Saturday 28 September 2024

In the grim darkness of the far future....

There is only a very silly game. 

 So I was going to write up my whole game with Blogger Scotty and, as per usual, I stopped taking photos about 40% of the way through the game. 

This, however, is the highlight: 

 

 I'd been dinging up Bel'akor with Thermal Spears, Hunter Killers, Krak Missiles and a Culexus Assassin and left him on 1 wound so the brave Commissar, leading the last remaining parts of my Penal Legion squad charged the Daemon Prince. I rolled two hits, two 6s to wound and the whole game held it's breath as Scotty needed 2 4+s to not die and promptly rolled two more sixes! It was EPIC. He then promptly ended the Penal Legion squad, cut up my artillery and finally found himself very dead as an Armiger Helverin took the centre objective and noted the large wings and promptly Anti-Flyer 2+'ed Bel'akor back to the warp. 

So first real game of 10e was a good success. The rules feel mostly pretty good and I like how much it's slimmed down from the 8e / 9e bloat. There's not *too* much to remember and once I get weapon stats down and things like that, I'll be much happier.

Scotty admitted he didn't bring the Soul Grinder since it would probably have chewed me up pretty badly but I had plenty of anti-armour stuff on the board and reckon I could have given it the beans. I also need to tinker with the list a little bit - the tank commander definitely needs to be giving out 2 orders a turn and the Imperial Agents contingent needs a second look. This one worked, but only because I was playing against daemons. I reckon it'd give Tyranids a good go too but probably a bit middling against a more general list.

Anything I don't like? The stupid 60x44 table just vexes me for no real reason. I understand exactly *why* it's like this but come on. Otherwise, while I remain unconvinced I'll ever play in a comp (unless it's big enough to have a real drinkers bracket for me!), I'll be happy to play it casually and use all the nice models that I have! 

The long dark night time of aggressive troops...

I played a game of Late War Flames of War against clubmate Chris, breaking out my Volksgrenadiers and their new 12cm mortars against his Brigade Panzergrenadiers. I wanted to try this list out as I think it has game in both attack and defend missions (but never maneuver!) and elected to defend against the Panzergrenadiers. Who also defended. Uh oh. D/D missions.

We wound up rolling up Night Patrol, and given that neither of us had ever played it,  we thought it was worth a blat. It was a slowish setup as we worked through the completely different game setup and we were both a bit baffled about what correct decision making looked like but I think both of us could play it again. Chris reckoned playing it in a tournament would be a tough ask to finish the game and I am inclined to agree. It definitely feels like if you're going to defend you need to know how to play, and how to win, these missions.

Here we are at the end of my first turn:

  

On turn two, almost nothing happened as we both kept our heads down.  Chris and I had occupied these two houses below - me defending my objective and him waiting for enough of his half-tracks to remount to come up and try and shove me out. We spent most of the game pounding the other players building and Chris came off second best in the end. But not well enough for me to assault him out and finish the platoon the quick way.

Turn three and I got no reserves so spent a relatively quiet turn shuffling things around and lining up my SdKfz 250 Recce tracks to go after Chris' Stummels because this happened:

 

In an absurd turn of events, the King Tigers were basically stuck between my minefields and Chris' and their main contribution to the game was rolling 6s and absolutely ruining the recce tracks you can see below! Chris said later on that he should have brought them on later and instead brought on his second platoon of Jagdpanzer IV/70s on his right to stop my Recce making a cheeky run for the back objective (which I was totally trying to do!)

Chris rolled up on my fortress with his SdKfz 251/16 Flamm tracks and did some great unpleasantness for a couple of turns but I kept up a respectable return fire with panzerfausts (I lost the shrecks early) for, in the end, a whole lot of nothing!

We reached a stalemate on the right where those flak hlaf-tracks in the top of the photo pushed my remnant assault platoon back to the bulletproof cover of the craters while three Jagdpanzer IV/70s sat off to the right electing not to cross the hedge given the additional +1 to cross checks at night. I managed to range in both my 8cm and 12 cm mortars on the remnant of his infantry platoon and eventually thrashed them into next week over nearly six turns...


