We're Coming Back in 2012

Good times, good times.

More pie charts and more goings on in the next year. It should be a good one.

I think nobody was looking anyways, but all the gaming related posts have moved to Stone Corridors. If you missed them somehow then click over there.

Update

Well, so much for posting more regularly. It's been a month.

Lots of Games-Workshop related stuff going on.

Dawn of War 2 hit. It's been fun going through the single player campaign, both cooperatively and on my own. Multiplayer smackdown on the AI is a fun after work activity.

I've been playing Dark Heresy with three other friends. I GM'ed our first mission, Shattered Hope. This was a simple mission that took a single night to run through. It was originally designed as a demo mission for GenCon so it could probably be played through in a couple hours if everyone was familiar with the rules and on-task. Afterwards we played through the first half of the adventure in the back of the rulebook, with a different person in the group GMing. I'm having fun with my feral word guardsman, Mar. We'll likely wrap up the adventure tonight.

Tuesday night has been going well for the Demons. We've mostly been playing team battles, so the demons have had a chance to really shine. I suspect that tomorrow night will be their first solo battle in a while, so we'll see if I've learned anything from my forays into team-play.

Fight Night Report

Pictures from Yesterday's throwdown are here. It went pretty well.

This was our newest player's second game and he's starting to pick up the rules. Abaddon is still a beast in any sort of combat, mowing down wraithlords, wraithguard, and Lords of Change with ease.

Daemons are still fragile, but they work well in a team setting. The thing I've learned most about daemons is that they are insanely good in low point games. At five hundred or seven hundred fifty points they just tear up the opposition. There's almost no stopping them. Once you start moving up the handicap of only having half your force on the table becomes more pronounced. With your opponent getting a turn to react and pour all his firepower into just half your army, you'll feel lucky if you have anything left to make choices with on turn two. Running as part of a team softens the blow quite a bit, since with a teammate you've got three quarters of your combined forces versus all of theirs, which distracts from killing the daemons and helps keep more of them around to cause damage on subsequent turns.

Twenty Four Thousand Points in Seven Hours

This last saturday we ran an apocalypse game. Twelve thousand points to a side. Seven hours later and we had met our time limit and completed four game turns. The forces of chaos came out victorious this time, but I'd say that it came down to the final turn and some die rolls to push the imperials off a couple front line objectives to clinch the victory.

Pictures to follow.

40k Gaming Night

It's the game before our big apocalypse game. Tonight's just a precursor to the carnage we can expect this weekend. We're playing 1500 points and in the interests of going quickly I'm bringing just a few high point cost units.

• Chaos Lord Bike, Mark of Nurgle, Daemon Weapon, meltabombs
• 8 Thousand Sons led by an Aspiring Sorceror w/Wind of Chaos and meltabombs
• 18 Chaos marines w/2 plasma guns and an Icon of Chaos Glory led by an Aspiring Champion w/power fist, combi plas and meltabombs
• 10 Bikers w/mark of nurgle and 2 melta guns led by an Aspiring Champion w/power fist and melta bombs
• Land Raider

It's fairly straightforward with the lord leading the bike charge and the thousand sons in the land raider moving up to kill anything wearing power armor.

Warhound Progress

Work on the titan is coming along better.  The major pieces are all put together. Some of the detail pistons are put on and most of the gaps have been filled with putty.  The weapons, torso, leg plates and void shield generators are all magnetized as well.

Final assembly will see the rest of the pistons put into place.  Then it's on to priming and the start of the painting process.

I'm keeping the hip and upper leg armor pieces separate for now since I think it will be easier to paint them separately.

As for the Apocalypse game this last Tuesday, the titans performed pretty well.  They pounded on each other and various doomed troops that stood between. Ahriman used a demon shell to wipe out Belial's terminator squad.

The lessons to learn are that you need weapons that can get through their armor.  These guys are super resilient.  Chainfists, Deep-striking melta-guns and massed las-fire are a must.

