3 Generals Part 1

After a good breakfast we arrived at the inn, greeted all those player we knew and the staff. Since one team didn't made to the tournament, we had an uneven number of teams (19) and the captains decided together with the staff that we would use a free ticket system, giving the last team from each round after the first one a 13:7 victory.

The first mission was then announced:

- 6 rounds
- pitched battle deployment
- objectives each worth 250 points.
- +2 tournament points if you win the mission, +1 for a draw and +1 if you destroy all of your opponents HS choices.

We met up with the first team, who brought along a DE army, a SM force with 2 raiders and Witchhunters with some drafted IG choices. After shaking hands I lost the roll, the other captain went first and nominated the SM army. I matched our SW player against them, which wasn't that clever. The other pairing ended in CSM vs DE and my eldar vs WH. In retrospective I should have set our CSM player against the SM, since he was the only one in our team with a raider. SW vs DE would have been in our favour.

My army was:

Jetseer with fortune
+7 jetlocks

2x6 FD incl. a DBF-Exarch + SC-Serpents

2x5 DA + BL-Serpents

DAVU-Falcon with Stones, Holo and SL+SC
2xprism tank

My opponent had:

HQ with holy weapon, 2+ save and jump pack
2xElite sisters with 2 melter and a immolator
4x10 sisters with a HF, Melter and rhino
1xsquad of jumping sisters
2xexorcist tanks
1x IG command squad and AC
2x10 IG with a LC
2x3 HW teams with AC

The game started rather succesfully for me with a exorcist tank and a rhino dying rather fast. I also get rid of the AC teams quite easily. Then I made a big fault in my humble opinion: I played rather offensive with the jetlock council. Guess I should have tried to get rid of his tanks through firepower, aiming for a small victory thanks to contesting objectives. So I moved the council in the direction of his tank wall, failed to spear a immolator and then charged to tanks. In return he unloaded most of his infantery (except for the two squads of sisters held in reserve), unleashed a firestorm on my council (only one lock died)and then charged it. I won the first round with a -4 modifier, but thanks to that damned 5 points wargear those girls have, I failed to run them down. In return I failed two fortuned inv-saves on my seer in one turn, lost a round of combat with a -1 modifier and rolled 11 with the council, rerolled it and got a 10. Meh! They got away, but I feeded too much units into that grinder, distracting me in return.

Thanks to those 8 scoring units he scored a minor victory over me in the end, with the overall result for the whole team was a draw.

Lesson learned: don't get in charging range with sisters, unless you own a breaker unit like Yriel, the Avatar or 1-2 Lords.


After one hour of free time (lunch hurray, did I mentioned that the tournament was hosted inside a inn?) the second mission and the pairings were announced

Second Mission:
- 6 turns with Dawn of War Deployment
- HQ, each player must declare one piece of terrain inside his DZ as his HQ.
- Holding your own was worth 500 points, holding your opponents HQ 750
- +2 TP for winning the mission, 1 for a draw and +1 if you manage to kill his whole elite-department

Our opponents were called "Westerwaelder Waagh and fielded the following armies: A hybrid Eldar force, Nidzilla with a focus on big and mean CC fexes and a mechanised BT force without a single raider.

We won the toss and after shaking hands I placed my eldar army first. The other team captain matched that with their nidzilla army, so I choose a desert table with some small tau buildings and landing plattforms as the battlefield. He placed his eldar next, which I matched up with our SW. 18 longranged S8 shots and a runic priest sounded like a clever idea to me.

My opponents army was:

A flying fex with 2xtalons
A broodlord with a stealer-retinue
One large squad of cc-warriors
Two elite-fexes with a strangler
3x6 stealers as troop choices
2 HS fexes with T7 2+ armour and talons
3 Zoas with blast

Rather toothless against my uber-mobile eldar army. I won the right for the first turn, but forfeited that to him. In retrospective I shouldn't have done that...

He placed nothing on the table and then brought his whole army except the stealers on the table. The broodlord and the warriors moved behind his HQ, which was the only large building on the whole table. On his side was that building and something looking like a small tau oil tank, which didn't provide full TLOS cover. I had a shallow landing plattform and two small terrain pieces. If I had picked going first, I would have denied him that terrain piece. Shame on me.

