Really good showcase to have on the board so should help draw some more interest too.

Whilst running there were a couple of other people popped over to watch so hopefully get them hooked in too!

Does mean I'll need to get to work with a few more models, as need to expand up my crews to get some more options to put down on the table.  A Malifaux order I placed months ago finally arrived Maelstrom had been struggling to get some stock in so a bit delayed.  I'd ordered a mix of Guild and Neverborn:
The Twins (Lilu & Lilutu)
Guild Guard
Austinger
and possibly something else, I forget.

I've also got Collodi and his Marionettes to paint up still so plenty to be going on with.

Finally Jon showed off his Von Schill crew.  I've spoken about Jon's painting a few times, he's the 'I can't paint' player down the club and safe to say I think he's finally getting over it.  The crew have a really solid paintjob on them and he seems incredibly enthused about them.

25% off sale

I've been doing a bit of shopping recently what with OG having a 25% off on all carrying stock sale.
Ended up buying:

2 x 5 DE cold ones
3 x 16 DE spears/Xbows
1 x 10 Savage Orcs
1 x 10 Black Orcs
2 Empire Cannon/Mortars
1 x 8 Knights
1 x 5 Pisotliers/outriders
1 x 2 battle wizards
2 x 20 Stormvermin
1 Doomwheel

Already have 5 pistoliers, 20 free company, warrior priest and some other bits and bobs so all of that gives me a decent chunk of an empire army and a DE army to work on after my Skaven.
The Orc stuff was just random to check out the kits, but I'll probably turn the Black Orcs into Dragon Ogres using some of my spare lizzies cold one models. 

Also picked up some Tau Kroot which I'm going to have a look at turning into plaguebearers to expand out a daemon army from my old slannesh stuff.

Once again I've totally blown my 'paint what you buy' stats but on the plus side I've painted 500+ models so far this year, so not as though I'm slacking in that regard.

I hate dice

Seriously my game last night the dice were going crazy.

1150pts for the campaign WE vs Ogres.

Diagonal deployment I have to set up first, only lose 1 unit which should really have been 2 on averages so started up!  After that though...

Magic - First spell, dispelled, 2nd spell 3 dice = irresistable and lose all 3 mage levels...
Shooting - 8/10 hits for my first few bunches of shots, 3 wounds caused from 30 archers.  HoD arrow rolls up a total of 4 shots and then proceeds to only wound with 1 of those that hit.

Basically this continued for most of the game barring one stand and shoot which caused 5 wounds from 10 shots but then in combat over 4 round 10 elves couldn't cause a single wound to the last remaining maneater until they were all killed.

My dispelling I missed dispelling 3 spells due to the Ogres +1 for casting multiple spells in a turn and the forest i needed to hide my dryads in for stubborn decided to be a blood forest, cause a load of wounds to my stuff then moved perfectly off the dryads so they were no longer stubborn.

Basically I came away thinking this game is utter garbage.  I should just run an army with lots of the hardest combat troops I can get my hands on and not bother with any kind of tactics because none of it mattered.

Play wise I think I out played him. My dryads blocked him up in a forest, I pinned him for a turn as he didn't want to chage due to the wild form (remember diagonal deploy meant he started very close to me so this was my T1). I then maneuver to get a unit in his flank and unit in his rear, so he just passes the march block and moves 12" away and I fail my charge rolls to rear charge him needing a 7 on the dice and he powers off into the heart of my archers.

Also fecking me off was my opponent running 7 Iron guts & Butcher with the +1ld banner and stubborn crown, now stubborn did nothing but the ld8/9 whichever it is takes away the only weakness of that unit I could possibly exploit.

DWARF Winter War review

My list
Slann, BSB, Loremaster - Death, Rumination, Ethereal, Reroll all miscasts, bane head, feedback scroll, 2+ flaming ward, +1 LD banner

Scar vet - Cold one, LA, +1 to hit sword, charmed shield, potion of strength
Scar vet - Cold one, LA, GW, Venom of firefly (magic & poison attacks), dawnstone, dragonbane helmet
Skink Priest lvl 2, scroll
Skink Priest lvl 2, curse charm (force opponent to reroll 1 miscast)

20 Saurus std, muso
24 skink, 3 krox, FC
10 Skinks, Std & Muso (for blood and glory to sit in a back corner)
10 Skink Skirmishers, Javelins
10 Skink Skirmishers, Javelins
10 Skink Skirmishers
10 Skink Skirmishers
6 Chameleon skinks
6 Chameleon skinks
3 Terradons
Salamander, extra crew
Salamander

Reasoning on the list, 2 combaty blocks one of which shoots quite well, a load of chaffy skinks to gun stuff down, slann to zap characters, skink priests to zap heavily armoured stuff

Game 1 Brian - WoC - Battleline
List was
18 Tzeench warriors, shields, FC, 5+ ward vs shooting
45 Khorne marauders, FC, Flails
2 x 5 dogs
30 Nurgle Chosen, FC, Banner of Rage
Warshrine
lvl 4 shadow
lvl 1 tzeench
BSB - no idea
Festus nurgle special character dude - in chosen to give them regen 5+ and for wither & rot combo

T1 Pushes all forwards, gets off withering to drop the skrox to T1, irresistables RgR, I take off the unit, puppets miscast to only kill 3 chosen and wound festus

I try to snipe the Shadow guy who was bane headed both snipes fail (1 dispelled 1 wound from the str one which he warded), I shoot off both dogs units

T2 pushes it all forwards, I stop some spells think he killed some chaff with the 18" d6 sd6 bubble spell.

Snipes fail again, skink priest miscasts with a chain lightning and cascades after the puppet adjusts it down

T3 Same again from him, shut down his magic.

Move slann in range of festus, both scar vets into the tzeench block with lvl 1 & lvl 4, challenge from champion & S7 scar vet takes it so other guy can pummel the lvl 1. Magic, does nothing. Combat, kill his champion and then 3 wounds on lvl 1, 2 x 6+ AS, 1 x 6++ ward and zero wounds caused... I hold in the combat having lost by 1.

T4 khorne guys chage some skinks with over run into front of impassable terrain I flee roll low and he catches me. Nurgle advances forwards. Magic 4 dice wither gets a high roll and I let it go as only 3 dice left, rolls 5 for -3T on my slann & saurus. 3 dice rot, double 6's take the slann & saurus off, miscast loses all levels. Should have scrolled the withering really, my mistake. Scar vets on 2 characters both flub their dice I cause 1 wound he causes 1 to each of mine, Both fail their break tests on a 4 or 5 I think, both low flee rolls both run down (realised this isn't possible now I think about it as can only chase one unit, oops my mistake again).

Skink priest goes for comet at the tzeench guys, goes off but they are able to move away before it lands.

T5&6 He just shuffles around as no combats on any more. I continued shooting on the khorne stuff & shrine as only points left I could possibly get barring a lucky comet/thunderbolt. Irresistable the thunerbolt on 4 dice and puppet makes it cascade, take priest off.

Shoot the warshrine dead and khorne guys down to about 8 but not enough, I get 190 vps for 1-19 loss.