Fight Night

It's 40K fight night. The crowd continues to grow. I think last time there were eight people throwing down.

My buddy and I are debuting our Titans tonight. We're going to throw down a minimal (3000 point) Apocalypse game so we can be sure to have a handle on the titan rules before the next group apocalypse game.

I'm still undecided about the Strategic Asset I'm going to use, but here's what I'm bringing model-wise:
Chaos Warhound Titan
Baneblade
Conclave of Chaos
Ahrrimann
Demon Prince w/Wings
Demon Prince w/Wings
Demon Prince w/Wings
Demon Prince w/Wings
3 Terminators w/ 1 powerfist
3 Terminators w/ 1 powerfist
5 chosen w/Icon of Chaos & Lascannon
5 chosen
Possessed Land Raider
5 Lesser Demons
5 Lesser Demons

Titanic Proportions

Are these one and the same? I have eight pages of instructions that tell me they are! The chaos warhound titan from forgeworld has at least 150 pieces to it and an insane amount of detail inside of the model. All the parts are cleaned and on Sunday I'll have time to start removing flash in preparation for getting the legs put together.

Crazy.

Happy New Year

2009 is upon me. Here's some goals for this blog in the new year:

• Post More - I already have sort of failed this since it's already 5 days into the year before I even get around to a New Year's post. I'm shooting for twice a week.
• More Exposure - Try to get some others to come to the site. Currently it just exists as a place for me and me alone. Maybe there are other people out there who enjoy 40K and warhammer online
• More Painting - I'm going good on this. I've got ten daemonettes a few drybrush passes away from being done. Pictures will be up soon.
• More supplements - I've got my campaign write-up and a scenario that I want to polish up and post. I'd like to do more of these things, especially since I have a regular group that seems willing to indulge me.

That's it. We're off to the races.

Obliteration

Order forces finally managed to take back a keep near Baraak Vaar, so I was able to fly over and grab the gloves for the Obliterator set. On the way I found some interesting pieces about getting chickened:

• Chickens can buy from vendors. So you can always go back and get pieces from keep renown merchants.
• Chickens take no falling damage. So it can be difficult to kill yourself if you want a quick trip back to the warcamp.

Next up I'll need to start looking for pieces to the Devastator Set. And gaining renown so I can wear it.

Third Tier

I officially levelled out of tier two last night. Rank twenty-two was gained while in the Mourkain Temple scenario. I had been running around in the Troll Country RvR lake so when I got back I was immediately chickened. I went on a rampage. Oh yes, that is a dead pidgeon at my feet. None can withstand the might of chaos.

Trying out the new PvP scenarios was fun. I poked my head in on three out of the five, and they were pretty fun. The first one I got into had the sides fighting over a bomb that they then had to place at the enemies base. It reminded me a lot of SOCOM's footbomb missions.

Finally, I was trying to get ahold of the gloves for my obliterator set. I ran all over the place. Turns out you can only buy them from the renown trainers in the tier two zone RvR lakes. Last night all the tier two keeps in the whole world were order controlled so I got nothing. We'll see about tonight.

Area of Effect Spirit

Here we are, one big happy family. It's a picture of me with all my minions. I'm the Gorton's Fisherman looking guy there in the middle, and the rest are my loyal subjects. The picture is a bit out of date, since I have a new staff now, and Umbrella has stepped it up and dyed his armor nuklear orange. When you're trying to work as a team in PvP it turns out that having dyed armor is actually pretty valuable.

I sat myself down and looked through some forums yesterday to see what other people were doing with their Magus buildouts. Formerly I was going all single-target direct damage, with my mastery tree specced to increase the damage this was doing. Turns out most people are doing area of effect damage, speccing to the mastery tree that boosts the skills that do spirit damage. I gave it a shot and there's a huge difference. I can single-handedly take down Champion mobs that would have crushed me before, sometimes even handling two. I also manage to crush large groups.

