Scouts, why does it always have to be Scouts?

o/

With Space Marines on my mind after the rant in my last post, I decided to paint a scout/recon sergeant, and partially repainted two grunts with bolters. Then I went on use them alongside my Storm Wardens in a game this past Saturday night. (on a side note, I found another stupid Aurora Scout with a sniper rifle this weekend! Most worthless unit ever!!! I sold that infernal squad years ago to somebody in Stockholm Sweden which has plenty of icy waters to drown them in, yet they still keep coming out of the wood work around here, what the hell?!?!)

...and with that outta the way, here's this week's painting:

The two with bolters were repaints of the Recon Marines I was going to use for the Emperor's Children in 30k (which is such a laughable notion considering our finances right now). Honestly, despite purple being my favorite color, I didn't like em as they were. Painting them black gives me some options on what to use them as, although the Imperial Fists are my preference. I really like the Breacher Marine minis (and their Legion specific rules requires Breachers as compulsory troops choices). Also, recon marines probably wouldn't work too well if they're wearing bright fucking yellow armor. So the black works for that legion as well.

2nd ed 40k starter box marines, vs. old Warzone starter box Imperial infantry converted into Astra Militarum (Cadian arms fit them perfectly) and fighting over The Imperial Forestry Service who were acting as objectives. Miniature-wise it was a battle of the ancients! Indeed, virtually all of the infantry in this game were as old as, if not older than my opponent!

In my game this weekend, they served as regular 'old codex' scouts.  Fielding a squad of 5, the three newly painted ones not only survived their first game, they took out a basilisk that was deep in cover as well! Easily paying for themselves (which made up for them not showing up till turn 4...). In the end the game was a close one and ended in a tie, though had it gone one more turn I probably would've been tabled.

Battle Demi-Company Formation: a rant and some questions…

Okay first off I'll get my rant out of the way:

Personally, I think formations are investor driven cash grabs and nothing more. GW is well aware that a lot of gamers apparently want an 'I WIN' button and many are all to happy to buy into the new winning bandwagon if it is presented to them. Why field a C.A.D. list when you can have a formation (or two) which will blow the other player off of the table due to the *free* rules incentives?

A complete lack of even acknowledging game balance is why GW insist that 40k is a narrative game. The forged narrative being spend more = win more (with the ultimate winners being their investors). Its like the Ferengi are now writing the rules.

Floyd Uberson of the Angry Marines HATES the fucking Ferengi!!!

Moving on…

The other day I was perusing my new Spess Mahreen PDF which was made available to me via our Russian friends on the internet. The hacked iPad interactive PDF was free-to-me BUT, in order to make that possible, the process turns the hyperlinks and drop downs into nothing more than blue type, limiting the PDF's usefulness considerably. Unfortunately I'm poor so beggars can't be choosers (and anything useful for Noble-Knight Trade-in credit has already been used as such).  At least I can build army lists with it which brings me to the following questions…

Starting off in an act of COMPLETE hypocrisy (when considered with the above rant and why not? GW retcons their code of conduct all the time, so why shouldn't their customers?) I was looking at the Battle Demi-Company Formation and realized that I can actually field that with the remnants of my Storm Wardens army. Well, I think so anyways. As such, I'll be looking at the formation based on what I have left of my army and without adding in any future purchases.

First up, I don't see anything that says I can't use the minimum squad sizes. If that's the case them my half-company is more like a quarter company, but it's still legal, right?

Also what if I want to use a Techmarine? Can I do that, and if so as what? An ally to his own army? (lame) Putting him in the list by himself (as he's not in the formation) feels like the army would instantly go unbound (and unbound armies are about as frequently played around here as WHFB is).

Techmarine aside, the same question stands for my Predator tank. Can I just tack that onto the formation too? Or do I have to buy a bunch of crap to make a legal CAD (or other formation) for allies in which to be able to use either of the two? If that's the case, then I'll just sell 'em (well, not the Techmarine, he'll stick around as I love the mini) as I can't afford to buy more stuff in order to use it, and as mentioned above, formations are apparently what 40k is all about these days.

Lastly the formation lists 0-1 unit of Dreadnoughts. Are the dreadnoughts in a squadron then? Or do they deploy as one and then wander off to do their own thing after that (which, considering their wildly different weapons fits, would be appropriate).

All told, using what I have left of the Storm Wardens, and using this formation my army would clock in at approximately 750 points (techmarine and predator excluded). Given that the average game is played at the 1500 point minimum most of the time (but often more), I wonder if I should even worry about any of this at all, or rather just sell off the whole lot (again, minus the techmarine).

That or fuck it, I'll just run a standard CAD as usual and just be behind the 8-ball since the CAD gives no free rules (because I didn't spend any $$$).

Another Grymn heavy twin-linked stubber team is complete!

whew, I'm wiped out. We spent this father's day visiting with and cooking for our families. It was a really good day but we're kinda exhausted so I'll just post a quick pic of this week's painting progress for my Grymn Militarum army:

Not sure where the slight hazy effect came from, as I couldn't find any cause for it in the photoshop file...(edit: depends on the monitor I guess, as this looks fine from work).