Game 2 Sean - Skaven - Blood & Glory +500vps

Seer on bell, BSB, ~30 stormvermin
Priest on furnace ~45 Plaguemonks
2 x 40 slaves in horde formation
2 x 20 clanrats
2 x doomwheels
2x WLC

Only got 5 turns in and my 5th was about 5 mins long, for an army that needs all 6 to harvest points that's frustrating. One thing he did forget was the MR2 on the bell, I didn't pick it up either so would have had a 2+ ward on his seer against snipes but suspect it wouldn't have mattered in the end.

One question for me to look up, when the bell rings can that move be a charge?

I killed 1 wlc, 1 wheel, Seer & Bell (in T5), 1 slave unit.
He killed skink krox - I fluffed in combat versus slaves for 3 rounds then wheel went in the flank. My error as should have charged the wheel earlier anyway and not left the charge on for the slaves. 1 priest 3-4 units of skinks for a tie.

Most frustrating moment letting plague go on skinks when he 6 diced it and didn't irresitable so I could use feedback scroll, didn't roll a single 5+, good chance of killing his seer right there...

10-10 draw (neither achieved breakpoint)

Game 3 Russell Empire - Capture the objective.

Total mismatch of armies, mine was basically designed to kill his. Skinks death clouded everything, every second artillery dice he rolled was a misfire, think he managed to kill 2 saurus all game or something like that. I sniped off all his characters except the warrior priest but miscast on one spell to lose 3 levels when taking a wound off the tank and lost purple sun just before I was about to cast it on the tank. Knights died to salamanders after fighting through the Skrox and losing a load of them & the character. He had about 8 halberds left & priest and tank at the end of the game. I'd lost the skink krox unit when the tank went in after they had done some grinding on the knights. T6 slann charged the tank to stop it from charging my saurus who were on the objective.

20-0 to me (would have been an 18-2 without the objective)

Overall quite frustrating event given how hard my army was I really expected to do better than 1-1-1 record ending on 31/60.

DWARF - Winter War Charity Event

So we've rolled round to November and for the first time ever I'm actually going to manage to make a local tournament that isn't at my own club!  You'd think 2.5 yrs of tournament gaming I might have managed to make something in Scotland but no.

The event is a 1 day, 3 game max 50 players event and it's currently got 48 but just saw another possible sign up today so seems it might max out.  Restriction wise it's very light touch, ie no comp at all, only hero level special characters are alowed but otherwise it's 2400pts of all out nastiness.

So what to take, well having bumbbed about with dwarfs, WE and TK for a while I've finally decided to go for my lizzies.  And  my god is there a power difference in those books.  List isn't optimised I don't think but it's massively hard,  taking a slann with all the toys for 535pts and a bunch of other characters, basically it means I've got a hell of a lot of safe points in the army unless people are able to snipe them out. 

I've been running the slann on death magic, the sniper spells tend to frustrate your opponent as the tough decision is toss dice at it or chance a lucky dice roll taking off their characters because so few people build their armies to combat it.  Plus if you get lucky you can get all your dice back when you do cast a spell!

But the lore lacks any good zappy spells for targetting infantry, after a rather brutal game against a WoC list where his wards held up all game and I didn't snipe a single character (did kill 2, 1 with shooting, ran 1 down who fled) I decided a couple of skink priests on heavens means a quite high chance of getting thunerbolt, chain lightning or comet All of which are good against troops so give me something benificial to the list.

The other change was to drop the second skink-krox unit, they are fantastic when combined with light magic but with death there are no synergies, so I'd rather have more chaff shooting away where possible, plus chaff just frustrates people which is always nice.  That dropped me to 2 blocks and as blood and glory is a scenario I added in a unit of 10 ranked skinks with a standard who's job will be to standin a back corner and try not to die!  With the slann holding 3 breakpoints I only really need one other unit to ensure I'm above and best it's not one I'd ever consider fighting with!

There were a few posts asking about the power level for this tournament.  I'd describe a number of the players as taking very hard armies.  I know there will be Daemons, WoC and DE players who will have pretty much maxed out lists (I've played 2 of them already), so that's the level I'm looking to compete with.  I've surfed mid table mediocrity for quite some time now, it would be good to see if I can mix it with the big boys but I have sold my soul to a filthy list in order to do so!

So the question I'm asking myself now is do I really want to go down that road?  For those that follow the scene there is a rankings website which tracks how everyone is doing relative to each other in the UK.  Scoring is based upon everyones top 4 events, with a max score of 100pts for 5 game+ events with 60+ players, it gets pro rated below that, so at 3 games and 50 players even winning the event won't get me a max score.  Add to that the whole thing of 'who cares?'.  And to be honest other than as a bit of a laugh with some mates the usual answer is - nobody.  But I do wonder if the additional thing of being an ETC player but ranked way way outside where most of them are makes me think I should really show that, actualy, yes I am ok at this game.

Anyway my list is written, the fun is there to be had.  Fingers crossed I don't ruin anyones days (there was a suspicion I somewhat upset someone at the forgotten heroes event, oops!) and I get to play some toy soldiers.

I'm just not that good

It's a strange thing, I've been playing Warhammer pretty solidly for the last couple of years, played a bunch of tournaments and face a fair number of decent players.  Locally I play against a lot of pretty decent players who've won tournaments and regularly place well, my record versus them is pretty mixed but generally sub 50%.  At some point presumably I've got to accept that I'm just not that good?

The thing is every time I play someone with a good record their comment is that I've given them a really hard game and they struggled to beat me, though usually they do in the end!  So I'm not sure where this leaves me, is it that I'm not that good a player, or I don't design good army lists or some other intangible factor.

One thing I'm famous for is my dice rolling, as a general rule I buck the averages, unfortunately this tends to be rolling low, apart from those occassional games where my dice will catch fire and I'll burn someone up badly.  But I had a game recently where my dice were running pretty hot, pretty much everything I put into combat was hitting above averages, and wounding about normal, so overal I was up on the average, but I still lost the game badly.  Partly due to not hitting the averages when I needed it.  In one turn there were 2 ogre characters standing in the open <15" from 50 Wood Elves, 3's to hit, 5's to wound and armour and wards to negotiate. One character was 5+ armour, 4+ Look out sir, 4+ ward.  Other was 3+ Armour, 5+ ward.  Avg is 33 hits, 11 wounds before saves.  After armour & wards I did nothing, thinking about it I was dreaming that I would drop a character, even with a 3+,5++ that should negate most of the wounds.

I hear tales from other people of regularly gunning things down in that same state, I can only assume they approach things differently to swing the odds, but I can't see how!  More than anything else I struggle with armies which run at you and try to smash you off the table.  I think I play it right, I generally avoid setting up directly opposite them, I spread my units, concentrate my fire, put out diverters, blockers and yet somehow it always seems to cave in on me and I'm left dodging characters around the gaps between their units in a desperate effort to survive whist everyone else dies a horrible death.

Another game recently I lost due to a tactical blunder, plus my opponent having missed something that was critical to my decision making process which left a slightly bitter taste but for a fun practice game of no significance.