And this is where the game finished up:


Unpictured were my Brigade Panzer IVs cleaning up the second platoon of Jagdpanzer IV/70s while my Brigade Panthers finished off the work started by the Assault platoon and killed Chris' first Jagdpanzer VI/70 platoon. They went on in the following turn to bail out all of the half tracks on the objective to emerge victorious. 

So this was both of our first time playing the Defend / Defend Night Patrol game. Possibly not a great choice for Chris with his Brigade Panzergrenadiers but I think he managed a cunning middle ground to keep all his half-tracks on table. He said afterward that his big mistake was putting that objective in the open where he had to be on it and there was some proposition I got the first turn. Shuffling it just up the street so he could be in the church and defend it would have made this a very different game. 

Night was hard work for two armies who are mostly Trained at best - my artillery was next to useless and most shooting at concealed, gone-to-ground infantry was on 6s with the extra +1 for night. So it was a grind but a really enjoyable one, just because it was such an unusual mission. If you've never played it, read through the game setup VERY carefully when you do because it has a completely different order of operations. Also, minefield placement really matters. 9/10, would play again. 

Next Time

Bit of a workbench. I'm working on a character model for an upcoming game of Shadowrun then another one for the game that follows that (Vecna, Eve of Ruin for DnD5e) and trying to finish up the last of the KoW conversion - I've had some wings 3D printed for the 'Elohi' proxies and while they're a bit silly, they should do the job of clearly denoting that these things fly! 
 

Saturday 21 September 2024

September Workbench

 One more rebase for KoW....



Also, I have done many other things!!

 Flames of War

This is the last unit I needed for my Late War Volksgrenadiers. It's a unit I have, for some reason, held off on for a long time but for not obvious reason - heavy mortars: 

They were easy enough to do and other than remembering how to make my snow recipe again, an easy job to paint. So I've finally finished up ALL the bits that have been sitting on the to-do list for Flames until the release of Early War for v4. And, honestly, that'll be a complete repaint of a very old army. I suspect my Christmas break might be taking all that paint off...

Kings of War

 The rebasing grind has carried on and I've got two more bases done - a second unit of Ogre Palace Guards and rebasing my Holy Zealots into my Men-at-Arms 'Swordsmen' lead by Vice Scrutator Vindictus as another horde of infantry.

This leaves me with only two bases left have basing material put on and two more left to rebase completely, which are the two I have been deeply reluctant to start - full metal, multipart cavalry. They were exceedingly unfun to do in the first place on their own bases, getting them onto a unit base is going to be a whole thing. But they are the last two bases that need doing...

Warhammer 40K 

I'm hoping to get my first real game of 10e in a week or so with my Imperial Guard so decided I had one fairly important task to do before then - giving my Last Chancers a quick touch up and change: 

I'm going to try running a tank company so will have limited infantry support other than a large squad of Cadians and a generic 'infantry squad' which is a great reason to break out the Last Chancers. Given the constant changes in squad makeup for Guardsmen between 2nd edition and 10th edition, all sorts of stuff is wrong but rebasing Rocket Girl and Fingers onto a single base and making them into a weapons team.

Next Time

40K hopefully. Probably some more KoW too. I'm *so* close....

Saturday 14 September 2024

A fairly conventional club day and blog post

Team Yankee!

This weeks club day included a game of Team Yankee - a game I haven't played in ages. With new dynamic points, it seemed like it would be worth rolling out some M1A1s and seeing how the really big bois run. 

Clubmate Tom rolled in with a really cool Polish list - taking some of the good kit - T72s with ERA and Songsters - and attacked me in Escape. 