Working with Umbrella, he can turn on an aura that draws aggro and just run around until he gets a train of eight to ten guys on him. Just bring them back to me and the DoT spam begins. Before we would look at stage one of a public quest and see that we needed to kill fifty guys to get to the next stage. Now we can clear that in around ten minutes.

We muscled through the intro stages of a number of chapter seven and eight quests, and cleared the Chapter 8 PQ "Lurza's Blight." This was a three stage PQ. The first just having you kill a bunch of plague priests and their attendant nurglings. The Train and Pain tactic working great here, as we would mow down at least eight at a time. Stage two had us killing nine Rot Bearers(lvl 17 champs I think). These spawned in groups of three and summoned nurglings that could be killed in one shot, but that would basically be DoTs against you. AoE cleared the little guys right out.

Finally Lurza his/herself shows up, accompanied by three plaguebearers. When fighting her, just concentrate your attacks and ignore the plaguebearers. Any time you kill one another will come right back and as a 17 Hero it will probably take a minute or two before you knock her down.

Of course, the loot from the PQ was worse than what either of us already had. I don't understand why with just two people finishing a PQ in the area where they belong we still ended up with two Lesser Loot Bags. Where's my awesome PQ loot?

Rumble and Grumble

This last tuesday's gaming night I pulled some tanks together and ran an Armored Company list.  Here's the list:

Command Tank: Leman Russ w/various options

Troops: 2xLeman Russ w/various options

Heavy Support: 3xDemolishers w/various options

Fast Attack: 2xHellhounds

Fast Attack: Squad of 2 Sentinels w/Autocannon

Inquisitor Lord w/3 Warrior Henchmen (1 melta, 2 plas)

1 Callidus Assassin

The plan is to pound the enemy line with the tanks, root out squads hiding in cover with the hellhounds, and outflank with the sentinels to get side or rear shots on enemy armor.  The inquisitor lord and his melta/plas followers would hang around the main body of tanks and provide targeted close range fire support to finish off what couldn't be killed by the templates, while the assassin provides a crucial first turn bunch-up of troops in addition to assaulting any targets that might present themselves.

I rolled up against my friend's Dark Angel Deathwing Army.  He was rolling with a Land Raider Crusader, Belial, 3 Terminator squads, 2 Dreadnoughts, and a Devastator Squad with plasma cannons.

We rolled Annhilation, so my lack of scoring units wasn't a factor. As the battle progressed it became a standout example of how vehicles in general, and imperial guard vehicles specifically have been affected by 5th edition. Here are some highlights:

• Defensive Weapons - It's only defensive if its strength four or less.  This means all those heavy bolter sponsons are basically useless.  In fourth when you were forced to move you could just unload with your bolters, now you're stuck to just firing one when you move.
• Close Combat - Vehicles that have AV10 in the rear die in close combat.  It doesn't matter if you moved twelve inches and your opponent hits on a 6.  Any MEQ unit is capable of generating a glancing hit or two, and a squad of terminators is more than capable of putting the hurt on.  Your vehicle might only get glanced, but it's almost a sure thing that you won't be shooting or moving in the next turn, and then the squad that's attacking hits automatically.
• AV14 is king. Even with strength nine and ten weapons there's a good chance you won't destroy your target.  And unlike with Hand-to-Hand your chance to kill a stationary vehicle with shooting doesn't get better.
• Ballistic skill does help your ordinance, but not that much.  Pulling your shot back to center when it scatters is nice, but you're still going to completely miss your target most of the time.

I still think Armored Company is viable in 5th Ed (See post on BellofLostSouls).  However, I thin they need to be treated like a gunline army.  They need some solid counter-assault units that can screen and clear dangerous units that are trying to close with them.  My nomination for this role will be Grey Knights.  Demolishers are just as good as as standard battle tank, and just the same cost, too, so I'd throw in the Seige Doctrine to get those guys as troops. Without pointing it up here's what the modified list would look like:

Command Chimera, 3 Demolishers, Inquisitor w/3 warriors and 3 acolytes with combi/plasma weapons and a Land Raider, Assassin, 2 squads of Grey Knights.  If there are any points left over they would be spent on basilisks, sentinels, and hellhounds.

