Wednesday 28 March 2012

Custom Necron T-Shirt

I got bored one day and decided I wanted a Necron T-Shirt. Problem is, I don't think there are any. So I did some digging and found there are various websites where you can get custom T-Shirts. So I loaded up photoshop and sketched up a Necron head and voila. I made it red to go with my army. Its a one off so I don't start annoying GW.

Done with this image:
 

Tuesday 27 March 2012

Tournament army finally painted

I've spent the last 3 nights finishing off my necron tournament army. Had a ton of scarabs to do. Painted some scenery too for the tournament. Looking forward to the RAF wargaming association tournament on Saturday. I don't want to see a paint pot again for at least a week...... still got a tomb stalker to do and some puppetswar wraiths........

Anyway, the only thing people are really interested in is pics (sorry about slight fuzzy):



Tuesday 20 March 2012

Game 5 of the Alaris Dream campaign - Imotekh Lives Again!

Last nights game was the penultimate game of the club campaign. Due to issues with numbers on the Imperial side 2 of our games had to be changed to 3000 points Imperial vs 2x 1500 point bad guys. I was allied with Orks against 3000 points of Blood Angels.

My list was:
Imotekh, Destuction Cryptek with Gaze of Flame and chronometron cryptek attached to 20 warriors
Overlord with warscythe in Command Barge
2x 8 warriors with 2x Destruction crypteks in 2x Ghost Arks
4x Wraiths, 3 with Whip coils


Ork list was:
Warboss with Power Klaw
3x 30 boyz squads with a nob with power klaw and boss pole
10x burna boyz
6x deffkoptas with rokkits



Blood Angels (2x force orgs):
2x captains with lightning claws
1x sanguinary priest
1x furioso dread with blood talons in drop pod
3x scout squads
2x land raiders
2x vindicators
2x stormravens
1x predator with autocannon and lascannons
1x baal predator with the burny flame template thing
1x big assault squad



The game itself was an objective game with 5 objectives on the table. We were meant to play with a weird rule that meant all infantry (including jump infanty and bikes) would come back on as reserves. We canned this rule because our game was taking forever anyway and this would have made it insane.

Deployment was table quarters on a normal 6' x 4' table. This made it very hard to deploy 3000 points on either side. My deployment being squished to the side of our quarter effectively meant I was kept out of the game. The Orks filled a lot of our deployment and the Blood Angels were struggling for space too, too many orks and too many large BA vehicles.

Before the game started we all had ambushes to do as per the previous games in the campaign. I rapid fired 20 warriors into a land raider hoping to immobilise it. I got 5 glancing hits! I then failed to get anything higher than a stunned, even with the chronometron reroll on one of them! GAH! The orks managed to kill a vindicator with their ambush and the blood angels killed one of my wraiths, Mark really hates my wraiths XD


Once the game got started it was a very long and slow game. I'll just go over the highlights.
The orks moved towards the enemy as orks are wont to do. The Blood Angels mostly held back. I tried to get round to the enemy but we only got 4 turns in so I never really got there.



Imotekhs lightning killed a stormraven and immobilised a land raider.
The drop podding dreadnought slaughtered a squad of 30 orks but didn't do much else.
Imotekhs squad got charged in the last turn by a squad of 5 marines, because I had a crytpek with Gaze of Flame he didn't get a charge bonus so I only took 10 attacks which killed one warrior, I then hit back and did nothing. For the first time ever my warriors actually passed the morale check and stayed in combat, I just wish I had a power weapon in the squad somewhere.
I don't really think anything else spectacular happened. It was mostly a game of kill the orks or be killed by them.



My Necrons were pretty much ignored all game, which meant I still had 3 troops by the end to claim objectives. I had one ghost ark on an objective, one which I believe had an objective but there was a difference of opionions on it and one squad of 20 warriors on an objective but in the last turn they were charged which pulled them away from it. The Blood angels held one objective too. The objectives were worth d666 points each, I got 400 ish and the Blood angels got 100 ish, so we effectively won anyway. I only got 2 kill points in the end and I haven't a clue what the other 2 got but it was certainly much more than me.

We finished at 2300 and I still had an hour drive to get home :'( sooo tired today!

Apologies for the funny coloured and sometimes fuzzy pics. We were in a dark corner of the room and my cheapo camera had difficulties with it.
 

Thursday 15 March 2012

Ghost Arks and Command Barge finished (probably)

I've pretty much finished my Ghost Arks and Command Barge. I'll probably make a few adjustments at some point but I've done enough for now.

I have to say, Ghost Arks are the most annoying vehicle from GW that I've ever painted!! So Many awkward angles, so much surface area and it uses so much paint! And the moving guns..... so awkward to make sure they'd move. One of them got stuck and snapped the assembly it was attached to.

The command barge was alright to paint, still some fiddly details and overlapping parts that I should've painted before glueing.

