Sunday, June 26, 2011

Lamenters vs. Ultramarines

1750 pts

Game 1: Spearhead + Kill Points





Did someone call a cab?


Acting as puppets for their space wolf masters, the Ultramarines have failed to defend Fenris from the red thirst...





Game 2 (Dawn of War, Killpoints) didn't go as planned. (picture from the bottom of turn 6). DRAW



More to come

Sunday, June 19, 2011

A weekend of 40k


Saturday was the LEGION finals. Lots of good looking armies, great tables and most importantly a really friendly crowd. I really wish 40k was like this everywhere. Where you can walk out of the store, grab a bite to eat and not worry about some jerk five-finger-discounting your army. Where there is not your typical "TFG".  Hard to believe we really don't have one up here. Everyone is friendly and there is little, if any, drama to speak of. And where there is some hot competition without the usual baggage of jerk players, cheaters, or sore losers. All the people from the other stores were mad chill. Northeast 40k community represent, yo. Mini wargaming at its finest.

I managed to go 3 wins 1 loss in the tournament, which placed me in a 3 way tie for 2nd place - battle points dropped me down to 4th place (haha, someone had to get it) so no trophy this time! It's all good, I took first place in the last one so the other guys need their share of glory. The dudes who came down from triple play were (as expected from the ass kickery when we went down there a few months ago) pretty rockin players. Really cool looking armies too, especially the Deathwing force that nabbed 1st place. I wish I went around and took pictures of all the armies this time... It's hard to have a store rivalry when they kick the snot out of us most of the time, haha.

Armies I fought were Draigo Wing mega deathstar (Triple Play'r, kicked my ass), Dark Eldar (no problem for mech BA), Necrons (poor codex, not too much he could do), and an Ork Nob army (Yeeeah, lets just say the vindicators were MVP's of the day).

All good games, all good fun.

Then today I came back for more! Got 2 games in, first was 1850pts  vs. the venerable local known as "Sharky" (we all have nicknames) who unfortunately could not make the qualifier due to his participation in the marathon. He is really starting to get a competitive list going, and without help from the nets mind you (so he claims, lol). Second match I played all-infantry vs. a vehicle-light Grey Knight army at 1500 pts. Massive amounts of plasma guns made short work of that opponent...

Some cool pictures of the Dragons bringing the pain.... Ultramarines dare oppose us!?






 More to come



Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Blood Angels Librarian psychic power breakdown



The mathhammer breakdown on what to use... Librarians are still the best cheap HQ available for those of us who aren't codex jumpers (haha jk?). Mephiston... Scary, killy, but too many points and really unfluffy for my self-made chapter. I'd rather use a Land Raider. Other characters are kinda useful, but this post is going to be about the tried and true BA librarian that you get starting at 100 points.

Quick rundown of the psychic powers in order...

Blood Boil: 1 auto wound, no armour save, you can select the model if you roll a 5 or less. Okay, but this is a shooting attack. What's the point to taking this? The only real use I see out of this is punking tooled out 1 wound sergeants, you know, the ones running rampant with combi meltas and power fists (I am guilty as charged). Even still, you only have a 36% chance of actually getting to choose where the wound goes, slightly better than 1 in 3 tries. With a 12" range you will probably only get to use this power 1 or 2 times a game, if at all.
In short - it's pretty crappy, I wouldn't bother with it.

Fear of the Darkness: Interesting stuff here. This power is a little too situational to just mathhammer away. How close is the enemy unit to the table edge? Can you get them to run right off? Are they below half strength? Avg Ld values of your opponent? Etc etc, the list goes on. I think that this power can be extremely good. I would defintitely want to run with 2x librarians and double-cast this for insurance, similar to how I play my pair of vindicator tanks - as a single cast is going to give you somewhere in the ballpark of succeeding half the time depending on Ld values ofc. 40k is not the kind of game that you want to rely on half-chances. Always make sure that you statistically have the volume of shots needed to perform and your army should do well. Obviously there's always crazy dice rolls, both good and bad, but volume of shots is SO essential to reliability.

Might of Heroes: +D3 attacks, or 2 on average. For a typical librarian, this is weak. Only really worth it with Sanguine sword, and to cast 2 powers in the assault phase means you must be an epistolary which is pretty much a waste. Much better power to use for assault is Unleash Rage. I'd only take this with a Furioso Librarian dreadnought.

Shackle Soul: Some eldar trickery is going on here. Looks interesting on paper, and truth be told I've never tried it. Very manipulative, so if that's your game then maybe I'd go for it. The big problem I see with it is that it has a 12" range, so that enemy unit will really have to fail most of the checks (unlikely) in order to not be a threat to your librarian and his unit. A little too chancy for my tastes.

Shield of Sanguinius: Hell yeeeah! Alright, it's not that good. But if you are running a parking lot, I think it's pretty much retarded these days not to take a Librarian with this power. I know, traditional cover for vehicles isn't that hard to achieve, and it also isn't hard to generate cover by interlocking your own vehicles. However, you're pretty much always going to have a few vehicles up in front and out in the open. Consider this an army-wide 5+ cover save for all your vehicles. Don't let that force you to bunch up all your tanks though. While this power *does* make castling generally appealing; remember to play the board and not run the same cookie cutter deployment vs. whoever you play against. Librarian's are all about force multipliers and not being the individualistic kill everything turbo street fighter champ.

