Apocalypse on the cheap

It is, perhaps, not good that I am setting my sites on apocalypse, but I am.

The reason it's not good is because I am one of those players who can field a 10000 point army, in sheer man-power, but that's not really the point is it. The point is that you want to field a Titan, and well...I don't have a Titan. Not yet, anyway.

But what in the hell are these people thinking over at Forgeworld? The scale of superheavies is the scale of cheap toys. Seriously, go to the toy aisle at Big Lots, Walmart, Target, or the dollar store and tell me you can't, in five seconds, pull a model off the shelf that's in Apocalyptic scale. Hell, they sell a tank for army men for $9.99 at Big Lots that looks a hell of a lot like a Baneblade and it's the exact right size. I know they don't expect people to have great modeling skills, but really, how hard is it to glue some bendy straws to the thing and maybe pop on a few extra guns you got from a GI Joe lot auction on Ebay. How much do they want for a Baneblade?

For $18, I found a Scorpion that is nigh-playable right out of the box. I just have to get the barrels of the cannon on it. Do you know how much forgeworld wants for a scorpion. I'm not kidding. Right out of the box. Now, I know what you're thinking, "how much conversion are you going to have to do?"

If I were sloppy, none. I'm not sloppy though so I'm going to have to cut up a frizbee a bit to fill out the back slopes of the wings. Still $18.

And now, I've set my sights on Titans. Did you all know that they're only 10.5" tall. You know what else is that tall? ED 209 vinyl models on Ebay. You know, that robot? From Robocop? Looks like a titan? So, now I'm cruising the cheapo store to find a headpiece that looks remotely like a dog, though I've already figured out that it also looks like the cockpit of a plane, maybe with the nose sanded flat, but how hard could that be to get for under $5.

Seriously, $500 for a 10" model. Are they fucking high?

Making daemonhunters not suck!

I like that 40k finally came up with an army for the daemonhunters, but they are the worst army they've so far devised. They aren't even really that good at killing daemons unless they take the options. An army called Daemonhunters shouldn't have to take options in order to hunt said daemons.

On the other hand, they're such a great idea for an army that it seems like a crying shame that they suck so bad. I've seen a few people try to work their way around the "suck" factor which I thing revolves around the lack of any ability to kill a tank, and this seems to be how people have managed.

First tactic, Allied armies: This tactic seems to work a bit. There's a direction you can't go. I think you have to do Space Marines with Daemonhunter allies rather than Daemonhunters with space marine allies, but there are problems here. You end up having to buy way too many troop choices to get a single las cannon on the board. Also, don't you want to load the grey knight terminators in the land raider? Well, it's like Mac and PC--the Ultramarine land raider is for Ultramarines, the Grey Knight land raider is for grey knights, and you can't buy it unless you have a Grey Knight hero along with the Ultramarine hero. It gets to be too many points just to play a normal army. Lastly, the problem is in conception. Are you playing Grey Knights, or Blood Angels with some Grey Knights hanging out. And hell...why not just make it Eldar with some Grey Knights hanging around.

Second tactic, IG/Grey Knights: Great tactic so long as you know you're playing IG. I even think that this is a great idea to punch up your IG's hth possabilities. But don't fool yourself. You can't just drop IG guys into another army. They need to be there in numbers to be effective. Otherwise, this only looks like a fix, and will normally come back to bite you in an actual game.

Third tactic, IG/Inquisitor: Again, this tactic is more about making a scary IG army than a real daemonhunter army. You're basically still playing IG with the added benifit of an Inquistor in a Land Raider. But the army will play the same thing and it's not nearly what you want to do, which is to play a grey knight army that doesn't suck....

Which brings me to tactic four, which comes to me from one of the guys in my group:

His reasoning is this: First, no psycannons. Aside from daemons who realy does it hurt. It's a waste of points.
Second, Daemonhunter dreadnoughts, un-modified with all the stuff you can buy dreadnoughts, are cheaper than marine dreadnoughts. Okay, use them. Three of these guys aught to take care of your more obvious tank problems.

Trade in the force nemesis weapons on the terminators for thunderhammers. They bust tanks. The urge is to throw around strength 6 power weapons, but you should think about at least trading over a few thunderhammers in order to make the terminator threat more real.

Lastly, you are a shooty army. You're not that great in hand to hand, but at a range of 24", you are mean. Anything longer, leave to the dreadnoughts and the inquisitor with heavy weapons servitors. Set up some fireplatforms, defend them at medium range with your grey knights, and kick the hell out of people as best you can with your terminators.

Last week I fought this force and won, but by the skin of my teeth and with a Thousand Sons army who are basically designed to wrip through Grey Knights like a hand goes through air.

Hope this helps.

Painting the nids, pt. 2

Here's the thing you should understand: my other color for the nids is orange. Orange is yellow and red. Purple is red and blue. Between orange and purple I make black. In other words, if you put orange over purple its likely to turn black.

Step 7: moistbrush all the appropriate areas orange. Moistbrush all the appropriate areas burned umber. Moistbrush all the appropriate areas green.

Having completed only this step and having done nothing by way of shading. My miniatures look like the Tyrant guard mini in the picture. That's without shading and already you can see three different layers of color (red-orange, orange, and light orange). This is clearest on the creature's head and chest. After this, I need only paint on light orange and then a dull yellow and the sections in orange will be done.