One thing that painting me has convinced me of, Necrons look good with verdigris. I'll make that modification to my stuff over time I think. No rush.

Anyway, enough rambling. Some pics.









Tuesday 13 March 2012

40K on the BBC news site!

The BBC has an article on Warhammer 40k. Rick Priestly has even commented in the comments :O

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17274186

Game 4 of the Alaris Dream campaign

Today's game was a random objective game. There were 5 games on 6'x4' boards with one on one 1500 point games. There were 5 markers on each table, one in each quarter and one in the middle. Everyone was handed secret objective cards that were for their eyes only. The card detailed which 2 objectives were yours. Due to the secret and random nature of it some players had objectives in their opponents deployment zone and I'm sure some would have both players going for at least one of the same objective.

Each of the 5 tables had different terrain and this in turn had different effects on the game. Our force commander had asked us previously in the week if there were any preferences as to which board we wanted to play on. I picked the swamp board. The swamp counts the entire board, minus hills, as difficult terrain that grants 4+ cover. There's also a chance of your models being eaten by a swamp monster. I picked this board specifically so I could pull some C'Tan Writhing Worldscape shenanigans with Imotekhs nightfight and some scarab farming.

I won the roll to pick sides and go first. We could pick any side of the table. So I picked one of the short sides to keep Imotekh as far away from the enemy as possible. If he died then he'd be gone from the campaign permanently. 

My opponent was Space Wolves. His army was mech mainly with a squad of long fangs and a dreadnought.



Before the game started I had an ambush tactic to use. I decided on ambushing his Long Fangs with Imotekh's warrior squad. Imotekh's flamer attack massacred the squad killing 3 of the missile launchers. The relic Imotekh gained in the last battle came in use for the return barrage of fire. 2 missile launchers and a bolt pistol fired at Imotekh and his squad. The bolt pistol missed and the shot was reflected back, killing the sergeant (Yay relic!), one of the missile's was save due to cover, the other knocked down a warrior who promptly got back up again. The 2 remaining Long Fangs then cacked their britches and decided to leg it in the opposite direction but they regrouped at the beginning of the game.

Once the game got started it pretty much revolved around me getting my close combat elements to the enemy while Imotekh blatted things with lightning. He killed 2 rhinos and a razorback. Probably the best he's ever done with it. But the important thing was that the nightfight was keeping away fire from my warriors which were sitting nicely on objectives.

My Wraiths got to the enemy first but had been decimated by Vindicator fire by the time they got there. They managed to destroy the main gun on the vindicator before finally falling to their injuries. 

A turn later my scarabs got to the enemy. The didn't really kill much except for the dreadnought, taking 20 off its armour value lol. They mainly acted as a tar pit for the 2 squads of wolves and the lord that had got out of exploding rhinos.

My C'Tan killed a lone dude and I then made a hideous tactical error and charged him into a combat already going on with a horde of scarabs and wolves. The scarabs died in droves, loosing combat by 12. The poor C'Tan, after taking not a single wound, then fell due to fearless saves. He only killed one marine with his explosion :( After this his effect of making terrain dangerous was lost.



After this all happened, the Spyders finally made it into combat. They didn't do much either. They did manage to chomp through a few marines but eventually they had all fallen bar one that was in combat with the Wolf Lord.

At the end of the game my warriors had been sitting on their objectives the whole time and I'd kept the Wolves at bay. They held one objective and I held 2. I got 6 kill points and he got 5. Each objective was worth d666 (3d6 sort of) points, due to some lucky rolling I ended up with over 1200 points :D

It was a fun game but I really ballsed up with the C'Tan. I could have put the scarabs onto better targets too. I didn't realise that Space Wolves are so damn annoying in combat against mediocre combat units like scarabs.

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Flying bases - break no more!

Tired of flying bases snapping in your models? Bases falling off when you pick the model up? Models madly spinning around when you put them down or they get knocked?

I have found the solution!

Well, someone else did and I tried it for myself.

I'm talking about the Ninja Magic Magnetic Adapters Linky
I saw them on a blog a few weeks ago, can't remember where. The idea looked great but I was cautious about spending a load of money and converting all my flying bases to this system without trying it. I forked out the money anyway and bought enough adapters to convert my Necron army to this system.



The first models I tried were my 2 work in progress Ghost Arks and my Command Barge. After clearing off the flash from the adapters I had to work out how to make it work with GW models. It wasn't too hard. Basically for the base you just cut off the top of the flying base stalk until the adapter just fits on, i.e. it isn't loose and requires a bit of effort to push it on then I put some super glue in the adapter and stuck it on.

As for the model end, this was a bit more awkward as I didn't have any drill bits that weren't 1mm. For the Necron vehicles this wasn't a problem as they have better than normal holes for the bases, so I just put a load of super glue in the hole and it worked. For normal models however the hole isn't big enough. The adapters are from the US, as such I'm guessing they've used some weird imperial measurements for the diameter. I found a close enough equivalent though. 2.5 mm seems to be a close enough fit when you stick some glue in there. Its not a perfect fit but its good enough. I've now done 9 tomb spyders and 5 destroyers with this method and they're all fine.



