6th edition Necron upgrades!

I've been reading the new rulebook all day and the new FAQs have come out. From what I've seen so far necrons have gained a lot more than they've lost.

My not exhaustive list of awesome new things:

• Command barges are now chariots and can charge into combat! The lord on board can also negate the loss of armour points.

• Wraiths whip coils now work properly against grey knights force halberds.

• Wraiths also get an extra I10 strike in combat when charging.

• Spyders now have as good a psychic defence as psychic hoods.

• Spyders and C'Tan cause Fear! Omg awesome.

• Spyders get an I10 hit when charging!

• Fearless models now don't take fearless saves when loosing combat. Scarabs, wraiths and spyders just got an amazing boost.

• Night fight change. I'm not sure if this is better or worse for Imotekh armies.

• Warscythes are back to being one of the most awesome weapons in te game. They have AP1, armourbane and don't get an initiative modifier like most weapons that add strength now.

• The changes to rapid fire make warriors awesome and their ability to strip armour points is awesome too.

• Scarabs don't have stealth anymore :( they still have 'vulnerable to blasts' and now they ignore difficult terrain.

• Our skimmers now have 'jink' saves. I.e. if the skimmer moves it gains a 5+ cover save. If it goes flat out it gets a 4+ cover save.

I'll update this list when I notice anything else. My brain is busy melting at the moment from all the new info.

Dakkajet painted and ready for krumpin stuff

Waaaaaagh dakka dakka dakka dakka!!!!!

 I've just finished painted what might be my first of 3 dakkajets for my Waaagh Wazdakka. The kit was great to assemble, there's loads of options for different panels and gubbinz, you also get left with loads of gubbinz to use on your other ork vehicles. The painting for this was relatively easy, I'm lazy so I'm not going to make it the Mona Lisa of ork vehicles. I have to admit that I actually used a brush normally used for painting walls. It did make the job pretty quick though.

The method I used for the red was nice and easy with a big brush. I undercoated it with red oxide primer. Then slapped a load of blood red on with the big brush, I let all the deep recesses stay as the red primer, it added shading. I then covered the whole thing in my custom mixed brown wash made from roughly 1 part brown dipping paint, 1 part water and 1 part acrylic mat medium to make it not glossy as washes sometimes go. I then just dry brushed the whole thing with blood red a couple of times.

I experimented with a way of painting rusty metal on the base. I first painted scorched brown, then a wash of watered down macharius orange, followed by a dry brushing of boltgun metal and finally mithril silver. I'm really pleased with the results.

 

If I do decide to make more I have an idea. I play to buy one kit and make to planes out of it by plasticarding the rest of the models. That way I'll get unique models. I hate using ork vehicles that look the same, its just un-orky, everything is meant to be bodged together and not mass produced. I might still decide to upgrade this one with scratches and rust spots but I quite like it as is at the moment.

I'm on fire this week! 4 articles in 7 days!!

First steps back into Warmahordes - a 35 point reminder game

Tonight at the gaming club I played my first Warmachine game in probably over 3 years. I used to play occasionally but gave up when mk2 came out. With the wait for 6th edition of 40k there has been a resurgence of interest into other games, at out club Warmachine has all of a sudden become very popular. It'll probably go back to 40k in about a months time.

For tonight's game we played 35 points. I used my Cryx with Terminus, Deathjack and some other stuff in a not really thought out list, I just picked what I had painted really. I played against a Cygnar army led by Epic Nemo and a ton of lightning based painful stuff. It was weirdly enough almost exactly the same army that I played last many years ago that put me off the game. 

I deployed first and ran pretty much everything towards my opponent on the first turn. Probably a big mistake but I'm still learning. He moved forward a little bit, just enough to stay out of my charge range. He then started his lightning shenanigans. My pistol wraith and my machine wraith were quickly dispatched by his solos with some magic attacks :(

I almost pulled off an amazing blast attack with the Deathjack casting one of terminus' blast spells on his big unit of troops. Unfortunately it scattered away, wasting the 4 focus points I'd spent. If it had succeeded then Deathjack would have gained a huge bunch of soul tokens.

My Mechanithralls did absolutely nothing.

The Deathjack then got charged by his heavy jack and those troops I'd failed to kill. The game pretty much revolved around this combat from this point on. DJ stood there taking a punishing turn after turn but every turn DJ attacked he'd kill a couple of dudes and heal a D6 of damage for each one, much to the annoyance of my opponent. By the end of the game the Deathjack had killed his heavy jack and a bunch of the infantry and still had all his systems working :D

With the rest of my army; I went crazy with Terminus and charged him into a jack. After a couple of turns Termy had killed it but had taken a lot of damage.