The tactical blunder was my being too cautious with my super slann who should have been thrown into combat with a big unit of knights to pin them in place, they had magical attacks so I ran away instead, but I forgot they had a character in them who didn't and with WoC having to challenge I'd have been taking ld 9 tests on 3 dice for the rest of the game with a reroll to pin 8 chaos knights and a hero in place so my army could have shot off his other blocks.  His error was not testing to restrain a frenzy charge from a nurgle block with the banner of rage, as a result I stuck 24 saurus into them after thinning them down thinking I could whittle them before they did me.  The extra attacks meant I poped in quick order and I'd have just backed off and shot him with skinks and salamanders if I'd known (which because of the test I should have been aware of the frenzy).

As a result he got my breakpoint, the unit, their banner and his unit survived. with the BP being worth 500vps at the tournment this was practice for that equates to 800 additional vps from me and him not giving up 300vps.

Again I felt my luck screwed with me on this one.  T1 I go to launch a bit of death magic at my opponent and double 1 my first spell needing a 3+ to cast it.  I then shoot 10 skinks at a guy on a disc, 2 poison hits, 2+ AS and he double 1's the armour and fails his 6+ ward losing his only mage in the process.  From then on I've a death slann with utter magical dominance and he achieved a grand total of 2 wounds from his 3 snipe spells virtually every turn.  My opponent just let me cast them then out diced me in the LD test, I rolled low on the S & T test and then he warded eveything on his 3+/4+ wards on his characters.  Seriously nothing close to averages.  I did get to beat up his general 3+ ward, stubborn general in combat with a skrox unit and I'd doom and darnessed to drop his LD to 6 and he broke.  Next turn he remembered that his disc had an attack rolled the dice, hit wound, would have been enough for him to win the combat, ah well hindsight.

I just wish death magic would do what I expect, banehead combined with death should equal dead characters early in the game.  My slann has killed next to none.  The most useful thing he ever does is D&D and soulblight units so the salamanders can flame them and make them flee, only reason it seems to work is that is an uncontested dice roll.

Anyway, I'm going to take him to the tournament this weekend and see how it goes, but it might be the death knell for death magic if he still refuses to perform. 

Dreadfleet & other stuff

I picked up dreadfleet from GW on the basis of they seldom made a bad game.  I've not played it yet so can't comment upon that but got round to clipping it all off the sprue and gluing it together yesterday.  The figures all look pretty nice, not the most amazing thing I've ever seen but for what they are I don't have a problem at all.

Most peoples gripe seems to be the price.  Given you're getting 10 ships, plus the rules plus some terrain I don't really see £70 as a ridiculous pricetag.  But I can see how younger hobbiests who don't have the disposable income I've got might be put off.  It seems that they haven't flown off the shelves in the same way that space hulk did, probably because a) it wasn't as well anticipated/marketed b) It's not a reworking of an old favourite and c) the figs don't look quite as stunning.

Speaking of space hulk I've still only played it whice and painted zero of the models.  I should really put it up for sale on Ebay to cash in the upside of the game but the terminators are a tad too nice for me to want to part with despite my not playing 40k at the moment.

Other stuff, I've updated my Malifaux pages with most of the latest additions to my crews, still missing a few which I'll need to get pictures taken but I have to say for a game I've only played properly about 4 times it's got me hell of  a captivated.

Warhammers - I've been churning out Skaven, now at 80 clanrats and 40 slaves with another 40 slaves only a couple of steps from completion, think I've now worked out the correct approach to painting these guys with the most efficient manner.  Hopefully get the army out on the table at some point next year but I'm really looking to get the WE going again but TK keep tempting me and the lizards too.  Damn you temptation!

WE are going to be used in a club campaign which kicks off this week, starting at 1000pts and building from there.  There are a few restrictions in place to prevent some of the worst excesses but the biggest limitation is the 'don't be an idiot' request.  I've gone for a fairly balance list with a bunch of archers and some dryads.  Deciding between either a mage or a hero for my general is the hardest part.

Lizards are getting a run out in a couple of weeks at a tournament, will be going with the death slann again along with all the usual lizard nastiness.  Just a 1 day event with 3 games of no comp 2400pts nastiness!

Staying Unfocussed

I read a number of other peoples blog and plogs and a recurring theme seems to be the question of how do people stay committed to a project.  I feel I've done pretty well on this over the years, I played and painted the dwarfs for pretty much 15 years non stop (ok a big break in the middle but was commited to that army when I did paint anything).  Since I branched out and started with the WE (branched out, da dum cha) they were originally intended as a 'quality painting' project.  Unfortunately I got really bored of them really quickly and just shelved them.  I then started gaming regularly again which led me to looking at wanting other armies to play and I bought the lizards to have as a 'quick' project whist I could concentrate on the woodies.  Then 8th came out and blew the whole gambit by utterly changing how armies were constructed.

So what did I do?  I went back to my dwarfs painted up enough to get them on the table, played a few games, got bored of them all over again and wanted a new army!  That lead to me bashing out the WE next because I happened to get hooked on painting a few of their models again.  Then I got hooked into the lizards and got them really going, plus I picked up some Malifaux, Epic, 40k, Skaven and doubtlessly some other stuff.

I think had I tried to stay with one army I'd have really struggled, I'd get bored painting the same thing over and over and the shelve the project.  Instead I've got my scatter gun approach which keeps me desperate to paint something new all the time.  Last week was a slow week, I did an ogre to show a clubmate, a couple of bret knights to try and come up with a scheme for when I do the army (project Pokemon* continues).  This week saw me finish off a third bret knight and then bash out 40 skaven and I've got 2 malifaux models on my painting table for when they're done.  Before the ogre it was WE's.

I have a tournament coming up, I've got a choice of 4 armies I can bring out for it, one's a bit limited but the others I can take virtually everything from the books.  The most common question I've had on my painting is how on earth I can paint so much and stay motivated?  The answer is
1. so much because I've set my standards well below my best, mass army painting = mass army paintjob.
2. Because I enjoy painting a variety of different stuff so it doesn't get stale.


* Gotta catch 'em all - I want a painted version of every army

Club Hobby Guru

The last couple of weeks saw me get somewhat hobby distracted.  I flipped back to my WE in order to get some updates done for a silly list I was wanting to take for a tournament in late November, but it's now looking like I'm not going to be able to attend.

But progress was made, I painted a forest dragon and 13 more glade riders (I now have 20 in total, yes, I know they're rubbish).

But then I hit the wall a little but playing a game vs Jon (a clubmate) with his brand new Ogres in the classic grey plastic scheme.  He's dedicated to painting them up though so we were chatting paint schemes.  I very tounge in cheek suggested he go for a night time scheme.  There are a number of 'source lit' night time armies, mostly VC, floating about in the UK tournament scene.  The majority of them look 'ok' but nothing special in my eyes.  So in suggesting this I was saying 'spray black, dust with lighter colour 'claim it's done'...

We then got onto more serious schemes and how easy it would be to paint an ogre army using current techniques.  Total army is 6 bulls, 6-8 iron guts, 4 lead belchers, 3 characters, 4 mournfangs, iron blaster and 3 sabretusks.  Model count is very low, so that's the first tick.  Models themseleves are quite big and simple, so painting between the lines is quite easy and they don't have a lot of unnecessary detail on them, so you're not wasting time on intricate stuff people will never look at!

