Where do I shop?

Just a short post with a couple of links.

Thought I would share some of the sites, from around the interwebz that I shop from for 40K.

GW products I get from my local hobbystore and Forgeworld I get from them ofcourse

Why my local hobby store you may ask? Two reasons mainly.
They provide a very nice way in for new players with the physical store, intro games and gaming tables that you can come in and use for free.
The second reason is a tad more idealistic. I like local stores where I can go in and look at stuff, where I can yell at them if a product is defect or where I can just stand and chat for five minutes. Sure I could get my minis cheaper from internetstores but supporting local business is worth my effort and money.

http://www.shop.microartstudio.com/
- For all my scenic bases.

http://puppetswar.eu/
- For alot of alternative models, especially their walker and vehicle weapons and heads for infantry is nice.

http://www.anvilindustry.co.uk
- loads of different stuff. Cloaks, loincloths, guns and also cyclone missile launcher

http://sciborminiatures.com
- alot of different stuff and alternative models.I used alot of their egyptian things to spice up my 1K Sons. Some of their stuff is a bit too big for your ordniary marines (i.e. shoulder pads).

http://chapterhousestudios.com/
- different things from tyranid weapons to heresy style jumppacks (which are the ones I fancy)

http://www.maxmini.eu
- guns, wings and lots more. Never actually bought anything from them but thats just coincidence. They do have a nice alternative meltagun.

If you have something nice, like alternative models or bits from a company I missed, feel free to post it in the comments. Im always on the lookout for ways to make it interesting.

Battlereport: league match 1

My first opponent was a really pleasant and cool Norwegian guy, Magnus.

He plays a really awesome looking Chaos space marine list (Thousand Sons / Tzeentch).

His list is something like this:

Abaddon
Daemon prince with wings and lash
Greater daemon

3 Terminators with combi plasma in a Land raider
6 Thousand Sons with bolt sorcerer in a rhino.
5 Chaos marines with a meltagun and champion
5 Lesser daemons

3 Bikes with 2 meltaguns

6 Obliterators
Vindicator

The mission:

Primary: Kill points
Secondary: 4 Objectives
Tertiary: more than 600 VP difference difference

Deployment: Dawn of war.
Beginning roll: Magnus wins and choose to go first.

The battlefield

Pregame thoughts:

My deployment and my target priority would win me this game. Of that I were certain from the beginning. The chaos army has a limited number of shooting bases and could I take them out I could more or less at leisure take the army apart.
So obliterators and landraider first, vindicator, bikes and the two daemons second and the content of the rhinos third.


The mission and the deployment screwed alittle with me. Killpoints is never a good thing for me, I have 25 killpoints and the chaos army has 13. Also dawn of war is not really my thing. Even with nightfighting its too uncertain what will reach and what will not.

I would prefer to go second in most setups, since that would allow me to outdeploy my opponent from the beginning. I would be making sure that most of his shooting could not reach anything in his turn two.

Deployement:

Neither of us deployed anything. The greater and lesser daemons started in reserve ofcourse and so did my Reaver jetbikes.

Turn 1:

The Sons of Magnus rolls onto the board. The Land raider sits with a dominating position in the center and the Obliterators walks towards a central ruin.
 Also the vindicator and the rhino with his single champion for greater daemon summoning deploys to his left. This as we will see later turns out to be a mistake.

Hurtling onto the battlefield comes the skimmerfleet of the Dark eldars.
I choose to come on full speed with everything and to refuse the chaos forces a flank. The two raiders with wyches in them goes full speed up the tableedge, which is my first mistake. They are withing range of both the raider and one group of Obliterators. Otherwise a good deployment that force the chaos forces to come full speed towards me.

Turn 2:

None of the reserves come in.
The Thousand Sons move up towards the eldar army. The bikes turbo boost behind the building and vindicator and both rhinos go full speed. The daemon prince hides behind a rhino. The Obliterator group furthest away from the dark eldar line run.

The result of the 1K sons shooting

The shooting from three oblitertors and the landraider that pivotted on the spot wrecks the Succubus´ride and immobilizes then other raider. Ok shooting considering he only har two firebases.

None of the dark eldar reserves arrive, and having weathered the first round of chaos shooting, the skimmers moved up and prepared to unload on the chaos lines.

The shooting goes well for the Dark eldars. The landraider loose both of its lascannons, the daemonprince is wiped out of excistense and one group of obliterators are killed outright.

