I keep meaning to update this….

So it’s been a busy few months. The new daemon codex dropped which meant my army changed in a few radical ways. In my oppinion in very much better ways, gone is the top tier auto win units. It’s now a much more balanced affair, very aggressive but very delicate.

But enough for now on the codex changes. Project silent nears completion, i have all the units i wanted to use painted, i’ve been neglecting the gaming board due to a codex change and needing to learn an entirely new codex for March Throne of Skulls. I elected for a very fast moving aggressive army with a couple of units to camp objectives. On the whole my list worked very well, I came second in the daemon category by a single point,  both myself and the top player having picked up 4 wins and 3 sportsman points, the difference being he drew his first game, i lost mine. The Bloodthirster and Lord of change tag team worked very well. The 2 units of fiends were disruptive and hard hitting (they are now excellent psychic defence and impose a -5 iniative penalty on any unit they assault!) 

With spare points i had from the codex change over i added in some blood letters modelled on the lost children that were censored from the first game and added in some plague drones (which again are excellent models and stats wise!)

I don’t have many pics of the new units yet but i’ll get on it and do something about that this week sometime! I’ll even add a pic of my Alessa conversion. 

However this month sees the Tau getting an update (this is expensive all 3 armies i play being updated since october.) From everything i’ve seen the new codex i exactly what we’ve been waiting for, new toys, new mechs and most importantly a rebalancing in points so that everything isn’t stupidly expensive!

I’ll do another update with pics of the daemon stuff and some of the new tau stuff as i get it done!

Project Silent…..

So first real update on this. It will also include pictures, i apologise in advance of the quality but they were done on my phone cam.

So i’ve been getting back into doing my silent hill inspired daemons between painting up pyramid head, the first batch of nurses and work on the display board for them, it’s been a productive couple of weeks!

I’ve talked a bit about what i want to do with the army, but for the board i have a very specific vision. The idea is that i want the outpost to be going through the change from mist to hell world,so i’ve been laying down sections of brass to represent where the hell world is starting to break through. After all the brass has been set in place i’m going to use wax to create a peeling effect, to show how it’s causing reality to literally back off from the brass. I’ll post updates as i make progress so you can see how the project evolves!

My musings on gaming in general….

At the moment i’m on a bit of a break from 40k. Recently i’ve found it kinda hard to get motivated to play any games. I plan on starting to work on my silent hill inspired daemon army soon, but time and money have been lacking.

As a result of this break i’ve been playing a few other systems, looking at other alternatives and thinking on gaming, gamers and the whole shebang in general. Recently i’ve been playing a lot of x-wing. For those that don’t know it’s an awesome wee system from fantasy flight. It’s very easy to pick up, fast paced, balanced, tactical, has a solid rules set and most importantly very cheap to run. You can run a competitive fleet for as little as £30.

Because of this i’ve been thinking about my gaming experience in general. I’ve been gaming in some form for most of my life. I started with 40 at the age of 7 (that was a fair while ago) I then tried RPG’s in my early teens, then onto LARPing in my late teens early 20’s, and then back to 40k. For me gaming has always been an escape, something i do to chill out and wind down from real life, i like the competitive environment but it doesn’t bother me if i’m not top of the pile. But i know a lot of people who are very competitive, the kinda guys who wield the power builds. The guys (and girls) who need to be the big alpha. I have never quite understood this mentality, sure i get the thing of being the best at what you do, i always strive to do my best but by the same token winning isn’t everything to me….. But back to my main point, the people who tend to wield the power builds also tend to be very highly strung and very defensive. I have found that these people don’t tend to take criticism or losing very well. Hell i know some people who get openly abusive when they lose or get out maneuvered.

I must stress that not all power players are like this, but it is a very common trend amongst them. The other interesting thing about this particular group of players is the polar view of them, some people hate then and deride them as dicks, others tend to follow thier trail, weilding the build they use in the hope of emulating them. My view on this topic is that power builds aren’t my style, i can never get them to work for me, i prefer to play my own way and in my own time.

It’s largely because of the power play that i’m taking a break form 40k, the circle i normally game with have got into the high end competitive scene, and as a result have become ‘gamey’. I still get on with them, but that scene isn’t for me. i find it frustrating and mind numbing, but fair play to those who want it!

I’m focussing on x-wing, the tourny scene is still quite new and small, and the forum i inhabit have all been quite friendly and open to discussion.My first tourny is in january and i have an imperial fleet that have done quite well in play testing!

It’s been a while

It’s been quiet on here, largely because of the real life work load and the amount i’ve been trying to do.

So with that in mind here’s my last few months!

 

My tau project has been fully completed and has had quite a good success rate, notiching up 2 wins and a loss at the last chaos of the warp and 2 wins 1 draw 2 losses at october ToS.