Discussion then turned to how to make them look good.  As it happens there have been a few nice armies floating around with different skin tones, mostly blues, but I'd seen a beasts army with a very effective red skin scheme.  So I suggested that.  Jon was thinking black trousers but that's quite a tricky paint scheme so I suggested grey and after that it's really only metals and leather.

With that set I went away and dug out the 4 ogre models I'd bought thinking I might use them in a WoC project which I then shelved (and sold on recently).  I then tried to work out the quickest possible way of painting them.  To be clear Jon doesn't really enjoy painting and wanted a few pointers on how to go about it, I didn't just steal his scheme!

So speed being the call of the day with a tournament in a months time
1. Red skin - that'd be a trip to halfords for their red primer
2. Grey trousers - foundation grey - astrimonicon I think
3.  Iyander darksun for the leather basecoat
4. Boltgun metal

Everything then got a black wash and a few highlights reapplied to the red and metals before basing.

Really simple and quite effective.  Over to Jon now to roll it out across an army.

Malifaux updates

Having done the two crews for the guild and a couple of support guys I decided I wanted to paint something a bit different and branch out.

Of the guys down my club who play there is:
Me -Lady J, Sonnia
Graeme - Perdita
Jon - Collette (and another but forget who as he's not used them yet)
Trev - Rasputina
Dale - Kirai
Tim - Seamus & Sommer

Therefore leaving a nice big Neverborn shaped gap.  So I decided to put that right (and apparently they're dead good too!)

First up was who to buy, a quick look through at the masters
Pandora - Oh my god what a horrible crew (actually a guy down the club owns them but he's thrown a hissy fit claiming the rules are rubbish and don't work) totally about stimeying your opponent from doing anything, not really how I want to play.
Lilith - Massive beatstick, so a bit like lady J, who I've already got
Zoraida - Umm, so I make your guys do stuff or alteratively fly 20 odd inches in a turn, ok sounds good to me! Plus I love the dolls thing and the flexibility to take all sorts of different models, in no way at all with that result in me having a vast collection...
Dreamer - Aparently ridiculously good in the game, love the background story.  His models didn't look that cool though other than the stitched.
Collodi - More dolls, not necessarily sold on him, suspect the rules may take some getting used to but double teamed with Zoraida could be fun.

So one obvious winner - Lady Z but as it happens someone on a forum was selling off the Dreamer box and a Collodi box too so ended up buying all three (actually also tried to buy Pandora and Lilith boxes too but got ripped off by someone claiming it got lost in the post).

ETC - Team Scotland

The ETC has come and gone, I'm just about recovered from the burn out and as with the last time, it was awesome.

Montreux was spectacularly beautiful, I'm somewhat gutted that I didn't spend more time just wandering around it enjoying the sights.  Anyways rambling over onto the event, hall was basically in an underground car park on a conference centre, it was pretty much perfect for our needs, lots of space, nice and cool given the outside temp of 30+ degrees.

I won't go heavily into the results, they can be seen elsehwere and most people won't care, but that said for my personal records
Round 1 - Denmark - Daemons
Round 2 - Serbia - WoC
Round 3 - Croatia - Daemons
Round 4 - Sweden - WoC
Round 5 - Ireland - Lizards
Round 6 - Wales - High Elves

All opponents were awesome fun and the games were great, the team all seemed to have a great time and everyone wants to come back again!  This really is an event unlike any other there are so many like minded people in the room all doing the same thing, plus the fact I was blind drunk for large parts of the weekend...

Oh and one more thing, I've been voted in as captain for next year... Eeek!

Wow, how time flies!

So following on from my 6 nations ragequit of the dwarfs I've been frantically painting up TK.  The good thing about that is it exposed me to all the new kits they released and wow are they great.  GW really smash it out the park when it comes to big plastic kits and the TK take this and run with it.

I've got 2 Spinx and 8 Necroknights done and I really want to add a necrosphinx now too just to complete the lot, unfortunately the Sepultural stalkers don't have a place in my army so they won't be showing up any time soon.

Also got my hands on some finecast, turns out GW aren't total muppets, after some teething issues with their initial release they've brought out a slew of stuff which has all been top notch quality and I've heard none of the whining that there was about bubbles and issues from the initial release.

I've got a casket (it's so light it's amazing) so instantly magnetised up the crew as they weigh so little I've no worries about them snapping off.  Now picked up a lich priest to go with that too, not a massive fan of the pose of the model but wow is the detail great and worth bearing in mind the older sculpts weren't built with fincast in mind where this guy has been, it really shows I think.

Complete army was painted in around a month so by a mile my fastest ever project.  Doesn't look amazing but I'd say it's a decent tabletop standard.

Now can relax for a while and enjoy the army but painting it has got me quite motivated to crack on with my next project.  I decided to go back to Malifaux for a while and paint up Zoridas crew, I've started work on the first silurid.  As ever Malifaux figs are just great fun to paint so blasted through it in short order.

6 Month Hobby Update

So the blog software ate my last post and in a fit of huffyness I refused to replace it.  So instead of a post about the 6 nations ETC event and my subsequent move to doing TK you are going to be treated to some proper geektastic hobby stats

Unfortunately they seem to have shrunk somewhat but the first 6 months of the year has seen me paint 276 figures.  I'm pretty confident that that will be my highest tally ever by some distance and I'm only half way through the year!  Traditionally the back end has been a bit slower for me as I have more holidays lined up but I'll be completing a TK army for August (another 80ish figs to go) and then probably cracking on with the Skaven after that.  Though I could do with getting some more 40k painting done for the Eldar.

Malifaux - finally starting to get there

Played a game last night which it finally started to feel like a proper game as understood the scenarios and a bit about my opponents crew and starting to play a bit more tactically.

Game was 25SS Lady J vs Collette
My Crew
Lady J
Executioner (7 SS)
Austringer (5 SS)
3 Death Marshals (12 SS)
+1SS in my pool

Arcanists
Collette
Cassandra
2 Corphy
Dove
Think he might have miscounted as pretty sure started with more than 3 stones but hardly matters.

Diagonal deployment and the strategies were:
Guild - Plant Evidence
Arcanists - Claim Jump

So quite a good objective as it forced his crew to get to one area meaning if I could boss that area I was likely to win.  Planting evidence is tricky with a rather slow crew but I thought it was achievable.

Schemes
Guild - Bodyguard (Lady J) and Hold Out
Arcanists - Bodyguard (Collette) and Sabotage
I revealed bodyguard but not hold out and he revealed both. 

Against Collette I really didn't expect to be able to prevent him from doing either of the schemes so knew I was pretty much starting vs 4pts and my only option was to try and prevent him from achieving his strategy.  Because of my speed I didn't think I was likely to achieve all 3 of my objectives and because I wanted to run down his crew to make it harder for him on the claim jump I couldn't just run everyone accross the board or I'd just end up losing 8-7 as I didn't declare the hold out.

T1 He pushed Cassandra right forwards towards his sabotage objective but hid her from LoS.  I was tempted to have a go with the Austringer just to start chiping wounds but thought it was just out the 18" so basically everything just moved up.  Collette did her soul stone routine and started to create doves.

