The Ravenwing ride to war!
More shots available over at my Dark Angels Flickr album
— Andrew Waite
Dark Angels – Ravenwing Rides
Category: Wargamming
Dark Angels – Terminator Librarian
The advent of 7th has spurred the need for some psychic reinforcements. The first of the reserves comes in the form of Calistarius from the recent(ish) Space Hulk boxset.
Let me know what you think.
–Andrew Waite
Dark Angels – Greenwing Rising
I’ve been working on my new Dark Angels force for around six months, whilst theres been plenty of activity on my Flickr feed covering my progress I’ve been slow to write up any of the progress in any meaningful way. This is the first in what should be a series of posts hoping to correct this.
When I started painting the tactical squads I had available it was with one purpose in mine; Force Organisation Chart requires two Troops choices for a legal army, and Tactical Squads are the stalwart of any Space Marine list. After finishing work I’ve come to really like the look of the unit both in pictures and on the tabletop; and after a handful of games I’ve found my mundane core troops to be far more reliable than the more exotic elite options in my force.
After a bit of trial and error I’ve settled on a quick, easy and repeatable method for the Greenwing elements of my force:
- Spray basecoat: Caliban Green – GW’ recent release of coloured sprays are a godsend (or Army Painter’s range will come to your aid….)
- All over wash with Nuln Oil for shading – You can be more careful and just shade the recesses of the figure, personally I found this overly time consuming for limited improvement in effect. Your mileage may vary depending on how ‘clean’ you want the final miniature to look
- Drybrush: Warpstone Glow
- Drybrush: Moot Green – If you follow the Dark Vengeance painting guide these steps should be edge highlights with the detail brush. Personally I’ve not got the patience nor steady hand for that method, I like the drybrushed effect and have had favourable feedback for the end result so far.
If you’ve followed the above, without additional detail your mini should look like this:
With the basics out the way, and without further ado, I give you: Dark Angels, 5th Company, Squads 1 & 2:
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Unit (numbered shoulder pads) and company (left knee) insignia are freehand; I’ve not given sergeant, heavy or special weapon figures unit markings to allow flexibility with lists if I need to swap different weaponry in to counter specific threats. Bases have been a quick and effective processes, essentially broken cork board – but I intend to cover the basing scheme for my Dark Angels force separately at another time.
Armoured transports are currently a work in progress, but teaser/progress shots have already leaked – watch this space…..
— Andrew
Papercraft Terrain – iKube
Previous attempts at home built terrain pieces were less than successful. Luckily some research and assistance from kind #warmongers on the Inter-tubez I came across a Spanish site (with English translations, thankfully) Toposolitario; who, amongst other projects, developed and FREELY released the iKube project. As the project has a tagline of ‘Scenery made easy’, it sounded like exactly what I was looking for.
You can download several PDF’s from the project containing full colour templates for easily, quickly and cheaply building some good looking terrain pieces. First production run:
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Considering I purchased no specialist equipment I’m delighted with the results, it’s amazing what can be produced with a standard, ageing printer and low-weight A4. I had expected the units to be somewhat flimsy, especially given the thickness of paper I had on hand with testing; but even now the units stack well and as you can see above happily support plastic minis without collapsing.
Each crate took around 5 minutes to erect once I has the process figured out.
Going forward I intend to purchase some thicker paper / thin card for strength and durability, plus consider some form of cross-brace to help support the top section, just to be sure.
As 6th ed. 40K meta is requiring an increasing amount of LoS blocking terrain, and other systems (like *cough*Infinity*cough*) are played with a higher terrain tensity this should be a nice way to begin or expand any terrain collection – especially as there is no gluing involved, allowing the templates to revert back to flat A4 for safe and minimal storage requirements.
—
Andrew
Warmaster Chaos Warband
A recent tidy up of my gaming cupboard (don’t ask) caused me to knock the dust of my Chaos Warband for Warmaster. For those that haven’t come across it before Warmaster was one of Games Workshop’ (sadly now de funct) ‘Specialist games’. Unlike most of GW’ games, Warmaster is 10mm scale, and is basically a Fantasy version of the better known Titan Legions/Epic 40k game systems.
Looking over all my army choices, seems I’ve got no love of being the good guy, so it should be no surprise my army of choice was Chaos. On top of personal preference Chaos provided several benefits:
- Firstly: Chaos are expensive points-wise, meaning you get a solid core of hard hitting troops, in limited numbers – so you don’t need to paint masses of units.
- The figures are nice, I particularly like the harpies and dragon orges, even the massed ranks of low level marauders look good en mass.
- Chaos tactics are fairly one dimensional: find something to hit, hit it hard – perfect for what was my first foray back into the world of gaming a few years back.
Being 10mm, the armies are quick and easy to paint due to size and (thankfully for me) very forgiving for an incompetent painter like myself. Unfortunately the scale was playing havoc with my camera so these shots are far from ideal, think I’ll need a more powerful lens before I start a major foray in the the world of smaller scale gaming, will stick to 28mm for the time being.
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Whilst the warband haven’t hit the table top for a while, I’ve still got some heavy hitting units finish painting and basing; heavy cavalry, chariots and a DRAGON! Watch this space 🙂
–Andrew Waite
Necrons – Royal Court
I’ve finally finished HQ for my Necrons, just in time for their next outing at the weekend: 1750pts vs Tau.