Smite: Okay, this is another junk power. Please don't pay 100 points for a dude that pumps out a mindblowing FOUR!! Str4 BS4 AP2 shots - at 12" range to boot. (Averages to a massive 1.32 MEQ kills not in cover). Yeeeah.

The Blood Lance: Unlike Smite, you can actually kill things with this. Auto hit if it goes off (yeah!), str 8 (yeah!), AP1 and Lance (YEAH!). Oh, and you can hit more than one unit if you line it up and get range. Really, it's not so so good, but the thing is that you can only cast 1 power per player turn. If you are running the librarian in a squad that prefers to shoot (double tap) instead of assault, then this may be the power for you. I have blown up my fair share of tanks with this power. The squad my Librarian goes with has effectively 2 meltaguns, which is not very reliable. The extra shot will help.

The Sanguine Sword. No you are not mephiston. This is a horrible idea for a regular librarian. See next power!

Unleash Rage: Force multipliers are what you want, like this power. If you want to run a super killy librarian unit, take this with terminators or anything assaulty. I have had great success using this with terminators. You will kill anything you charge at providing the power goes off. Unlike a chaplain you can keep using this if you get locked in assault.

Wings of Sanguinius: Only bother with a Furioso Librarian. Don't gamble by running this on a pack-less Lib in a jump-packing squad. Disaster waiting to happen. You have been warned!



That wraps up this post. What I have been using for my Librarians are the following:

Terminator Librarian (Terminator heavy list)- Unleash Rage + Blood Lance or Fear
(Note: Don't be dumb like me, you should probably give him a storm shield)

Power armored Librarian (Parking lot) - Shield + Blood Lance
(Note: Keep this one cheap and cheerful. Hold the wargear please!)

More to come



UPDATE:

New GW FAQ took a big dump on psychic shooting in order to nerf OP space wolves. In the process they nerfed everyone else. I won't be running Blood Lance anymore now that you need a BS check on top of psychic check - the auto hit was huge and now that it uses the Lib's mediocre BS4 I reckon it's crap compared to taking Unleash Rage.

Also, I tried an Epistolary setup today, something I RARELY ever do in an all-infantry list. Took Rage and Sword (Yeah, I know I said it sucked) but it turned out to be okay. I think the shield was still a better deal but the 3 attacks (4 on charge) re roll hits at str 10 was pretty nasty tbh, especially with furious charge granted from the honor guard meaning he was striking first. Just a thought.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Flames of War tournament results + lots of pictures!

Today was a blast. I think Flames of War has a great system going on. My first 4 games went smoothly and I feel like the mechanics are a good representation of WWII combat - basically they work as they should; which is I think a contributing factor to my success at the tournament. I didn't really need to know every single little rule to know that *this* should be able to do *that*, etc. Speaking of success, I went 3 wins 1 loss :)!! which placed me right at 4th place, just enough to qualify for the regional. Not bad for my first day of playing!

As the internet purports, FoW is indeed very similar in many respects to 40k, thus if you have a good grasp of 40k I think the learning curve is not too steep. If you have some knowledge about WWII military history/units then the game should be even easier to pick up. (EG: I don't need be familiar with the exact rules to know that my panther can totally trown that sherman tank). The game designers have indeed done a good job making rules that properly represent the historical units.

Here are a bunch of pictures (click for larger image) that I took today. All the armies were very well painted. The guys really inspired me to touch up my current force.





 2x Tigers I used for objectives. I can't take credit for painting the closer one from the store shelf!
 My army gets a break during intermission.
 Soviet Tankovy force.. I would have loved to go up against this army >:)
 US mechanized army - Played this army and it was a close win.
 German w/ a captured T-34
 Soviet infantry army with 5x KV flame tanks. Played vs this list and barely won. Flamethrowers are nasty..
 Another well painted mech US list
 And another...
 Some gorgeous airborne (brits by the looks of the Typhoons?).
 Canadians were also represented!

 Waffen SS
Battle in progress
One of the tables... The terrain (as you can see) was simply excellent.



Unit performances... Well, firstly I was surprised by the Toldi light tanks. They are really worth their points. I also think that the 40mm gun upgrade is massive. I don't see how you can pass up on that. 

The Panzer IV/70's and Panther... Well, the PaK42 is simply crazy good. Without even fielding a king tiger I can already tell that it would be overkill. Allied tanks rarely even get to Armor 10, and are more often in the 6-8 range, so the AT 14 of the PaK42 is perfectly suited to deal with any armor thrown at me. Who knows, I could be wrong as I have only played 4 games..  But even the mighty IS-2 has just 10 front armor, still quite vulnerable to the long 75mm.  8 front armor is respectable on the tank destroyers, and the 10 front armor on the panther is simply hard to deal with for allied players and even axis. My first game my command panther bounced a few hits from an 88 - and survived the battle. In fact, in all 4 games my panther didn't get knocked out. I think that alone is a testament to its durability.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Flames of War - 750 pt army ready for battle

There's a little 750 point tournament going on tomorrow for FoW. I have not even played a game yet so I'll most likely get crushed. Completed my force a few minutes ago. Here are a few pictures! It's dark out so I took some with flash and some without.






I'm reallyquite  pleased with how the tanks came out. This armored division is intended to represent the battle weary Panzer Division Muncheberg; which fought in and around Berlin during the last hours of WWII in Europe.


More to come