T2 Cassandra completed the sabotage mission and I ran towards my objective markers again, I then set about trying to get some wounds on cassandra but the combination of light cover and her innate abilities meant everything missed.  he pushed up his cophyry to block me getttng to my objective and then joined them together.  My eyes somewhat lit up at this as it was in range of lady J.  Over she charged after activating her sword style with onslaught as I had some high masks in my hand.  Couple of strikes later with no cheating required I had one dead duet, clearly a massive advantage this early in the game. 

T3 Cassandra took revenge for the corphy as I'd forgotten she had blast attacks in her flame breath and she toasted a couple of marshalls I'd left close together, managed to kill one and badly wound another.  We hit a rules query here that I'd not come across before as the fire blast activated her push trigger to put her out of LoS and I wasn't sure which happened first, the trigger or my slow to die, resolved it by flipping cards and she hid before getting shot.  Austringer then put a heap of wounds on her and he was forced to burn a stone to reduce the damage.  Exec onto the other objective, unfortunately it was the last thing he did as he then got turned into a manequin by Collette who hit books everywhere!

T4 initiative agian and tried to kill cassandra with the Austringer before her defenses went up.  Nearly got her but with a stone she was left on 1 wound.  Doves bombed a marshall eventually taking him out and Lady J smashed up the remaining doves and went for an objective, collette created doves and moved onto his objective. Cassandra then activated her sword strike mid move and took down my last marshal.  He went to strike back with his slow to die with a good chance of getting the kill with a decent damage flip.  Unforunately I hit the black joker on the strike and it failed so she got away with it and went into the Austriner.

T5 austringer & J only ones left, I won the initiative and tried to break combat with cassandra, unforunately flipped badly and he burnt a stone to stop me breaking free on my cheat.  He then went for a bash but flipped low damage for zero wounds with a single neg flip. finally he activated J.  It was a toss up, I could have tried to shoot cassandra but instead focussed on my stragety burning one marker and then moving back to the next one.  Cassandara killed the austringer and moved back towards his strategy.

T6 J kills stuff on route to marker and takes it (think I'm a bit mixed up in turns here as she had to blat a few doves and the manequin but still did them and took the marker in T6 then with final move went down to contest the claim jump. Flip gave a T7.

Killed off dove and was forced to charge collette for only chance to win by killing her.  Tried for onslaught as it's my only hope but no masks in my hand meant it was unlikely.  Flipped, cheated, stoned and didn't hit one and collette burnt stones and flipped to end up preventing the strike I think.  Game ends, cassandra moves into contest the objective and he has 2 to my 1 for the max 4 pts.

Game ends 8-5
I got - 2 for plant evidence, 2 for bodyguard, 1 for Hold out
He got 4 for stake clame, 2 for bodyguard, 2 for sabotage

Painting slowdown

Having blazed through 100 models in the early part of this month I've now settled into a week of non completeion.  Admittedly it's largely driven by the fact I'm having to build models now.  The next lot of Skaven were all still on the sprue so I spent a fruitful couple of hours clipping all the bits off and segregating the spear arms from the HW&S ones and removing all the excess bits that I won't use.  I've now got a massive bag of 80 IoB clanrats and 80 of the older monkey like models which are slowly being cleaned of all mould lines.

Because of the break in the mass painting I took the time to also clean up my last couple of terradons so they are now fully built, greenstuffed and magnetised.  Unfortuantely I ran out of primer so a slight stumbling block on progress but should get that cleared up tomorrow night.

And finally I spotted a model I'd picked up a while back but then burnt out on my Malifaux stuff before getting to this one.  I promised myself I'd only play with painted models and I'd not buy any further crews until the ones I owned were complete.  But also something about the model just grabbed me.  I knew I was changing paint schemes and I'd not sat down and worked out how I'd do the Guild Guards but I knew I wanted them to look more normal than the specialist crews, less of a bespoke uniform and more like the everyday people.

This weekend sees the 6 nations event in Edinburgh, the cream of the teams from throughout the UK (and France) are coming together to contest the 6 Nations (and really just to practice for the ETC).  Last year this was one of the most enjoyable events on the calender, really chilled out yet competitive gaming.  So good luck to Scotland (who I'm playing for) and the other ragtag contenders (England, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales).  I'll be running my dwarfs and trying to bore 6 opponents into accepting 10-10 draws, fingers crossed my back board edge tactics do me proud.

Lizards - An end in sight

So this week saw some more lizards hit the painting table.  What should have been 32 Saurus ended up being 31 as I misplaced one prior to undercoating but has since turned up again!

Done in the same quick format as the rest of my army but still a pleasure to paint as it gets so much done so soon.  That leaves me with the following outstanding for the complete army: 12 chameleon skins, 2 salamanders & crew, 3 Kroxigor, 2 Terradons, 1 stegs crew and 2 more mounted scar vet models because I want to do them a bit better than my saurus cav.  Probably want to add 20+ temple guard at some point but don't own the models at present.

Also got a game in at 2000pts, no lords vs Pash's High Elves.  Ended up he was trying something new, a horrible gunline army 80 archers, 4 bolt throwers, 2 eagles and 2 x lvl 2's plus a mounted BSB.  I had wanted to take the lizards but just lacked time to write a list due to work so ended up pulling out an old dwarf list that was compliant with the no lords restrictions.

Unforunately that made it elf gunline vs dwarf army with warmachines.  Basically it's hard not to make a dwarf army a gunline but my two blocks of 35 strong troops tried their hardest!  In short however I proved that templates > arrows.  blew some gaping holes in his army early on and then started to chew up bolt throwers once I took the eagles out.  My combat stuff had mix fortunes.  Unit with BSB in it failled a LD9 with reroll panic test and put themselves out the game but were never going to surrender their points.  Other unit chewed up 2 archer blocks and 2 bolt throwers. 

Pretty straightforward game with a fun opponent but nothing really learned.

Dip dip dip dip

So the high quality Eldar project has hit my usual stumbling block, I got most of the way through a second vehicle and first squad and lost all interest.  Just goes to show how results focused I am.  I hate not having something to show for it after a few hours work so have set them to one side for the moment and I'm working on various other figs I've got stacking up uncompleted.

Addition 1 - 47 Skaven Slaves, these were done to add to the 40 Island of Blood Clanrats I did last year.
They were bought second hand so came pre assembled and all I had to do was fix up some damage recieved in transit, a few broken tails and arms but nothing to significant.

Quite happy with how they came out, the scheme was designed for the IoB style rats so wasn't sure how it would transfer, thankfully it works ok and they don't look too bland.  Not using brown on the bases is one of the key visual elements of the dipped army.  So I now have something like 300pts worth of painted skave, all that in 90ish models, yikes!

Addition 2 - 31 Saurus
The lizardmen have been languising for quite some time now, but I lent some terradons out over the tempest weekend and got the comment that they were the best painted part of his army! well that was such a nice complement it made me actually want to finish off the army off.  What I'd been putting off was the last bulk painting requirement.  Currently I have 20 saurus with spears and knew HW&S was the way to go these days so decided I'd best knuckle down and build a unit.  I finished cleaning them up last week and then set about getting them painted over the weekend.  Slow progress but I eventually got them all dipped.  Bases have been started for them and some remaining skinks I'd not gotten round to basing up yet.