The match was kind of boring. My tanks killed all his elite fexes, the one dragon squad killed the tyrant and the other one brought one of the cc fexes down to one wound. Sadly my council failed to kill that one in CC. I destroyed most of his nidzilla department, but that took me too long and with the huge building my prism tanks didn't manage to blast the stealers off the table.

I tried to contest his HQ with one prism tank. In return I only lost some seers, one squad of FD and got one immobilised serpent. With his HQ not in my hands, one cc-fex only slightly scratched, one barely alive and all those hiding stealers and warriors I only got a minor victory. I also didn't get the extra TP for killing his elite, since I forgot that I needed to wipe out the warriors for that too. Dunno why I forgot that over the course of the game.

Lessons learned:
- Think more about choosing table sides vs going first
- getting only 5 melter wielding FD in each squad hurt me a lot against those T7 W5 fexes.

Jochen maimed the hybrid eldar army. That his opponent was drinking a lot of beer over the course of the game (and the day) didn't help their team either. Manuel even felt pity for his BT opponent. That player was a really nice guy, but his list was pure crap with no raider and only to LCs against our CSM force with a raider carrying some zerkers, 6 oblis, a lashprince and squad of terminators with combi-plasma bolters. Basicaly he smoked all the rhinos and then used the BT special rule against him, letting the guys in black running into rang for lash or a countercharge from his zerkers and the winged prince.

Overall result: Major victory

And that's enough for today, game 3-5 will be written over the course of the weekend.

Team tournament (Introduction)

I already talked about the team tournament in my news from the front posting yesterday.

I'm trying to find a golden thread for this posting, so let me begin to say some words about the tournament and how I managed to form my team.

Playing team tournaments got very popular in germany over the course of the last year. I'm not sure who started the trend, but the fact is that "da boss" of my gaming club (called Firebug) announced the next club tournament to be a 3 players team tournament a couple of months ago. He is a very nice fella but also very ambitious. So the first team formed up quick, with him and the two other good players from the club joining forces. A second team formed up quickly after that. Since our club has ~40 members (not everyone playing 40k) and the inn we play at can't hold more than 60 people, we decided that we don't want to have more three club teams with the remaining members being free to form up teams of their own with friends of the club.

I'm more of a honory than an active member due to distance between my home and the club rooms(~200+ miles). For example I can't visit the weekly gaming days, so my activity is limited on club tournament participation and wearing the club shirt at other tournaments.

During the last club tournament I met Jochen gain. He is a friend of mine whom I acquainted years ago and we stayed in contact after the tournament was finished.

So we idea came up to form a team of its own. With us two forming the core we were just one member short. There is a another gaming club called WEC ~90 miles away, with a friendly relationship to our boss and other members. Their own tournaments are also a real blast and I'm eager to play one of them in 2010. After one of their members heared that our team was in need of a third player, he send us the name of a member of them who searched a team for that specific tournament. With Manuel our team was full and we started making plans using a mailing list, a couple of phone calls and gmail chat conversations.

Manuel owns a lot of armies, but he's playing chaos at tournaments for years and Jochen is mainly a SM player, running a SW force back in edition 3 and new DA army using either the DA or SM codex in edition 5. I only own eldar, so my choice was rather easy. Our original setup was SM/CSM/Eldar, but we changed that to SW/CSM/Eldar after the new SW dex came out. More about that and the reasons for that setup later.

The Tournament setting was:

- 5 games over the course of a weekend
- 1850 points per army and for every team no codex can be taken more than once.
- 20 teams of 3 players each
- Swiss system
- missions unknown
- couple of restrictions like no named chars, two Raiders maximum and no 3 units of the same kind except for troop choices. So no Vulkan led armies with 2 raiders full of SS/TH terminators or a eldar force with tripple wraithlords

Each team had a captain, in most cases one of the 3 players. I was the captain for my team, so my job was to meet with the other captain at the assigned table set to exchange lists, shake hands and try to get good matchups for my team.

The pairing system was borrowed from another very popular team tournament. After going over the lists the captains roll off like you do during deployment. Let's call the one who needs (or wants) to go first captain A and the other guy is captain B and take a look how the system works:

Captain A chooses one his three player for the first pairing.
Captain B then chooses one of his members as the opponent.
Captain A now has the right to pick the table those two player will battle on against each other.

