1500pt battle report - Dark Angels v Nurgle Chaos Space Marines, Game 1

Ben suggested we have a mini tournament the other week, using Blog Wars rules. I managed to get it down to 1500pts for convenience and Ben, Liam, PeteB and myself rocked up to see what we could do.We randomly rolled starting match ups and I got Liam

The low down:

• Hammer and Anvil
• Kill points
• No night fighting, won deployment, elected to deploy second and stole the initiative.
• Warlord Trait - Ezekiel - Fearless to all units within 12"
• Psychic powers:

1. Psychic Shriek
2. Terrify
3. Hallucination
4. Dominate

I set up diagonally opposite Liam, using plenty of cover for my Bastion. This was the first time he'd played the Nurgle marines since our pairing at Throne of Skulls but I wasn't about to lose my Bastion turn one like last time! I did cruise the Land Raider forward, with Ezekiel, Techmarine and Deathwing squad inside.

I wasn't able to score First Strike [kill a unit in your first turn] but I did kill 1 Chaos Spawn.

I also killed a zombie cultist.

But forgot to move my Scouts who were too well hidden in Liam's back field that I didn't see them at all!

Not much happened in Liam's turn. I think he managed to kill a marine, but that was pretty much it.

My turn 2 and my second unit of Terminators teleported in. Unfortunately they deviated back towards my own lines instead of within cover of the trees, still, at least they didn't mishap on the cultists who had somehow become aware of the well camouflaged Scouts in the wood - maybe they could smell BRAINS! The Deathwing were pretty rubbish shooting, even with twin-linked 'to hit' on Deep Strike. I must have kille donly one or two, it was pitiful.

Tactical squad in the tower managed to Kill and wound another couple of spawn.

Hell-flies both turned up which would result in a classic display of Liam's 'bad luck'. I intercepted this Hell-fly with my Quad Gun, hit twice, got one penetrating hit of a 6, then rolled and got another 6 for damage! He is cursed, and then I suggested it might have some daemonic save but if it did it failed and then the only thing that would keep it in the sky was a 3+ roll on the imobilised flyer table which he failed, of course! The only silver lining was the fly was punched out of the air backwards and landed on top of my Deathwing and killed one of them.

The other Hell-fly took revenge by burning out the Tactical squad in the tower.

Meanwhile Typhus and his retinue disembarked from the corrupt Land Raider and would set their sights on the Land Raider. The Terminators who'd just lost one of their number were targeted by the Obliterators and promptly obliterated, even sheathed in Tactical Dreadnought Armour.

Armed with melta weaponry the chaos Terminators made short work of Deathwing Land Raider, reducing it to molten slag.

Luckily all the occupants were too well protected to suffer any harm from the explosion.

With Dark Vengeance™ in their eyes they faced their traitorous foes.

 

What followed was an epic confrontation with Chaos terminators doing little to no damage on the Deathwing, who responded with killing most of them, the Techmarine finishing them off while Typhus and Ezekiel faced each other. As his traitorous bretheren fell one by one to the Dark Angel powerfists he fueled all his hatred into a might attack, killing Ezekiel, the Techmarine and all the remaining Terminators ro become last man standing but not without taking two wounds from Ezekiel as he crushed him underfoot.

The Chaos Spawn attempted to eat the tower but the remainign combat squad of Tactical marines had properly barricaded themselves in, preparing to seek flaming retribution from the firing ports int he door.

Tyrphus stood over the gore-soaked remains of his guard and the might of the First Legion.

But failed to notice the nearby Tactical Squad who managed to find a chink in his corrupt armour with a sanctified and blessed holy bolt shell. He succumbed to this one wound and fell where he stood, his traitorous endeavours forever to be expunged from Imperial records.

The zombies finally managed to catch the Scouts, killing the sergeant as he tried in vain to defend the corpses of his squad from the cannibalistic hunger of the appproaching horde.