After that I've just got some metals to finish off:
2 x terradons
3 x kroxigor
12 chameleon skinks
2 x salamanders
and the crew for a stegadon plus the howdah weapons (which will be magnetised to allow all options.

That'll take me up to 3 complete Fantasy armies with the skaven being a mere 200+ models to go!

Tempest 3

Tempest 3

After those practice games I ended up making a couple more tweaks to the list and had a final warm up the night before.

My list:

Lvl 4 Beasts, fireball ring, wand of wych elm

Lord, Bodkins, Bow of Loren, Stone of rebirth, GW

BSB, Hail of doom, 2+ ward vs flaming

12 Archers, FC, flaming banner

12 Archers, FC

12 Archers, FC

12 Dryads - champion

8 Dryads

8 Dryads

4 Treekin – champion

4 Treekin – champion

7 Wardancers

6 Waywatchers

Eagle

Treeman

45 shots

45 combat troops

1 flier, no war machines

Basically fully compliant with the comp restrictions despite not needing to be because it’s wood elves!

Warm up game was vs Kevin Gillett and his Bretonians. In short he ran across the board at me with all his lances and did horrible things to me!  My treeman was heroic killing blowed and lances bust up my units pretty badly.  I killed a load of stuff back, but didn’t get any of his big points in lances.  Big win to Kev making us all square over the last couple of years.

Tournament was all 6 missions out the rulebook played on w/d/l 30/10/1 with vps as a tiebreak.

Round 1 – diagonal deploy

Round 2 – Battle for the pass

Round 3 – Watchtower

Round 4 – Random Deployment

Round 5 – Blood and Glory

Round 6 – Battleline

Special rules meant I got to pick the type of woods all weekend and magic levels weren’t added to casting attempts, plus some other pretty standard stuff.

Round 1 I had grudged an opponent.  Bernard Lewis is one of the most enjoyable opponents and friendliest guys on the tournament scene.  And thankfully we generally play at about the same level too.  He’d beaten me last time out to go 2-1 up so I grudged him for the chance to pull even.  Unfortunately it didn’t work out!

The other good thing about playing him is he brings the most interesting lists you’ll see pretty much anywhere, in this instance:

2 x 15 marauder horse of slannesh with exhalted champions on steeds of slannesh (quite scary when in your face T1)

5 Dragon Ogres

6 Chaos Ogres (Khorne maybe?)

5 Chaos Trolls

20 Marauders (who sat in the back corner)

Lord on Jugger

warshrine

Think that was about it, lightning fast and quite scary in combat, so not really what my army wants to face.

Usual fun game with loads dying on both sides and combat from T1, unfortunately I blew up my mage on my first spell of the day so no magic on either side! Ended up coming down to a single dice roll at the end. I had my treeman fighting his lord on jugger and a single dragon ogre.  He took 4 wounds but had a 6+ save due to the warshrine, I kill him and it’s the best part of 500 more vps to me and possibly breaking the lord too.  Unfortunately 1 dice comes down a 6 and he wins the game by ~350vps.  Awesome way to start the tournament.

Game 2 and I face... Warriors of chaos (Tris), much more standard list with 2 x blocks, 2 x knight and various chaff.  Lots of magic. Early he pounds me with magic till I suicide in the treekin to try and take the mages out.  Get one and wound another other.  My shooting hammers his chaff and then his knights.  Basically that’s about it.  He kills treekin and dryads, I kill knights and mages.  I just get enough to win.  I was a bit lucky on the dice but was a fun game.

Game 3 Warriors of... Really! Watchtower 18 khorne warriors halberds and as my treeman discovered flaming banner.  Non game, opponent still whined for 2 turns when his hellcannon rolled a 1 to wound my treeman T1.  My shooting did nothing all game and he rolled me up.  Was pleased to have it done quickly.  Also had his GF at the table, which is weird, I can’t see why she had come along, looked bored and made him ignore me because of talking to her.

Game 4.... Yup you guessed it, warriors of chaos.

Pete Bradley, who I last played at Sheffield in 2010.  He was rising off the bottom tables in game 3 to face me as I sunk down.  Another fun game where we both smashed up each others armies. I thought I was in trouble when a unit of treekin decided to leg it away from a marauder block with HW&S when they fluffed their attacks.  They were run down and the pursuit put him into my archer block that was shooting his rampaging hellcannon. Not good, but then my treeman decided he’d solo a chariot then a block of warriors with halberds and the flaming banner that I’d shot up badly, I survived the attacks and a 6 for the thunderstomp meant they all decided to go bye bye.  A bit lucky and it gave me the win by 350ish points

Game 5 Nick Price and Oh thank god, not warriors! High Elves

All I can say is that curse of Aranrahir and lots of terrain was brutal to his combat units.  I also outdeployed him quite well and was able to take off all his shooting in 2-3 turns.  In the end it was 1 sword master with a lord and mage and 8 phoneix guard was all he had left.  Pretty brutal fight and one I didn’t think I was losing from early on.  I was a bit scared he might get my breakpoint though as archers were getting chopped up late in the game.

Game 6

Woodelves.  Only he had 80 archers!  But to be honest we didn’t really play much I ran down flanks in cover, he shot me.  We chatted and only got 3 turns done in the round time.  Points dead was a draw and we both just accepted it.  Good fun to chat and pretty sure he’d have had me if we’d played all 6 turns.

Fun tournament and I came 31^st of 84.  Unfortunately that was still bottom wood elf!  Mark (game 6) was 1 place above me, Ben around 20^th and Paul in 4^th had all played their socks off and gad winning records leaving me with a positive result but sadly nothing to show for it.

Still the rankings points put me back into the top 200. I now have 4 scores again, 2 in the very low ~10 region, 2 at 30ish but unlikely to score many more until 2 results drop off so will just have to accept that as my normal teriotory (as it has been in the past anyway).

Gaming Updates

Resalised I've missed off the last few games I've played.  After a slightly slow start with my Tempest List I've been tweaking it slowly and finally starting to get to where I want it.

List is:
Spellsinger Lvl 4 - Beasts, fireball ring, wand of reroll dispel dice
Lord - Bow of loren arcane bodkins (4 S3 no AS shots), 2+ ward save once on 1 wound
BSB, hail of doom (gets to keep his bow under the comp)

10 Glade Guard, FC, BoEF
10 Glade Guard, FC
10 Glade Guard, FC
11 Dryads - Champ
8 Dryads
8 Dryads
6 Scouts

4 Treekin - Champ
4 Treekin - Champ
3 Warhawks

6 Waywatchers
Eagle
Treeman

A nice mix of various bits and not doing the whole eat my massive horde unit tactic.