Captain B chooses one of his remaining players for the second pairing
Captain A picks one of his remaining guys
Captain B chooses the table to play on

Rinse and repeat... As you can see this system works out with any amount of player and the penumilate pairing also decides the last one.

In my opinion this kind of tournament is far more challenging than a normal one and it needs a bit more preparatory work. Why?

Let's run a quick scenario and assume that we have team A (lash-CSM/Mech-SM/nidzilla) facing team B (Pod-SM/JotWW-SW/BT). Team A has put some thoughts into the tournament and after hearing those horror stories about Jaws of the World Wolf the nidzilla player says that he can't even guarantee a draw against a SW list with JotWW in it. After looking over the lists team Bs captain sees that he doesn't want a CSM vs SM matchup, thanks to lash and oblis using morphed plasma cannon and his SM player skipping on a psyker in favour of other HQ-choices.

Team A wins the toss and what can the captain do?

Scenario A) Listen to the words of his nidzilla player, trying his best to avoid a Nid vs SW game at any cost. He can achieve that regardless of going first or not. If he goes first he doesn't elect his nid-player. Thus he can influence the second and third pairings, but looses the chance to pick a good table for those games. If there is only one bad table for the nid player, which isn't too bad for the one player of his team, who goes first, he can also take care of that. For example if one of the three tables is void of any good terrain, while the other two aren't and his nid player doesn't use warriors to create coversaves for MCs, he just use that table for the first pairing.

Scenario B) He thinks that his CSM player would massace both the SM and BT forces, thanks to their lack of psychic defense. He also thinks that his mech-SM have a small edge against the BT thanks to his SS/TH terminators. So if he sees a chance that his nid-player could achieve a draw or minor loss against the SW through a denial tactic, he could sacrifice him and hope for two other good matchups (Mech-SM with SS/TH against BT and Lash-CSM against Pod-SM)

So you need to pour some thoughts into army combinations and tailored vs all comers list. That of course assumes that you have enough large armies to draw on. If you're only 3 best friends with one army each you can skip the army selection process.

That's the reason why we choose SW, CSM and Eldar. We didn't have a tournament ready IG force in our closets and Manuel really excels when he plays CSM. CSM gave us a very offensive army, esp. against enemies w/o psychic defense or a lot of transport vehicles. Our SW army packs a lot of long ranged punch, has the "new kids on the block" bonus and with JotWW works really well against both nids and ork armies. My eldar force filled the need for a denial list. With the scoring system used my chances weren't that high to achieve a major victory or even a massacre, but you don't get tabled that easily with them too. Manuel made some test games with his army, Jochen went to a small tournament with a first version of his new SW. I talked a lot with Dverning (thanks again if you read this!) over gmail chat, since my experience with eldar in ed5 is rather limited and with my side job I didn't managed to glue everything together for some test games.

We all met up at the inn on saturday...that was where the fun started, but more about that and the first game in my next posting tomorrow.

News from the Front

2 weeks after the last posting I find myself looking on a little trophy, a nearly full jetlock council and those drugs I take to remind me that I lost all my 4 wisdom teeth to a cruel painboy in a white cloak this week.

But let talk about those things in a chronological order:

Over the course of the last week I managed to convert those 7 jetlocks and the jetseer I needed for one of the tournaments I talked about. I still need to glue some crests on the helmets, so you will have to wait for pictures of them.

After getting them done, buying new foam trays for my army case ( I realised that my jetlock wouldn't fit in my original design) and glueing together 15 ordinary DA I was ready for a team tournament called "Firebug 3 Generals". So as the name already hints at: You need to have 3 players to form a team. Not two, not four...just three.

On Friday the 6. November I travelled southwards to meet up with my two fellow teammates. Now how does such a kind of tournament works? Each team has a captain, this can be one of the 3 player or a fourth person. Each of the 3 players need to play a different army, you can't play two armies using the vanilla SM codex. Our team combination was SW, CSM and my eldar, with me being the captain.