 

The game came to a close. I'd lost 1,030 points and only managed 300-500 in return. Liam also got Slay the Warlord and Line Breaker so it was a pretty comprehensive win. However, I had to love those defining moment in the game: 

• stealing the initiative - always makes Liam sad
• one penetrating hit, one immobilised vehicle, one failed crash test on the Hell-fly
• Tyhpus losing his last wound to a bolter round

 So, on to game 2...

Tyre Safety Month

This may explain why I've published 1,000+ posts in under 5 years but it would be remiss of me not to use this platform to share something I felt was important [especially when I did the animation below ;) ]. It's Tyre Safety Month in the UK [but you can 'play' along in other countries too] and the main headline is that there were 80,000+ tyre related incidents on England's motorways over the last two years and many of those could have been prevented by a very simple '20p tyre check'.

I know this isn't hobby related, or even a particularly exciting and 'sexy' topic but if you're interested please look at tyresafes website, share the message with your friends, or at the least check your own tyres before the Winter weather hits.

Actually saying tyres aren't exciting, I bet this guy wished he'd checked his tyres...

The Autumn Awesome - Ben's pre-Blog Wars 1,500pt mini tournament

Ben suggested a little mini-tournament for last weekend, using Blog Wars rules but at a reduced points size because I'm already struggling to make 1,500pts and I was worried about game times too. Inbetween my own games I took a few pictures of the other guys games so thought I'd share these separately so you can enjoy the miniatures. Although PeteB won't be able to make BWX he brought his Eldar, mainly footdar with a Fire Prism and some War Walkers.

Ben went with his Ork horde with Ghaz and a bunch of bosses and nobz.

This was the kill points game, first of the day.

Ghazghkull did a magnificent job of sneaking up on these Dark Reapers.

Such a great lunch, worth waiting until about 1pm for anyway ;)

To save time moving around, Pete and Liam ended the day on my board. Sadly the footdar found it tough securing the three objectives on this board but by the howls of frustration from Liam it sounded like Karandras was up to his usual awesomeness, he certainly did my Dark Angels over!

Darn Hellflies.

Liam's MVPs - the Obliterators

It still amazes me that that Land Raider is scratchbuilt!

The Walking Dead

And by the end of the night their was Blood for the Blood G.O.D. [even if there was no Khorne on the battlefield!]

Imperial Knight - Cerastus in manufactorum pt 6

The Cerastus is getting all my attention at the moment, it is afterall the largest chunk of points in my proposed Blog Wars list. If I don't finish this then I can't proxy a Paladin. Some of the other Dark Angel Bits can be swapped if I don't complete but if this fails it'll have to be nids. Therefore I'm still trying to work through 'process' - a lot of washes need to be applied to bring down the shininess of the metals. However, the armour plates will also need shading so I can actually save time and do them all at once, at least initially. To that end I started in blocking in some on the plates that had not had red oxide primer. Unfortunately my Valejo Heavy Red, which is closer to the primer wasn't up to covering the black so I went Khorne red but you can see the difference in hue/tone below.

This does match up more in line with my Epic Reaver Titan which was the original intention. However, my success with red recently has been based more on the Vermilion on the red planet base. Still, it's early days and as I'm considering the washes having a big impact on this I'm not too concerned at the current red colour, it could easily change.

So I've concentrated mainly on the metallics, bringing all the pieces up to the same highlight stage, even if some have already had some washes on -  the carapace. Should it transpire that extra metallics needed to be added post wash to just 'shine them up a bit', I don't think that'll be too hard.

But I am still debating the heraldry options: bonewhite panels, black panels, yellow/black chevrons. I'm thinking the chevrons would be nice on the Carapace, on the angled ridge on the left as we see it below. The right hand side has a little cylindrical thing that would make it look odd. But if I go with yellow/black then adding in the bonewhite panels, which will tie in the Deathwing will be another colour and perhaps too busy. Whereas black panels, will tie with the Deathwing but I'm just not confident in execution and certainly don't think I can match what I've envisaged for the Bonewhite.

What I may do is play around in Photoshop with some fully constructed images this week...