Played
Skaven - Quite heavily restricted under the pack
lvl 4 bell, Abom, 1 WLC, no storm banner, no doom rocket, 2 x slaves (max 40s), 2 x 30 clanrats, 20 giant rats, warlock -brass orb, BSB, 30 Plague monks & plague priests lvl 1. 9 Censer bearers. 1 ratling gun, 1 Warp fire thrower. 24 Night runners and a grinder team. 6 gutter runners

Was the random deployment mission and his bell went in one corner which stuffed him up a little, but everything else went where he wanted pretty much, so not too bad in the end, he basically loaded up everything within the bells ld bubble and then put the monks, abom to the far side and then just shoved it forwards. His night runners sat right beside my character block (they didn't turn up until T6 and that was a misfire which killed half of them and I had the treeman sat on the marker so they got beaten up for their troubles, oh dear!).

My list did it's usual thing of being spread out across the entire baseline but all the archers ended up pretty well grouped and I dumped all my characters in one unit as my first deployment to give me some control over them.

Basically it was one of those games where the skaven toys didn't work much and I was able to kill his abom with my first turn of shooting (it should on averages).  I was then able to swing one flank and draw back on my other flank keeping most stuff out of combat.  Without the Abom or furnace skaven can't deal with the treekin in combat so I was able to push those up at him and really block him up.  The censer bearers got to play with dryads and the volume of attacks means I dropped them to 3 thus removing their combat efficiency so the only remaining threat was magic and the WLC.  The treeman did nothing all game except sit on the night runners marker until they appeared, without that he'd have been doing horrible things to his units.

So under these restrictions skaven are quite a nice matchup.

Next was lizardmen, generally a horrible match up.  This is why I have the waywatchers in the list.  The kiling blow shots means he has to keep the scar vets in his units or I can pick them off.  Without them he can meanace me with the scar vets who I generally can't touch.

I was able to force him to hold off which let me shoot his skrox unit to bits, he sacrificed his chameleons to get a unit of treekin but that let me get a saurus block too by charging the second unit in.  Not the best of trades but I also got the scar vet as a result because he was left exposed after combat which meant I could killing blow him with the waywatchers so about neutral on points.  I thought I was up early when I cast the big amber spear into his steg only to hit the steg and get a 1 to wound.  Very frustrating.  Eventally took the steg down but he got my treeman at the same time.  I sacrificed some dryads and couldn't kill off enough of his chaff to force a win but did eventally get the Skink krox unit through a bit of luck, otherwise he'd have had my bsb and probably the win.  Ended up a draw with ~30 vps in my favour.

Finally felt like the army was starting to click.  What I can't decide between are the 3 warhawks vs a unit of wild riders.  Both are very flexible but is fly better than the combat of the wild riders, not sure.

Eldar goodness continues

I had a slight delay in getting this up due to blogger falling over, but seems to be ok now.

After my sterling start to the Eldar (painting a Guardian) I wanted to test out my scheme on a vehicle and therefore pulled out the airbrush.  It was high time I used this for something a little more sophisticated than base coating so wanted to give this whole blending thing a go and the scheme I’d chosen looks like it would suit it pretty well.

So battered out a couple of coats and got a result I was pretty happy with after some experimentation.  Messed up a few bits but nothing that was too irrecoverable (though a bit of a panic at one stage where I managed to pool an area).  I then set about picking out the detail with the brush which gave me some good practice on gemstones which I reckon are looking decent enough.  Overall I’m quite happy with the end result so definitely full steam ahead for this scheme now. 

Unfortunately the painting challenge doesn’t allow me to claim my Falcon for my painted component until month 4 (only posted once I’d started) so will have to rip through 200pts of something else to get my challenge points which is going to be some Dire Avengers.

I’ve bought a shed load of Elder stuff too.  Incoming are:

3 Warwalkers

1 Wraithlord

2 Fire prisms

7 Fire dragons

3 Wave Serpents

3 Warlocks

All of that gives me the basis of the army I wanted except for the Warp Spiders and Jetbikes.  I think I should be ok for the allowed elements of the painting challenge, as it is Troops, Elites and Fast Attack only for the first couple of months, so painting Dire Avengers, Fire Dragons and Wave Serpents should do the trick nicely.

Something else I looked at this week was my output for the year.  Generally it's been pretty good.  I worked out it's over 150 models I've painted so far in ~5 months.  So greater than 1 per day.  The unfortunate thing is I also counted up the number of models I've purchased and due to a recent splurge on a Skaven army that is in the region of 450 figs...  Somewhat ruins the record for the year and no chance of hitting my 1:1 target.  But if I persevere and only paint up what I've purchased thus far (maybe plus a few jetbikes/warp spiders) I should start to dig into that tally.

Post holiday blues

So I'm sure that everyone in the UK enjoyed the Royal Wedding very much.  I missed it, I was on my way to a stag do where I wrote myself off for the long weekend and felt like death come the end of it!  So one might expect that I didn't achieve very much this weekend past but I did get the opportunity to do a few things.

At the club last week I got a quick game in at 2000pts vs a daemons player.  Again he was off to a tournament with a few special rules so got to experience the joy of a magical change - irresistible needs 3 6’s but still miscast on 2.  We played dispels were on 2 but don't know for sure if that was right or not.  Overall it was a tad unfortunate as it resulted in T2 my mage blew his head off on a spell which didn't even succeed (it was dispelled) and then I had daemons run over the top of me with magic having pretty much no impact.  On first viewing I'm not a massive fan of this rule!

Painting as I say was somewhat limited, but I did put a bit of work on a couple of items.  I'd agreed to paint up a furnace for a skaven player down my club.  He doesn't enjoy painting but I'd convinced him to get a brown spray, can of dip and to get his troops done to a basic standard by showing him how simply it could be done.  This actually worked quite well and he's been cracking through them at a rate of knots. 

What he didn't fancy was doing the big stuff.  So I agreed to take on his furnace as probably the most fiddly thing he needed done (he does have a bell and an abom which are 'sort of' painted and will do for now).  I'd seen them about but never had my hands on the kit, it's actually a really nice model, got to give credit to GW for the quality of their plastic kits as nobody else makes things as nice.  For painting it it had been mostly glued together before I got my hands on it, which isn't ideal, but thankfully the wrecker and crew at the back were unattached.

In typical 'quick paintjob' fashion this was getting some airbrush love for the basecoat and then a tonne of washes and that's about all.

Steps taken
1. Undercoat - white
2. Airbrush wood basecoat using vallejo air range ochre
3. Go away on stag do for weekend, return feeling like death
4. Painted the stone 'field blue' a Coat d'arms colour which is a grey but with a lot of undertones of blue which come out when thinned.
5. Drybrush stone with mix of field blue and dheneb stone
6. Pick out metals with chainmail: dwarf bronze 3:1
7 Wash all wood and metal with devlan mud and let dry (I aided this with a hairdryer)
8. Wash stone and metals with asurymen blue
9 pick out ropes in dheneb stone
10. wash ropes with thinned devlan mud
11. Wrecker ball metals done as above but not washed in devlan and make sure all the smoke trail is still white.  Wash this in thrakka green.
12. Crew colour scheme was provided - red cowl and off coloured cream robes.  Here I had to take a bit of a punt, he had clearly worked over a black basecoat so not really my style,

Robe - I guessed for dheneb stone, washed it down with devlan and highlighted back to dheneb then further with a bit of white mixed in.
Red cowl - Dark flesh basecoat, devlan wash, highlighted back up with scab red.
Fur/skin - graveyard earth, devlan wash, some dwarf flesh/graveyard earth mixed highlights to fleshy areas.

