Tag Archives: Warhammer 40K

Maximum Khornage!

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I’ve gotten several more games in with my Daemons over the past few weeks and have, for the most part, done quite well with them.

In fact, until last Tuesday, I hadn’t seen anything worse than a well-fought, skin-of-the-teeth draw. Tuesday saw two completely one-sided games: one in which overly-aggressive deep strikes and incredibly unfavorable scatter rolls helped John beat the living tar out of me and one in which everything in the army clicked together like clockwork and I steamrolled over Sean.

I’ve done some thinking about what’s gone into my army, and have toyed around a little bit with it as I’ve gone along. Now’s as good a time as any to document it.
HQ
The Bloodthirsters are great. Even when they’re swinging for 6’s on a Eldar skimmer, I never feel like they’re being wasted. In my game against John, I wished I’d shelled out for Unholy Might, since it would have let me squish Pedro Kantor like the mortal bug he is instead of getting sucked into a three-round tickle fight… but 20 points is an awful lot to spend and it pushes the ‘Thirster up to nearly 300 points!
I’ve yet to really use any of the Heralds (Skulltaker or one of the generic Khornate heralds). They look like they’re pretty killy for the points (especially Skulltaker on a chariot), but come at the cost of my most effective anti-tank unit: a Bloodthirster.
Elites
I’ve yet to run Bloodcrushers, but I’ve got a stack of them to assemble. At first, I dismissed them as not giving me anything Bloodletters didn’t already give me, but that’s because I didn’t truly appreciate how nice that 3+ regular save is. I’m looking forward to running a few of them.
Troops
Bloodletters are where I do the most waffling. I think I have a clear feel for what works well with pretty much all of the other Khornate choices… just not Bloodletters.
In small groups, they die too easily. In large groups, they’re overkill. Without Fury of Khorne, they don’t stand the slightest chance against a walker. With Fury of Khorne… they stand the slightest chance against a walker. When I give them Icons, I don’t need them. When I don’t, I do.
The only thing I do know is that I don’t expect to ever need to give them Instrument of Chaos.
I’m also playing around with how many I deploy. When I first started working with the army, I’d drop 40 of them on the table (five squads of eight each). That seems to be overkill, but it has been working better than the three squads of eight that I’ve been running.
Next, I’m going to try a large squad (of sixteen) and a small squad (eight), each with an Icon. We’ll have to see.
Fast Attack
These guys get poo-pooed by other folks I know who run all-Khorne daemon armies. “They cost nearly as much as Bloodletters,” I’m told, “but they’re not Troops and they don’t have power weapons or WS 5.” This is true… but I’ve yet to have Bloodletters be anywhere nearly as useful as Flesh Hounds.
The speed is the key. Fleet, plus the 12″ charge range gets them engaged and very, very quickly. They fight like Chaos Marines / Assault Marines, and that’s nothing to complain about. At the very least, they do well locking up units while nastier things (like Bloodletters) close in.
I’ve recently started giving them Fury of Khorne, and I’m very happy with it. It closes the gap a little bit between the Bloodletters and the Hounds. I’ve also been happy with Karanak, though I think that if I ever need to shave points, I’ll drop Fury of Khorne in the unit that gets Karanak (since he comes with it as well).
Heavy Support
I’ve yet to really use Daemon Princes. I put one in the list I used on Tuesday as a points sink, but it didn’t really get the opportunity to succeed or fail. It’s slow, though, and it costs too much to buy Flight, so it seems like it’s a poor choice… unless I’m running three of them.
And why would I, when I love Soul Grinders as much as I do? The model is awesome, and it’s never really disappointed me. Fleeting into combat is a treat, and does a great job of locking up squads that can’t hurt it. The close-range shooting is utterly devastating to 4+ save armies. I’ve also had a great deal of good luck with Phlegm, against 3+ armies. AP 3 Large Blast makes me feel a little guilty.