Anyway, just to let you know, PeteB, Liam, Ben and myself all had a little pre-Blog Wars warmp up, but with only 1,500 pts at the weekend. So I've three battle reports to write up but I think this is the headline folks, the obligatory lunch picture:

That's two brown rolls, with fresh-laid eggs from Ben's chickens, two sausages [one Cumberland, the other from a local butchers, made in Birkdale that had peppers in, which I don't usually like, but were fantastic] and a mound of crispy bacon. We were convinced Ben was trying to kill us off with coronaries instead of just winning the games. Good times were had by all!

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 

Imperial Knight - Cerastus in manufactorum pt 5

Not sure why but the Cerastus is getting the love at the moment. Progress on the Bastions were goign strong but he snuck in there and I had my first painting session in the 40k man cave where I laid down some more metallic stippling. Once again this is a bit weird because the mottled metal effect is really cool but quite bright, this will be toned down with subsequent washes and the obligatory verdigris but it's always a gamble at this stage I just have to have faith that'll come right in the end, well that IS the most important rule of painting afterall.

The funny thing is that the metallics are actually something I've done a lot of and should be confident about but every time I hit these milestones where I think, that actually looks nice, I should stop there when I know the end result will actually look just as good if not better. Doubt seeps in and that will cause procrastination and perhaps make other projects seem more appealiing leaving this in the doldrums. When you add in the doubts that appear that there is still loads more to do, despite my best efforts to convince myself the 'metallics are actually really easy', which then evolves into 'yes but there's loads of them'... You see that's the problem with painting, too much time to THINK! and those thoughts are often a barrier to progression.

Yet another internal debate is the actual House colour scheme of the Knight. This will be house Corvus, an off-shoot of house Raven. But I'll still use the supplied decals [which I may live to regret] just because they're awesomely detailed. It may result in a rather incongruous finish amongst my freehand symbols elsewhere but they're too good to pass up. However, there are elements of the Corvus scheme I don't like, mainly the black quartering but also the chevrons. With my issues painting the Ravenwing I don't particularly want to paint black if I can help it. Of course as it's an off-shoot of Raven I can do whatever the hell I want which means I can switch black to Bonewhite and not include the white lines in the yellow black Chevrons

But I have just rediscovered this blog http://musingsofametalmind.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/imperial-knight.html which has a pretty cool take on Raven that I'd like to follow. It has the level of weathering I'd like to do and more importantly think I'm capable of.

The legs have received a little more attention than the body, I'm thinking I may need to add a small amount of gun metal as extreme highlight to match up with my long in gestation Dark Angels drop pod [now that's something that'll never get the verdigris treatment].

But the gold is just a little too 'flat' it needs some more tone on top to create more patination in it and add depth and texture. There's a lot fun doing metal like this, there's no real skill involved it's mainly stippling with a crappy brush and adding washes in places to create that depth.

And of course knights are full of metal underneath the carapace so that's why it's deceptive because the process is simple, it's just there's lots of it and then there are details I'll want to pick out to make the mass of metals more interesting and then I have to paint the carapace which isn't just red but all the other colours [not to mention the special FX afterwrds] and that's when the task ahead looks insurmountable and my Blog Wars to do list unlikely. I'm confident I can manage one of the three outstanding elements, perhaps two but the Ravenwing seem doubtful...

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 

1,000 posts

Welcome to yet another arbitrary milestone celebrating my continued blogging enterprise. The funny thing is these begin to feel like award ceremonies, y'know when a winner will say 'this award is great because it's voted by the fans' and then at the next ceremony 'this award is great because it's voted by my peers in the industry'.

Anyway, this milestone is great because it's all about me! I've created 1,000 blog posts, sure some have been much like this, self serving gratification but 1,000 posts is still a big deal. But I can't sit here thanking me for being me and writing so much because once again without you there wouldn't be a blog, well there might be but it's doubtful I'd have persevered to produce 1,000 posts in such a time. So thanks, and I promise that aside from my up-coming blog birthday the next milestone will be all about you, so you can feel pleased with yourselves like I currently do ;)