 ...and a bit of my army's fluff to go with this team:

In general, the Grymn feel that the civilian chore-bots are completely unfit for combat situations (including their pretty paint jobs!). So rather than being used to fight, they're instead assigned to heavy weapon teams where they serve as grunt labor to haul weapons or as in this case, to pile up rocks for the team to shelter behind.

You're not going to sell all of your bitz are you?

No, I...uh...well...

My friends who have rummaged thru this box over the years will probably be horrified by how empty it is now.

Looking down at my near empty bitz box (the 'BIG BOX' as I generally refer to it), and the 6, full, gallon sized bag at my feet...well, it sure looked like I was heading in that direction. I guess I kinda just got into the ebay mindset and wasn't stopping till Wolfy posed that question to me.

Next stop: ebay.

 My Orks, Space Marines and Eldar (what survives of the three armies), along with Wolfy's Tau are all already built, with no plans of any future purchases at the moment (and I'm two updated codexes behind already). The Grymn and Quar are all largely 1-2 piece metal minis, with little to no need of conversion. X-Wing conversions to date number just one ship, and that didn't require anymore than rearranging its own parts. Ya know, I always said I'd be done with gaming when I sold off all of my bitz, and after seeing how well Mike's bitz bags sold for a few weeks back, I thought:

Why hang onto all of this junk that I'm not using anymore?

But I dunno, faced with the reality of what I was doing, I quietly stopped and instead I collected my smaller bitz boxes and dumped them into the now almost empty big box, closed the lid and put it back in the game room. I know I'm not done with gaming just yet, but my connection to my 20 year love of all forms of Warhammer took another big, BIG hit today. It makes me sad, but more for what 40k & WHFB was, rather than what GW's turned them into now.

On a brighter note, here's my latest Grymn WIP Twin-Heavy stubber team:

Too much sand?

Is she in there watching porn?

lol, sorry folks, but I wish I'd had the camera ready for the look on Murl's face when he asked that! I replied with 'I doubt it but its on the Roku, so its not as censored as regular TV' followed by Wolfy in the living room yelling:

 I'M WATCHING HEMLOCK GROVE ON NETFLIX!!! Jeez...

lol, well somebody on the TV was having sex and it was clearly audible if not visible (and it did sound a lot like porn...). This conversation was taking place whilst Murl and I were playing Battletech. I was running a 3050s era 15th Dracon (Mercenaries) list, vs. a Marik list of...I dunno, roughly the same time period I guess. I didn't ask but there was at least one ER PPC shooting at me...

Rifleman down...

You'll note that my Rifleman died on the shore of a small lake.  That particular mech runs really hot, and water helps with that right? Asking how it works Murl told me that any heat sinks in the legs operate at double efficiency. Awesome! Or it was until I looked to find that there are no heat sinks in its legs, WTF? really? To make matters worse he asked: How much armor is left on its legs? not much, why? Because if any rolls are made for internals the whole leg shorts out and the mech is effectively dead, that's why underwater fighting is so brutal.

Oh fuck! 

Luckily, that was the end of the game turn and my rifleman ran its ass out of the water to where you see it died shortly thereafter on the lake's shore, so it probably didn't matter anyways...

Aww, poor Hoplite! When the ammo got hit, there was no way for the pilot to make it out alive!

Maneuvering my Exterminator into the backfield got the Apollo to turn around for a good ol' fistfight. Its kindova waste of a heavy mech, but it kept those 2 LRM 15s off of me for a few turns!

This isn't really a battle report since as you can see, I only took a few pics, but it was a good ol' fashioned battletech slug-fest like we used to have all the time. Honestly, we need to play this game more often. In the end we called it due to the  late hour, but I ran up the white flag.

I ended up with 2 mechs down and my Warhammer about to go to internal damage just about everywhere in the next turn. That said, were this a campaign setting, my Exterminator would have been able to go onto its next battle without a refit needed (though probably recommended).

Murl in turn hadn't lost anything though his fucking Hunchback should've been blown to bits mid game but I couldn't make a crit roll to save my life! One of his Apollos was in bad shape, the other had minor dents and dings and his Wolverine was in decent shape as well.

All in all it was fun and I hope we get to play some more CBT more than once or twice per year.

This week in primer...

...sorry folks. It can't be all pretty pictures every week. This week for instance, I primered some stuff, but that's about it. As I type this, our YT-2400 is outside, its new coat of black primer drying. My beloved Wolfy wants in it purple, and so it shall be.

Space Dwarfs and Robots, does it get any better?

Earlier this week...or maybe it was late last week, I'm not sure, but anyways I primered some new Grymn recruits (acquired via some Noble-Knight trade-in credit), plus a few more who were recently liberated from the simple green, and a few Bombshell minis as well. Yeah I know, nothing too exciting (though if you're looking for excitement, we would like to recommend Mad Max, Fury Road which we saw Tuesday night!).

