WIP: Sanguinary Guard w/ Chapter Banner

 I worked on the Lamenters Chapter Banner for the Sanguinary Guard tonight.  Blocked all base colors in, still need to wash/highlight and cleanup a bit, but I'm happy with how it looks.  The free hand is getting a little easier, but I have a long way to go still.

I also primed a bunch of stuff. Vindicator, Sanguinary Priest, and bunch of various weapons options for Predators.  Decided to take a break from the Storm Raven and Land Raider that I've been spending a lot of time on.  Hoping to have a couple hours tomorrow to get some more painting done.

More Storm Raven WIP

Had a little more time to work on the Storm Raven. It's coming together nicely, but still a lot of details to paint. The main challenge tonight was working while the wife was also working on a sewing project. We were sharing a long folding table in front of the TV and when she started sewing it felt like I was trying to paint in an earthquake. Her sewing machine is older than she is and really starts to shake things up. So much to the point I spilled a new jar of paint while trying to paint. I had to give up after a while, but did manage to get a nice coat of brighter yellow on the top of the vehicle. I did manage to do a little shading, though I think I will try and gloss coat it and try using oil paints to do the line shading.  I haven't decided if I"m going to do weather or not yet.

On the Table

A quick update on what I'm working on right now.  The Landraider and Storm Raven.  Still a lot to go, but they are starting to come together.  Also put together a Vindicator and got a box of Death Company.  Not a ton of progress, but we spent a couple weeks out of town.

Doubles Tournament Game 3

Epic Assault

  So Michael had to leave after game two, so I played both armies for the last game.  Getting tabled quickly in the last game at least gave me an hour or so to relax before the last game.  I was definately tired and starting to drag a little after the beating in the second game.  The good part was I was no firmly in the losers bracket and playing against other less experienced players and less nasty lists.

  I played a space marine and blood angel team played by Chris and Joe.  The space marines had a 10 man TH/SS terminator squad with Marneus Calgar attached that took up most of his points.  He had a lascannon predator, a tactical squad in a rhino, and small scout squad.

  We had a nice relaxed game and we agreed we needed something "awesome" to happen.  I deployed first and had first turn and pulled the Eldrad trickery redeploying essentially the entire Eldar army.  That gave me a nice alpha strike on his predator which was immobilized and couldn't move or shoot.  I also unloaded with the war walkers on the scout squad with 20 guided hits.  I then rolled to wound and all 20 wounded!  That was probably the highlight of the tournament for me as I had been rolling poorly for most of the tournament.  Joe then got to have a great moment when he rolled 19 of the 20 3+ saves!  Crazy dice on both sides there.

  On the next turn the Blood Angels dropped a death company dreadnought in my back lines and heavy flamered a couple assault marines and stunned one of the War Walkers.  The rest of their rhinos moved up, and popped smoke and went to my turn.  My baal predator got the right side on the outflank and came in behind his rhinos and immobilized one.  The assault marines moved up together with the storm raven full of terminators and got ready for the assaults on the next turn.  The other squad dumped some melta guns into the DC dread and blew it up.  The wave serpents stunned the predator again and started to flank to one side to be ready to pick up objectives on the other side.

  His next turn the terminators came in off the scouts teleport homers.  The blood angels had a tooled out death company with Dante come down and infernus pistoled the wave serpent with the fire dragons to death.  Everything else moved up.  That was when I decided that we were going to do something awesome.  I dropped my terminators out of the storm raven, and took both full assault squads and assaulted the giant blob of terminators.  There were going to be a lot of dice on this assault.  20 Lightning claw/Power Weapon attacks and 29 Strength 5 normal attacks.  That was enough to wipe the terminators out  completely and put one would on Calgar.  My powerfists and TH/SS didn't get to swing.  Calgar killed one of the sanguinary priests and two or three of the assault marines.  It was a ton of fun rolling that many dice and seeing that giant mob.

The rest was mostly just cleanup at that point.  The tooled out death company did manage to bring down Eldrad's falcon and kill everyone inside and the vanilla tacticals destroyed the Baal predator with a meltagun shot.  So I ended the tournament with  1-2 record for 5th place.  I learned a lot playing in a more competitive environment than I'm used to, though I still prefer friendly games and unique missions to tournament play.

WIP: Custom Mephiston

 So I have made some more progress on my custom Mephiston.  I really don't like the correct miniature for this so I put some pieces together to make up a version for the Lamenters.  Not sure on his fluff name or story yet, but I will be figuring something out as I'm on the finishing touches for him. The banner was a lot of fun to do, though it needs some more cleanup still.

Doubles Tournament Game 2

An assault squad in a lot of trouble

 After our first defeat we were hoping to get paired up with other losers to play someone more our experience level, but with only 6 teams one winning team would play one losing team in the second round.  We were the highest scoring losing team, so we got paired up against one of the winning teams. 

We played a Chaos Marine and Space Wolf team and we got to learn how nasty Thunderwolf Cavalry can be.  There were 9 of them on the board and I could not believe how crazy fast they are.  There was no where to run from and they ate both our armies alive.  Things started out poorly from the start when they ceased the initiative from us and blew my Storm Raven out of the sky with a single lascannon shot.  To add insult to injury the explosion killed two terminators, with Feel no Pain, and pinned them as well.  The Lamenters where all dead by turn 3 and they then finished off the  Eldar on turn 4.  They went on to win the tournament in the last round.

One problem at this points level is board size.  The Eldar couldn't hide anywhere, because with 2500 points they were able to flood the entire board.  I dislike anything above 2000 points in general and really think the game is the best at around 1500-1750.  I would love to do another team tournament, but limit the number of points to 1000 per team.

Double Tournament Game 1

So we showed up for the doubles tournament (first tournament either Michael or me had ever played in) and got to play three games.  There were six teams and the first army we got put against was Imperial Guard and Orks.  This was a great game and I really enjoyed both players.  The Ork player was Mark from the Overlords Podcast and the IG player was his brother Mike.    They were real fun to play against and were very patient with our rustyness with the rules (generally we play about once every 2-3 months).

They managed to quite soundly defeat us in all three of the mission goals, but I think we could have done a lot better had we matched up with them later in the tournament when we knew how to play the army a little better.  The primary was victory points and had we played point denial we could have stood a chance at winning.

They managed to wipe out most of the Lamenters, but hardly touched the Eldar  at all.  A little better juding of distances on my part (18" is a really hard distance for me to judge) would have helped out on getting charges off.  If there is one thing I've learned with Assault Marines is that they must get the charge to survive.

Also for the Eldar positioning is huge, especially for the psychic powers.  We needed to focus fire a little better and the assault squads need to operate together to do any real damage.

All in all this was a really fun game and I would love to get a rematch.