Tyranid Models

Having finally had the opportunity to get a few games of 40K in since my somewhat disastorous first game. I took a moment to get some half decent photos of my Tyranids to share with you.

First off, his Royal ones and twos to hit ness, the Swarmlord. 

Trygon prime

Tervigon

Venomthropes

The Four Stompas of the Apocalypse

The tactical situation - apoc game at the local Games Workshop. Two Ork players and a small Guard contingent line up against the varied forces of the Imperium, with Guard, Grey Knights, Space Wolves, Blood Angels and Dark Angels stood before them. Time for Waaaaaaaggghhhh!

 "Hand out those camo sticks!" yelled Platoon Sergeant Crick "Cover every exposed part of skin in green. You two, start a small brawl among that squad! Don't stand up straight, hunch over more! We're gonna have to really pull off one hell of a show if we're gonna make it back to Imperial lines alive..."

Bugrit surveyed the field in front of him. This was a Meks dream, the fruits of his labours given life on the field of battle. Naturally he didn't see things this way. Bugrit saw a good chance to crump stuff and get more loot. But despite his lack of elocution, it's fair to say that the description of his feelings was probably accurate.

Wazzdakka and a horde of bikes were over to the right flank. A Stompa and a Skullhamma were surrounded by all the wagons, truks and buggies of the clan, with a swarm of Stormboyz clustered behind the mass of the Stompa. Bugrit stood in a nest of Snotlings, plenty of ammo for his Shok Attack Gun. Over to the left, a rival clan had brought three Stompas to the party. They may think they had the best position in the centre of the field, but they aren't as fast as Bugrits lads. We'll beat em to the enemy, hell we can probably reach THEIR enemy before they do. On the far left there were what appeared to be some looted wagons crewed by Grots. Presumably they were allied with the other clan as they seemed to be in the midst of their lines. But grots are unimportant anyway...

The Stompas strode forwards, thier super gatlers tearing vast chunks out of the opposition. The entire speed freaks clan surged forward... well, not quite as one. They were bumping and shoving and trying to make sure they got to the enemy first. One truk exploded as a paniced shot from a krak missile struck home. As the vehicle fell to pieces around them, the lads emerged and vowed revenge upon the lowly marine that had committed them to walking. Their temper was not helped by their erstwhile allies driving past at speed, throwing insults and quite a bit of faeces at them. Most of the enemy fire was bouncing off the super heavy vehicles though. The occassional ripple of a kustom force field betraying the shots that could have potentially done more than scratch the paint job. Meanwhile, the bikers slaughtered the Ravenwing bikers who had been foolish enough to try to slow down the Stompa by getting in it's path. As they died, the air rippled and a squad of Terminators appeared behind the Stompa. The bikers roared into the assault, as did the Nob bikers lead by Wazzdakka. They slaughtered them in a brutal close combat, though several of the bikers were cut down in return. 

As the Orks broke in a wave upon the Imperial lines, more and more troops started to arrive behind the Ork forces. Blood Angels, Ultramarines, Space Wolves, Dark Angels. A couple of Dakkajets swooped low and annihalated the Blood Angels with supreme weight of fire. A jingling sounded as Santa came flying across the battlefield, firing missiles at... well, anyone happy really. You never know, it may even have hit the enemy. Bugrit decided that devastator squad in a bunker had been troublesome enough, and targetted his shok attack gun at them. There was a brief "Zogging eck!" followed by a bright flash... Bugrit, his grots, and the two low flying dakkajets had all vanished! Lost in the warp somewhere...
A double 1 roll on a Shok Attack Gun probably wouldn't effect flyers, but as the Orky side was winning so easily by this point that most of the reinforcements were troops that had already been killed in the battle being given a second chance we didn't see the harm in losing the flyers to such a funny result

The bikers and wazzdakka charged into the second Deathwing squad, and Santa joined them. ore than half the squad were wiped out. However when the Dread countered into Santa and managed to instant death him, the combat tipped in the Dark Angels favour. Wazzdakka tried to make a hasty escape, but he was captured by the Dark Angels. They seemed to think he had some intelligence on the whereabouts of some people who must have tripped. I don't see why they're so concerned, but have to admit that the idea of asking an Ork for intelligence shows the supreme naivety of the first legion...

By this point the left flank had started to turn upon itself. Smelling the umiez for what they really were, the Orks had turned upon them. They had then promptly switched sides and fired back. The speed freaks spotted a glint in the eye of a Stompa as they roared towards the nearest Baneblades... including a red one. Seeing the challenge, a speed freaks battlewagon instantly rammed the rogue Stompa with a deffrolla, as a looted wagon, dive bomber and Skullhamma all started firing at it. After quite a bruising the Ork player retired from the field of battle, with one Stompa dead and 2 limping (one of which had lost half it's mass, yet none of it from enemy fire!)

