Flames of War engulf Dusseldorf

So we (me, Rory, Josh and Britt) had a Flames of War 'Total War' megagame last Saturday, kindly hosted by Britt at his house with every table at his disposal and a bucketload of terrain.  Massive unstructured picdump follows:

Beginning of the game, the Hungarian (me, a few thousand miles out of my historical place) sector of the bombed-out ruin of Dusseldorf faced off against British artillery (Josh) in some fields

US Tank Destroyers (Britt) appear from ambush to threaten my StuG Gs. Inexplicably I pass all my armor saves!

Blurry men having blurry fun

A view from the British sector of the battle, and the Anglo-American artillery park

The Heer commander (Rory) is vehemently gesticulating about... something

Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the intermediate stages of this, but Britt's four M10s, while only scoring two kills, held up my entire armored push for about three turns, which was more than enough to let the British infantry dig in on their objective

By this time we are running out of clock, so I push forward and find out just how much harder it is to assault in v.3 of these rules compared to v.2; my Hetzers pay the price

The German sector of the assault has also bogged down short of their objective; perhaps divisional command should have released their Tigers sooner?

The Allies, despite being infantry companies, were able to secure their third objective before the Axis with their armor; by keeping the Axis off their third as well as securing their own, they wind up winning 9 to 6.   Casualties were fairly light, although things might have gotten worse if we had more time (which can be blamed on my unwise consumption of gas station hamburgers for dinner the night before).  Still, a good time was had by all!

40k Doubles Tournament yesterday

So while my home internet has been Having Problems (which has negatively impacted my blogging), I've been slowly getting ready to play in a 2x1000pt Warhammer 40k doubles tournament yesterday.  I stayed up late Friday night getting my 1000 points of Deathwing ready, and awoke to a steady snowfall.  Still, assuming they wouldn't cancel due to snow, my doubles teammate Rory and I headed up there.  It was a long day - we got up there at 10, probably got started around 10:45 or so, and left at about 7 that night.  A long slog for three games, but we had a pretty good time.  I'd love to post some detailed game breakdowns, but that will have to wait for later in the week. For now, pretty pictures:

GAME ONE: our opponents: Chaos Space Marines/Traitor Guard

Result: we got tabled around turn 4 or so?

Game Two: double Chaos Space Marines (Alpha Legion, "For the Emperor!") with Daemon allies

NB: thanks for being awful, new version of Photobucket.  I can rotate the picture there but it shows up here unrotated.  New Photobucket is awful.

Results: We held 4 points of objectives to our opponents' 3; plus we killed a lot of their stuff

Game Three: Necrons/Guard

Result: Rory and I got whittled to death by giant piles of dice and incomprehensible Necron special rules.

Steady as a weathervane

And now that I have about 75% of my 1850 points worth of White Scars assembled and ready to prime, what better time to radically rethink my Combat Patrol selection, and switch to Orks?


400 - Da Firestartas

HQ: Big Mek w/ Kustom Force Field - 85

Troops: Boyz Mob x 20 - 120

Elites: Burna Boyz x5 - 75
-???x Meks w/ Kustom Mega Blasta, or Slugga/Choppa, or Big Shoota: free

Heavy: Killa Kans x3 - 105
-each w/ Skorchas - 15

Basically all I have to do is assemble the Killa Kans (two extra Skorchas are e'en now winging their way here thanks to eBay) and find my Big Mek with KFF who is in the garage, somewhere.  The Boyz and Burna Boyz are already assembled from the handful of games Britt and I played back in 5th edition; the biggest thing is trying to decide if I want to run more than the one Mek I have in there right now.  I hate losing the burna for a KMB on somebody with BS 2, but having a spare Mek around to fix the Kans might be useful? Or maybe not, I dunno.

Consistently Inconsistent

So after a productive afternoon of cutting Space Marine bikers, speeders and attack bikes off the sprues (thanks again Rory!)  I have decided to run White Scars in the Combat Patrol league as well!  Ignore the previous post!

We learn by failing

So a while ago (two years now? how time flies) I tried to inaugurate a Warhammer 40,000 "Combat Patrol" league at my local game store.  This format, for those of you unfamilar with it, is basically supposed to represent a few squads of troopers running into each other unexpectedly, rather than the pitched battles of full-sized 40k. I think we had a decent turnout for 'opening day' - eight players, if memory serves, which isn't bad for a store with virtually no minis scene anymore.  Unfortunately it fell apart nearly immediately, for a few reasons which I will address frankly here:

1. no one was sufficiently familiar with the rules
2. some people outright cheated
3. other people brought 'netlists' specifically designed to abuse the Combat Patrol format
4. #2 and #3 above got me so pissed off I basically abdicated my responsibility as league coordinator

So it died a flaming and well-deserved death, and I'm only sad about it in the abstract.  However!  Another local game store (well, 45 mins away, but still) is starting up a Combat Patrol (now called 'Force Patrol') league to begin in the new year, and I am interested again.  There's a new version of 40k out there, several new codicies, and from what I understand the player base up there is not horrible.  So I'm playing with list ideas again!