I'd be curious to try this list out, since I think it could perform well against a variety opponents.

Demonzilla Redux

The Demonzilla's first outing was a dismal failure. The troop selections were the ones to show up first and then the monstrous creatures stayed at home in the warp until turn four. They gave a good show when they showed up, but it was too little too late.

We did manage to get a lower point game in as well. A Lord of Change in a 750 battle is a pretty unbalancing factor.

Tonight will be their second outing, albeit at a lower points value.

We're doing one thousand point team battles. I'll bring a lord of change, the Masque, some bloodletters, daemonettes, horrors and a khorne demon prince. My teammate is running chaos marines and we're going up against ultramarines and dark angels. Even with the points split between us there should be quite a few monstrous creatures on the table.

I think if I had the model, I'd drop the masque, horrors, and khorne demon prince and replace him with a bloodthirster. Which means it might be time to pick up a bloodthirster model. Maybe black friday....

Demonzilla

The plan for tonight's 40K game is to bring 2000 points of monstrous creature heavy demons. I wanted to field an army that let me use my old greater demon models, and that would hopefully play differently than the list that comes out of the army box.

The list:
HQ
Lord of Change We are Legion, Master of Sorcery, Breath of Chaos, Boon of Mutation
Masque
Skulltaker

Troops
10 Bloodletters Icon, Fury of Khorne, Instrument of Chaos
10 Daemonettes Icon, Instrument of Chaos
5 Pink Horrors Icon, Bolt of Tzeentch, Changeling

Heavy Support
Demon Prince Mark of Tzeentch, Iron Hide, Flight, Might, Breath of Chaos, Daemonic Gaze, Master of Sorcery, Bolt of Tzeentch, Boon of Mutation
Demon Prince Mark of Tzeentch, Iron Hide, Flight, Might, Breath of Chaos, Daemonic Gaze, Master of Sorcery, Bolt of Tzeentch, Boon of Mutation
Demon Prince Mark of Khorn, Iron Hide, Flight, Might, Death Strike

3 scoring units, 9 kill points.

It's low on scoring units, but the Bloodletters and Daemonettes are traveling in a reasonably large blocks and plan on getting into hand to hand and winning. The plan is to drop in with the Greater Demon and Demon Princes on the turn one wave, trying to keep them together. They'll have a bunch of shooting attacks that can kill MEQs from 18+ inches away. Turn two they are in melee combat or destroying dangerous, armored vehicles. Moving them in groups means that even if my opponent concentrates fire chances are they won't get all four monstrous creatures. Breath of Chaos templates and three chances to create chaos spawn every turn.
If the chaos gods don't smile upon me and I get the other half of the army on turn one, then their job is to set themselves up for a turn two charge, and bring down the demon princes to support with breath and boon. Also the masque and changeling do what they can to disrupt the opponents movement.
Smaller points versions of this list (750 and 1000) just include the Lord of Change, Bloodletters, and Horrors, adding princes to get to the desired points value.

Public Questing

I was working on finishing out the influence from some earlier chapters, so I went through the stages of a number of public quests in Ostland and Troll Country.

Umbrella and I finished out the Krul'Gor Herd and managed to horn in on Ragash's Last Stand. Krul'Gor Herd is a chapter below where we are, and Ragash is a chapter ahead. With Krul'Gor the two of us were pretty much able to solo the whole thing, and with Ragash there would have been no way to do it all without all the other people who showed up.

We also mucked about with Bells of War (chapter 5) and Griffon Outpost (chapter 7), and while we didn't finish either of those off, we did make it to some of the later stages.