Sadly none of us did bring a camera to the tournament, so you won't get any huge pictured battle-reports from me. But I will talk about the tournament in another posting next week, let me say that as a team it went rather well and after a hard fought match against the leading team in game 5 we placed third in the end. A trophy for each of us: Huzzah!

Two days later I got my teeth pulled, which is also the reason why I cancelled my participation for this weekends tournament. Ironic thing is that after loosing their original place, they moved the whole tournament into the german GW mainstore in my town. So I will visit the tournament as a spectator today, grab some sprues from another local player and then travel home again.

Nice weekend folks,

Karnstein

Must have units?

Easy to answer: Eldar Aspect Warriors of any kind. The cover of the eldar codex back in edition 2, with those swooping hawks, fire dragons and dark avengers on it, forced me to buy it right away. For me aspect warriors are the one thing defining the eldar way more than everything else.

Sure, I love the sight of a lot of eldar tanks on the battlefield and I sulk over tournament restrictions limiting my choice of tanks with a passion. After bitching around a bit I normaly get over it and still apply, seeing those enforced changes in my setup as a good way to learn more about how to play eldar.

But I could never ever field a force without at least two squads of aspect warriors. Sure my DA squads are getting smaller and smaller thanks to the local metagame, which is kind of tank heavy. Still I'm aiming for having at least a full squad of most aspects in my army, customized ones or vanilla stock from GW. I don't own hawks and scorpions yet and they very likely will be the last things on my "to do" list, but I eventualy come around and put a squad of each together. You can think of this as a promise.

Something else: My blog was kind of inactive for the last couple of weeks. Sweating away a lot of hours for getting those student fees payed doesn't work well with taking care of a blog and a army buildup. My winter term at the U has started 3 weeks ago, so my spare time (and motivation) should increase over the upcoming weeks and months. I'm participating at two tournaments in first weeks of november, so I will need to glue some models together until then and chances are high that I will write some small battle reports after the tournaments are over.

Enjoy your weekend folks

Current status of the project

As you may have noticed, there wasn't much development to see lately. The project isn't dead, far from that but RL demanded some more attention in the last days.

So let's see how far I got in the last two weeks. I started using green stuff, trying to get my female Yriel conversion done. Doesn't worked out how I wanted it to be, so I scrapped the model. It turned out to look like a old woman with a hunchback... I glued all my 20 saurians from the cold one knight boxes together, repaired the magnet-system on the walker weapons and also glued all the legs from the DA, guardians and cold one knights together, incl. casting of all the mold lines. Far less than I wanted to achieve

I also managed to make three sweet deals:

• traded my unneeded spiders, rangers and maugan away for a prism tank, bringing my force up to 5 serpents, 3 falcon tanks (two with prism tank weapons) and a Night Spinner.

• ordered 4 serpents and walkers at wayland for a friend of mine, who don't have a PP account, and changed the order into 4xeldar force. Which means I pay +20pounds and get my hands on 20 DA and 40 guardians.

• ordered some IG squad for another friend of mine too, in return he will send me some serpent&guardian bits I need for my spider conversions.

I'm not sure if I really need all those DA and guardians, but it's nice to have them as a reserve for future conversions (and all the DA exarch bits are nice to have anyway). Which brings me to the last subject of todays posting: I finished my build-up plans, incl. solving the questions how to make the dragons fit into the overall theme.

I now own 20 WHF DE cold one knights, 50 WHF DE corsairs and 35 DA + ~60-70 guardians...all more or less unassembled. My original idea was to cut off some of the cloaks from the corsair rear body and attach them on my metal fire dragons, using GS to fill the gaps and create a clean transition. After my disaster with Yriel I skipped that plan and here is how I want to use all those DE models:

Everyone using a jetbike will be riding a cold one and every psyker in the force will wear the heavy armor of a DE knight. This means that I will field:

9 jetlocks and a jetseer, using DA exarch bits and knight bodies riding the cold ones
A jet-tarch, using a knights lance and various eldar bits.
9 guardian jetbikes, using the knights legs and guardian bodies, helmets and weapons
9 warlocks and a seer on foot using DA legs, knight bodies and DA-exarch weapons

Everyone on foot except for the psykers, quins, shees and spiders will wear corsair cloaks, so those 50 corsairs will net me:

20 DA + 2 Exarchs with twin catas, using the corsair body, DA helmets and weapons and guardian legs (the loincloath gets in the way of the cloak, that's the reason why my yriel turned out to be a hunchback)
10 storm guardians, using guardians front torso, legs, arms and helmets + corsair cloaks and hand weapons. The flamer will be build using spare quin fusion pistols+ guardian Shucatas
1 "count as Yriel" female autarch, using a female guardian torso, a corsair cloak, a head from a quin and DA exarch arms (shield+power sword)
16 fire dragons and one DBF exarch, borrowing akenseths idea.