Lascannons begone!

Daemon prince disappears in a puff of smoke!

Thats five lascannons less to worry about.

Turn 3:

This round both the daemon reserves arrive. The greater daemon is still quite a bit away from my dark eldar lines which I also factored into my deployment.

The bikes and the landraider hurl themself towards the dark eldars. The rhino with the bolt sorcerer in it sneaks outside cover to get a clear line of sight. The remaining forces move up in support of their forward elements.
The three terminators deploy out of the Land raider to unload their combi-plasma on a Venom.

The bolt manages to miss on the to hit roll and the 6 combi-plasma shots all hit but every single result on the attempt to penetrate rolls a one or a two. So not a single result.
To compensate alittle, the obliterators explode a ravager, the melta bikes blow up a Venom and the warriors inside are pinned.

On the dark eldar turn both Reaver squads decides to enter the battle. They go full speed 36 inches up the opposite side of the board as to where the battle is. I want them behind the remaning Obliterators and the Vindicator.

The dark eldars move around, without getting too much closer. The exception is Succubus and Wyches, who without regard for who might be sitting inside the raider runs screaming towards it.
The shooting is sort of meh.
An immobilized result on the rhino at the chaos backline, 3 dead bikes, a stunned vindicator and a greater daemon that manages to take 8 out of 9 saves on 4+.

During the assault phase the Succubus and her Wych girlfriends charge into the landraider. A single haywire grenade hits it, glance it and rolls a 6. The raider is now immobilized. Talk about a punch to the nads coming out of left field.

Turn 4:

Starting to be very short on units the Thousand Sons tries to gather kill points. Abaddon moves towards the pinned warrior squad. The terminator hides inside the immobilized landraider and the rhino with the chaos marines in it moves back to get out and rapidfire on the reaver jet bikes. Big bird (greater daemon) moves towards the dark eldars who are peppering the Obliterators.

Scattered shooting erupts and a single bike is killed by a boltgun. This results in the squad breaking and speeding back towards their own tableedge. The obliterators kill a Venom and the heavy bolter on the landraider puts a big fat hole in a wych. For the second time in a row the sorcerer with the bolt misses.

The lesser daemons charged into the wyches and somehow manages to get a tie. Abaddon makes mince meat of five warriors.

After wiping some warriors Abaddon is sitting right there for the shooting.

On the dark eldar turn four, the running reavers regrouped while the other reaver group turbo boosted up behind the rhino with the bolt sorcerer in it. I would try to surround it with the bikes and warriors and maybe wreck it to death. Always fun when your opponent cant deploy anything out of a wrecked vehicle.

Again the Venom and Ravager fleet moved around in their firing line to get clear shots on their choosen targets.

Abaddon was taken down by concentrated blaster and splintercannons fire, but Big bird managed to stick in there and not go back to the warp yet.

In the assault phase the Succubus finally managed to wipe the lesser daemons. The five wyches who were on their own assaulted the immobilized Land raider and managed to score 3 penetrating and 1 glancing hit with their haywire grenades. The Landraider wrecked and the single Terminator inside were forced out.

Turn 5:

 (I forgot to take picutres after chaos turn 5)

Being very limited in what they could do, chaos moved Big bird up to slap around a ravager. The rhino, with its chaos marines inside moved onto an objective to try and draw the secondary objective and the obliterators shot at and blew up a venom sitting in between alot of wyches. This resulted in nine wyches being wound by the explosion, but only a single one dying. Thank you pain token.
In the assault phase bigbird managed to stun a ravager with the single hit it got in.

The dark eldar forces again moved around to get clear lines of sight, but also moved in to contest all objectives held by chaos (that would be 1). The small group of wyches moved onto a single objective to make sure the secondary objective would go to them.

The dark eldar forces starts wrapping up the last Thousand Sons. After the shooting phase Bigbird is gone. The vindicator is blown up, nearly wiping out a trueborn squad in the process. The rhino with the bolt sorcerer in it is wrecked but unfortunately I had moved the reavers away and forgot to run a warrior squad behind the rhino before I shot at it. A single obliterator is killed leaving one.

The game ends after turn five on a roll of one. Probably for the best because on turn 6 the chaos marines would have been tabled.