For the most part, I’m pretty settled on the things that I think work, save for how many Bloodletters I should invest in, and what I do with the points I have if I spend less on them.
In terms of getting the army together, I’ve got to assemble those Bloodcrushers and settle on a paint scheme. I’ve got some thoughts, including a non-traditional scheme that should look awesome if (and only if) it actually works. I’ve written of August to work and vacation, though, so at the rate I’m going I’ll start painting them in December.
The list I’m currently planning on using is:
Bloodthirster
Bloodthirster
Bloodcrushers x4 – Fury of Khorne, Chaos Icon, Instrument of Chaos
Bloodletters x16 – Chaos Icon
Bloodletters x8 – Chaos Icon
Flesh Hounds x7 – Karanak, Fury of Khorne
Flesh Hounds x8 – Fury of Khorne
Soul Grinder – Phlegm
Soul Grinder – Phlegm

Painting Progress – 20090726

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I’ve had a strange terrain fetish going on lately. It’s probably the result of getting in the Imperial Strongpoint and Landing Pad over the weekend.
I’ve had the crashed aquila lander from the 4th edition Battle for MacCragge floating around in a tub for a couple of years now. Unpainted, no longer!

It’s not the greatest job, in that it’s 90% drybrushed, but I think it’ll look good on the table.
I also combined the two bastions in the Strongpoint kit into a single, bigger bastion much like BrassScorpion did on Bell of Lost Souls. I’d forgotten that they’d written that article until I was nearly done with the project, though, which is why mine’s not as good. I didn’t think to use the spare door from the kit, so I ended up using a spare door from one of the Cities of Death kits. It looks… okay, but not as good, for sure.

I had more success with the Landing Pad! I’d had some concerns about storing it, that it would take up more space than it needed to and prone to breaking. At some warning about the poor contact points from John, I decided to magnetize the support struts.
I shaved off the lights inside the contact points and glue 20mm metal squares (of the sort I glue to the bottom of my WHFB figures) in their place.

Then, I cut plasticcard to fit across the inside of the strut, leaving room for the metal squares. I glued magnets to the inside of the plasticard before gluing the plasticard in place.

The end result are struts that are removable but, when placed, are disinclined to go anywhere. Had I used bigger, or more, magnets I’m sure the contact would be stronger, but what I’ve got is more than sufficient to make sure the terrain piece is stable enough to play with.
I also followed through on an impulse I had earlier this week: magnetizing my turn counter. I painted my turn counter last summer, when I got fed up with being unable to read the symbols on the (then) new 40K token set. I’ve been happy with it, and I always get a nice comment about it at tournaments.

The arrow’s loose, though. I obviously can’t glue it into place. So, I had the thought of drilling a small hole in each piece and glueing tiny magnets into them. Surprisingly, it worked really well! (Though, unfortunately, the process of drilling the holes seems to have pulled up some of the paint. Grrr.)

Daemon Prince of Khorne

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On a pseudo-whim, I decided to see if I could build a Daemon Prince out of a Chaos Spawn kit. On Tuesday, I’d seen that Casey had done it and it looked really good, so I figured why not? I’ve got a couple of Bel’akor models that I plan on using as Daemon Princes but 1) they’re all winged (which I probably won’t use on account of cost) and 2) are metal and therefore a lot longer to assemble.
So I popped into GW Fair Oaks on the way home from work and started fooling around.
I’m not altogether pleased with it. It’s too runty for a Daemon Prince and the model has a strange balance to it. Also, I was shooting for “hulking, ‘roid rage Bloodletter,” and the Spawn model has too many freakish, lumpy and asymmetrical features to it to really get the effect I wanted.
But, it is what it is, and it’ll do until I assemble some Bel’akors.

Painting Progress – 20090715

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Because it looked neat and because I wanted to use it as an objective marker in the Apocalypse game over the weekend, I painted up the Communications Arrray that comes with the Bastion kit. It’s incredibly detailed for what is, ultimately, kind of a throwaway kind of model and it’s just the right size for an objective. I’m looking forward to my Strongpoint coming in this weekend/early next week so I can assemble and paint the two that will come in that kit.