Quins and Shees will be fielded as they are, cause I like both sets of models very much and I'm clueless regarding a well looking and easy to build shee-conversions. I also own 18 original dragons, allowing me to play some games before the conversions are finished. After that I will either sell or trade them away.

My goal is to get enough bits for 16 spider conversions, which will be build around various eldar and WHF eldar bits... don't expect to see pictures of them in the near future, chances are high that I will start with a prototype model and finish the rest later after getting all the needed bits together.

And now I'm off to work... ^^

Tanks before priming

All 8 tanks sitting on their bases...

I'm not sure if I want to strip the paint from the blue serpent or just try to paint over it with the violet basecoat. Bases are a little bit wobbly even with 2 5x2mm magnets, talk about center of mass and force of gravity. Maybe I glueing a ring/nut around the either the pvc rod, raising the contact area the tank rests on, or on the hull, blocking the serpent from tilting over on his nose.

But basicaly I'm rather satisfied with the solution, even a wobbly tank beats having those small pins on top of the normal rod breaking off.

I'm off now for a second breakfast and some shopping (refilling the fridge). After that I will grab a box and start priming a test model first, trying to avoid a second primer mishap. If that works out fine, I put a white coat over all the unprimed tanks/walkers and start working on my jetbike squads and jetlock council.

WIP flying bases

So...finished all my 8 magnetized flying bases and if the weather is nice tomorrow, I will prime all those tanks and make some fresh pictures. Also pinned one of my dragon exarchs a couple of minutes ago, guess I will start on the jetbikes and jetlocks tomorrow.

Talked about jetlock-mech eldar vs mech/wraithwall-hybrid eldar with dweomer over gmail chat today (thanks for the spare time and the great tips!), resulting a rough concept for a list I want start playtesting next week, so I need those miniatures for it first. Hopes that gives me an extra kick for working on my army instead of reading SciFi-Books the whole day.

Spin Spin Sugar

Got crazy, maybe drinking another glass of wine wasn't that cleaver. Nevertheless I started working on my Nigh Spinner (hence the strange titel, great song btw), I even worked inside my room. Resin dust isn't that nice, but same goes for those homes for the aged in germany. So shaving a year off or two while working with resin isn't that bad.

I filed away all mold lines, glued the new back hatch on the falcon model and even magnetized the beast. This doesn't allow fancy positions for the guns, but it keeps them from falling or breaking off.

Well, here are the pictures...bad as always, but its dark now here in europe and I still haven't found a decent camera in my mail box.

Spinner with the turret mounted on

6x2mm magnets in the gun casing, 4x1mm magnet placed in a hole I drilled into the hardpoint.

Neodyme magnets are rather strong, esp. if you try to stick them together with the wrong polarities, so I'm thinking about drilling two small holes in the turret right unterneath the guns and a corresponding hole in the muzzle, then placing two magnets with the same polarity facing towards each other in those. Should be enough to keep the guns hovering over the turret.

Couple of pictures...

All the magnetized weapons after I finished them. I even glued togeter 4 starcannon, guess I own too many magnets and lost too much of my sanity to super glue vapor.



My two falcons/prism tanks...the third falcon/night spinner is sitting on the bench, I'm scared of working with some few resin parts worth ~30€.



3 Serpents with EML, S*C and SL armament



the remaining two serpents with SC and BL. As you can see swaping the chin guns just takes a few seconds, thanks to my magnetizing spree.



