Mission 55 Theta - clearance of space hulk 'Revenant of Despair'

So we decided to play a game of Zone Mortalis where 700 points of ordo xenos inquisition would attempt to purge a sector of the space hulk 'Revenant of Despair' clear of 700 points worth of tyranid infestation. The primary objective being the hive queen or 'tervigon' to give it it's correct designation. The queen would birth 2D6 plus 3 broods of termagants per turn and would not 'burn out' as per the standard codex tervigon rules. The aim being that the hulk is infested with tons of little gribblies and it is up to the inquisition to blast their way through to reach the hive nest and torch the queen.

Both sides would be using blip markers to represent their different units and squads (only themselves knowing what was under each one). Interspersed amongst the blips representing termagant broods were the 700 points worth of tyranid elite units which comprised of genestealers both ymgarl and standard, a brood of two lictors and a brood of venomthropes. We also decided that the lictors and the inquisitions eversor assassin could traverse the map via the airducts which we represented using the tops of the walls.

Finally, we agreed that the game would last the full seven turns and the unstable void ship damage table would be in effect. (My apologies for the use of the same blip markers to represent the tyranids and the inquisition. It might be confusing for readers but we knew what was going on).

The layout of the hulk - tyranid blips appear throughout the hulk with blips to represent the breaching ordo xenos troops in the foreground
 

Ethrion's Night Lords

At the moment just a work in progress as I change the colour of my army to the 'new' colour scheme. Many more to follow in the coming weeks and months... The idea is to make them as spikey and "evil" as possible and have them adorned with skulls, helms and other battle trophies. Plenty of Dark Angel and Blood Angel helmets I think!


Krieg Acerbus 'The Axemaster'

A narrative battle report (1K Sons & DA)

My first attempt at trying out a narrative battle report.  Inspiration came after my game with Ethrion's Thousand Sons.  We played a 1,750pt game, pitched battle deployment, mission being the Relic and my Dark Angels got first turn.

Let me know what you think, and do comment & criticize as much as you can.  I'm a big boy, I can take it.

Ethrion, hope this will form the basis of our next match up... great game btw.

As the last remnants of the Imperial defenders were cut down, the mortally wounded Lord Commissar Marcus Valerius laid face up, the grip on his power sword slowly relaxing.  All around him was the relentless harmony of war playing out; the steady thumping sound of mass-reactive bolter rounds punching through the bodies of fleeing soldiers, chunks of masonry collapsing, blown off by auto-cannon shells and krak missiles, the moans of pain coming from his men and the sound of his own dying, but still beating heart.  In his last moments, Valerius replayed the event that had unfolded.  However, despite the different strategic alternatives he thought of, the outcome, he knew in truth, would have been all but the same.  He simply had lacked the resource and the ability to muster sufficient heavy artilleries as the call to arms was rushed and his men ill-prepared.  As the noise around him began to dwindle out, he knew that death was coming to embrace him.  Before blacking out into unconsciousness, the commissar picked out a distant sound which was not there a moment ago.  It was the sound of engines roaring.  Not the sound of lumbering battle-tanks or transport vehicles but the noise Valerius heard was higher pitched, like the sound of bikes.

Yes, death was indeed coming now, of that Valerius was sure.

New Chaos Rumours

Quote from B&C:

First off, I want to say that it just doesn’t make any sense for GW to release the new Starter Set with models that doesn’t have a codex, so we have to assume that CSM codex will be out before the starter set. The only way they don’t (would be a big slap in the face) would be they add a mini update like Daemons and still put off the CSM codex release.

Anyway on to more rumors/leaks.

Remember I might just repeat other rumors floating around and debunk others.

–Special Characters–

Ahriman: Mastery Level 4, Same Stats as before, Access to Biomancy, Pryomancy, Telepathy, and Tzeentch. He is the master of witch ire spells, he can cast three spells that are witchfire in the same phase. He can also give up to three units infiltrate ability.

Huron: Same Stats as before, Mastery Level 1, Spells are randomly determined at the start of each turn.

Typhus: Same Stats as before, Mastery Level 2 can only take Nurgle powers, Destroyer Hive has been changed to be a Nurgle Holocaust Str4 AP2 ignores cover. Has Fear

Kharn: Same Stats as before, Him and his Unit get 2+ to deny witch and is completely immune to force weapons. Still attacks random people, but now a sneaky way around it. Always hits on 2+ in Assualt. Best part is he has Hatred that he can give to the rest of his unit.

Fabius Bile: Same Stats as before. Enhanced Warriors can only ever kill one model gives them Str and Fearless.

Lucius: Same Stats as before. His attacks are the same number as your opponent WS (Avatar vs Lucius fun times). Re-rolls all Wounds, Armor saves made by Lucius inflict str 4 ap2 hits back.

Aegis Defence Line

The Kit: I was pleasantly surprised when I opened up the Aegis Defence line by the fact that apart from the gun emplacement, all the sections were just singular solid pieces of plastic, so no need for assembly and very little chance of breakage. The downside is that you only get the quad gun. If you wanted to build an icarus lascannon you'll have to carv it out of plasticard or give up and throw the kit back at your LGS manager's face while howling in dispair.

Painting: Do you have a pot of Leadbelcher silver and a big fat brush? Then you're pretty much there already. To give it a little bit more variance of colour I coated it in devlan mud (or whatever it's called now) and then splotchily dabbed red, blue and green wash over different bits of it. Finally I slapped black soot weathering powder on it and the bottom edges had muddy-brown weathering powder applied to make it look like it had got shit all over it from the battlefield.

Lastly I got various bits of green vegetation looking stuff (I think the stuff I bought is really supposed to be used for scenery on model train sets or something) and glued them into the nooks and crannies to make it look like the defence line had been sat in a warzone of a long grinding campaign and so stuff had started to grow on it.