I’ve actually found the Tau very rewarding to play with, while they do have a lot of firepower they do have some very big weaknesses, it’s not so much playing 40k as having to play chess, target selection is absolutley vital, you need to know what you need to shoot first and make sure it goes down. The Tau struggle with this even with marker lights because of thier dire BS, i found the addition of Eldrad and divination mitigated a lot of problems the Tau have, including a lack of psychic defence. A far few people i game with regularly have commented on how much my playing has improved since i took up Tau and i myself can see the difference.

I recommend to anyone to take an army that isn’t top tier and game with it, it’ll give you a much deeper appreciation of the game and how it works in very different ways .

Since my last post the new Chaos marine codex has been released, this caused me to revamp my World Eaters and once again let them loose to do what they do best.

I’m finding it quite tricky to get a list working properly, i think after months of playing with Tau i’ve gotten very used to playing the counter punch game, sit back, pick targets and whittle them down, with the World Eaters you need to be aggressive to get stuff done, After a lot of tinkering i think i have a list that will work, it’s now just a case of re-adjusting my thinking to be able to play the much more aggressive in your face game.

I’m aiming to actually keep this thing a lot more up to date than i have been! In a future post i’ll go over army concepts, painting stuff and other things such as trolls and how to deal with them (because you do get a lot of them)

An interesting thought

I read a necro’ed thread on caledonian deathwatch today where people list thier top 10 players in Glasow.

It was quite interesting and thought provoking for me, this time last year my name appeared in a few peoples top 10/5 of good players in the area, now i’ve not been mentioned once, and it got me thinking why that may be. I started thinking back over my last year of gaming, in that time i have gone through no less than 7 different army projects. This time last year i was purely working on my custodes, that was all i was gaming with,and as a result i got quite good with them. I however got very bored of using the Grey Knight codex, i also got very sick  of the various negative comments concerning me using that particular codex.

So for a long time i’ve kinda drifted through armies until i went back to my World Eaters, because of the decline in the chaos codex i opted to use the blood angels codex, again i went through several incarnations of the army before i settled on the dread spam list, i sat and played with exclusively and got consistent with it. Then 6th ed came out, and while most people stuck to thier armies i went for a new project (the Tau) and as a result it’s been a very steep learning curve, one that is now leveling out as i’m much more confident and i know exactly where the lists weaknesses lie.

Most of the ‘top players’ in the Glasgow army have  2-3 codices they play, thier playing ability comes from familiarity with that codex and how it operates, it’s a skill i used to have before i went through what i call hobby limbo.

With the chaos codex around the corner i think i’m gonna focus on both my existing and potential chaos armies and continue developing my tau force, They are both armies i enjoy very much and i think that’s been something i’ve been missing from the hobby for a long time, maybe i can reclaim a place back in the top 10!

Current army projects……

So the obligitory post about my current army projects.

My current big army for 6th is the Tau. I’ve always had a soft spot for them, i love the fluff, i love the mech suits (that’s more than slightly due to my love of japanese mecha anime,) and as weird as it sounds (especially to those who know me personally) I love the whole concept of a race that pulls towards a greater ideal and belief that they all have roles to play and a purpose for the greater good of the tau.)

For all of 5th Tau were the whipping boys, the army no one took (hell i didn’t use them because they didn’t suit my play style for 5th at all.) But when 6th was announced i started to look for a new army, and it was time for me to re-visit the Tau.

The basic idea came from my love of the Gundam series of anime, it’s set in space with a whole load of mecha suits fighting a war for both ideals and survival (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundam here’s the wiki link for those that want to understand more of the concept behind my army.) So my starting point was that i want to both play this army in competitive environments and for fun, With that in mind i have 2 very different armies (i have more because i love the tau codex for all the different options) My fun army contains as many crisis and broadside suits as i can manage and the awesome metau gear conversion i have done for my hammer head.

When deciding what colours i wanted my army i decided to go with green, through out the series the main bad guys the principality of zeon use green mobile suits (mechs.) It hit me how similar fire warriors look the the main zeon suit the zaku. With that i decided that each of the mecha teams would be modelled on and wear the colours of a different gundam from a different series just to give them all a really unique feel. In a similar vein each of my firewarrior and path finder teams are each named after the main line suits used in each series, again to give the army a bit more flavour. (pictures will follow as i complete units)

As i finish bits of the army i’ll post up pics and a bit about how i approached the painting, why i selected the unit and where they fit in my battle plan, this way i can chart the evolution of my army, maybe i’ll even do a few battle reports!

 

Stay tuned

My musings on 6th edition 40k

So down to my first official gaming post then. 6th edition has been with us a couple of weeks now and there seems to be a lot of debate over it and the future of the game. I’ve seen a lot of flame wars, a lot of people saying they will quit the game.