Primary: Kill points
Dark eldar 11 - Chaos marines 7

Secondary: 4 Objectives
Dark eldar 1 - Chaos marines 0

Tertiary: more than 600 VP difference
Dark eldar 1450ish - Chaos marines 500ish



Battlepoitns total:
Dark eldar 20 - Chaos marines 0
 

Post game thoughts:

The game played out mostly as I wanted. I managed to outdeploy the chaos player and used my superior mobility to  choose when and where the shooting happened.
The chaos player was struggling uphill from the beginning with his older codex and the outcome was never in doubt. The only thing that could have messed me up with dice rolls.
 
Also. I couldnt for the life of me take a single flickerfield save during the entire game.

Why I dislike space wolves

I think dislike is too mild, I hate them!

Disclaimer: this is a rant, if you do not want to read it feel free to head over here.

I hate them when I play my chaos armies because ..... Well because my first army was Thousand Sons and being a real fluff bunny when I started playing the game, who could forgive them for Prospero.

I also dislike Mortarion for what he did at the council of Nikaea and for a very long time i refused to buy plaguemarines for my chaos space marines.

But thats an entirely different story.

So the wolves came and burned down Prospero and pushed Magnus and his sons over to chaos.

Besides that who could love those selfrighteous loudmouthed sheepshagging braggarts. I mean .... vikings in space. My heritage is insulted back several generations.

Thats what made me hate them fluff-wise.

So then I began playing Dark eldars.

And ohh boy did that hate get reaffirmed.

Any army that shoots alot is a problem for dark eldars. And do the wolves shoot alot? Yes siree!

On average a shooting fase from the Wolves will down between 3 and 6 of my skimmers in a single round.

The average wolf armies i face have about 10-11 firing units. That comes in at about 20ish shots fired, 13 hits for 10 glances or pens.
Now here is the bad part about playing Dark eldars in a all skimmer army.

Glances will fuck you up! 

 The best you can hope for is a weapon destroyed or an immobilized. Yeah stunned is not something you want since punching the enemy in the face fast and repeatedly, is what you´r all about. So a round where you can not shoot is bad, worse than being immobilized or loosing a single weapon.

And with a deep sigh you realise that even glancing hits will wreck you 1 out of 6 times. Dont get me started on the number of times, I had boltgun fire wreck one of my venoms on a glancing hit.

and back to Space wolves .....

Ok so i didnt really say why the results from the space wolves in particular makes me hate them.

Splitfire!

One unit can kill two of my skimmers?

Thats just so uncool. As I wrote glances will screw you up. So splitfire will, if not guarantee, then at least make it likely that you get two nice results on two different skimmers.

The wolves are not alone

I´d like to mention that I also dislike Grey knights and Imperial guards for many of the same reasons.

But that is a rant for a later time.

Introducing: Draigo the Thousand Son version

Just a short update before I head out for drinks.

Build myself a count as Draigo for my Thousand Sons.

Shield and sword are from Scibors monstrous, base is from micro art studio and the remainder is a Chaos terminator lord.

/Peace out

The 40K league has begun and ....

... my first opponent will be someone unknown to me. As far as I know anyways.

Im gonna face a chaos space marine list. The army I played extensively for close to three years. Theres not gonna be any surprises there.

The list itself is pretty straight forward and probably a very nice matchup for me.

Before I go on to discussing the list im facing im just gonna go over the league.

Pairing and matchups

Its 24 people participating in a league over the next three months. Each round is about 2 weeks and we have to get in a single game against an opponent during that timeslot.
The pairing system is swiss draw, random for the first round, and for subsequent rounds pairing is based on tournament points.

2 For a win,1 For a draw and 0 for a loss.

I was hoping for a good matchup for the first round, to avoid some of the tougher armies. And ohh boy are there some tough armies out there.

Scoring, deployment and missions

Scoring, deployment and missions are rolled at random for each single game, from an extensive list made by Patrick who is the organiser of it.

The short version.
There are two kinds of scoring, standard rules and everything non vehicle with WS and over four models at the beginning of the game.
Deployment has six options, the three standard ones and alpha strike which is like dawn of war with HQ and Fast instead of troops. Also ambush which is like spearhead but with forced 500+ points in reserve and Fog of war which is like pitched battle but with hidden (written down) deployment.

The missions, all nine of them, consists of primary (10 battlepoints), secondary (6 battlepoints) and tertiary (4 battle points). The primary and secondary shifts around on all nine variants between killpoints, scoring of objectives each round, holding objectives at the end of the game, getting units into the opponents deployment zone and so forth. The tertiary objective always is victory points

A win, draw or loss is then converted into tournament points.