I’ve also made some more progress assembling Bloodletters (when I played Bill last night, I only had to proxy four!) and assembled my second Bloodthirster. Hopefully the rest of this week will see the last of the Bloodletters assembled and maybe a stab at either a Daemon Prince or some Bloodcrushers.

Apocalypse First Turn Deployment Thoughts

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I got to play Apocalypse for the first time in ages over the weekend. I might get into what I brought (3,855 points of painted Dark Angels, 145 of unpainted Dark Angels) and how it went (tied); we’ll have to see. Mostly, the undertaking was an exercise in making clear how essential planning is with an Apocalypse game.
One of the problems we ran into was with what I’m going to call First Turn Deployment. What I’m talking about is how half of the Drop Pods in a Space Marine army and half of the Deep Striking Terminators in a Dark Angels army don’t actually get deployed at the start the game on the table, but instead get to enter the game at the beginning of the first turn. Chaos Daemons are the ultimate example of this, in that they don’t even get to choose to start models on the table and, instead, must Deep Strike half of their army during their turn.
One of the players was relatively new to the game and was playing Chaos Daemons. Their team bid 10 minutes to deploy…. which ultimately became nearly an hour and a half as the Daemon player took over an hour to Deep Strike their initial wave of troops into the battle.
Mind you, this was unintentional. The Daemon player wasn’t trying to take all morning putting their troops down, and she wasn’t trying to abuse the bid/deployment rules. It just ended up that way.
It is a problem, however, because Apocalypse needs to move… and frankly it’s unreasonable for a Daemon army to be able to bid zero minutes (ensuring that they go first) and then spend 45 minutes actually deploying their troops. So, I’ve come up with two solutions (and have been presented with a related Apocalypse house rule that also addresses this):
Option 1:

If you have units that are placed on the table after initial deployment or at the start of your first turn, you may not spend more time on these deployments than you bid for your initial deployment.

I’ve expanded the initial wording a little bit to account for Infiltration.
If your team bids 10 minutes to deploy, they get 10 minutes to do their initial setup and then 10 minutes to do any first turn deployment. This is still a good deal, as it effectively doubles your deployment time, but it does cap how long you can spend.
Option 2:

If you have units that are placed on the table after initial deployment or at the start of your first turn, the amount of time you bid to deploy is shared between your initial deployment and and subsquent “first turn” deployments.

This one is significantly more restrictive but even more fair, I think, to players without first turn deployments. If you bid, for example, 25 minutes to deploy and take 20 minutes doing your initial deployment… then you only have 5 minutes to do any first turn deployments.

Jay suggested the third option, which is what’s in use at Games Workshop stores during their megabattles. It doesn’t explicitly address this issue, but it does cover it.
Option 3:

Players have a set amount of time per turn. Bringing in units past the initial deployment counts against that time.

In other words, if you take too long doing your first turn deployment you won’t have time to shoot, run or assault.

This is certainly the easiest to implement but seems a mite punitive towards armies like Daemons who really don’t have a choice about the first turn deployment thing.
That said, there is something very attractive about turn time limits. If we’d gone with 30 minute turns, we’d have gotten 6 rounds in instead of 3… but sometimes it simply isn’t feasible. (If we’d gone for 30 minute turns, this weekend’s game would have been a complete disaster.)
What do people think? Alternative approaches to this problem?

