Another Small Project Selection

Hello!

It's another compilation of recent-ish small projects that haven't appeared on the blog yet! We've got a Dwarf pirate, a bunch of 'Tau' and a hot git!

First up, this guy, one of the infamous Long Drong's Slayer Pirates. This was for a discord speed paint challenge, so he was done in an hour. A classic mini that takes to contrast and the like well - though I did accidentally paint him in jeans! Didn't win the competition but he did get plenty of votes so I'm happy enough with that!

Next up, a bunch of 'Tau' Fire Warriors. A full strike squad of the little blue guys and also a unit of Breachers represented by auxiliary kin, presumably part of a trade deal with the Leagues of Votann. Slightly fiddly conversions for the Breacher weapons, but the result looks decent and with the shoulder pad they fit right in alongside their Tau allies.

Finally for this one, we have the melee monster of the Aeldari, the Avatar of Khaine! As usual, it's fun to paint a big centrepiece model, so this was a pretty good time, using mostly pretty simple techniques and a fairly limited palette. It's a great update of a classic and I think pretty hard to go far wrong with this mini, but that said I'm pretty happy with the result.

Anyway, hopefully you've enjoyed seeing these, thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.

The Vardenghast Swarm - Tyranid Combat Patrol

Hello!

The first batch of the Leviathan box I got on the painting table was this lot, the Vardenghast Swarm, aka the Tyranid Combat Patrol army. 

I usually paint my Nids in fairly big batches so I thought this would be a reasonable ask, though in hindsight it was a bit of a slog doing all this carapace at once! As you can probably see I go for the 'paint lots of little semi random lines' approach to my bug backs, and this lot have got quite a bit more armour plates than most of the previous Nid models. In fact all round the new stuff here represents a slight departure from the smoother Tyranid aesthetic that was laid down with the 3rd edition revamp, and takes a lot of design cues from the older 2nd edition models, in my opinion at least. Personally I'm ok with this, but it does mean there's a lot more sticky-outy bits to paint! 

Anyway, first up, the new Termagants. I'm hopeful that even with the slightly larger bases they will still look decent alongside their many, many older siblings!

The Barbgaunts are the first of the newer breed here, and there's certainly a lot going on here. Being hybrid organisms I debated painting the guns in a different scheme, but in the end opted to keep them on brand, with a bit of a green glow from the symbiotic brains as a spot colour.

Von Ryan's Leapers - a very cool trio of models, but man that is a lot of plates to highlight! You can see here that I incorporated some rubble into my usual swamp bases for this set, a lot of them are standing on tactical ruins!

The boss of this lot, the winged Prime. Another cool kit but another one that's a fair bit more knobbly than his predecessors. Also pretty hard to get a good angle for him to show off wings, skin, carapace, and face!

Finally from this swarm, the Psychophage. This is the model that most drastically departs from previous Tyranid design conventions (bulging abdomen like a spider, reversed back legs, no hooves), but also I think my favourite model in the whole set. Just awfully glibly and horrible looking, a true alien terror. Also had the most fun of this batch painting this one.

And here they are together - sort of fitting into the light box! And I managed to just about paint them all in time for a game!

This was my third game of 10th ed and my first of the new Combat Patrol, against Orks fighting over their town!

It was a lot of fun, both sides having a nice mix of units and the scenario having a nice mix of skill and luck required to win - making for a close game until the end.

Both sides lost their 'chaff' units quickly, with this one Nob being the last 'regular' Boyz that whittled down the Leapers to a single model on one wound.

The bigger units were a tougher nut to crack however as the Warboss and Deff Dread took several attempts to down the Psychophage, losing the Boss in the process.

This mission had disappearing objectives and it came down to holding the remaining No-man's land one to win. Sadly for me the remaining one was in the Ork half of the board so I could only pile a few Termagants onto it against the surviving Deff Dread and two Deffkoptas. A narrow loss for the Tyranids, but a really fun game all the same. It took us about two hours to play, with a lot of rule checking, so I could easily see getting through a game in 90 mins, and playing something like a 5 game event in a day. I certainly enjoyed myself, and I hope you did too! Thanks for reading and stay safe out there!

My Seraphon Update

Hello!

Another Seraphon post, this time with stuff for me! As mentioned before, I managed to grab most of a launch box, so here's what I did with my own new Slann and Raptadons:

Raptadon Chargers - I opted to make both units the melee focused ones, which seem the most powerful individually, as I'm probably not going to be running enough of them to make the synergy between the two types reliable, they are more likely to be running out on their own to charge onto objectives or get in the way of stuff. Still, I'm a big fan of these models and I enjoyed painting them with a more muted but hopefully still striking scheme. They are based on the Snake-kicking Secretarybird, not quite a desert creature for the theme but I think it works well alongside the mostly brown lizards.

