Footslogging on with CHaos Marines
April 26th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Got in a couple more games with the footslogging chaos marines. Mech Eldar, and Mech Dark Eldar. In both cases, I found that the oblist get shot by all the anti-tank weaponry first and the prince gets shot after he eats a squad to remind people he’s there.
The Havoc squad has yet to be wiped out, and yet it consistently kills more vehicles then the obliterator squads. I basically get told the enemies just don’t have a good way to remove the entire squad.
The Lesser Daemons have been doing well. they either enter combat and die but not before killing off at least 1 unit, or they sit off in never-land camping an obscure objective that wins me the game. In a slow list like this, thier ability to pop in where I need them makes them very handy.
The big Khorne marked squads are kinda so-so. They tend to be the focus of enemy attack and often die rapidly. In fact, thier most often cause of death is fleeing from close combat and either running off the board or getting swept. An Icon of Chaos Glory would greatly alleviate that, albiet at the price of some offensive punch.
So, what I’m thinking of next:
Drop the Prince and the Oblits entirely.
Take a cheap lord.
Add in another squad or two of basic CSM with missile launchers
Change the melta squad to Chaos Glory from Khorne and add a combi-melta on the champ
Beef up the size of the main Khorne squad some more.
The net result of various tinkering on this leads to about 80 models in the army. 72 in power armor, and 8 daemons.
Other ideas:
Add in what is known as a “Karmoon Special”. It’s a squad of 4 terminators. 3 with combi-plasma, and 1 with a power fist and Heavy Flamer. It’s a deepstriking suicide squad that’s only 140 points and can unleash a lot of havoc.
CotC: Ork Nob
April 20th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Yay! More Conversions on the Cheap! When building a horde, it always helps to cut costs. especially with GW promising another price increase of up to 25% on most of thier inventory come June 1st.
So I picked up a box of Assault on Black Reach for my upcoming Ork army. Obviously we’re already looking at “on the cheap” by using this set heavily. I need ork nobz with power claws, ‘eavy armor, and bosspoles for the mobs of boyz. AoBR gives the boyz, and some nobz, but the nobz only have slugga and choppa.
I had ideas slated for using everything in the box except the termies. Termies have power fists. A Power Klaw is just a Power Fist by another name. Orks love to loot stuff from defeated enemies. So I chopped up a termie and used chunks of his armor for ‘eavy armor, his power fist is now a bionic replacement for the nob’s hand, and his leg is now on a stick and used as a bosspole.
I’m also doing magnetic parts on each nob to play wound-marker with. In this case he gets a bleeding gaping hole in his back where some loot used to be.
I have 4 spare nobz still. I’m looking at adding a unit of Flash Gitz. Termie guns chopped up and added to sluggas and a few extra wire gubbins should make suitable snazzguns. Some of the ork heads in the AoBR box have bionic eyes already for Git Findas. So I can readily convert up half-a-dozen or so flash gitz with another AoBR box. All sorts of fun to be had!
40K Battle Report: Chaos Marine vs Eldar
April 18th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
My footslogging experiment got another go at the mechanised eldar. This time we got the Hill Point victory condition so we were set to actually get a decisive outcome (for once) with a Dawn of War deployment.
It was a fun game, but turned brutal for the eldar very quickly. They made the mistake Turn 1 of leaving the jetbiking seer council within 12″ of a squad khorne-marked marines. Granted, it was a weakened squad and the council was fortuned, but it was quickly locked in combat. After that it was a turn 2 pile-in with the 2nd khorne squad and the daemon prince and suddenly the Eldar no longer had Fortune or Doom to help them.
At that piont, I basically had a killer advantage and it only got bigger as I started downing skimmers with oblits and havocs, leaving the squads inside to slug it out with advancing marines.
the game ended at 10 to 3, my favor. However, had the council remembered it’s 6″ assault phase move and backed out of a Turn 1 charge, then it would have been a much more burtal bloodbath of a game. I think I’d still have managed a win with reasonable certainty by virtue of tank-popping firepower being able to net a lot of kill points before it could be reliably taken out. That’s just one of the weaknesses of a mech list. Especially when you skip on Holo Fields because the normal opponent is lootah-loaded orks that go “Holo field? whatever, I still hit you like 12 times”
KP missions play to the strengths of a footslogging list with big units. So I’m not overly surprised I won since my opponent basically had a handicap to start by sheer opportunities given to me.
In other news, I picked up my first box of Assault on Black Reach today. And I figured out what I can use the termies for! Chop them up and use pieces to make cyborks, for starters. Termie armored limbs are about the size of a normal nob limb. Power Fists make good looted power klaws since the AoBR nobz don’t have any in the models. And I can convert the 4 extras into Flash Gits using the storm bolters and other bits. Maybe make 1 into a painboy instead.
Picked up a box of grots, too. I shall have fun using this first box for conversion fodder 
The hunt for the second army
April 13th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
It’s an old problem for me in virtually any game. I eventually find 1 main favorite character / faction / whatever to play as, but I’m always looking for that second one that could be as fun or more then what I already play. You know, the old “grass is greener” syndrome.
Now it’s working it’s magic once again in my 40K hobby, but on a more literal scale this time as I contemplate building the greenskin army I had thought of doing ages ago.