Gaming: I measured the defence line to be slightly over 28" long when you stretch it out. It seems you'll be able to get the required 25% of an infantry model obscured by it, even from a flyer's point of view as long as the model is in base contact with it. Terminator sized models may find it problematic to get cover saves reliably from it, but from a level view they will be fine.

However, it's difficult to get a rhino sized model a cover save from it and pretty much impossible from an elevated POV (i.e. a flyer's POV). The situation is even worse for dreadnoughts, though again, still possible.

Finally, it's worth mentioning the effectiveness of the 50pt quad-gun. My shaky mathhammer tells me that if fired by a BS 4 model, it should strip around 1 hullpoint from an armour 12 flyer or around 0.8 hullpoints if the flyer takes a jink save. The chances of it getting an explodes result on such a model are less than 1 in 10.

Chaos Rumours

Quote:

–What will be Released–

We will know if GW has changed policy. This codex will reveal if GW has abandoned the wave method to model release with a new codex or if they have stopped caring and show you all the new models even if they don’t come out right away.

Finecast: Dark Apostle, Warsmith, New Lord, Oblits, All Old Special Characters not updated already

New Plastic: Dragon, Raptors, Dreadnaught, Demon Engine, Assault Oblits, Chosen

Upgrade Packs: Plague Marines, 1k Sons, Emperor’s Children

–General Changes–

Almost all of the old units are either the same point cost or have gotten cheaper. With the notable exceptions of Chosen, Terminators, Defilers getting more expensive. The notable cheaper ones being basic CSM, Oblits, Zerkers, The CSM is really an upgrade codex, while things have gotten cheaper you will be hard pressed to keep your units inexpensive with all the wargear you can add. The cheaper units doesn’t come without a cost as well, almost all units saw a LD drop. Also you will start to see a lot of the new USRs in the CSM book.

–What has stayed the Same–

The Cult units are the same in stats and basic wargear. No new Spacial Characters. Abbadon is still the only one with Eternal Warrior. Demon Weapons still can kill you. The Dreadnaught is still Crazy. The unit sizes have stayed the same as well as the wargear options found in the old codex; e.g. Chosen can still get a butt load special weapons.

Interesting points from the GW Open Day

Quote:

· 6th Edition was actually finished 6 months ago

· They thought long and hard about using a points system similar to WHFB instead of FOC’s but it would have been to difficult as there was so much emphasis on FOC's in the Codex’s. New players would have found it too confusing.

· The reason that charges are not allowed on Deep Strike is to prevent the utter predictability of mega-hard units appearing anywhere and destroying whatever they want every game. There was a possible hint about Genestealers being able to do this at some point in the future!

· The new edition nerf’s some units and provides buff’s to others. The new Codex’s will rebalance incidents where this is too extreme.

· One guy complained that the new rules were adding unnecessary complexity (e.g loads of new universal special rules). Ward argued that it’s best to keep lots of the rules universal in the main rulebook. New codex’s can then have units with a variety of the SR’s and opponents will know exactly what to expect. He did caveat this though by saying that USR’s would still apply to certain characters in Codex’s.

I spoke to Matt Ward in person after the seminar and I really must emphasise that he’s a really nice, polite and engaging fellow who doesn't deserve the flak he gets from some members of the community. He deserves praise for his role in bringing us 6th edition. He explained that rule setting is always going to be ‘a moving target’ and what works for one person is going to upset another. He said that there were many things that were out of his hands because business decisions have to be taken into account when developing game systems and rules. A couple of key points that came out of that conversation:

· Flak Missiles are currently unavailable to all armies, but we’ll soon see them filtering through into the game.

· We can expect a new FAQ before the end of the summer.

· He spoke about Tyranids being a tad difficult to work with as they have (in the past) been a little one dimensional (i.e charge everyone into CC). He made a point about there being no vehicle rules in the Tyranid army and that its monsterous creatures need to be able to kill Daemon Princes so how do you balance it out? We shall see!

I spoke to Jervis for a long time about ‘associative and disassocaitive’ rules but I think I’ve covered that off.

Next I spoke to Phil Kelly (the dude) who again is a really sound guy (and by the way - he isn't leaving GW).

Phil said that there are currently 6 ‘projects’ on the go for 40k. I think he was referring to Codex’s. I asked him about Tyranids too and he said (rather excitedly) that he has ‘some really great ideas up his sleeve’ for the Nids. Sounds encouraging! It's worth noting that everyone I spoke to in the design team understands the need for Nids to get a boost.

He also shared his personal opinion on 5th edition and said (with the greatest of respect) that Alessio Cavorte seemed to want to make the game more competitive and simplified. He thought that this made the game a little to flat and generic in its function (which I personally agreed with). His words were that it ‘lost its craziness’. 6th has therefore moved to address this and give more feel and character to the units and the game as a whole. It does seem to be a consensus amongst GW staff that 2nd was a great edition in many ways (although obviously broken in others).

One other exciting thing that he mentioned was the release of expansions. He said that one example of an idea floating around is the introduction of relic’s which could be (for example) wargear from the Horus Heresry era, usable in today's battles. Possibly a new book or expansion but still just an idea at the moment.

Phil said that the quality of the new Codex’s far surpasses the paperback’s of 5th and beyond (I wonder how many are finished!?)

Lastly I spoke to Robin Cruddace. I asked him about GW’s release schedule and to my utter amazement, he said that they were aiming for some sort of release each month. Be it a codex or some sort of expansion. I would be surprised if this were true!

He said that there would most likely need to be a larger number of expansions between now and 4 years time so that you don’t reach a point where all codex’s for 6th are released with 2 years still to go before the next cycle. Take that how you will!

So there we have it folks. A very enjoyable day indeed – and most insightful!