So, it's been a bit quiet round here, I kinda got tied up with a lot of 'real life' over the past few months and hobby took a serious backseat. Events in my life:
1. Having a kid
2. Moving house/city/transferring job
Reckon that's a detailed enough description, now back to the important stuff of Toy soldiers!
My desire to own/paint every army for WFB is still the same as ever, I want's em. Currently on the chopping block are the Bretonnians. I'd done a bunch of work adding units to some other armies and branched out for a bit but then got bored so started on the Brets. I've now got most of the army well under progress and hopefully will get it churned out first half of the year. Also added a bunch of units to my TK army and will be running them out at a tournament soon so need to finish a few more off just for completeness as soon I'll have every unit out of the book available and in pretty decent numbers too.
Malifaux - totally gone on the back burner, I still love the game and the models but lack any opponents with my move of location, no bad thing but I do still have a heap of models to get painted up.
Warmachine - Again back burnered, though in all honesty it was never really much further forward than this!
40k - Eldar are grinding along slowly in the background, hit a bit of wall with them too so they've not come out the box in the new house but I do have a solid start to a force with standard HQ & Troops choices available.
Other thing I'm doing is a commission infinity army/team/crew/squad as someone asked nicely with a pretty please! Really nice models with a great amount of detail though it's quite fine so could be easily clogged.
Tuesday, 26 March 2013
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
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 (2nd place) and Richard Payne’s Ogres (1st). 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.
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.
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.
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 (2nd place) and Richard Payne’s Ogres (1st). 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.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
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 8th 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
Monday, 20 August 2012
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.
Thursday, 2 August 2012
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!
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!
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, 28 June 2012
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.
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.
Monday, 18 June 2012
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).
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).
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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.
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.
Monday, 28 May 2012
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.
Skaven - Doomwheel and Warpfire Thrower
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.
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