First though, I am going to go ahead and finish my current chaos army. It’s so close to completion I can taste it, and it’ll be a huge deal to me to have a full army completely modelled and painted. I so often keep adding new units or models that I never seem to catch up, but this time it looks actually feasible. So the Go-To guys in the chaos marines will all see paint before the green sun rises.
But when it does, there shall be speed freaks! Long ago when the ork codex first came out I was looking at it and came up with an idea for an army I could build and paint and expect to finish. Only 27 models at 2000 points. Dual nob biker squads with battlewagon and warbuggy gun support. Small, portable, and off to left field back then. Nob bikers were thought to be uncompetitive at the time. Nowadays they’re better then sliced bread on internet forums, but whatever.
Now that I’m actually going to have a completed army I can let go of the compact idea and spread the love a bit. I still like the speed freak and nob biker idea, so 1 squad stays. The points from the other one, however, are going into a trio of battlewagons, big mek, some boys, and upping the buggies to dual squadrons of deffkoptas.
Assault on Black Reach will be my best friend. orks a plenty to use and abuse, basic marines to convert to more chaos marines, a dread to convert into a grey knight dread for the back-burner Inquisition army, a commander to convert into an inquisitor, and some termies that will probably be converted into meganobs for the heck of it (or fall to Chaos, if I ever want to field more then the 6 termies I already have), and a warboss that be converted into my big mek, or my biker boss. Or both if I eventually get 2 sets.
One of the things that draws me to orks is the conversions. Much like chaos, but where I do more serious conversions with my chaos guys, I’ve got lots of quirky and goofy ones in mind for the orks.
The new warband will be a freebooter gang called the Midnite Ridaz, led by Warboss Kit’Grash. The big boss will be riding a black bike with a little painted red eye beam on front like Knight Rider’s Kit 
My battlewagons will have stikk-chukkas that are just grots trying to light and throw stikkbombs from the roof. The multi-wound ork models will all have some ablative model piece, like a non-weapon-bearing limb, that’s magnetic and comes off to leave a bloody stump when they take a non-killing wound. the pain boy’s Grot orderly will be hanging onto the back of the bike by it’s fingertips for dear life and the plate it holds onto will be magnetic for when the orderly gets used up.
The Big Mek’s Kustom Force Field will be a big tesla coil with a mid-electecution grot suspended between them. The field is actually a take on the shokk attack gun, but instead of shooting things through the warp, it routes incoming fire through the warp and into the hapless grot to absorb the fire. Of course, this means you need a lot of grots handy because they don’t tend to absorb much in one go. Luckily, he’ll have a unit of grots joining him to make his battlewagon scoring.
So many ideas, so little time. It should be fun though, and deffinately help ease the pain for the opponent of having to face yet another freaking ork army.
Battle Summary – CSM Footsloggers 1.1
April 10th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Well, I got in a game with the revised footslogging chaos marine list. It performed a lot better this go around. Mech Eldar vs Footslogging Chaos Marines. If ever there was an enemy that could make me feel the pinch in mobility, this would probably be it. We wound up with Capture and Control and Pitched Battle.
We both made a battle line towards the middle of our deployments, me with the heavies in the middles, khornies to either side, and the prince and plagues both reinforcing the left near the eldar objective.
Right off the bat the new baby-sitting squad made itself worthwhile. I put my objective back in a corner and just parked that lascannon squad right on it. Over the course of the game, they didn’t do a whole lot, but thier lascannon did contribute to wrecking a fireprism and immobilizing a falcon before it could jet over to contest. Not bad.
The smaller khorne marked squads still did thier jobs quite well. Neither survived the battle, but they did bring the fight to the eldar objective, keeping them occupied the full 6 turns just defending thier marker. The jetbike seer council was a royal pain and wound up dealing the bulk of the enemy’s damage to my troops, but I didn’t have the ability to catch them, and shooting them while perma-fortuned just doesn’t work well as I’d have to ignore the rest of the army.
Even so, the lesser daemons served well, summoning in and pasting a dire avenger squad then marching on to help soak fire on the way to the enemy objective. I did make a mistake trying to assault a wounded firedragon unit instead of forcing them to waist a unit’s shooting on thier own turn to finish the squad off. Had I done so, I might have had something left of my last khorne squad to limp over and contest the eldar objective for the win.
The nekkid daemon prince did his job exceptionally well. Pasted a transport worth more then his own points while forcing a unit of dire avengers to flee in the process (they managed to regroup about 2″ from the table edge 
). He then proceeded to absorb basically an entire round before eating an assault from the seer council on his last wound and flubbing his attacks back.
The plague marines did basically the same as the prince, eating a large amount of fire., letting the prince and khornies get in close. I actually beat my way through his entire army to contest his objective, and eleminated all but 1 of his scoring units, downed all of hit tanks with only one not completely destroyed.
Havoc squad probably took the MVP award though as they downed multiple skimmers and polished off one of the objective camping squads. The oblits assisted as well, but mostly just took the brunt of the missle / lance fire.
In the end we had a tie, both still hanging on to our repective objectives. Big shock, I know. Not like that scenario ever winds up as a tie (gasp, shock). I won on Kill Points, my opponent took the win on Victory points, so we both could come away with morale victories after a fashion.
The biggest thing I think I should have done differently was to bring in the daemons on the left instead of the right. The right offered a ready charge, sure, but the left could have tipped the balance enough to let me finish driving off thier last scoring unit, or keep something around to contest at the end.