400 point Lamenters (Blood Angels)

Troops: Assault Squad #1 - 135
-Sergeant w/ Infernus Pistol, Power Axe
-4x Marines: 1 w/ Flamer

Troops: Assault Squad #2 - 265
-Sergeant w/ Thunder Hammer, Storm Shield
-9x Marines: 1 w/ Plasma Pistol, 1 w/ Meltagun

These guys are actually built and primed from the failed league - they were the list I built to punish the guy who bragged about his net-built abusive list, and they worked for that.  I would kind of like to play them for fun instead of for punitive reasons, but I am assuming the typical Space Marine-heavy metagame so maybe....

400 Point Recusant 113th (Traitor Imperial Guard)

HQ: Primaris Psyker 70

Troops: Veteran Squad 80

-Sarge 

-9 Veterans, 2 w/ Flamers

-Chimera w/ Dozer Blade 65

Troops: Veteran Squad 80

-Sarge

-9 Veterans, 2 w/ Grenade Launchers

-Chimera w/ Dozer Blade 65

Fast Attack: Scout Sentinel 40

w/ Smoke Launcher

Again, this one is mostly built from my earlier Traitor Guard project, that fell apart due to the sheer distance I was having to drive back then.  I think all I need to do here is hammer together another Chimera (ugh). The Dozer Blades are frankly a points sink, but the backstory is they're a PDF from an Agri-world that falls to Nurgle so all the armor has Dozer Blades as they primarily used them for civilian work before they turned to Chaos.

396 point Kabal of the Annihilating Embrace (Slaaneshi Dark Eldar)

Troops: Kabalite Warriors x 10 - 105

-1 w/ Shredder, 1 w/ Splinter Cannon

-Raider w/ Splinter Racks 70

Troops: Wyches x 9 - 140

-1 w/ Razorflails

-Hekatrix w/ Phantasm Launcher, Agonizer

Fast Attack: Reavers x3 81

-1 w/ Blaster

I have no idea how these guys will work but they are the ones I actually think I want to play the most.  The only thing I wonder is if I would be better off leaving the Warriors on foot (which gives up access to the Splinter Racks on the Raider) as a stationary firebase and loading the Wyches on the Raider for delivery of boot to head (in which case I'd probably shave points from somewhere else to buy them another body and special H2H weapon.

400 point Necrons

Troops: Immortals x 9 - 153

Troops: Warriors x 9 - 117

Fast Attack: Canoptek Wraiths x 3 - 130

-2 w/ Whip Coils, 1/ Particle Caster

I have boss red plastic rods to replace the green ones on the gauss weapons, so I am kinda stoked to play these guys as well.  The warriors are color primed and ready to go with just a few details and some metallic drybrushing; the Warriors are clipped and ready to go.  But I'd have to buy a box of Wraiths for this list, which is not the biggest problem in the world as I really like the Wraith models.  Plus I think they'd be a very good mobility element for this level; I'd love to run a unit of Praetorians instead but that'd be half my points for 5 guys....

So what I have here are four lists, one which is actually ready to paint, two that are a model or ten away from being ready to prime, and one that's half ready for paint and then 1/4 unassembled and 1/4 still unbought.  Expect my usual dithering and screwing around before deciding.  Updates to follow, etc.  

PS obviously if any of you reading this have any Combat Patrol experience I'd love to hear feedback/critiques/suggestions/etc!

Even More Battlefleet Gothic

So Rory and I are on game four of our campaign, and since I finally got some merchant freighter minis (literally the day of the game) Rory assembled them while I finished my campaign paperwork and then we played the (honestly randomly rolled!) Convoy Escort scenario.  As the attacker, my forces were randomly determined, at which point I realized that none of my existing Chaos cruisers were cheap enough to fit under the 200 point allowance per cruiser I had a chance to roll up.  While I did have two new Chaos cruisers, still on the sprue, I just proxied in an existing ship for my shiny new Murder-class cruiser, the Blood of the Ram.  I also got two escort squadrons and a few ordanance markers.  Rory fielded two light cruisers and a small squadron of Sword-class escorts.

We actually played the first several turns of the scenario totally wrong*, so we reset it and started again.  Good thing we did, because what was otherwise going to be a perfunctory trip across the long axis of the board for Rory's merchant ships turned into what we both agreed was the most fun game of BFG we've played thus far!

*: my forces were deployed as 'blip' markers on the board, that would activate whenever one of Rory's ships came within 30cm.  What we didn't realize in our first attempt was that once per turn, I was allowed to voluntarily deploy one marker.