Returning to 40K

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For the past six months or so (really all of 2009 so far) have been spent not playing 40K.
I started out the year playing Fantasy, which wasn’t so bad but would have been better if I hadn’t been playing it with the oldest armybook currently in use. Fundamentally, it’s not a bad game, but there are some serious army balance issues that I’m looking forward to seeing resolved (later this year, if rumors are true). Also, all this gaming took place within the context of an escalation league that was fun… but ran a couple of weeks too long.
I then followed up Fantasy with War of the Ring. It’s new, looks neat, and I had a fun idea for an army. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is also a game that’s fundamentally pretty fun but starts to have issues the closer you look at it. Although I’m less optimistic about the game getting cleaned up (since that would really require a new edition, and the game’s not been out six months), I do think a little distance will help. Plus, as with Fantasy, all this gaming has been within the context of an escalation league and it’s running a bit long, too (despite making this league shorter than the previous Fantasy league).
This past week, I decided I needed a short break from War of the Ring before the league wraps, so I played some 40K (against Bill, Sean and Tyler) and had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. All three of those games were nail-bitingly close. Two of them were games I shouldn’t have stood a chance in (I went in knowing that mechanized Eldar should be nearly impossible for my Khornate Daemons to handle) but managed to eke out a win and a draw in. It’s nice to come back.
This week’s the last week of the War of the Ring league. I’m back to Harad for the week, and I think we’ll be doing something to celebrate the end of the league (we were going to have our traditional Top 8 tournament, but given that WotR seems tournament-unready and we don’t have eight players, it’ll have to be something else). I hope to get some momentum up later for painting my Skaven in anticipation of the new book. Saving that, though, I’m very much back to Warhammer 40,000.

Painting Progress – 20090706

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Things have, as usual, been slow with the Harad. I’ve gotten more than a little burnt out on War of the Ring, which helps nothing. Fundamentally, it’s a fun game, but there are too many niggling little yet confusing rules inconsistencies that add up and what seems like some not insignificant balance issues (though I can’t tell if that’s because of my approach to the Fallen Realms or not).

I’ve finished a few more things, and am maybe halfway through some Half-Trolls. My goal is to finish the Half-Trolls by the end of the month, and not worry about painting any more War of the Rings for a while.
I’ve finished off a tray of Corsairs, as well as both a Bosun and a Captain. I’m not likely to ever run these guys, though, so I’ve been using them to fill out trays of Haradrim.
This is my Saruman. I could just as easily used a Saruman figure, but hey: this guy’s got a cool, big hat so why not?
This is my WIP on the half-trolls. Weapons, bone ornaments, and belly/face skin are pretty much all that’s left. I’m quite pleased with how the reed armor came out. I didn’t expect it to look that good.

Outside of War of the Ring, I’ve been much busier. I’ve started to pick up some momentum on assembling my Daemon army. So far, I’ve finished putting together:
  • 16 Bloodletters
  • 16 Fleshhounds
  • 2 Soul Grinders
  • 1 Bloodthirster
  • 1 Karanak
Which means I need to finish:
  • 24 Bloodletters
  • 5 Bloodcrushers
  • 1 Bloodthirster
I’m also starting to think that I need a third unit of Fleshhounds, so we’ll see.
I picked up a Bastion over the weekend: I’ve got more on order, but I figured an impulse-bought third wouldn’t hurt anything. It goes together very, very easily: the only snake in the woodpile is that the middle section (the section that is neither the top nor the base) has two wall sections with windows and two without windows. I didn’t realize this until after the glue had finished drying, so I had to get creative with placing things where the windows should have been to make the building look balanced. The communications array and Icarus-pattern lascannon that come with it are amazing… especially the communciations array. I think I might bits-order a few more and use them as objective markers in regular 40K from now on.
Finally, I made some progress on a Chapel that I’d bought quite some time ago, painted sandstone, changed my mind on and repainted dark grey. All it’s needed is some drybrushing (which it got) and some minor details (torches, doors, rafters and window frames… which should happen tonight).

Games Day Baltimore 2009!

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I’m still exhausted! And dehydrated!

Rapid Fire

The Iron Fist League ran a variant of the Rapid Fire tournament I ran back in March (and plan to run again next year): 500 point games with some light composition restrictions, play as many games as you can as quickly as you can. We did both a 40K and a Fantasy version.