You'll notice everything gets hit with devlan, that was all done as a single step doing usual basecoat, wash, highlight process.

It all then got hit with a layer of gloss and then matt varnish for protection and is ready to hand over.

And finally this morning saw me start looking at colour schemes for my Eldar.  Seeing as I've just started an Epic army I thought I'd best see how that scheme translates.

Looks ok I reckon, but going to try some other things to see as it's a bit simplistic and possibly want to challenge myself a bit more on the larger scale.

3 Day week at work = not much to do.

Things that have happened on the gaming front.  Finished painting up my 3 warhawks and 2 eagles, just getting the bases sorted out so that I can pop the models on and off the magnets for making transport a little easier.  All riders are magnetised and all fliers are mounted on paper clip metal which attach to the bases via magnets so they can be removed, all in all it makes them a lot simpler to transport and they break far less frequently.

Also worked on the characters a little and found my missing musician so will be able to field the proper command group for my Scarlocks WE archers RoR unit.  Once the army is fully painted I'll be going back and improving the command as they're currently far substandard to the rest of the unit due to painting constraints... Oops!

Wed games night is due to go on it's summer hiatus but due to overbooked sporting events it'll continue for another week, will most likely be running Tempest Ragnarok restrictions and trying to work out how on earth I should set up my characters, magic continues to stymie me.  I'd ideally like a few magic missiles but the WEs lack easy access to those.  Considering dropping all mages and adding in a fighty character as my list currently lacks much in the way of hitting power that can kill characters.

In further news I might have just bought a Skaven army... Not sure I'd planned that! Saw a couple of deals going on t'internet that looked pretty good and decided I'd stick in some offers and picked up something like 250+ skaven plus a few of the toys.  Add that to the 40 IoB skaven I dipped just to see how they'd come out I'm now pretty sorted for an army! 

Will need to revisit my schedule of what I'm going to work on as I've agreed to join in a painting/gaming event down the club to paint up a 40k army.  I've an old box of eldar stuff kicking about in my cellar that I'd got dirt cheap and intended to paint up but never got round to, so this will hopefully get me started.  I'm not a massive fan of 40k, played about 5 games of the current edition and generally found it a bit meh.  I think it's largely because the whole tanks generally trump infantry thing and my lack of desire to work on tanks.  But Eldar are sweet models and it should give me a chance to get my airbrush going again so no bad thing.

Easter weekend

Well with a 4 day weekend here in the UK you'd have thought I'd have been hard at it but I was away over the weekend visiting family so barely touched a figure.

With the WE coming out for tempest I had a look at what I needed to paint in order to get everything ready.  Because of this I painted up 2 eagles (one finished, one half done), the riders for my warhawks and basecoated up a couple of characters as the ones I was using were a bit shoddy. 

Also a few more Eldar finished up for Epic

Tempest Rising Practice

So back on the tournament preperation bandwagon.  Tempest Ragnarok is the third in a highly popular line of very heavily restricted tournaments.  It aims to balance out a lot of the armies and remove a lot of the tricks from the game to help reward good generalship.  Obviouly the reality is that not all armies are equal even under the restrictions but it makes for a very fun tournament.

So my practice game was against the much abused Tomb Kings, the big losers to 8th Edition.  Only my opponent has been playing them solidly since it came out and hasn't had the best of results but certainly knows the army well and it makes for fun games.  The big impact of Tempest comp this time round is mages aren't adding their wizard levels to casting attempts, for normal armies it's not too bad, but against TK it makes a massive difference.  Their incants go off regardless and even on the 1 dice incants a high roll leaves you needing to throw a couple of dice at it, combine that with the wizarding hat and you've got a horrible phase to face!

I'm not going to go into a full report here but had a very fun, if a little bit frustrating game which ended up in a tie.  Basically we killed off all the cheap stuff in each others armies and the characters and expensive units all survived.  I had some dice nightmares in the middle of the game which probably cost me the win, lots of fluffed attacks followed by lots of failed painc and rally rolls.  My opponent played it well and kept the pressure on me from the start of the game and I was slack in advancing some of my units which cost me on one flank but generally I felt I dealt well with his bigger threats forcing them to stand off me.

Also tried beast magic for the first time and to be honest it achieved pretty much nothing, but the magic rules as they are I think that will tend to be the case.  If I had the option I'd probably go with a damage oriented lore as they tend to be cheaper to cast and with multiple spells you'll get something through.  As it was I really struggled to get any spells off which had much of an impact.  Time will tell and more practice is needed.

More painting on the Epic stuff has taken place and also finished of the Judge for my Malifaux crew.  Now putting some work onto my WEs just to get all the units I'm going to use for tempest done up to an acceptable standard and then build some movement trays for the current unit sizes.

Week 2

Not a lot of progress this week, a bit of prep work for Tempest III down the club on Wed saw my WE face off against Trevs lizards.  Due to the unusual comp restriction of not adding your magic level to spells I decided to ditch the level 4 and mess about with treesinging, turns out that didn't work out well, partly because of the random deployment scenario and his haivng the life awakening of the woods meant I generally stayed out of the trees so it was all a wasted opportunity.

The game was a bit one sided, basically I couldnt' deal with his saurus heroes and they tied up a couple of my units until his army could smash home.  I still made a bunch of mistakes with my treeman and left my treekin a little bit exposed but the random deployment forced my hand on that one.

So totally reconsidering how I'll run the list again. Ho hum.

Painting I picked up an Epic Eldar army for ~50% of retail from a guy selling out of it at the club so have been having a play about with that.  Not a clue what makes up a good force so been doing some reading and coming up with a paint scheme.  Over the weekend I painted up:
8 Stands of Guardians
4 Wave serpents
2 stands of Dark Reapers
2 stands of Warp Spiders
1 Nightwing
1 Phoenix Bomber
1 Vampire

So that's 550 pts worth of legal units and some other stuff just to see how it looks.  Not bad start, in addition I've basecoated up another guarding formation and a falcon troupe (400 more pts).

Still reading up and trying to find some resources for what goes in a list but by the looks of it what I'm working on isn't wasted.

I'm somewhat disappointed I never started tracking what all I've painted so far this year as it's been fairly productive and think I've found the balance between sinking time into painting and spending time with the girlfriend so I won't get abuse, but lets see if that lasts! So might find one of those tally sheets and work back through my photobucket to see how I'm doing.

The beginning

Ok so first up lets see how things look. 

The purpose of this blog is to centralise all my painted figures into one repository.  As such it's possibly easier for me to track what I've been upto by dumping it all on one page, here!

Anyone dropping in you'll see I'm mostly a Warhammer Fantasy player but Malifaux has captured me recently, the figs are just so cool.  In addition I've got a Space Marine army for 40k which I play once in a blue moon and I'm looking back at Epic again as it seems to have got a solid foothold in my local Club.

On which note I'm based in Edinburgh and can be found down the [elg] club most Wednesdays.