The Joys of Shopping

On Saturday Sarah and I went shopping and ended up in a shop called Home Sense, it is a derivative of TXMaxx but only sells home wares. As I walked through the aisles of china and glass I found these horrible metal representations of a WW2 fighter. I laughed at its cranky and silly style attempting to be a classic British Fighter.

Then my 40K brain kicked in and I realised this was an Orky Fighter already to go. The cockpit opens so I can put orks in and there is plenty of room for rokkits, big shootas and the compulsory Grot hanging off the side!

All of this, pre painted and metal for a staggering £12.99

Bargain and will fit nicely with the Speed Freaks army

The Grey Knight you see there is merely for scale purposes and plays no part in my fledgling Ork Force

Daemonic Testers

Right. Camera died on me tonight. Brilliant. So after much begging I used the wife's and after much more pain trying to get the thing to work I decided to read the manual...

So here we will see a Bloodletter and a Daemonette; painted up in the colours for the army. For those with slight colour blindness the Bloodletter is in red. Both are from the new plastics and paint really nicely.

The thing I'm most looking forward to with the army is the fact that every unit can be a different colour - it's the first army I've done that doesn't rely on total uniformity. The Soul Grinder is going to be a nice shade of yellow in honour of the Custard Marines. Meanwhile, all I've got to do now is work out what to do with the bases.

Month 1 will see me painting the Bloodletters and the Flamers. Oh and trying to finish my Chosen for that other army of mine!

Playing areas.........

Just showing off the new industrial/starship interiors scenery that is now more or less finished!!

This has caused a few late nights recently as I really got into it! My study turned into a little scenery workshop. I fully intend to do more, especially the 3D block sections but as I got my final exam looming for my degree, I've sadly been forced to do some work instead on playing with toys :-(

One interesting additional advantage of the 3D blocks is that because they are so chunky they can be safely stacked. If I knock together a few more of those and some walk way sections this should all be very usable for a Necromunda type game.........

...or 1949 Secrets of the Third Reich game in a Nazi research bunker..

...or Legends of the Wild West Firefly style!!!

Test Figures

Thought I'd better try my hand at the new paint scheme whilst I still have a chance just it case it turned out to be a massive pain in the bum!

Thankfully the free Terminator figure from White Dwarf gave me the perfect vehicle to try the scheme without actually touching one of the figures slated for the army.

This is just the under coat spray of white, topped with Bad Moon Yellow and then Blood red quarters. I halved the helmet but probably won't do that on the normal marines. I did give me the idea of making each type of squad (ie Tactical, Assault etc) have different Helmet schemes. I'll think on that some more.

Eddy

Because i gotta have faith... Ooooh, i gotta have, faaaaith....

Right, from the cryptic title to my post, the bigger George Michael fans amongst you (I'm looking at you Silverback) may well have deduced that I'm talking about faith. Faith in my ability to draw up an unbeatable list that I'll use to beat all the rest of you? Heck no. I'm talking about good, honest faith points that a full Sisters of Battle army will produce, as that's the army I'm now intending to take (assuming the marine codex isn't so exciting that I lose my head and go for them instead!)

I currently have a witchhunters army, but it's pretty heavily skewed towards the inquisition (who nobody expects, due to fear & surprise being their chief weapons, well, fear surprise and....) so I thought I'd chuck all them inquisitorial folk out and get a full Sisters list in place for this little tale

Now then, for the list.....

Canoness w. eviscerator
Canoness w. blessed weapon (I know, I know, 2 canonesses is a bit beardy, but Palatines are just rubbish by comparison!)

9 Celestian retinue w. heavy flamer, flamer, Veteran sister with eviscerator & rhino
9 Celestian retinue w. heavy flamer, flamer, Veteran sister with eviscerator & rhino (one each for the Canonesses - count as retinue so give them some protection once the Orkal hordes hit home)

10 sisters - heavy flamer, melta gun, VSS with power weapon & rhino
10 sisters - heavy flamer, melta gun, VSS with power weapon & rhino
10 sisters - 2 x melta gun, VSS with power weapon
10 sisters - 2 x storm bolter, VSS with power weapon

Exorcist
Exorcist
6 retributors with 3 heavy bolters

Only 4 troops compared to everybody elses hordes, but as sister squads are 10 bodies min. squad size, I need to take celestians to get space in the rhinos for the Canonesses!