The Fantasy side of things looked like it went about as smoothly as they could have.

The 40K side (where I spent the bulk of my day) was wildly successful. We should have had more tables set up (and we could have, but we weren’t confident that we’d have the turnout to support them), as the line to play got long. One guy complained of waiting over an hour to play! Although that’s a good indicator that things were a lot of fun, that’s an unreasonable amount of time to expect someone to stand around.

At the end of the day, on the 40K side alone (I’ve yet to see the Fantasy score sheet), we had 99 players play 98 games. Most games played: 7. Longest Streak: 5. Highest Score: 10.

A large part of our success was the lack of the Open Gaming tables. I lost count of how many people came by asking for them. I think this was a huge mistake, and I hope they fix it for the next Games Day. I know that the beautiful tables that they’ve had in the past are too expensive and cumbersome to transport, but these people would have been delighted to just have a mat and terrain to play on.

There are some lessons to be learned from the event, I think, but that’s for the club forum, really, and not here.

Loot

I spent more than I should have at Games Day. Not more than I could afford, which is good, but certainly this month’s hobby budget.

The real treat of the day was in the madness that was their clearance section (which, while awesome, was kind of a problem: only six to eight people could belly up to the table and everyone else was SOL), I was able to get three Bloodthirsters for $10 pop. I hate the Bloodthirster model, and had been thinking about ways to convert up a better looking one but, for $10, I was sold. Even better was that I was able to flip one of them to someone who hadn’t been able to fight their way to the table for twice what I’d paid (it’s what they offered). So, in the end, I got two Bloodthirsters for $10 total.

I also ordered some of the new Khornate Forgeworld stuff: specifically the Daemon Prince & Herald and two Blood Slaughterers (which will be Soul Grinders). Also, on a strange whim, ordered a Manta. (That’s a little disingenuous: it was an Epic/Aeronautica Imperialis-scaled Manta, not the 30 lb, £875.95 40K scaled one.)

In part of my buildup to my Khornate Daemon army, I’d been hoping to pickup a second Be’lakor model… but he doesn’t seem to be available any more (certainly not in the store, and I can’t find him anywhere on the website). I saw someone who’d bought one, though, so I ran back into the store and grabbed two.

The total list of stuff:

  • Khorne Daemon Prince & Herald (on order)
  • Blood Slaughterer x2 (on order)
  • AI Tau Manta (on order)
  • Aeronautica Imperialis
  • Tactica Aeronautica
  • Bloodthirster x2
  • Be’lakor, the Dark Master x2
  • Herald of Khorne on Juggernaut

The only real problem I had with buying this stuff was actually buying it. The lines were terribly slow. I’m not sure why (the temporary credit card machines were suggested as a possible cause), but a line only twelve people deep should not take over thirty minutes to work through. It just shouldn’t.

Golden Daemon

I’ve never entered anything in the Golden Daemon before, so this year was a first.

I’d decided at the last minute not to enter my Haradrim Troll (because, although it’s a clever little conversion, it’s really not GD-level amazing), but I convinced myself that I should still enter my Deathwing Techmarine. It’s a neat conversion and I think it’s one of my better paint jobs. Also, I never get to use it in a game, so what else am I going to do with it?

At about 2:30, I went to collect my mini: I knew I wasn’t in any danger of winning anything. They wouldn’t let me have it back! “We’re not done with it; we’d like to takes some pictures of it,” I was told. I made the finals!

Ultimately, I didn’t win anything with it, but I never expected to and I can’t get over making it to the finals. It’s really exciting, and I probably won’t stop talking about it for the next few months (apologies in advance).

If I understand things right, they took pictures of it, so it should show up on the Games Workshop website and, possibly, White Dwarf. How cool is that!?