I'm going to preface what follows with a caveat - I didn't get reserves or air support until the third turn and that makes winning in Escape fairly difficult when your only reserve is 40 points of M1A1s. Also, I picked the wrong end of the table, deployed badly and then didn't play to my failing to get reserves. Not to take away from Tom's game at all - he played it well knowing that there was an inevitable pile of M1s arriving behind him!

In some sub-par defensive positions

Army defending their favourite TV show...

 I made a bunch of long range ATGM shots in the first turn and polished off some Monkey T72s and a few light vehicles but lost most of my Bradleys (who weren't properly concealed from the return fire because I didn't think through my first turn properly). Tom pushed slowly and deliberately up the whole front and having the good T72s definitely gave him better odds of landing shots, even with RoF1!

Air support finally arrives and is roughly handled

Turn three and my Abrams and Harriers finally arrived. The Abrams removed Tom's Gaskins and wrecked a Dana but couldn't get a bead on anything heavier from the base edge. The Harriers weathered a phenomenal amount of fire (and left Tom and I looking up loads of AA rules) but their cluster bombs managed to miss everything of substance.

 The LAV-ADs, having had no air assets to go after in the whole game, rolled out and gave the Polish BMPs an absolute hiding with their GAU-12s. It was pretty effective but they went down in a screaming heap to some T55s and T72s.

Polish T72s roll onto the objective

 So in the end, I needed a to hit a very specific pair of T72s with a couple of shots from my Cobras, which I didn't. I probably had a turn where I could (and should) have moved my infantry across the table to defend that objective but like I said - Tom played well! 

It was actually a good game and I would like to play it again. It was interesting to poke around the list and see what else I could do with it. Basically I concluded that probably need to fit in some M106 mortars and shift the infantry out of the Bradley company and into a Mech platoon so that I could have four more Bradleys on table. That would have given me measurably more AT firepower and a smoke bombardment which could have given me better opportunities to focus TOW2s into the T72s.

Kings of War

The rebasing of the old Warmachine army is nearly done - I have four more units to rebase and a couple more that need flocking and then it's all done. This current batch is pretty much the last of characters: 

Reznik1 proxying as a Dictator, a War Wizard, a Mounted High Paladin and a Mounted Abbess. Nothing too big or clever but good uses of the old models.

I took the army out for a run yesterday and it went surprisingly well - I got a 2 - 2 draw with Scotty in a very very swingy game and then clubmate Ryan got pinged by some very lucky boxcar Nerve tests by me. The cool thing was learning that the army standard bearer can hand out Aegis Fragments making the fairly beefy army beefier.  Downside? 10 year old superglue is a PITA and I have got a very big and irritating repair job on the blasted Errant Standard Bearer. It was a nuisance in the Warmachine days and, it turns out, still is! I'll be giving a few variants on this army a go in the foreseeable future.

Next Time

Good question. The to-do pile is diminishing nicely so probably a bit of a mixed bag of whatever I feel like painting this week! 

Saturday 7 September 2024

Mad rebasing efforts

 So I've been doing a BIG rebasing effort on moving my Warmachine to Kings of War and it's come on a treat this last week. 11 new bases done, three more nearly ready for flocking and three more waiting for basing.

This collection of single models will be a Priest and a pair of High Paladins - using the High Reclaimer as a lowly priest offends my Warmachine knowledge but it's a sweet model and I wanted it. 

I did a couple of bases of Sisterhood Cavalry. These are obviously not riding around on cats but I think I can live with that proxy. I'm going to keep the Unit Leader to make a mounted Abbess too. They'll ultimately go in to support the two units of Paladin cavalry that are coming down the pipe as flanking units.

Then, the logical extension of units and the reason this whole conversion became a workable thing. These two bases of Knights Exemplar from my Menoth collection will do solidly as Paladin infantry. On the left, with two handed weapons and on the right, with hand weapons and shields. It was a nice easy pick up and rebase an boom done.

