Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Eldar Strike Force taking shape

Last night I did a good bit of work modeling up some jetbikes. As mentioned before, I got my hands on some Jetbike Seer Council conversion bits from Chapterhouse Studios. Each kit comes with a rider (the farseer kit has two torsos to choose from), new handlebars, witchblade and spear, and some bits for spicing up the jetbike itself. Last night I built up 8 warlocks (4 with witchblades 4 with spears) and my autarch. I had pieced together the farseer on Sunday to familiarize myself with the kit.

I went ahead and pinned everything so the superglue would have more surface area for holding the models together. I have the riders just sitting loose on the bikes right now. after I get them painted up I'll secure them, probably with a tiny amount of superglue, as some of these sit very loose on the bikes.

Here are some images of a few.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Playing Eldar: Ulthwe Night Spinner Support List

Now that I've done a whole month's worth of Dark Angels gaming, I'm taking a step back towards my Eldar army. I have several new units to try out, and it looks like it's going to be a fun ride. I ordered some conversion kits from Chapterhouse Studios a while back, and the models just came in this weekend. I now have the stuff to build up a farseer and 12 warlocks on jetbikes without having to carve up a bunch of metal, and for a little less than the normal price. Double-win in my book. I also have a couple of Fire Prism/Night Spinner kits I'm working on. I've got one magnetized, and will be working on the second one soon. The following is a list I've developed to get the most out of these models:

Monday, June 28, 2010

RayJ Goes Undefeated!

You heard it here first folks. I have attended my first ever tournament where I have not lost a single game, and I was playing Dark Angels to boot. The catch here, however, is that I walked away with two draws on the day, going 1-0-2. The missions were fairly straightforward, and actually not all that bad after the final edits got in. One of these days I'll learn not to play with a handicap and use a real codex.

I've got a lot on my plate today, so I'm not gonna go very in depth on the games themselves. My camera phone (which was working on friday and I got fine-tuned for 40k pics) decided it wouldn't even start up at the event, so no pictures from me yet again :(

My first game was table quarters against an ultramarines player running Lysander and Tigerius. Lots of elite spam in his list, and anyone with volume of long-ranged firepower could take him easily. That wasn't me, and his 3+ storm shield saves laughed at my powerfists and lascannons all game. I almost had the win before Lysander came over and sucker-punched my command squad off the board.

My second game was seize ground against Orks who were running 3 battlewagons and a kustom force field. Thing is, his battlewagons were about 3 and a half times the size of a land raider, and all the terrain on this board was huge impassable line-of-sight blocking stuff (pretty much the only board at the event like that). It made movement around his army super-hard and side-armor shots on the battlewagons almost impossible after turn 1. Getting a draw under such circumstances seemed good to me. I failed to take down even a single battlewagon, shooting every lascannon (and some multi-melta at it) pretty much every turn.

Game 3 was killpoints against an IG army. I got the first turn and took a small but early lead. The catch in this mission was that any non-hq unit that died came back on that player's turn. I ended up immobilizing most of his heavy-hitting tanks so that they couldn't bring all their guns to bear and I farmed on some chimeras and the vendetta. He managed to kill two dreadnoughts and immobilize all my land raiders, but by that point they had fire coverage on the whole board. This was a fairly hefty win by turn 5 when I sprang ahead by a large number of kill points. Other than the immobilization of another dread when it came on, he killed a single terminator.

Two draws with mediocre battle points puts me in the same bracket I always end up in, right in the middle of the pack in scoring. I'm gonna start looking heavily at Eldar and the other marine codices to see what the future might hold as far as tournaments go. I love playing the Deathwing, but I'd like to go in and completely smash face from time to time, and that's extremely hard to do when one isn't playing a 5th edition codex.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Rocket City Invasion: Yay for Mediocrity

Saturday I played in a local event being run at the university in town. Here's a rundown of the basic points:

2000 point armies
Standard Missions used for 3 games (deployment and mission type pre-selected for each round)
Bonus objectives to earn up more kill points.

Here is the list I ran. It's a pretty basic mechanized Deathwing list that I ahve been using for a couple of months now:

Belial with Claws
2 Dreadnoughts with Missile Launcher/Lascannon
Deathwing Command Squad with Assault Cannon, Apothecary, Standard
Deathwing Squad with Assault Cannon
Deathwing Squad with Cyclone
2 Land Raider Crusaders
1 Land Raider

All Deathwing squads had 1 chainfist and 1 thunder hammer model.
All Land Raiders has an extra storm bolter

In the event I played against Space Marines, IG, and Blood Angels. here's a general overview of the games:

Monday, June 14, 2010

'Ard Boyz: A Tale of Epic Fail

Despite the title of the post, I did not perform badly at the semi-finals of 'Ard Boyz this year. No, in fact I was not even able to play this weekend. My region has quite the active 40k community with 10-12 gaming groups within a 2-hour drive. Add in another hour or two and you can see that the Tennessee Valley has an amazing group of active players.