So with that in mind i thought i’d throw my 2p in on it. I’ll admit when first hearing stuff about 6th i was very skeptical, i even went on air in the podcast and said so at great length, i hated the idea of terrain you could buy (to be honest i’m still not overly fond of it but more on that later), I thought allies would be a stupid idea, and i hated a lot of the rules borrowed from fantasy such as a psychic phase and random charge lengths. I honestly thought i would probably be quitting the game myself. But……

 

I got my rule book, and i started to flick through it at length, the first thing to strike me was the very nice, clear and concise explaination of how all the rules interacted, this was nice, it made things clear. No longer would we have to debate the meaning of the rule because it was there in plain english (something 5th lacked a lot of the time). On top of this it felt very stream lined and while still usable for competitive play, it also contained lots of nifty new things. 

It dawned on me while reading this book that this was something totally new and different, while 6th shared some of the basic core game mechanics as previous editions this was a new beast, you can’t really compare it to the things that came before because game is a whole new way of doing things.

To illustrate my points i’ll do a things i like and a things i don’t like.

 

Things i like:

1. 6th edition has totally reset the playing field in terms of the power lists and the top tier. Why is this a good thing? Because it needed to be done, A lot of the big power lists were super optimised and no fun to play against (or with). Since it was released everyone has complained about the grey knight codex (yes i have too and i play g.k’s), it was vastly over powered and very few things could stop it. Hell to a throne of skulls i took a 12 model army and finished 2nd in race 5th overall. The list was a total nightmare to stop, everyone has stories of 5 psydread lists and the destruction they could reap, they turned below average players into absolute monsters because of all the things you could get in the codex. Now with 6th quite literally resetting the land scape the razorback/dreadspam lists are nigh unusable because of the ease of now demeching stuff, paladin spam can now longer play it’s wound allocation tricks to maximise saves. A lot of people have complained how thier list got the shaft, i have said on numerous occasions 4 out of the 6 armies i run now really don’t work in 6th, it doesn’t bother me, why? because i love new challenges, i like to test myself with new things and new ways of doing it.

2. Older armies are now more viable. The reason, because with the reset of power and the boost shooting got armies like tau, or blob squad guard are now devastating to play because of the amount of firepower they can put down, shooting is a scary thing.

3. the re-balance between shooting and close combat. Ask anyone that knows me and they will tell you i love the assault phase (i truely do belong in the world eaters) nothing gets me going more than jumping up and down on things in combat. The problem was for me that it was very rare i wouldn’t make combat, and once that happened it was usually game over. Now with overwatch, casualties from the front and the power weapon ap value, i have to think about assaulting, i have to sit and work out if it’s worth going for it, or wether i have to hold back and await an opening. I love it, it’s added a whole new dimension to the game, one i feel has been missing for a long long time.

4. Vechile rules. I love this, because the rules now make more sense, no longer is it the same damage tables for all shooting, but glancing strips hull points and pen strips hull points and does a damage result, tank weapons and gun lines are scary again. If i’m being honest i think i’m more scared of glancing hits these days than anything else, it means you have to think how to place your tanks/flyers. Hell the new flyer rules are awesome, they make sense (altho with the snap fire at zooming flyers i think they may have been bumped too much)

5. Monsterous creatures. Are just that, monsters, i think the buffs they got made them scary again!

 

Things i don’t like

1. Buying terrain.  I’m still not fond of this, i can understand why you would do it from a fluff point of view, but i’m not sold on it, yes you can only buy 1, but it’s really all you need, they are all great, and they are all a total pain in the arse to deal with. This to me doesn’t feel right. You shouldn’t be able to roll up to battlefields stick down a fortress of redemption (those things are disgusting) and basically laugh at your opponent. I think for fun/campaign games it’s an awesome concept, for everyday play……. not so much

2. zooming flyers. I think these are just too good, they fact they can pelt around, fire 4 weapons at full bs, and you need 6’s to hit them back is just too good.

3. Power weapon ap values. I both love and hate these rules, i agree that power weapons really needed to be re-tooled, they have been too good for too long, i love the idea of different weapons doing different things. I disagree that the only ap 2 weapons are a power fist and thunderhammer. Last edition saw the deathwing thunderspam get awesome, this edition made it a top tier, a whole bunch of guys with ap 2 weapons and 3+ invulns, personally i think in keep thunderhammers as they are, they should have nerfed storm shields, but again that’s just my 2p worth.

 

I’m gonna leave it there for now, but feel free to comment, or ask questions, there’s a lot i haven’t covered, what would you guys like my thoughts on?

 

Until next time

Hello world!

So this is my first post on my gaming blog. I’ll try and update this as often as i can with updates on my army projects, how badly my win loss is looking, and general thoughts and views on gaming, the hobby and just random shit!