Teams

So, back in January I went to my first tournament. A 2k point team tournament in Syracuse at Millennium Games. A group of four of us drove over from Buffalo. I was teamed up with my friend and his Space Wolves, and my brother teamed up his Blood Angels with our other friend's Guard.

Scoring was as follows, 20 points per win, loss 5, draw 10.
Up to 48 points for sportsmanship. Up to 46 points for painting.
Then 7 judges points for whatever.
3 rounds, 2.5 hours each.
So, here's a look at my Task Force 14.

HQ
Company Command Sqaud		50
Power Sword		10
Standard		15
Vox		5
Bodyguard		15
Fleet Officer		30
Heavy Support
Leman Russ Battle Tank		150
Lascannon		15
Bolters		20
Stubber		10
Fast Attack
Vendetta Gunship		130
Bolters		10
Elites
Psykers		60
2 Psykers		20
Chimera Transport		55
Stubber		10
Extra Armor		15
Troops
Veterans		70
3 Shotguns
Vox		5
3 Meltas		30
demolitions		30
Infantry Platoon
Command		30
Vox		5
Powersword		10
Squad 1		50
Vox		5
Flamer		5
Commissar		35
Powersword		10
Lascannon		20
Squad 2		50
Grenade Launcher		5
Lascannon		20

And my team mate's list:
Rune Priest: Chooser of the Slain(110)

Wolf Guard x4: PF/combi-melta ; PF/combi-plasma; PW/combi-flamer; (137)

Grey Hunters x8: Plasma Gun (130)
-Rhino :Extra Armor (50)
Grey Hunters 9: Melta (140)
-Rhino: Extra Armor (50)
Grey Hunters x5: melta (75)
Razorback: Twin-linked Heavy Bolters (40)

Long Fangs x5: Missile Launchers x4 (115)
Long Fangs x5: 2x Las-canons, 2x ML(145)

The first game was Dawn of War with 2 objectives. 1st HQ dead from each team is additional objective. We played against a Tau/Black Templars team(HERESY!).
Turn 1
I camped the blob of guard on the one objective and concentrated my forces towards that side. Keeping the Vendetta in reserve. Team mate moved his rhinos up towards the enemy objective and popped smoke and moved his long fangs into an elevated position. I took a pot shot with the russ at a Devilfish and failed miserably. My psykers in the Chimera moved forward behind the rhinos to be in range for next turn.

For they're move they made a general advance, moving some firewarriors onto the objective. The Templars began moving towards my blob.

Turn 2
My Vendetta with Melta vets did not outflank.
I ordered Bring it Down! on the enemy's vindicator for the blob's lascannons, and well they brought it down. The leman russ failed again. The long fangs immobilised the devilfish.
One of the grey hunter squads assaulted the firewarriors they fled.

On their turn they advanced again, 2 Rhinos getting closer to the blob in cover. The Tau HQ suit deep struck next to my Russ and melta-failed. It was sad. Broadsides targeted my Chimera and popped it, pinning my psykers and killing 1 of them. A squad of crisis suits charged the grey hunters and a shield drone dealt the only wound of the combat. The Wolfs did not make the save, and ended up fleeing the combat.

Turn 3
The vendetta shows up on the right flank. My command squads move into cover overlooking my objective. The grey hunters move toward the enemy objective again. The other grey hunters move to the center to block enemy units there.
The Vedetta blows up one of the Templar Rhinos and the melta vets stun the other one.
Lascannons do nothing, the leman russ manages to kill a few templars.
Long fangs kill the Hq suit.
The grey hunters in the middle pop the last rhino and the others charge the crisis suits again. This time they kill 2 of them.


The enemy makes ready to counter attack. Another templar squad arrives via deep strike near my HQ squads. Not much occurs in the way of shoot aside from pistols. They may have destroyed a rhino, or just the storm bolter.
One of the Templar squads shoots their plasma gun by accident, this denies them the charge. Thankfully. The Grey hunters are defeated in combat again.

Turn 4
My HQ shoots the deep struck assault squad. The Russ picks off a few more templars.
The psykers move to cover and fail to use their power. I charge the nearest templar unit to deny them the objective. The marines kill a nice chunk of my men, but I manage to kill some of them as well.

The assault squad moves in and engages my platoon command. The squads in the middle engage, the Templar HQ(Emperor's Champ I believe) and the Rune priest engaging in single combat. My platoon command is destoyed, and I losemany more guardsmen near the objective but kill all but a Techmarine in that squad. Combat at center is a draw.