In other news, I'm hoping to get in a long, lonnnnnnng overdue game of Battletech in with Murl this evening. If that's a go then I'll try to post a few pics of what Wolfy calls the most boring version of giant stompy robots-EVER!

lol.

Mison Impossible...

...or rather, not impossible.

Well okay, this mess was impossible...

I made a list (with the above witty title) for this past weekend of my usual array of shitty pilots, and it is as follows:


• Tarn Mison, R7 Astromech

• Bandit Squadron Pilot (no upgrades)

• Gold Squadron Pilot, BLT Title, Auto-Blaster Turret, R2 Astromech

• Gold Squadron Pilot, BLT Title, Auto-Blaster Turret, R2 Astromech

• Gold Squadron Pilot, BLT Title, Auto-Blaster Turret, R2 Astromech

Totaling 100 points. 

I figured I'd take some shit for the auto-blaster turrets as I used to bitch about Kushial always taking them...and, I did. Auto-blaster turrets are (IMO) Phantom TIE insurance. Mike had a point when asking: How many Phantoms have you seen since their nerf? (okay, good point.) Well, they're also 3 points cheaper than an ion turret, so there ya go. Anyways, so what's my point in all this? I won all 3 games played!

Holy-shit Batman!

The first round (with no photos, sorry) was myself vs. Mike playing Wolfy's hit & Run scenario. Mike was running 2 HWK-290s (paired together) and forgot how slow they were, so it was easy to overload one side of the table and run away. Easy win.

Hrmm...I guess the Scum & Villainy didn't like my Rebels shooting their Z-95 in the back. Oops, wasn't apology enough either...

Round two, our buddy Scott joined in with Scum & Villainy running the same scenario. I won that as well, though only just barely and in all honesty I should have lost that round. Mike had a turn of mistaken maneuvering and all 3 TIE interceptors made a hard turn in the wrong direction. Boosts mitigated the distance damage a bit, but slowed him down just enough to allow me to escape the table first.

 Round 3 was myself teamed up with Scott running a pair of IG88s, vs. Mike running 200 points of Empire. The IG's took the lead and went after the TIE horde. Whereas my ships showed up late to the already developing slugfest and my entire squadron dumped into Mike's Decimator. His reply to this: Wow, you guys are going to take down my Decimator faster than the tournament guys did. I don't know if that's impressive or just sad.

Everybody will bump in 5, 4, 3...

...and ah yes, back to this mess.

You will note in the photo below that Tarn's X-Wing is waaaay far away from the clusterfuck as I also had a maneuvering error of my own which I tried to correct with a K-Turn. Thus he finished out the game just watching from afar.

Tarn aside, all attempts to fly out of this clusterfuck were futile.

lol, we soon took down the Decimator and a pair of Academy TIEs, and Mike called it quits as he was down almost 100 points (we hadn't lost anything yet), that and it was 11pm. Awesome.

Wolfy's 'Hit & Run' X-Wing Scenario

o/

Wolfy (my fiancé) has lately been avoiding X-Wing. In a nutshell, she's bored with every game's focus being to simply wipe out the other side. True, that does get old but there are scenarios, right? Well yeah, but the few you get with some of the X-Wing packs are kinda lackluster themselves, and we haven't checked out FFG's fan-made scenarios yet either.

To quote Lando Calrissian: That was too close!

So stricken with insomnia the other night, Wolfy came up with her own simple scenario and we gave it a try twice Tuesday night.

The verdict: Its a keeper!

Using a blind draw for our lists (out of the myriad that I have printed out), we both drew Rebels for the 2nd game. Here, you can see that Wolfy has effectively learned my tactic of blocking with scrub pilots...

Okay so here's the set up:

Force Selection: 100 points - any faction

Mission Objectives:  All ships must at some point cross the center of the game area (use the ship's flight peg to determine this). Additionally, you need to destroy at least one opposing ship, and whichever ship (on each side) that gets the 'kill shot' (final blow on the victim) must then get off of your deployment table edge alive!

Sounds easy right?

Okay, so there's nothing of note happening in this pic, but I thought it looked cool enough to post anyways.

lol, yeah, try it…between the two games played, the winning ships  (a TIE Interceptor in the 1st game and a the Scarlet Harlot with Chewbacca at the helm in the 2nd) made it off the table with (collectively) 3 hull points remaining and enemy ships in close pursuit! Not to mention that it REALLY sucks when the ship you got the kill shot with, gets itself blown up as happened to me in the 1st round...it really makes you think about who shoots what.

The Scarlet Harlot narrowly escapes the board to win the game!

With one win each, both games came down to the wire, and in our opinion those games are the best ones!

StarViper Repaint

o/

Ever since my fiance Wolfy first saw the preview pics of the StarViper, she called it the Butterfly ship. Except...well, it was colored more like a moth.

Well now that its been repainted, there may not be too many metallic colored butterflies out there, but try and convince us that this doesn't look better...

Yeah, good luck on that.