And here is my new Slann, sitting on his sandstone throne. I used pretty much all the alternative components to the lava one I built previously, including the cheeky Snakebite symbol at the top! Once again, it's a great kit and I had a good time painting him a bit like the Hypnotoad!

Here he is side-by-side with his predecessor. I didn't quite realise how much bigger this model is! The old frog isn't too far off but his throne is tiny- makes him look very cramped!

Of course the box also came with a new Battle Tome and assorted cards to go with it. Before got round to painting up the models, I had a go with the new rules, playing against Blades of Khorne with a Koatl's Claw Coalesced list. 

The game ended up in a narrow loss, but was pretty close and probably could have gone either way based on a couple of key rolls. The Saurus units felt a lot better than they did previously, with extra wounds, better attacks and better save near objectives made them really tough to shift outside of mortal wounds from charging bloodletters. The army rule changing from +1 to hit to +1 to wound on the charge was a big improvement, allowing it to stack with all out attack for a pretty nasty charge from pretty much anything Saurus. Both the dinosaurs I used, the Carnosaur and Troglodon felt much more impactful as well, with more beneficial buffing rules, extra wounds and more forgiving degradation. Judging by internet reaction it looks like the Starborne are the more powerful option these days, but I'm happy enough with the improvements to continue to play them as the no-nonsense fighting lizards I'm sort-of used to. I'm a little disappointed that the Saurus Knights got left out the book in favour of newer, bigger models, but with the doubling of cost for Warriors I've got plenty to fill the gaps!

Hopefully there will be some more AoS oppertunities coming soon, I would love the get the new units on the table, and play around with more of the new rules. As an aside, all the cards that came with the box are great, and I'm glad 40k has gone to data-cards, they are super useful compared to flipping through a codex or searching on an app! Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.

10th Edition 40K - First Game, First Thoughts, Reflections on 9th and Blog Update

Hello!

Apologies for the mouthful of a title, this one is going to be a bit of a disjointed collection of thoughts, but hey, here we are. Kicking off with my first game of the new 10th edition 40k: Orks vs Daemons!

This was a 1500 point game playing the standard Only War mission at the end of the free Core Rules. I was bringing the Orks, as is only right and proper for a first game, against Tony aka the Narrative Wargamer with his primarily Khorne based Chaos Daemons.

I took a mix of unit types, but keeping it fairly simple in terms of numbers of extra rules, with no enhancements. Three units of 20 choppa Boyz, two units each of three Killa Kans and Deff Koptas, a Battlewagon and a selection of characters: Weirdboy, Painboy, Warboss and Waaagh! Banner Nob (represented by the Goff Rokker!). The Boss and Banner went together with a unit in the Wagon.

The Daemons were a mix of infantry and big scary monsters. Two units of Bloodletters and a squad of Plaguebearers with a couple of support characters were backed up by a Skullcannon, a Daemon Prince, a Soulgrinder and the Bloodthirster.

Orks got turn one, surged forward to touch the middle objectives while leaving some Kans to guard the home one, did a bit of light shooting, and that was it, turn one of 10th edition completed!

Daemons responded in kind, leading to a couple of charges onto the objectives. Bloodletters cut into the 20 Boyz with Painboy, killing ten, but were stomped out by the return attacks. On the other flank the Soulgrinder went in to stomp a number of the Weirdboy's Boyz but took no damage in return.

Ork turn two meant WAAAGH! time, and the Weirdboy and friends sneakily jumped out of combat in order to charge the Skullcannon and take the daemon home objective! I'm pretty sure I didn't get Da Jump to work out this well for me in the entirety of 9th edition!

I plugged the gap they left with Killa Kans and the Warboss unit. Extra attack Kans punched some holes in the Soulgrinder before the WAAAGH!-boosted Warboss finished it off with nine strength eleven powerklaw attacks! Elsewhere the Painboy unit got a model back and then charged the Plaguebearers to ensure they didn't wander onto an objective - this mean the daemons were scoring no points on their turn!

The counter attack came in hot, with the angry Bloodthirster jumping over to mess with the Kans on my objective. The second Bloodletter squad turned around to go back for the Weirdboy/Boyz, and the Prince helped out the Plaguebearers. The big lad obviously did his thing, murdering the Kans and then killing a nearby Kopter with bonus mortal wounds, however the other two combats went a bit differently. 