As some of the Orks withdrew, the umiez on the left realised that the Imperials weren't so forgiving of their earlier "play-acting" as some of their shots had been a little too convincing... terminally convincing in fact. They meant to get their revenge on the traitors, so the guard switched back to the Ork side as they fought for their very lives. The Dark Angels swiftly retreated with Wazzdakka, who having been unseated from his bike for the first time in months was finding walking a little difficult. He'd have to escape when he had feelings back in his legs. The guard were slaughtered as the first lads out ran riot, though most of the boyz were still in their transports, having not reached the enemy yet. It was decided that it was a solid Ork victory and the imperials withdrew to lick their wounds, as the lads celebrated a glorious victory, and a bloody good fight. One or two even wondered where Bugrit and Wazzdakka had got to, and why were they missing all the fun..?

Santa Klaws Rulez...

As promised, the rules I came up with (and by now should be using in an apoc game) for Santa Klaws and his Sleigh...

UNIT OR FORMATION NAME: Santa Klaws POINTS: 250

DESCRIPTION:

Oi get your choppas out,

'ear the umiez cry,

Giv em all a clout,

and watch em all die...

Santa Klaws is coming, to WAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

SANTA KLAWS:

	WS	BS	S	T	W	I	A	Ld	Sv
Santa	5	2	5	5	3	4	4	9	6

Santa is equipped with Power Klaw, Eavy Armour, Cybork Body, and Santas Sack of Prezzies, Santas Sleigh.

Santas Sack of Prezzies.

At the start of the shooting phase, choose one Ork unit within 12” of Santa, and roll on the following table.

D6	Result
1	Lumps of Coal. The boyz have been bad. The unit cannot do anything this turn except cry.
2	The unit gets shiny new choppas and sluggas but no tactical change
3	As above, but these ones are snazzier, so the orks feel even better. No tactical difference, but they're happy.
4	Lotsa Ammo – Santa has given out extra bullets, all guns get +1 shot this turn
5	Wooly jumpers – The extra thick layers give +1 to the armour save this turn
6	Med Packs – The unit has FNP this turn!

The effect of Santas Sack lasts for one turn only. No unit can receive a second gift from the sack. That wouldn't be fair.

SANTAS SLEIGH:

	BS	Front Armour	Side Armour	Rear Armour
Santas Sleigh	2	11	11	10

Fast, Chariot, Open Topped, Red Paint Job, 2 twin linked dakkaguns, Exhaust Cloud, 4 Joy Seeking Missiles, A very Special Task. The sleigh has 4 hull points.

Joy Seeking Missiles.

Read out the name of the missile. Whoever has the biggest smile (friend or foe) is the target. That players most expensive unit is targeted.

Range unlimited, no LOS required. AP2 One shot heavy 1 hits on 2+. All are fired at once. Str variable*

*If the person is upset at this turn of events, the missiles are Str 6. If they are ok with things, they are Str 8. If they find the whole episode hilarious, Str 10.

A very Special Mission

If this unit is being used in December, it can choose to be a flyer during any turn. It must be a flyer for the complete turn. As a flyer the rider can vector strike instead of doing his sweep attack.

If the flyer is shot down, the unit that shot it down is immediately targeted by the nearest unit (friend or foe) and an out of sequence shooting attack is directed against it, as everyone is mad at them for spoiling Christmas. Furthermore, all units on the board (including the “friendly” ones) have preferred enemy against THAT unit for the remainder of the game. Whichever player ordered the unit to shoot down Santa can expect to receive abuse from all other players for doing the most callous thing since Alan Rickman called off Christmas...

Santa Klaws is coming to Waaaaaaaaagh!

'E sees you when youz sleepin,
'E knows when youz awake,
Cos 'E's peering through your window,
So stoppit fore you go blind mate!

Oh get your choppas out,
Raise 'em in the sky,
Giv your mate a clout,
We'z tellin you wy,
Santa Klaws is coming, to Waaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhh!

Cities of Death in 6th Edition

 In the new year I plan to run a Crusade of Fire based campaign at my local gaming club. As any battles fought over Hive City tiles require a Cities of Death game to be played, I thought I'd have a look over the rules and bring them in line with sixth edition.

For starters, I'd say we need to take into account the rule changes sixth edition has brought. To that end, there are some basic rule changes to clear up first.

NOT all units are scoring, nor does it matter how many survivors there are in a scoring unit. Troops only score, others deny, and unit strength is irrelevent.