In the last couple of turns some crazyness involving turning my leviathan jack into a giant magnet (apparently) and making it immobile screwed over my jacks. This gave Nemo an opening for him to charge into Terminus and finish him off personally. Yay for caster on caster combat, not yay for terminus only having 4 health when the combat started.

So in the end I lost but I put up a good fight. My heavy jacks were almost undamaged at the end and if I hadn't have forgotten about my units having tough and Terminus' awesome upkeep spell (can't remember the name) I might have won. Oh well, it was meant to be a learning game anyway. You always learn more from a defeat than a victory anyway.

2nd place at the Guardians of Tyr 1500 point 40k tournament!

Today was the 1500 point 40k tournament at wargames workshop (not GW) in Northampton (in the UK for anyone in the states reading this). I had ballsed up before I even started playing, I'd left my bag at home with all my dice, my rulebook, my codex, my army list etc. in it. It was a bit of a panic moment, had to borrow everything except my army, cost me a tournament point :(

The tournament involved 3 games over the day with 5 turns in each game, but we only managed 4 turns in each of the games I played in. I used my Imotekh/Scarab farm combo and found it to be good only if I deployed my scarabs as close as possible to the opponent while keeping them safe. Unfortunately I was trying to play too safely for the first 2 games and the horde of scarabs never did much.

1st game was 2 random objectives each, these were kept secret from your opponent. I managed to claim one objective and my opponent had 2. If we played for another 2 minutes it would have been a draw due to me smashing his guardsmen in combat with my scarabs and pulling them off the objective. :(

Ian vs Ian, Guard vs Marines

2nd game was 5 objective on the map. I held 1 objective at the end and my opponent contested one with me. So I won that one. I managed to keep night fighting going on the whole game with Imotekh, the lightning did loads of damage, more than the rest of my army.

Unleash the Swarm! This unit of scarabs started the game as only 3 bases.

I'm gunna eat you....

Multi Melta to the face!

3rd game was kill points with table quarters deployment. I was playing against a very nicely painted Red Scorpions army played by someone who found the tournament by reading this blog :) 

I managed to get a huge horde of scarabs into combat with my opponent and they chomped through his army with the help of my spyders. In just one combat the scarabs charged into 2 squads of marines and the rhinos they were riding in before. Both the rhinos exploded and I killed a bunch of marines. Then my scarabs piled into combat getting even more into the melee and slaughtered the rest. After that combat they wandered over to the stern guard squad led by a librarian and promptly started munching on them but we had to end the game at that point. 

Overall I beat Ian McDonald by only one tournament point to claim 2nd place. It was 46 points to 45. Congrats to Ian Wardle who claimed overall victory for the tournament.

Congrats to Ian

My article published in local magazine!

Just over a month ago I wrote an article for the quarterly magazine at RAF Wittering. Now its been published woo! I've never had anything published before. The magazine gets distributed to the RAF station and the surrounding area, it has articles about what the people working here do and events that happen here.

I'm famous lol. Shame they used a picture of someone else's army and not mine (and no, its not me running on the front cover either).

Last tournament of 5th edition 40k - Sunday 17th @ WargamesWorkshop, Northampton

Next Sunday is my last tournament for the current edition of 40k at wargamesworkshop in Northampton, run by the guys at Guardians of Tyr. A pretty standard 1500 point tourney and I plan on using my Imotekh/Scarab Farm army. I wanted to use my Orks or my Blood Angels but I know that one of the opponents is going to use guard and my Imo/Farm combo is the only army I can chuck out that has a chance against a leaf blower list. I know I shouldn't tailor my lists but sod it! It is a tournament after all.

My 1500 point list is a cut down version of the 1750 point list I used for the RAFWA tournament a few months ago. I've had to cut my fun bits down to the bare minimun and I've really found that 1500 points is just too small for 40k these days. I can't wait for 6th edition to happen and for everything to be shaken up. Hopefully games will get bigger so I can field more effective combos and be able to protect my vulnerable bits better.

I've got an Ork Bomma coming in the post, can't wait to assemble this kit. I'm really excited and aprehensive at the same time about the introduction of aircraft into 40k. I just hope they get the rules right. 6s to hit it with normal guns, stuff like that. Its just a shame that I can only have 3 dakkajets..... I'm contemplating scratch building an ork biplane and casting is in resin.