Not completely happy with the finish; with the benefit of hindsight I shouldn’t have forced through the end of my Skull White spray can, the finish isn’t as smooth as it should be. Planning to strip and repaint at some point to correct, but for now I need fully painted and based units on the table-top.
Unfortunately not the best quality shots, didn’t have time fully setup my usual lighting rig. I’ll try to get some better shots added to the Flickr set later, for now.
From left to right: Lord with Warscythe, Despair Cryptek, Nemesor Zahndrek, Lord with Warscythe and resurrection orb.
Both lords have the option of a Command Barge, but I’m currently preferring running these as Annihilation Barges
–Andrew
Necrons – Annihilation Barge
Annihilation Barge
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Like the Ark kit, the barge kit can be made into two different nits; the heavy weapon platform Annihilation Barge or Command Barge, both are AV13 skimmers making it fairly difficult to deal with quickly. I like the strength of both units, but am currently favouring the heavy option, especially as it’s only 90pts – bargain.
The twin-linked Tesla Destructor has the potential to dish out some serious hits; S7, assault 4, and as it’s Tesla it triples wound output for any to-hit roll of a 6. If that’s not enough, if it generates at least one hit, the Destructor can ‘arc’ into any unit (friend of foe) with 6″ of the target unit on a 6, causing additional damage to secondary units.
I’ve fielded one A-Barge in battle so far with a respectable return on investment, thanks to birthday gifts my Necron force now fields two for added tesla goodness.
–Andrew
Necrons – Arks of the Covenent
I love the Necron Ark kit, one of GW’s first multi-option kits. That is, until I started building my first Ark, this kit lives up to it’s reputation as one of GW’s trickiest kits.
Ghost Ark
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The Ghost Ark forms the core of a Necron warrior phalanx, providing transport, firepower and even the ability to re-animate fallen warriors. Getting the Ghost Ark into a premium firing position can be tricky as the vehicle’ weapons can only broadside so you risk exposing rear armour to the enemy, but as the Ghost Ark is open-topped it also allows a full unit of warriors (or Crypteks *cheese*) to fire from the platform. The pay-off is if you can position the Ark between multiple enemy units the volume of fire can be withering; in my last game it took out a full SW blood claw and long fang unit in a single turn, not a bad damage output.
Doomsday Ark
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The Doomsday Ark is the heavy weapon variant of the kit, mounting the rather frightening Doomsday cannon; 72″ range, S9, AP1, large blast. Not much can withstand that level of punishment. Unfortunately that statline is only relevant if the Ark remained stationary, if it moved it’s reduced down to 24″, S7, AP4 standard blast; not as devastating, but still no slouch if you need to reposition the Ark for a better tactical position.
I’ve yet to use the Doomsday Ark in a competitive match-up, but I’m looking forward to seeing it make it’s first kills.
–Andrew
Starting with scenery
As my Wordbearer host is starting to grow I decided it was time to build some scenery for them to fight over. Building scenery is something I’ve never really tried to do so I’ve attempted a few different projects to figure out what works, but mostly found what doesn’t.
Progress so far:
Hills
Noone wants to fight over a flat, desolate landscape, I thought hills would be a good place to start. First attempt was to shape a block of polystyrene, base and paint. End result, it’s not exactly hill shaped (and still not fully painted:
Second attempt at hill making took my back to my childhood: Screwed up balls of newspaper provided the base, with layers of papier mache providing the finish. This is still a WIP, and not ideal but I do think it shows more promise thank the polystyrene variant, and with cheaper materials to boot.
Fortifications
As I already had my polystyrene blocks and papier mache out, I tried my hand at some basic fortifications, essentially looking for some small, bulk and cheap scenery to change the battle field between each skirmish. Basically chopped the polystyrene into strips, and papeir mached for a foundation. I still need to paint these up (black spray, grey/white drybrush) but they should definitely do the job for cheap and plentiful scenery until I can flesh my collection out with more advanced pieces.
–Andrew
Necrons – Stalkers and Hyperspace Hunters
Triarch Stalker
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The Stalker is, in my opinion, a very cool looking model; and thankfully it has some useful abilities on the battle field. I’ve provided mine with the weapon loadout unique to the Stalker, the Heat ray.
Like the Doomsday Cannon, the Heat Ray has two alternate firemodes, providing some great levels of tactical flexibility:
- Focused Beam: 24″, S8, AP1, Heavy2, Melta – Perfect for popping heavy armour
- Dispersed Beam: Flamer template, S5, AP4 – Perfect for handling infantry hordes
If the heat ray wasn’t enough, the Stalker adds to Necron’s pool of AV13 armour AND if the heat-ray hits an enemy unit, all other Necron units targeting the same enemy unit count their weapons as twin-linked thanks the the Stalker’ target relay ability. Synergy FTW.
Deathmarks
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Deathmarks are essentially snipers, with all the offensive capabilities that the sniper rule brings to the table. Increasing deathmarks’ kill-ability is the Hunters from Hyperspace ability, pick an enemy unit when deathmarks enter the battlefield and they gain bonuses to ability to take out chosen unit even more easily than usual. Filter in deep-strike with the ability to arrive in the opponents turn thanks to Ethereal Interception, and deathmarks can definitely become a thorn in the opponent’s side.
–Andrew