"But wait" I hear you cry "don't you have a whole load of those miniatures already painted - how are you going to get painting points?!?!?!?" Well, it's true, I do have about 750 points of that lot already painted. However, my cunning plan is to use those spare months to produce a cityfight board with all the scenery that I've had sitting around for what seems like years.... Hopefully my fellow GOGs will award me points for producing that instead of sisters as that'll give us something nice to fight over (especially for those of that brought flamers to the party... Like me!)

So that's the plan for now, but be sure to check back in an hour, when I'll likely have changed my mind & my army list ;)

The Ork Freak of Speed, or something like that

So my brain has had a thunk about things and this is the plan for 1750pts

HQ - Wazdakka Gutsmek - 180pts

Troops - 4 Trukks with 11 Boyz and 1 Nob in each. 3 Rokkit Launchers and 1 Big shoota. The Nobs will carry boss poles and a Power Klaw - Total of 623pts

Troops - 1 squad of 5 and 1 sqaud of 4 Warbikers - 225pts (troops due to Wazdakka)

Elite - 5 Nobs and a Painboy on Bikes, 4 big choppas, 1 rokkit shoots, Cybork bodies, grot orderly - total ( wait for it and take a breath) - 360 pts

Fast attack - 2 lots of 3 deffkoptas, 2 in each in rokkit launchers and 1 with a Kustom Mega Blaster, 2 will also carry buzzsaws in each group. Total of 360 pts.

Giving a grand total of 1748 pts

Thoughts, comments, opinions????

Whilst Varistat makes his mind up...

Well clearly a new edition of 40K is justification for the start of a new army. That coupled with the imminent arrival of a new codex for the Emperor’s finest, I was obviously left with but one choice…..

Marines it is!

Already having an excessive, if somewhat dusty, number of Ultramarines knocking about, I decided that I really couldn’t bring myself to paint a whole army the same colour again. Thinking of my options, I found myself considering different ideas such as different colour shoulder pads, patterning or shapes on the armour, I even considered the heretical idea of camouflage! As I wanted a force that would be striking on the table top, I was left with only one option….

Howling Griffons!

Their heraldry is bold, bright and should be relatively easy to do as a paint scheme…. ….I’ll let you know if I still feel that way in about 1750pts time.

So now we have strawberry and custard flavour marines but what to do with them? What sort of army am I going for? The oh so short list of my wargaming victories stands as testament to my complete inability to design killy-uber-mean armies. They tend to be more like the Monty-Pythonesque suicide squad from ‘The Life of Brian’. This might be why I am more interested in them looking pretty.

I decided that I wanted to see just how mean a marine infantry could be under the new rules. Running, rapid firing and holding objectives is what I want them to keep themselves busy with. With this in mind, I’m planning (obviously just a rough plan prior to the appearance of the new codex) to go with five or six tactical squads. Now this clearly isn’t a particularly glamorous design for an army but having had a new hole torn into me by horribly unbalanced marine armies in past, I have a moral objection to marine lists in which landspeeders outnumber guys in power armour. Believe me its very possible and one particular game was so one-sided that I actually came third as the difficult terrain scored more kills than I did.

Two other factors have led to my decision. Firstly, having read the designers notes for the new codex in White Dwarf I realised that they seem to be making an effort to make to bring the marines back to their original incarnation as an Infantry Elite supported by a few flashy bits and bobs. I like that original view of them. It’s the one that first fired up my love of 40K in the Rogue Trader days and I love that the new edition is moving back in that direction. Secondly, as we are going to be playing games at paired 250pts, 500pts and every multiple of 250 thereafter, I thought that the good old marine tactical squad would be a great building block as we move through the different points thresholds. Their resilience coupled with mass bolter fire and a “miss”ile launcher should hopefully give me strength and flexibility. Well that’s the plan…….

As for the rest of the army, I’m probably going to include two dreadnoughts, especially as I have two sets of the marine contingent from the Black Reach boxset. After chucking in a commander (but before squad upgrades) I should still have 700 odd points left to play with. What to have?? Not to sound like I’m designing my army by what is in the AoBR boxset but Terminators deep striking under the new rules should be fun! I never liked having to put deep striking units somewhere ‘safe’. Now at least you don’t automatically throw away hundreds of points if Lady Luck shakes her head. I’ll feel much more inclined to have a crack at putting deep strikers right in the thick of it. It is what they are meant to be about after all.

So whats next after Troops, HQ, Dreadies and an Elite? Make the Termie unit bigger? Two terminator units? This is where I’ve ground to a halt. I’m just going to have to wait to see what new goodies they are going to treat us to in the new codex.

I can’t wait!

God this actually sounds like I vaguely know what I'm doing...............a momentary lapse I'm sure.