For grins, a couple of units and here's where the Warmachine vibes really start coming out. The unit on the left is a Zealot Rocketeer unit and a Redeemer warjack who will proxy in as Men-at-Arms crossbowmen and the second unit is a Regiment of Ogre Palace Guards. So the Devout and Dervish warjacks, and their favourite caster Amon ad-Raza, are the first of two Regiments made with light warjacks. And if you thought this through to it's logical conclusion, there are two Hordes of Ogre Palace Guards coming with heavy warjacks. Those bases are going to be heavy!

Finally, a couple of the big bois - Kreoss 3 rides in as the hero Gnaeus Sullustis and Severius 2 will be Danor the Wizard, a model that seems quite good in that it has five spells and can cast all of them every turn...

I've also done another base of Sisterhood Infantry and prepared a second of the two bases of Paladin Infantry as well so there's more of this to come alongside, with a bit of luck with timing and the excellent work of Che over at Potbelly, I'm actually coming dangerously close to be able to get this army on the table so will be booking in a game at our next club day to try and push me over the finish line. I think at this stage I've got six more big bases and a few other random models to finish...

Next Time

Kings of War and maybe Necromunda, maybe 40K. Not sure yet! 

Wednesday 4 September 2024

Pooch's August updates

Three on time updates? What is this madness?!

Madness. It won't last....

1. Paint something bought before 2024

So the push to paint all of my Late War US forces continues, starting this time with a whole bunch of infantry...

Three bazooka teams 

Three rifle teams

Another three rifle teams.....

And another three rifle teams!

Which amounts to about half of the total amount of infantry I need to get done to be finished with the whole army. Progress is good! 

I also finished up some more vehicles, first up some transports for the infantry...

5 M3 Halftracks!

As well as some more Shermans, this time with hull flamethrowers and fuel trailers! The hulls, trailers and trailer bases were all printed by Potbelly Miniatures, the turrets are Battlefront plastics, which keeps all of the Shermans looking consistent across my army.

Four flamethrowing fun tanks!

So muddy. So messy. So cool.

2. Paint something bought in 2024

Hey look, it's MORE tyranids! I'm continuing to knock through them, this time finishing up:

The first Carnifex, Old One Eye themselves!

Scything talons, crushing claws and a winning smile.....

Just in time to be totally nerfed, everyone's favourite spore mine shooter, a Biovore!

The new kit is awesome!

Little ol' Ripper Swarms. So cute....

And some more spore mines. Because, floaty death mine.

I wasn't intending to get quite so many Tyranids done, but it's awesome to have made that progress! I'm going to have to keep up a similar rate if I want to have the whole backlog done by the end of the year....

3. Play a game of 40k each month

The Tyranids were back fighting the Blood Angels this month- big bugs vs Dreadnoughts was fun for everyone- especially when the Norn whiffs their attacks to kill a dreadnought, dies to the return attack, then blows up to kill the dreadnought and a whole bunch of others things....

40k. It's a silly game, that I am really enjoying!

The Norn detonates shortly after this....
4. Play a game of not-40k each month

It was another game of Silver Bayonet, which saw the Afghani seeking to raid a long forgotten temple, before the Highlanders could beat them to it!

It quickly turned into a game of "don't die to the Monsters", as mini-Pooch took control of the monsters, and proceeded to do 80% of the casualties recieved in the game...

Afghani positions at the start of the game

That's a mummy, a giant viper and a snake swarm. And one soon to be very dead Afghan.

Revenant vs Mullah. Not ideal.

The mummy scared everyone away, but not before some looting was had!

Silver Bayonet continues to be an awesome game, especially when you play it on cool terrain like that too!


It's looking like travel is the order of the day in September, so I might not get on very well with gaming!

Pooch





Saturday 31 August 2024

He's baaaaaaaack!

 Guess who's back? Back again. Reznik's back....

So I've been slowly working my way through the rebase of all my Warmachine Menites into Basileans for Kings of War and the exciting moment was discovering this:

fits almost perfectly onto a KoW chariot base. This was one of my favourite models in Warmachine and I've always been sad it didn't really turn out to be much chop gameplay wise. Not sure it'll be much chop as an Abbess (HEY ABBESS! You'll know if you read that out in the voice I think you did) but I'm too stoked that it worked. 