Turn 5
The remains of the blob attempt to shoot the next templar unit. Do nothing. The russ hits the assault squad and kills all but 1. My Company command fails to kill it even with 1st rank 2nd rank.
Center combat ends with the rune priest dead.

The Vendetta goes down in flames. The assault marine burns some HQ guys. The templar squad wipes out the squad and ends up on the objective. Center combat favors the Space wolves.

Turn 6
A space wolf rhino tanks shocks the templars away from the objective and towards the Russ, but blocks LOS for the Vets. Everything shoots at that squad. We manage to kill all but 3. The Space wolves win the center combat.

The enemy does not need to do anything. They hold 2 objectives, we held 1 and contested 1.

We lost, all because of fail wolves losing to a shield drone. lol

Game 2
Spearhead, Kill points

We ended up having to play against the people we rode out with, which sucked, we had already practiced with them twice, beating them those two times.

The game was pretty boring, cover save after cover save on an urban map. I am not going to turn by turn this one. It was awful, but we ended up drawing 7-7. So it wasn't all bad.

Game 3
Pitched Battle, Victory Points.

We had a weird board for this one. The base was all tiles with big groves so we need to roll our dice in a box to avoid excessive tilts. Terrain was a bunch of huge buildings with bases extending 3 minutes out from the perimeter counting as area terrain.

We deployed behind 2 of the largest building, watching the left side and the central plaza. The enemy was Guard and Eldar, the deployed nearly the same, but with 2 leman russes nearly in the open watching the center.
The enemy has a power, I forget what it's called but it does such: all psychic tests roll on 3d6 and any fail is a perils.

Turn 1.
The Space wolves move up on the left and into the center. My psykers proceed to perils, lol, I had to try it, 3 die. Lascannons bring down a Leman Russ Vanquisher. Russ stuns the other one.

They make a grand advance pop one of my team mates rhino. That's about it.

Turn 2
I kill the other Russ and stun on of their wave serpents. SW in the center advance and kill some eldar.

Their left flank moves up and de mechs all of the space wolves, killing most of them. Banshees and guardsmen wipe out all of the SW. The guard consolidate into cover.

Turn 3
My Russ Moves to reinforce the left and fires at some banshees. Center SW engage a lot of eldar.

The banshees engage my blob in CC. I lose a handful of guardsmen and kill all but one.

Turn 4
My Vendetta moves on from the right, so I move flat out towards the action. Combat continues in the middle and with the banshee, who dies.

They manage to kill some SW in CC and try like hell to bring down my Vendetta, but it's save, well, saves it.

Turn 5
The Vendetta fires at an Eldar vehicle and pops it. The vets dismount and fire at some aspect warriors. SW wipe out the unit they are engaged with.

Another unit charges the SW and nearly dies.

That's it, we dealt a lot of damage to them, and my team mate took some heavy losses, but the only real losses that I took were to my Psyker squad. So we ended up winning by a pretty good margin.

For our effort out team went home with "Fought the Good Fight." I got a t-shirt and he got a box of dice. It was a fun day, but I was upset with our painting score and the fact we had to play our friends.

The person who ended up winning overall had the best painting score and won all 3 games. They had a pretty nicely painted but commissioned ork army with a nicely painted tyranid army as their team mate.

To Cleanse the Stars

First up for this evening a shot of my BFG fleet. Which I have called Battlefleet Vengeance. I started this fleet in early 2009, buying most of it discounted on ebay over the following few months. Throughout 2009 and 2010 I painted it between other projects and added a few more models slowly. I only get to play it rarely and my brother is the only person I know with a comparably sized fleet. It's a pretty fun game, and gets pretty intense, there's a lot to plan ahead for each turn. Torpedoes go flying, swarms of fighters and bombers are let loose, explosions everywhere. The damage done to ships is fun as well, each time there is a chance to critical, and when it does die, fun things can happen. Plasma reactors explode, warp drives explode, drift dead in the void...

There are nova cannons, which non-Imperial fleets know to hate. In the original rules you guess range, later on it was changed to a scatter. We like the idea of guessing, so that's how we always play it. Brace for bullshit. They hit hard. They make me happy and my foes sad.

Here we have one of the differently painted squads in my army, one which I have painted as Cadet Commissars. I always like the idea of Cadet Commissars running around with an army, getting their first taste of battle. These guys came out a bit glossy from the clear coat, it was the bottom of the can and never did dry just right. Overall I like the way they came out.