Deep Strike, Reserves, Dusk and Dawn, Random Game Length, Infiltrate... these are all basic parts of the game now, so anywhere that says "If these rules are being played" can be ignored. Likewise anything that let's that rule be played is fairly irrelevent.

Anything that talks about determining Line of Sight can be ignored, we use True Line of Sight now.

I will also suggest using the secondary objectives that we have come to know in sixth edition.

 All good so far? I can see you're enthralled!

Moving on, deployment. Now Cities of Death missions all used table quarters deployment. I did consider updating this to 6th ed deployments, but with the fact that Cities of Death had it's own different deployment when it was released and it isn't updates that have left it looking different, I will stick with table quarters. There will not be a specific order to what you deploy or alternating deployment - player 1 deploys their forces in their quarter, not within 12" of the centre. Player 2 then does the same. Player 1 gets first turn, unless player 2 siezes the initiative.

 A couple of other specific changes to the rules as listed in the book.

Page 9 - Rubble is listed as a 4+ cover. This needs to be a 5+ to bring it in line with 6th ed.

Page 34 - Command Centre - the secondary option for this is in relation to the long out of use Target Priority Checks. Best just to ignore this secondary power and stick to the primary power if you use this strategem.

Page 40 - As mentioned earlier, deep strike and infiltrate are now part of the game, these strategums are redundant. The sewer rats strategum is still useful though.

Page 45-46 - All rules are in line with 6th edition, these pages can be pretty much ignored.

The Missions

Firesweep
At the end of the mission each planted flag counts as 3vp.

High Ground
The objective building is worth 3vp to the side that claims it.

Domination
Each occupied ruin is worth 3vp to the holder.

Maximum Attrition
Each unit destroyed is worth 1vp to the opposition.

Urban Assault
Each objective building is worth 3vp to the holder.


There are also some special missions, but they're different enough in their own special rules that they don't really need modifying. Just use a little common sense and you'll be fine.

Hope all this is useful to someone, and I will be blogging about the campaign over on my personal blog when it all starts off, and will try to keep the writeups both characterful and also useful to anyone who wishes to run their own Crusade of Fire campaign in the future.

Pirates Dead in the Water...

I am sad to report that my begging letter to the tournament organisers fell on deaf ears, and the Pirate project is simply dead in the water.

They suggested using one of the Raiders as counts as venoms, but a) I don't want to confuse opponents that one of my raiders is a raider but the other ones a venom b) venom wouldn't fit the whole squad on, making it a pointless transport and c) the upgrades had been modelled onto the model, such as grisly trophies, enhanced aethersails, dark lance... and these would not be available on the venom. It just wouldn't look the part.

Limiting my force to one raider wouldn't work either. The crew of the Dutchman just look like weird mutants without their ship, so I'd have to include the Dutchman... but the Dutchman is easily recognizable because of The Pearl, and without that it's like "What is this some sort of ghost ship?"

I am continuing to work on the models as best I can but it is somewhat gutting. My hope is to complete the project and perhaps find a combat patrol doubles tournament that HASN'T incorporated this random ruling. Alternatively, I go to Bracknell this year and make my case for the problematic rule to be taken out so that we can take Pirates vs Ninjas NEXT year...

To that end, I have gone completely against character and come up with an efficient spammy beardy list. It is completely in line with the rules they have set. The restriction of vehicles was apparently to defeat Necron Quantum Shielding spam. Now given most people complain about Cron Air, QS spam is a new one on me. There are 4 vehicles that come with Quantum Shielding. The Annihalation Barge, Command Barge, Doomsday Ark and Ghost Ark.

Annihalation Barge - it's a HS slot, so self limiting. Only max of 2 in the combined 1000 point force if BOTH players take Crons.
Command Barge - needs an HQ choice to ride it, can't have HQ choices with more than 2 wounds, therefore ineligible.
Doomsday Ark - Ordnance weapon, so ineligible
Ghost Ark - sure you could spam these... but would you want to? They support warriors, and of all the things in the Necron codex, if someone wanted to spam warriors and ghost arks I'd say LET THEM.

Anyway, in their desperation to prevent anything more than one necron vehicle in an entire 1000point combined force, they have put the same limits on everybody else. The only vehicles you can take more than one of are sentinals, venoms, vipers, killa kans, grot tanks, war walkers, land speeders and storm talons. Now from the various tournaments I've heard, there's nothing there that can be spammed to death right? Right?

So, with about 6 weeks to go to the tournament, I now begin 500 points for Winds batch number 2. Ken and I have usually finished respectably mid table even though we've been playing with sub par fun whacky crazy lists. It'll be interesting to see what we can do if we realy put our minds to it...