Bloodletters cut down a load of Orks, but in the WAAAGH! turn the remainder fought back hard and killed the entire unit! This scrap would eventually result in the Skullcannon killing off the remaining Boyz and the weirdboy, and only just suriving the resulting deadly demise! The Daemon Prince had it go a bit differently - he used a big 14 attack sweep, but between the new 5+ save and 5+ Feel No Pain, he was unable to make a real dent in the Boyz, though was essentially immune to most of their attacks with a FNP of his own added to high toughness and 2+ save. At the end of the game the Plaguebearers were all gone but the Prince had still not managed to completely wipe the unit!

In turn three most of my remaining forces swarmed the Bloodthirster, including a second WAAAGH! being called for the Warboss/Banner unit. The 'thirster took his toll but eventually the Warboss smashed him down, leaving the daemons with not much, just the remnants in the ongoing combats around the objectives mentioned above. As a result Tony picked up his first victory point in turn four (as a Boyz mob failed battleshock) and the eventual score was, I think, 11-3 to da Boyz. WAAAGH!

So, my thoughts? Overall I really enjoyed it. It certainly felt like it will be a generally smoother and slightly quicker game once we've all learned the rules properly, and though there were a few weird rules interactions we weren't sure about, it seemed like a lot of the fiddly little details had been taken out. Simplified but not simple, as they say. My big takeaway however was that most of the units seemed to do more or less what they were supposed to, in a way that 9th tried to achieve but didn't quite. The big tough daemons took a lot of killing with T11, decent saves and loads of wounds. Rokkits were bouncing off them and buckets of dice from choppa attacks were only chipping off the odd wound occasionally. Similarly a mob of 20 Boyz with a character was a bit of a wall, taking a serious sustained effort to remove. Anti-elite Bloodletters were cutting down around 10 a time and then getting battered by the return attacks, and all the characters were adding powerful abilities. I could see myself running quite a lot of them!

Aside from the specifics of this game, I am excited to play more 10th and experiment with more stuff, though it's not all perfect. Balance is clearly going to be way off initially - and it always was going to be with a reset regardless of play testers, but I think the decision to 'power level' the points didn't help. I certainly don't hate it, it is nice and easy to just pay single costs for units, but I don't love it either. There's a lot of stuff that's just a no brainer, like the Deffrolla on the Battlewagon, that just hurts you for not modelling it that way (or alternatively encourages breaking WYSIWYG). I'm fairly confident that these sort of issues will be sorted in time though, through points updates and the full books.

Looking back over 9th edition, I can honestly say that I really enjoyed it, though it was clearly flawed. Once the complexity and power started ramping up it became very hard to keep up with and it clearly was not designed with the 'casual' player in mind. It had moments of actually being very well balanced and interesting from a veteran 40k player's perspective, but it must have been an absolute nightmare to have tried to get back into the game after a break of several years, only to come up against peak Drukhari or Tyranids and be wiped off the board in a slew of badly costed units and stacked special rules.

I think 9th had a bit of a reputation for being a tournament focused edition, but that's not strictly true. 9th brought is Crusade, and many, supplements with narrative rules - a lot of which I've spoken about at length! I'm glad GW decided to refine the Crusade format however, it seems like it will be much more balanced for random games between mismatched Crusades, and it also looks like the narrative element is kind of baked into the system a bit more. 

I feel like 9th will be remembered as a bad edition by many, but I think it was quietly important. This was the edition where GW decided to allow themselves to change decades-old rules and try to make units play like they are actually supposed to. Orks are supposed to be really hard to kill, so they got toughness 5 after having T4 since the early 90s. Same with regular (and chaos, eventually) marines getting two wounds, and multi-meltas having two shots, and Eldar covered head to toe in armour getting a 4+ save. So many changes to rules and stats that were almost set in stone before, so that the models in the game felt just a little bit more like they 'should' do. They didn't always get it right of course, but I think that will be the positive legacy of 9th, being carried forward into 10th and beyond.

Now, with all that said, for me personally the shift to 9th also signified a shift to not recording every battle on this blog. Some get summarised as part of a larger post, some just get posted to Instagram. I don't always have the time or energy to do big write ups anymore, and though I did beat myself up about 'missing' a few, it is ultimately something I've decided I'm perfectly happy with. As I've always said, this blog is mostly for my own benefit, so I make no apologies for not getting out content regularly or to a specific standard. So what this means for the future is... not a lot really. I will continue with sporadic posting with no intent to cover everything, just a general overview of what I've been up to. I hope that if you are reading this you will find it entirely reasonable on my part, but even if you don't, thanks for reading and please stay safe out there.