The problem I'm having here is that GW only gave two venues even remotely close to the area a semi-final location. The one I was planning to attend was only able to hold 24 people, and since I found out I was eligible with less than a week to go, the spots were already filled. That means 8 preliminary groups within 3 hours of the store could be supported there. I can almost guarantee you there were more, forcing people to drive ludicrously long distances or be left out.

When I discovered I was unable to attend the event (which I would already be driving about 2-hours one way to attend), I took some time to debate visiting the other venue. With a 4-hour drive one way, that would put me on the road for far too long to also be playing in any sort of event. I also felt that paying for hotel accommodations for this event would not have been worthwhile, so in the end I opted for the next-best thing: going out to the movies.

I am a bit upset with the situation, but not terribly. I mean, I didn't earn the spot to begin with, so why should I have a problem missing out? But my problem doesn't come from the inconvenience I received. It's the fact that even the people who earned these positions would not all be able to play, even if they all traveled 4 hours (one way) to get to them. It is very poor form to host a tournament environment with an invitational and then not have enough space for all those invitations. Someone at GW needs to take a look at this situation and have a solution for next year.

In fact, addressing this issue could be part of a greater tournament organization overhaul. The interwebs have been chattering away the last few months with a want for a more competitive environment. I would love to see an organized play system set up to make everyone happy. A league set aside for fluff bunnies with tons of painting and sportsmanship stuff about and a series of tournaments where the only thing that truly matters is how well you play (and winning all your games is more important than tabling two opponents and losing to a third). Sure, painted armies should be a must, but it shouldn't affect your score. Also, being a prick should get you knocked out of the event. And for crying out loud, USE THE STANDARD MISSIONS!

I feel better now. no more ranting for me, I just really needed to speak that out a bit. I need to go finish off painting my third land raider for next week's event. I finished up the highlighting and basic metalics last night. Tonight I need to get all the rivets and then wash the beastie to bring out some more depth. I do like the look of black and silver running (driving) across the table :)

Monday, June 7, 2010

Tournament Madness Ensues

I had planned on giving everyone an overview of the two tournaments I have coming up this month. On June 19, I will be attending a local event here in Huntsville, set up by one of the members of the local gaming group. It looks like we will have about 20 players including Raptor1313 of Spite for the Dice Gods. I haven't played against Rob in a while, so I'm hoping for the head-to-head there. He's always a blast to play against.

This event is done in the typical RT fashion, most likely using custom missions I have talked with the organizer about scoring and the system has been modified from his original vision to be a bit more competitive, but still relies a large part on soft scores. It will likely take a large amount of effort for my local community to move away from soft scores, but I'm being fairly vocal while also being civilized. Maybe it'll bear fruit soon.

[Edit]An update from the organizer made just moments after this post states that the missions for this event will be taken directly from the rulebook. Most awesome tournament mission set ever, as all players will be familiar with the rules. Apparently each of the objective types will be used once, so two different objective missions and a single kill point mission. Each mission will also have a separate deployment type. My 2000 point army is built around these missions in particular, so this should give me quite a strong showing here.[/Edit]

On June 26 I am playing in another event at Dicehead. The event page can be found here. You may remember that I placed 4th in the 'Ard Boyz event held at that store. They are a great group of people, and this event is set up to be quite large. They posted the missions last week, and I was a bit disappointed in how they were set up. Some discussion with the organizer has fixed some glaring flaws, and he has mentioned he will be updating the second mission to use killpoints instead of victory points as well as some other tweaks to make things more balanced. This particular mission has units respawning after death, and I was explaining to him the interaction of tervigons with both that rule and victory points.

In the course of our discussion, the organizer mentioned to me that one of the top 3 finishers from our 'Ard Boyz event was not going to be able to attend, and thus the spot opened up for me to go this weekend. It's a bit short notice, so I'm looking heavily at using the army that earned me 4th place, but also converting the venerable dread to another fire support dread. 3 land raiders, 3 dreads, and 4 terminator squads with the old smoke and apothecary fit into exactly what I've been mentioning about DA so far. I figure it's always good to put your money where your mouth is.

So there you have it. The next 3 weeks will have me competing in 3 separate tournaments. In the past I've always managed a single loss in tournaments. Perhaps one of these three will be the place I pull out an undefeated showing?

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Playing Eldar: My Experiences so far.

I've been messing around with Eldar for a couple of months now, but have been splitting me efforts enough to not have too many games in with them just yet. I'd say maybe somewhere around 7 or 8, almost all in the 1850-2000 point range.

My lists have been mostly similar, though I have been tweaking here and there to really get some ideas about the various upgrades. Here are the basic elements I've been using in most of my games recently:

Playing Dark Angels: The Apothecary

As I have been mentioning in my previous articles, one of the best ways to utilize the Dark Angels codex is to capitalize on its units that provide durability.  So far we have looked at how the Smoke Launcher keeps our vehicles on the field longer, and then ventured into the realm of dreadnoughts, where the venerable variety can shake off glancing hits like its no tomorrow.  Now we turn our focus to the apothecaries, the last piece of our durability puzzle.




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