Trazyn the Infinfinfinfinfinfinfinite...

So today I played a game with my Necrons where Trazyn REALLY excelled himself. In scenes reminiscent of Snatch he proved that you can't keep a good robot down, at least not for long.

Playing The Relic mission with standard deployment I gambled, and deep struck Trazyns squad to the centre, hoping to grab the relic with the edge of the squad and start my withdrawel on turn 2. However, a wayward scatter put me far from my target, about 6" in front of the enemy... an ork horde army. Ah...

Making the best of a bad situation the warriors Gaussed the battlewagon to death, giving me first blood... and spilling out a pissed off set of Ork Nobs toting lots of Power Klaws, lead by a rather angry looking warboss.

The nobz and a squad of 30 boys charged in, and thanks to trazyns empathic obliterator I managed to tie the combat. My lychguard piled in so at least some of the power klaws would be hitting invulnerable saves as opposed to chewing up combat res on the warrior squad. Trazyn helped tip the combat to a draw again with more empathic kills. My opponent then threw another squad of 30 boyz AND a squad of burna boyz into the mix. The burnas hacked trazyn apart with wild abandon, after he had failed to get a kill annoyingly. The combat was a massive loss and the lychguard ran, and everyone was hacked down. But trazyn got back up amidst the slaughter (on a 5 no less) Utterly surrounded I used my annihalation barges to try to blast my way through the burnas to let trazyn charge the big squad of boyz. Sadly I couldn't break them, so Trazyn charged the warboss and challenged him to a fight. He passed his mindshackle test... Trazyn wounded him, but without the mindshackle the warboss tore him to shreds. Again my opponent tried to block where he could deploy, but again Trazyn stood up. My opponent then tank shocked him into line of sight of the lootas, who gunned him down mercilessly. He got back up again. He then moved on and charged the boyz squad. He took out a healthy number but they took him down. Sick of his shenanigans, they finally deployed in such a way that he could NOT get back up. I then rolled for Trazyns other ability, and on a roll of a 5 (only needed a 2+ but still sweet nonetheless) he reappeared as a lord over in the other squad of warriors! He still lived.

After being held so long in the middle, my opponent broke forward with his boss and nobz to finish my immortals, the only scoring unit I had close enough to challenge for the objective. He moved one solitary boy that survived his first squad almost within spitting distance of the relic. The other squad had been sent packing by an effective gauss volley that put them below the 25% threshold, and they left the field of play. So the nobz charged my 3 immortals and one lord. The lord challenged the warboss, who accepted. Who then failed his mindshackle. The immortals did little but die ignominiously, but the warboss put three instant death wounds on his own squad, which only one cybork body saved. My lord taking the 2 wounds off the warboss left my lord winning the combat by 3, and he promptly ran down the surviving nobz. The game ended turn 5 with me scoring first blood and slay the warlord and my opponent scoring nothing. If there had been a turn 6, I would easily have taken his last scoring unit of one boy... leaving him just two turns to grab linebreaker and SOMEHOW slay my warlord to get the a draw, though slaying my warlord would have involved tabling me as he had 20 ablative wounds in the warrior squad. A solid victory, and I owe it all to just how tenacious Trazyn proved to be. Without him holding up the mass brawl in the middle then nipping at their heels to slow them down they'd have surrounded the objective and claimed the three points long before.

Trazyn, you'd do Boris proud...

Yarr harr fiddle de... oh f*$k...

So, there I was, storming along in my preparations for Winds of War 13 when the tournament pack finally came out, and my plan has completely come off the rails.

So yeah, I designed my army with last years restrictions on heavy vehicles in mind, meaning my two raiders plus two squads of wyches and a beastmaster with razorwing flocks was fine. Then the tournament pack has come out, and restricted the field to 2HP vehicles... So pretty much none of the transports, just light walkers and buggies.

You are allowed ONE 2+HP vehicle, provided it doesn't break the 33 armour value rule. That is, one for your combined force. So I'm still screwed.

I've emailed for clarification, because it seems a drastic change from last year. Chimera spam was annoying but you could still deal with it, and vehicles being easier to glance to death now I wouldn't have had a problem with facing them again. One of the more hated armies for small scale games would be venom spam, and that is STILL legal under this tournament pack. It doesn't make much sense.

The tournament pack was pretty clear and it didn't seem like a mistake, though it is a very drastic change from last year, which is why I've queried it. But it didn't look or feel like a misprint... it felt like a deliberate change of the way they want their combat patrol games to work. Which means that the nice little 500 point force I've been working through, am more than half finished, will be illegal. I can try to keep the stuff I've done and adapt the rest but I'm not sure how it's gonna work out...

Watch this space...