Khornate Daemons

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I’ve been thinking about playing a Daemon army in 40K for quite some time, entirely because I want an army that’s all about the assault. I’ve got two armies that are primarily about shooting, and was ready to start up a Tyranid army… until 5th came out and made that army much more about shooting as well. I’ve settled on doing an all-Khorne Daemon army because there’s no way it’s not going to be about running at the other guy and stabbing him repeatedly.

I played a game against a friend’s Daemonhunters army on Tuesday, using a lot of proxies (Tactical Marines became Bloodletters, Dreadnoughts became Bloodcrushers, etc.). It went very poorly for him, but I think that’s more because of his list hasn’t really been updated since 4th edition than my tactical superiority.

The list I ran was (going from memory, I’ll correct it when I have the printed list handy):

  • Bloodthirster
  • Herald of Khorne – Iron Hide, Fury of Khorne
  • Herald of Khorne – Iron Hide
  • Bloodcrushers x4
  • Bloodletters x7 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x7 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8
  • Bloodletters x8
  • Fleshhounds x8
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue

It became immediately clear that I need to play this army very, very differently than the way I’m used to playing. I tend to be a somewhat defensive player, and I simply cannot do that with this list. I need to drop in as close as I can and run towards them as fast as I can. Anything less is asking to failure.

I also got a bit of a feel for some weaknesses in the list. By focusing on Khorne alone, I’m positioned to do very well against Marines… but I expect I might have some trouble with Ork hordes, and I’m very, very weak on the anti-tank that’s the new Imperial Guard codex is going to make more essential than ever.

Also, I’m not terribly mobile. Sure, everything comes in via Deep Strike, but that’s it. Mechanized anything, especially Tau and Eldar are going to give me fits.

With that in mind, I’ve shifted things a bit.

The Bloodthirster is a big deal, not because he’ll chew through infantry, but because his high strength and Monstrous Creature anti-armor abilities are one of my few anti-armor options and his wings make him much more mobile than the rest of my army. I’d like to include a second, but I expect that would elicit groans… plus, I can get a Winged Daemon Prince for considerably less.

Flesh Hounds are fast, and that’s something I’d been overlooking. They’re not as good as Bloodletters, but they’ll get across the board much more quickly.

The Soul Grinders are essential. They’re very hard to kill, extremely effective in combat, and represent some more anti-armor that I need.

I’m likely to try to play this army proxied for a few more games to see if I’m on the right track with it. I’m not in a huge hurry to buy up the minis just yet: I’ll be slogging through painting miniatures for War of the Ring for several more months, but I’m pretty confident that this’ll be on the buying (then assembling and painting) queue immediately after that.

The list I’ll try next time:

Initial Wave

  • Bloodthirster
  • Bloodcrushers x4
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Flesh Hounds x8
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue

Reserves Wave

  • Daemon Prince – Flight, Iron Hide, Unholy Might
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8
  • Flesh Hounds x8
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue

Painting Progress – 20090404

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There’s a disconcerting lack of pictures here, and that’s really supposed to be the primary focus of this thing.

Still, this isn’t terribly surprising; I’m kinda-sorta in between projects. I’ve just decided to abandon my Tyranid army (to eBay, Batman!), have been waiting for War of the Ring to come out, and have been stunned and frustrated by actually playing Skaven in a local Fantasy escalation league.

So, in the interests of vomiting up painted content onto the shoes of the internet, I give you: some of the stuff I’ve painted over the past month or so:

I blew through 25 Stormvermin in a single week. I still really can’t believe I managed that. It was far, far more than I should have attempted because it contributed a great deal to my Skaven burnout.

I just finished a fourth squad of Deathwing Terminators. This is one of my “Devestator” squads: nothings special save for the Cyclone Missile Launcher.


I also painted up a power armored Librarian in a day for a friend to use in my Rapid Fire Tournament.

Next up on my to-do list are some Tau Barracudas (Barracudae?) for Aeronautica Imperialis and some Haradrim Warriors for Lord of the Rings/War of the Ring.