Rory moves his convoy onto the board, close under the guns of his Imperial Navy detachment

The convoy ducks behind an asteroid field; meanwhile my deadfall torpedoes and the 'Scopophiliacs' try to draw Rory's escorts into a fight

Blurry, but you can maybe see that I have driven one of the 'Scopophiliacs' right in among the freighters, while the other surviving member of the squadon comes in from the rear.  It was at this point I began to realize the freighters were not as fragile as I had thought they would be; at least not to escorts on 'Brace for Impact.'

In fact, if memory serves this was around the time I started to realize that the massed fire of six freighters was actually sufficient to be a legitimate threat to other escort-class ships.

Meanwhile, I chose to activate the (proxied) Murder-class Blood of the Ram before I ran out of time and real estate to use her.

Nearly immediately I crippled one of Rory's light cruisers, and soon after that set the other one on fire, but I'll spoil the surprise by letting you know that I didn't actually manage to destroy either one.  You can also see that by now I activated the 'Objectifiers' squadron and drove them into the convoy.

I had a clever idea about flying them through the freighters, guns blazing, and then turn hard to port to take on Rory's Sword-class escorts.  The turn part worked, but I failed to get the giant stack of kills I'd planned on racking up.

Somehow I did finally manage to score a kill on a freighter.  Meanwhile the Swords, and the freighters themselves, started hammering my escort-class ships.  I know the freighters got at least one kill; hopefully if Rory reads this he can refresh my memory as to whether they got more than that or not. They certainly weren't as toothless as I'd expected!

So eventually my escorts, wasting their time being stuck on 'Brace for Impact' weren't doing any damage, and Rory broke for the edge of the board.  My last hope was to pull the Blood of the Ram across something like half the length of the table.  But since I had a deadfall torpedo blip waiting directly in the path of the freighters I thought I still had a chance.  Meanwhile, the single Sword-class that kept dogging the tail of my Murder-class cruiser managed to take my prow weapons offline long enough to prevent me from taking 60cm shots at the fleeing escorts.  It was coming down to the last turn...

At which point my 5-strength torpedo volley passed right through two of the freighters without scoring a single hit.  I ran the Blood of the Ram up as fast as I could, but could only take out one frieghter with my freshly-repaired lances.  The convoy diverted all power to their puny engines....

And right after the above picture, Rory successfully put them on 'All Ahead  Full' orders and rolled something that nearly doubled his puny 15cm speed.  All four survivors made it off the other edge of the table; the Imperial filth got their precious supplies after all.  

We had a blast playing this scenario.  It's a crying shame that GW doesn't sell their freighter minis any more; these are the Forge World ones that ostensibly represent armed merchant freighters, but I consider myself lucky to have found them on eBay from a US seller so as to avoid overseas shipping.  Still, I'm on the look-out for the un-armed freighter minis as well!  If any of my intrepid readers are sitting on any that they're not using, please drop me a message...

Somehow people keep looking at this blog

Even when I abandon it for months at a time.  I've been gaming some, but not doing much painting, so I've neglected the blog.  I do have some new Battlefleet Gothic stuff to share though; my friend Rory and I are playing a small campaign, my Slanneshi Chaos fleet against his Imperials.  We got a quick game in today, where my mission was to deploy my 750pt fleet against Rory's randomly-deployed 1500pt defenders.  In the best Slanneshi tradition I ran like hell; stopping only long enough to conduct a hit-and-run raid on Rory's light cruiser to retrieve a spy that I apparently had stationed on his ship (thanks to the typically-random sub-plot generation table).  Pics here; the write-up is basically "I ran away and Rory tried to get in position to shoot me" so it's a good way for me to ease back into writing these posts:

Setup

Setup, from my corner

Setup, from Rory's side 

Rory, measuring for a Nova Cannon shot after crippling my Hecate-class cruiser New Flesh in an earlier turn. Forunately the Slaughter-class Strength Through Joy is masked by an asteroid field

One ship down, the 'Objectifiers' try to hide behind a gas cloud

The Aurora (where my spy had been embedded) in hot pursuit

Having been crippled by a Nova Cannon hit earlier, the Daemonship New Flesh translates back to the Warp

Objectifier Three, having been abandoned by Obj Two (and with Obj One and Four blasted to atoms), turns to lash out at a squadron of Imperial Sword-class frigates (it doesn't end well)

So back on the horse.  I have a few more Chaos ships on the way to round out my fleet; I also want to get some more paint on my Orks and Eldar who have been languishing in the graving docks (with just a coat of primer) since late summer/early fall.

Also, to those of you still checking this blog, thanks for your patience.  One of my many New Year's resolutions is to be more consistent both in my painting and my posting.  Whoever you readers are, I appreciate it!