A few pre-Offence 6th ed wips

Here's a few painting wips from before the tournament. As I said before I had actually finished my painting my whole 1500 guard force but I don't have pics of that. Here's some other progress though...

I found these in my Independent Stockist in Russia, they were Resin and I thought that althought they were a bit piratey, if I added to them they could be more grimdark.

I had tidy up some air bubbles with liquid greenstuff. Some of the crates were worsethan others...

Tournament Report: Offence 6th

Warning: Long post lol despite saying it's not too detailed... :)

So I've finally decided to share the tournament results with you guys... Won't be too detailed but will cover all 3 of us to an extent hopefully. It was to be 3 rounds 1500 pts... Round 1 missions 1/2 from the rulebook (on a d3), round 2 missions 3/4 and round 3 missions 5/6. Mysterious objectives and terrain were meant to be in play but we generally forgot/ignored that ...

My army for the tournament had to be changed a bit as counting up my army just in case before it, I realised that the excel spreadsheet which I use, I had been using had a slight mistake (!!!) and I was 10 points over, hence the slight change in my list:

Company Command Squad with 2x plasmagun, medic

Veteran Squad with 3x plasmagun, grenadiers, power sword, chimera with multi-laser and heavy flamer
Veteran Squad with 3x meltagun, demolitions, chimera with multi-laser and heavy flamer

Platoon Command Squad with 3x flamer, power sword and plasma pistol
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon and commissar with power swrod and plasma pistol
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon

Vendetta (had a hard choice between this or a hellhound or an aegis defence line)

Leman Russ Vanquisher with heavy flamer
Leman Russ Executioner with heavy bolter and plasma cannon sponsons
Leman Russ Eradicator with heavy flamer

Looking around before the match after I had set up my army on a tray (2 actually) that was (were?) given to me, I found that there were some interesting armies in sight. 3/4 grey knights, 4/5 space marines (various), no imperial guard apart from me, no dark eldar, 2 tyranids, 2 orks (1 Ilya), 2 Sisters of battle (1 with gk allies, one with guard), 2 chaos space marines (1 with daemon allies), a chaos daemons player, a tau player (with some forgeworld) and an eldar player (with just grav-tanks - forgeworld I think). Not sure if that was everyone but that was roughly it, there were roughly 14 tables so you can do the maths...

Round 1 I was paired up against grey knights, so I was a little scared, but I thought what the heck at least I get to see what they're all about. He had a stormraven, a dreadknight, 15 purifiers/interceptors (? troops anyway), a dreadnought with multi-melta, 5 grey knight terminators, a terminator librarian with some powers and a sprinkling of psycannons and maybe a flamer thing.

Mission we rolled for was objectives and we got 3 of them... deployment was pitched battle. Having determined the sides we placed objectives (He got first turn and decided to go first or maybe i was first but in any case he had first turn). One objective ended up in the open and 2 in opposite corners. Night fight didn't happen. His librarian + 10 troops + dreadnought went in the stormraven which he started on the table as he said he was scout moving + starting in skimmer mode (which you're not allowed but he was so confident about it I let it go at the time). His termies went central for the objective and a small purifier squad sat in a building on his side with their objective.

I deploy my blob in my building with the objective, the static ccs behind it to give orders and the executioner to the side to help out. The rest of my force (all meched up) presents a wall of A14 or gets cover saves on the other side of my deployment zone. Vendetta and pcs with flamers went in reserve. Plan: Get first blood, hope to hold home obj., drive up to middle obj and then contest/capture his objective if necessary.

Basically turn one he flew up and deposited his guys and shot me up a little, mainly knocking off the turret of the executioner. I responded driving up on the right and using first rank fire second rank fire on the blob to get first blood, take out his poorly placed librarian and kill about half the purifiers that were with him. (Btw when he saw how many dice I had to roll he suggested using an app he had on his ipad to roll all 60 or of them and it was actually quite useful allowing us to resolve the number of dead without any dice rolling at all) Also my executioner, unable to shoot next turn and with it's turret blown off decided to ram the dreadnought without much success, however in the centre I killed a terminator or two from long range shooting and did a little damage to the razorback.

It boiled down to me managing to kill his dreadknight and termies in the centre (but not before damage had been done) and taking out his remaining purifiers on the left while when the dread charged the blob in combat I just kept using my commissar's leadership and taking off 1-3 guys a turn. I got so engrossed with doing so well that I even forgot to bring on my reserves until turn 5... (facepalm) In the end my veterans in the middle managed to get to the objective on turn 6 after some back and forth running and I secured victory. I had first blood, slay the warlord and 2 objectives worth 3 points, while he had one objective slay the warlord and linebreaker, giving me and 8-5 win, however the difference in the score on vps wasnt enough to give me extra points in additional points to my 15.