Overall I think these are excellent adapters and I plan on implementing them everywhere I use flying bases. They're easy to use and do a great job. The only thing that would make them better would be if the base end of the adapter came in one part instead of 2. Also it was quite hard finding a retailer to buy the adapters, would be nice if there was a retailer in the UK. I bought them from here.

Game 3 of the Alaris Dream 40k campaign

A 6v6 750pt each objective game sounds like a long an tortured game to fit in one evening. It was actually a quick and fun game though (we did lose a player from each side as well, probably making it a bit quicker).

The mission was our special characters had to go as fast as possible to obtain the nearest relic. On the side of not being Imperial we had: Imotekh, Typhus, Swarmlord, an Ork biker warboss that isn't Wazdakka and another chaos dude (at the other end of the table so I didn't see what character). On the Imperials side was: Saint Celestine, Straken, a SM captain, a SW dude and Draigo.

The objectives were relics hidden in temples in a cave. (6 relics along the centre line of a 12'x4' table). Because we were in an enormous cavern the night fight rules were in play but I managed to negate it for a turn with a solar flare. Vehicles had to be kept in reserve and rolled a dangerous terrain test to come in.

My list for the game was this:
Imotekh
Royal Court with 2x lords with warscythes and mindshackle scarabs, one with res orb, 3x crypteks, one with chronometron, one with veil of darkness and one with gaze of flame and Solar pulse.
20x warriors
4x destroyers

I deployed opposite a guard infantry player with Straken. We had an objective in a building smack bang between us.

Through crazy pregame tactics, myself and the Straken guard player both had an ambush to use against each other. I went first and rapid fired a 20 man warrior squad into Straken's command squad. Normally I'd expect a crap-ton of gauss shots to be able to kill 5 guardsmen. 40k doesn't always follow laws of probability (or sanity) and I only killed 3 men. Straken and his guardsman returned fire and didn't do anything.
He then used his ambush to rapid fire a plasma gun veteran squad at my 4 destroyers. My destroyers were promptly wiped out before the game had even started. This meant a 3rd of my force didn't even start the game :( and royally messed up the solar flare tactic I had in mind (i.e. splatting the nearby sisters of battle with AP3 shots).

Once the game had actually begun to begin the enemy stole the initiative, ruining the next phase of my plans.

To my left was the Swarmlord, to my right was some infiltrated chaos marines and beyond them was a host of nurgle and orks. Sisters advanced on the Tyranids, the guard advanced on me and other forces advanced further up the battlefield.
Due to the night-fighting being in place I managed to avoid being shot by the 50 or so guardsmen coming towards me. Saint Celestine took a relic in the first turn.

In our half of the first turn we advanced ourselves. Imotekh unleashed his lightning bolts on the enemy and again my luck wasn't even close to normal probability, using the lightning against 3,750 points of Imperialists killed just one space wolf and fizzled out after that doing nothing more for the rest of the game. My warriors killed a few stormtroopers and my court zapped a penitent out of existence with their first shot of the game (hehe). I'd also popped the solar pulse but it didn't really get used as pretty much all of our forces were close range shooting, rapid fire 24".

From that point on it looked like it was over for me, the guard advanced and annihilated my warriors in combat, I failed my Ld check from loosing combat by 2 :( and got overrun. This left me with just Imotekh and his court. Inspired by pure insanity and obsession with the objective Imotekh left his group of advisers and body guards. He ran for the relic and sent his squad against the interfering Straken. He took the relic and the court killed a squad of stormtroopers and Strakens remaining guardsman (yay for evil AP1 flamer weapons). The court then charged Straken and made him punch himself in the face due to mindshackle scarabs but he passed his invulnerable, he didn't pass the saves from the warscythes though. Thus Straken was permanently removed from the campaign. My court promptly ripped through the rest of the guardsmen with the help of some chaos marines.
Imotekh has achieved his goal and then managed to avoid the enemy long enough to escape with his prize.

To my left the Swarmlord had beaten down the living saint 3 times but she still refused the give up. The Emperor wouldn't let her rest. An entire army of white-ish marines (you'd understand if you were there) outflanked to assist the saint but ultimately failed and the Swarmlord stole the relic from the Saint.

Further afield, both the Chaos lords took 2 relics each. The Ork warboss died in a heroic battle with a horde of ork boys swarming and killing Draigo and his paladins. The forces of Nurgle beat down the Space Puppies.

So in the end the bad guys held all the relics. The Imperials lost Straken and Draigo but Celestine lived. The bad guys only lost the Ork Warboss Watzhiznaym.

A victory for us but we have no idea what future there is as our force is only a loose alliance of convenience. Who knows what the purpose of the relics is or how the campaign will unfold?