Otherwise, just working my way through the whole shebang. I did the ballista (since it turns out there's one in the list:

and then did the first rebase of Daughters of the Flame into Basilean Sisters. I've included a Reclaimer on the base as, well, I have all these random character models and I kind of want to use them! The second base will look much the same I think.

   

I have also started working on a couple of list builds since I figured if I do that, I'll be more likely to get the right bases done in the right order. I have about 3500 points of models for this so it's doing a little bit of thinking about it all from end to end. 

Imperial Agents

So I finally painted my Arbites and they're mint. It's a mad unit of all sorts of silliness but I love how it's come out.  Somewhere in the last little while, GW started getting a thing for shotguns and I am 1000% here for it. The sniper and the sergeant are arguably my favourite models but mostly I'm glad they're done and the pile of shame is further reduced.

With the drop of the codex last week, I've decided it's finally time for me to start learning 10e so will be chatting to a couple of the lads about a low-effort learning game at the club next week. I've played a couple of games but I still have a lot to learn about how the game works. Also, the new Boarding Actions are out and defo keen to give an Agents Boarding party a run. I have two squads of Breachers for a reason!

Next Time

I attempt SOUP at 40K and who knows what else...

Saturday 24 August 2024

We did some gang fisticuffs!

Blogger Scotty and I tried to remember how toplay Necromunda. We did okay in the end - a few things that needed to be ground through to figure out what was supposed to happen (and a few things where a good consistency copy editor could really have helped) but it was an absurd game! 

The coolest bit is that because Scotty has the boarding action terrain, we could play a Zone Mortalis tunnel fight. It wasn't perfect but close enough! This was how we began our foray into the tunnels:

Scotty deployed a set of fire teams across his frontage and I mixed and matched with my Firebrand, Deacon and Redemptor Priest to get some solid multi-activations to deliver the redemptive fires...

First bomb rat of the game! The ganger who set him on his way passed his intelligence check and this rat ran his explosive molotov into the pair of Enforcers - the incendiary set them both alight and did no damage but it kept Scotty's sniper occupied for most of the game! The second bomb rat didn't go so well and instead ran right next to my boss and a jubve and set them alight instead. Scotty enjoyed this and rightly so!

Most of the game was poor die rolls making the difference. At one point, Scotty had a single Zealot engaged by his captain, an enforcer and a dog and the Zealot managed to put two solid strikes into the captain's head (Scotty failing 2+ saves) before the captain went down and shortly after the dog chewed up the poor zealot. 

I set a lot of things on fire but generally didn't do much damage with it although it kept some of Scotty's better troops occupied running around and stop-drop-and-rolling. I'll be curious to see if it's any more effective against less well armoured opponents. Gotta be honest, a lot of my success was due to Scotty's rolling 1s on 2+ saves...

  

In the end, we largely walked away unscathed despite a half a dozen casualties on both sides. The heroic zealot who took down the Palatinite Captain (only to be eaten by a robot dog) didn't much enjoy his trip to the doctor and worse still, one of my Redemptionist brethren was ARRESTED!! For practicing his religion. With a flamethrower. So there'll be a rematch as we try to get him out of jail with some degree of prejudice...

I also broke out the Wallachians for a run in ADLG but the less said about that game the better. It was an interesting match against a cavalry heavy Seleucid but honestly? My dice were fecking awful and there's only so much you can do about that....

More Menites

I'm slowly getting into a groove with this rebasing effort but it's a slow grind too.  But progress. 


The Avatar of Menoth is stepping in for the Ogre Palace Guard Captain (that proxy decision will make sense later) and then the Idrian Skirmishers will be a couple of troops of Sisterhood Scouts. Seemed like a sensible call to me.

Next Time

More work on the Menite Basileans and probably some pics from a local comp next weekend that I'm not playing in!