Last is another Leman Russ, Dueces Wild, this tank I painted in a little different shade of gray, kinda regret it now. I like the gray, but I would rather have it match the majority of the tanks.
I made the tank commander with a little bit of a gunslinger/Han Solo thing. The he avy stubber is actually a 1/35 M2 Browning .50 cal with a plasticard shield. As with the other tank this one is magnetized for multi-meltas, heavy flamers, heavy bolters, plasma cannons, lascannon, executioner cannon, battle cannon, and punisher cannon.

Just got an order in from FW with the small brass aquilas, improved comms array and the Commissar tank commander. I have another Russ to put the Commissar in, but I am not sure what I am going to use all of the aquilas or the vox for.

Battery Charged

First up some of the close ups which I promised before.You can see the light gray around the chipping. This was originally going to be codex gray, but that proved a bit too dark compared to the charcoal gray body. So I mixed 1:1 codex gray and skull white. I applied these chips and scratches quite liberally using a rather fine brush. Varying the size from as thin as I could up to 1 or 2 mm. On some I then painted on a 1:1 mix of Vallejo oily steel( you could use boltgun metal) to chaos black leaving a noticeable amount of the gray around the edge.
Here's a photo of the wording on the barrel of the battle cannon.
And lastly a shot of the rear of the vehicle.
And next are are few shots of my Valkyrie/Vendetta The Cadian Girl got this for my birthday shortly after the kit was released and painted it right away. There's a lot I could do better now a days but I am still very happy with this one. I magnetized the weapons early 2010, they were but pressure fit into the slots before, horribly unreliable. Lascannon come from the Imperial Guard Heavy Weapons teams and then some bits of sprue and plasticard to make a housing.
A view of the crew. There are also the door gunners, not pictured here, as well as a load master in the passenger compartment.
A view of the nose art. What's an aircraft without nose art?
And finally a view of the other side, I am really happy with the color scheme on this.
Also, in seeing other people's Valkyries I have noticed a lot of them are numbered 23.
At the last tournament I attended there were 2 other Valkyries there and both were 23.
How about you, did anyone else notice this?

TOUGH B4$74RD

Here are a couple pictures I was able to snap off before my camera's battery exhausted tonight.

This is my most recently painted vehicle, the Tough Bastard.
This tank was made with the Leman Russ Demolisher kit. All the weapons options are magnetized and interchangeable. I converted the demolisher cannon into a regular battle cannon as I do not usually use the demolisher. Besides the regular Leman Russ kit makes for a pretty fine demolisher when the barrel inserts are not used.

This tank is the Leader of 2nd Squadron which is why there is a white stripe on the front.On this side of the tank is written His Will Be Done!
Since this is the squadrons command vehicle I added a few things to it aside from the marking.
You can see the spotlight and radar from the space marine vehicles, as well as an additional vox array from the scout biker kit.
The name of the tank is painted on the front, and on the barrel it reads;
God Emperor, guide the flight;
Watch the target;
Take the unworthy's life.
Quite sure this is called the Litany of True Striking from the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer.



Here is one last shot of the tank showing the other side. I make a lot of use of Mig Productions pigments in finishing my models. I really like the dusty look which comes from a light coat over the entire model. It's great for dusting the treads as well as for powder burn on all of the weapons.
I did quite a bit of chipping and other weathering on this model which cannot be seen in these photos. I did this using a lighter gray color for the first coat of the chip, and over this I used Vallejo oily steel mixed 1:1 with chaos black, leaving the gray exposed around the edges. The next vehicle I paint I will photograph the process as well as take some close ups of this one in the interim.

Some Progress

Since my last post I have gotten some more models ans well as finished painting some.
I got another Leman Russ painted, Tough Bastard, it will lead 2nd Squadron. I haven't taken many photos of my finished products lately, but I do have some I have not yet posted.

First up is my Company Command Squad:Next up is my 1st Platoon Command squad:

Next up is an infantry squad. This is my most recently photographed squad, but I have since improved my techniques for both shading and painting flesh. Which at least the flesh method can be seen in the command squads above.

Lastly I have 2 of my special weapons squads photographed, one full of plasma guns and one full of snipers:
Wish I had a few more of the old school Cadians, they were a nice change of pace repainting them. They were my first 2 Guardsmen and were quite atrocious before. I regret now not taking a picture of them before they got stripped but too late for regrets now.

That's all for now. I should be able to get some pictures taken this weekend, maybe even finally catalog everything in my army. Hopefully I will remember to take process shots of my next squad or vehicle. If anyone is out there, please remind me.