Ragash's Last Stand was a disappointment for me, since I didn't get any loot. Umbrella managed to snag a small bag, but I don't think he got anything from it that was particularly spectacular. I understand that rolling for loot and assigning a bonus based on contribution is a good way to keep people from simply hopping in at the end of a public quest and grabbing a reward without having put the time in. But when I'm there for all the stages of a quest and I still end up with no loot I come away feeling cheated. Especially since that's the only time I'll ever do that quest. As fast as levels go by in this game I'll never end up going back and doing those quests again. Higher level PQs are a different story, since once you hit the level cap there's little else you can do to advance your character except search for better equipment.

Witness Krul'Gor Herd

Here I ended up with the second highest contribution bonus, but sill only barely managed to snag a loot bag. If there had been one less loot bag or one more higher level person helping out I would have gotten nada again. As it was I still ended up getting nothing useful for myself.

Griping aside, I do love some of the public quests. Staged monster fights are a great joy, giving me a sense of discovery and accomplishment as the encounter stages tick by and we, as a group, discover the mechanics of each stage. I'll be logging on tonight and hope to tackle a few more public quests, and maybe even poke my head into the Sacellum Dungeons.

Attika VI - Campaign Week 4

Reports from Attika VI clearly indicate that the chaos incursion has been repulsed. Preliminary reports suggest that despite fierce fighting inside the city walls, casualties were within acceptable parameters. Timely intervention on the part of the Dark Angels and the Sisters Sororitas ensured that most of the holy sites within the city were kept safe.

Pictures can be found here.

For the Raven God

A buddy and I have been playing Warhammer Online for a couple weeks now. He's the tank and I'm a fragile glass cannon of a magus. Together we roam the countryside making trouble for the forces of Order.

For instance, this guy named "Calvus." Don't know who he is or what he's about, but he's in for a world of hurt.

The Defense of Attika VI

In preparation for the final round in our campaign, I've drawn up what I hope will be an army reasonably capable of taking and holding all table objectives.

Since I know we'll be playing objectives, the list is designed around having a lot of men on the table, with a lot of scoring units. Mixed in are some elite units to provide speed bumps that will keep the opposing forces from simply rolling over the objective grabbing portions of the army. There's a distinct lack of heavy support in this thousand point army, and it would be very weak to anything that decided to bring a bunch of monstrous creatures or a bunch of heavy vehicles. Hopefully in one thousand points there wouldn't be many of either of these, and if there were then they would be unable to lay down the amount of weapon fire necessary to knock eighty-seven infantrymen off the table.

There's a troops squad in a vehicle to get to distant objectives quickly and a smattering of weapons capable of destroying light transports. The sentinels are there to provide anti-swarm support, attacking anything that has a strength of 3 with its heavy flamer before charging in and tying them up for the rest of the game.

HQ
Junior Officer w/bolt pistol & power weapon, 2 autocannons

Elite
7 ratlings
5 ogryn
5 Hardened Veterans. Sargeant w/bolt pistol & power weapon, 3 melta guns, Chimera w/Heavy Bolter & Multilaser

Troops
Infanty Platoon
Junior Officer w/bolt pistol & power weapon, 2 plasma guns
Infantry Squad
Infantry Squad
Infantry Squad

20 conscripts

Armored Fist Squad w/flamer and Chimera w/Heavy Bolter & Multilaser

Fast Attack
Sentinel w/Heavy Flamer
Sentinel w/Heavy Flamer


87 infantrymen
2 tank
2 walkers
3 meltas
2 Heavy Bolters
2 Multilasers
2 Plasma Guns
2 Autocannons
5 scoring units, 14 kill points.

Campaign Week 3

Apocalypse

The penultimate week brought Abaddon the Despoiler and a daemonhost to the outskirts of our fair city, where the brave city defenders gave their lives to delay the inevitable breach of the city walls.

More photos with a description of the battle can be found here.