Back to my first matchup.

My first opponent as mentioned plays chaos space marines.

Abbadon the Despoiler
Daemon Prince with lash and wings
Greater Daemon

3 Terminators with 3combi plasmas in a Landraider

5 Thousand Sons with bolt of change and meltabombs on the sorcerer in a rhino
5 Chaos space marines with a meltagun and champion in a rhino with extra twin bolter
5 Lesser Daemons

3 Chaos bikes with 2 meltaguns

2x 3 Oblitorators
Vindicator

Thoughts on the matchup:

Now this is probably a dream matchup for me.

Chaos in general and this list in particular is short on longrange fire, which is the doom and demise of my dark eldars. The list has a pretty nice close combat elements but since it based on two things 1) Abbadon in a landraider, and 2) Two monstrous creatures im foreseeing some difficulties for it.
Surviving with a landraider is pretty uphill struggle against 22 lance weapons and surviving at all with monstrous creatures, that are difficult to hide, against Venoms is neigh on impossible.

Then theres the third factor I have to deal with 3) the obliterators. But as a longtime chaos player I know too painfully well that massed fire of strenght 8 will kill them eventually. And failing with my lances then theres the spammed shots from the Venoms.

That said im not gonna jump to any foregone conclusions, the mission, the terrain and the dice are all factors which might play into the hands of the chaos player.

But all im really hoping for is a good and fun game where I dont make any mistakess

Introducing: transports and dreadnoughts

The transports first

I have five rhino/razorbacks which will be used for this army. Three of them are old rhino chassis from my previous Thousand Sons army. Two are new Razorback kits. On the old rhinos I had to bruteforce the tophatches off, to make room for the turret hatches.

I got three twin linked lascannons and three twin linked heavy bolters, all of them from Forgeworld. I do have the sprues with the guns from the two new razorback kits I bought, but im not sure I wanna use them.
Guess I will either try to trade them for some assault cannons for the razorbacks or save them for whatever.

The side and front panels are Thousand Sons rhino doors from Forgeworld. On the sides of the exhaust vents I put shields from Tomb king Tomb guards and on the rear ramp theres either a Tzeentch icon og an egyptian panel from Scibor´s Monstrous.

The dreadnoughts

No surprises here. I got three dreadnoughts kitted out as Psyfledreads,. The bodies are the Thousand Son dreadnoughts from Forgeworld. They got twin linked autocannon arms, again from Forgeworld, that are magnetized on.

That is, by and large, my Thousand Sons army. Im working on two characters, that I will post as soon as they are done. Also some lists on what I will probably field when I get around to playing them.

Introducing: the troops part 2

Time for the big boys in the troop department.

The terminators or paladins.

These guys are the core of my draigo wing list or part of the troops in my all round balanced list.

As is quite obvious in the pictures, some of them are old ones with the paint scrubbed of to some degree. Others are new ones.
All are made out of chaos terminators with parts from grey knight terminators, tomb king tomb guards and necropolis knights, the heads are Horus heads from puppetwars, unfortnately the Anubis heads did not fit in the terminator armor. The ruin bases are from micro art studios.

The halberd guys!

So here we got the four terminators (I will refer to them henchforth as such, but they might as well be paladins), equipped with halberds. The staff part of the halberds are from the real GK ones, the heads are swords from tomb kings.

The psycannon guys!

Next up we got four terminators with reaper autocannons. These are ofcourse count as psycannons, just as the ordinary autocannons are for the normal marines. A single ones of them also got a hammer. This time the close combat weapons is a mix of chaos terminator axe and mace hafts, with the heads removed and blades from tomb kings attached instead. I threw in a couple of carrion birds as pets sitting on the shoulders of models here and there in the army. I think it underlines the egyption theme nicely.

The ordinary gear guys!

Finally we got five terminators with standard gear. Four swords and a hammer.

What the future will bring!

This brings my total number of terminators to 13 plus the two sorcerers (librarians). I`m working on a count as Draigo, where I use egyptian weapon and shields from Scibor´s Monstrous and a Horus head from Puppetswar, on a chaos terminator sorcerer.

Im also thinking about how to make Karamazov in a way that reflects the Thousand sons and egyptian theme. One train of thoughts I had is making him out of a Forge world thousand sons dreadnought. Another is sort a floating palaquin with eunuchs carrying him around.

More to come on those two.