Oh and btw in this tourny you could give your opponent a sportsmanship score of 1-3 (with 3 being best) but you could only give each number once (a bit of a silly system). In any case I gave my first opponent 3 and he gave me 3 too.

Round 2

Going into round 2 I was quite happy but I knew it was going to get tougher now that I was going to go up against someone who had also won their first game. At this point Ilya had beaten another ork player and Paul had lost to a chaos + daemons army.

At first I was matched up against Paul, but then they reset the system and changed some stuff around...

So I was matched up against sisters of battle and was a little worried. He had 2 exorcists, 3 squads of sisters with meltas in rhinos, a squad of dominions (?) in rhino, Coteaz, Celestine, 3 squads of acolytes with some sword thing and storm shield (perhaps some with rhinos), a storm raven, and some squads with loads of heavy bolters.

GW Psychic Powers App Launched

Just some quick news... it seems gw are really starting to take digital products seriously, coming out with an app that is just limited to ipad and is actually useful! The perks include:

- having all the psychic powers from all the races to choose from
- Being able to randomly generate psychic powers from the rulebook
- Having the mastery levels of all the psykers in the game
- Keeping track of psykers and which powers they have
- And even being able to take a photo of your psyker and use that to remind you which psyker has which powers

After seeing all this I was extremely excited, as are you probably, so I decided to have a look at the price. And then my jaw dropped... £7.99 for this !?!?!? Seriously WTF GW?

So maybe it's not such a great thing after all, and added to the price is that apparently (according to a reviewer) they don't have any/some of the codex powers... which is a big minus. Perhaps I won't be getting this one after all...

1500pts IG vs Orks: The Emperor's Will

This was the last practice match before the tournament. Mission: The emperor's will (not sure if that's the correct name but 1 obj each) and deployment was the diagonal one.

Lists:

IG: Same as last time and time before

Orks: Ilya was trying out nob bikers but also was looking at how an ork army with max/nearly max troops played out, for the tournament he used what he learned in this match extensively. As far as I can remember:

Gazghskull 

Wazdakka Gutsmek

26? Boys and perhaps a nob with power klaw

10 nobz with assorted weapons

Quite a few normal bikers (about 10) (proxied, sorry)

3 4 Nob Bikers

20 shoota boys with 2 big shootas or smthg

A wartrukk and I think that's it really...

We pre-agreed the terrain setup to save time and because we thought that it would be pre-setup at the tournament. Again no mystery objectives/terrain... Ilya setup first hiding his 20 shoota boyz in the building, along with (to my turn 1 surprise the load of bikers - I didn't notice them). The trukk filled with nobs and Ghaz hid behind a piece of terrain and the orks spread out in a line (to reduce the effects of blasts, although you never know with Ilya's logic, sometimes it's more random than Paul's)

My plan was to hold at all costs my home objective, and for that I knew I would require more or less my whole army to batter away nobs, ghaz and whatever else would be thrown at me and then to send a squad of veterans to capture/contest Ilya's. I didn't know which way the Orks in the centre would go so put my heavy tanks on two flanks, although the Executioner went further away from Ghaz's trukk. My chimeras tried to find some cover behind either the central ruin or another tank and my 2 front AV14 Russes were out on the left in the open, giving me a nice spread of firepower and creating overall quite a nice castle, so the blob deployed right on the objective in the midst of all this. Vendetta went in reserve, for the first time without it's payload of the flamer platoon command squad, which along with the company command squad hid behind the tanks close to the blob to give some orders. As usual first blood would be vital.

I then failed to seize and perhaps this was a good thing for me...

GW and Pricing - Rant about Dark Vengeance

One thing that's caught while browsing the vast interwebs is people complaining about GW "breaking the $100 price barrier" for a starter set with the about to be released dark vengeance... Really? You're already spending a lot more money on non-starter set models (which are a lot better in terms of quality, poseability, detail, etc) and probably have no interest in the actual starter set and yet you're complaining? Come on - this is an EXPENSIVE hobby after all. The worst thing is that all the people complain and then go and buy the product nevertheless... How is this showing GW that they are wrong to be pricing so high? The only thing ranting on the internet does is annoy people who have to read through loads of blog posts which are full of complaints. I highly doubt that ANYONE in GW even looks at any of the online community or there would have been loads of 'purged' posts which infringe on their copyright.

I haven't even started to mention that it's an 100 DOLLAR barrier... so for english people they have broken what - the £50 barrier??!? Really? What about other countries? The statement obviously doesn't apply, although I do not deny it is high price compared to what it was before, yet can we really put a value to the increase in quality of the miniatures in the box? Couldn't gw be claiming some increase for the newer, better rules that come in the box too? (which could have also been why the full rulebook costs more aswell).