I go over the white/purple sections with a strong white to dull out the purple and to make it nearly white also.

Nonetheless, it took me about an hour and half to paint the hive tyrant.

Painting the 'Nids pt. 1

So, first of all, this is what I hope my Nid army will all look like after they're painted.

And here's how I'm painting them... I say this because I think they look good, and my method is extraordinarilly simple.

Step 1: Paint it black! Everything.

Step 2: Drybrush it white. Heavy heavy drybrushing. The figure after all is said and done should look white with black only in the cracks and low lying areas. It doesn't matter if it looks scratchy.

Step 3: Using a method that I'm calling "moist-brushing" apply purple over the entirity of the miniature. Moist brushing here refers to an ammount of paint on the brush somewhere between dry brushing and normal ammounts of paint. Take the brush. Dip it in the paint. Drag it across the paper until the paint is thin but still apliable to the miniature in one stroke. The goal here is to basically, cover the miniature in purple but in such a thin coat that the black remains visible underneath.

Step 4: Drybrush it white. Heavy heavy drybrushing, but a little less than in step 2. This should make a miniature where the deep spots are purple with a darker stain at the really deep crevices.

Step 5-6: Pretty much do steps 3 and 4 with violet, and drybush white even less. The overall result should look like the Tyrant guard in the picture.

ICon update: The Tournament

The guys over at The Brothers Grim turn out to be pretty good at running tournies. Out of 20 or so tables, I think there was a game going in all three rounds. No Orks, No Eldar, No Necron, 1 Dark Eldar, a couple of tyranids, and a few chaos. It was surprising how many people were playing marines and daemonhunters, but no biggie.

How'd I do. Well, the first two rounds I lost the raptors and a daemon prince and that's all. The first battle, I left behind a squad of marines and an immobilized predator. The second, 3 plague marines. So, I'd say I did pretty well.

I have no idea how to score tournaments and still don't so I can't really help anyone with that. I don't think I was in the running for overall victory, but it wouldn't have mattered because in the third game I played against this really hostile kid who cheated from beginning to end of the game. I actually thought about walking away from the table at turn 3 and telling him to go fuck himself, but then I think he would have scored a massacre against me, and I didn't want to give him that.

By the way, cheating included 6"=8", rolling dice when I was talking to people, rolling dice at random and just yelling out numbers of hits, giving his land raider the Grey Knight cloaking thing, and before the game even began, offering me a IG guy as his "traitor" when he should have handed me over a Grey Knight terminator.

Is there a W40k version of shinanigans that can be called on people like this in tournaments?

Everyone else though was awesome. The scenery looked great; most of it made it down in one piece; and a lot of it didn't get used because they already had too much to go around. I don't know if any of you reading this live anywhere near New York, but if you do, I recommend you go to ICon for the Warhammer 40k tournament. It's really fun.

By the way, I now love rhinos like they are the center point of my army, but I'll save that for another time.

Apocalypse Now!...or later

I played Apocalypse at ICon. Here's my review. If you don't have a bunch of squadrons and all that stuff, it reminds you quickly why you don't play 5000 point battles in 40k. This was our front line at the beginning of the game. It was 19 tanks big and there were about an equal number to that waiting to come in on the reserves. You can't even see me in there. I'm the orange guys. 1500 points of chaos stationed between 9000 points of Space Wolves. And it just kept getting weirder.

My gaming group gave up on four person battles because they were just too much. Here we had a 12 person battle. People would walk in and just plop miniatures on the board. It was insane. Ocassionally in a good way. Occassionally in a bad way. Overall, I think if no one has a titan or a formation of baneblades or something, it's probably more enjoyable to play 40k. The sheer volume of crap on the board was amazing, however, and if I weren't playing, I think it would have been, in and of itself, an amazing thing to see.

The picture below, for instance, is just crazy. That unit in front of my 2 obliterators was 4 chapter commanders and a terminator.

ICON

I have officially prepared myself for ICON, which I will be going to tomorrow in time to watch the Armaggedon tournament and then hit the dealer's room. On Sunday, I will be sponsoring the great big tournament which has about 20 or some odd tables. I already told the guy who's running the thing that I'm not really bringing hills. Hills take up space. Let the guys who actually live in that state bring the hills.

In any case, last year we rented a van which was WAY too much. This year, we've got a subcompact, which is WAY too little. One day we'll get this right. Next post I should have some pictures from the Con assuming I don't lose my camera like I did last year.

By the way, my Chaos list....lost to IG. Yes, it did.

How? Well, the mission wouldn't allow deep strike and the guy took a division of Daemon hunters for support, namely an Inquisitor in a Land Raider. So, I was running up against 2 Leman Russes, 1 Land Raider, 1 Basilisk, 1 Chimera, and 40 guys with Las-cannons all within 4+ rubble (because of the crack that the makers of Cities of Death were smoking). I pretty much destroyed everything down to an Inquisitor with a servitor, a Leman Russ without a big gun, and a squad of storm troopers, but VP was easilly in IG favor by about 250 before the mission gave him another 200 for having kept me from getting a hold of a hostage.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: mission rules can break the game.