The whole tank force (except the spinner). I glued together in total:

- 7 chin catapults and 5 chin cannons
- 2 d-cannons aka "count as prism tank"
- 6 EML and 6 BL
- 4 S*C and SL
- 10 SC
- 2 pulse lasers

And in the last picture you can see my assembled infantery. Shees and Dragons will get corsair cloaks attached to their back with GS, but I won't do that until I finished everything else except the spiders. They are sitting on their bases, so I can play with them anyway...



Sums up to:

9 ranger
15 FD + 3 DBF exarchs
7 shees, a old mirrorsword exarch, a new executioner exarch and Jain Zar
4 old reapers, a usless shucan-exarch and Maugan

= fullfilled my assembly vow for this week, next things to will be the flyer bases for the tanks, the guardian jetbikes and the DA. My goal is to finish them until thursday, allowing me to play a game with them at our local GW store. Thursday is "veterans night", after the shop has closed older players like me are allowed to play against each others on those fabulous tables of the german GW-HQ without any small kids running around and pestering you with questions.

Short notice

Got my hands on the TOS pics a couple of minutes ago, so the remaining 4 reports will arrive tomorrow

I'm now working on the remaining tank&walker weapons. When those are finished I will take a group picture with everything I finished in the last days and add it in this posting. My order of white and black primer cans also arrived today, but thanks to the bad weather here (18° and raining) I will prime my tanks not until next week.

Nice weekend to you folks, I hope your summer weather is better than mine...

The first serpent...

I finished him ouple of minutes ago after I magnetised the chin-mounted weapons for all 8 tanks yesterday.

Tried 3 solutions for the turret/weapons. First try was to save me some magnets and glue cut off heads from nails on the weapons and magnets on both the turret and the weapon shield. Didn't worked out that well, since there are some molding lines on the back of the heads, resulting in a crooked look after putting all the parts together. Next idea was to replace those nails with stripes like I did with the walker weapons. No crooked look, but the shield was too close to the weapon&body.

Thanks to ynneads great tutorial dished the plan to be a cheapskate in terms of magnets, recalculated the amount of weapons I really need (nobody fields 5 SL or StarCan-Serpents anyway) and went ahead. Next challenge that came up during the process was the lack of proper drill for the weapon shield. My magnets are too large, so drilling the shield mounting would have very likely resulted in a disaster.

Thankfully I bought most of my magnet from the bay, some of them came in sets with other magnets mixed in. Digged through my box of magnets and found some 5x1 cylinder magnets, who fit into the shield mounting rather nicely. No drilling needed, only a small amount of glue on one side and put them in.

Put a cut of nail head on the one side of the magnet stack, to keep me from glueing the side with wrong polarity on. After that it was rather easy and here are some pictures.



As you can see I magnetized everything, including the chin weapons, the falcon pulse laser and the "count as prism tank" d-weapon.



Quick overview, showing both sides of the tanks. You can see the magnet in the serpent turret and the turret ring. The large 5x2mm magnet underneath the falcon keeps it save in my army case and on the flying base I'm going to build next week.

Battle report - german TOS game 5

I promised some battle reps and I will now deliver the first one, or rather last one of the german TOS.

My army list was:

Eldrad
Yriel
8 Quins incl. seer&master, 7xkiss and a pw for the troop master
8 dragons incl. a breath/SS exarch + Serpent with stones&ShuCannon
9 Avenger incl. a dual-cata/Storm exarch + Serpent with stones&EML
5 Avenger, riding the falcon
3 Jetbikes with SC upgrade
2 Lord with EML/BL, twin flamer
1 Falcon with BL/stones/holo

Mission was Annihilation with spearhead deployment. My opponent won the roll-off and choose to go first.

He played a fluffy World Eaters army with:

Winged prince
Greater Deamon
5 Terminators (various equipment)+ Landraider
3x8 Berzerkers+Rhino, all with champs and only one wielding a PW.
2x8 lesser deamons
Defiler with extra cc-arms
Deployment

He placed all his units in a line in the middle, trying to keep the distance to my army as short as possible.

I placed both serpents behind a building, used the falcon as a cover for the lords, left the jetbikes in reserve and placed the quins+yriel save out of scatter distance. Tried to steal the ini, but only rolled a 5.

Turn 1 CSM

He moved all his tanks forward, triggering the smoke launchers in the shooting phase. The defiler tried to move over the hill, but failed miserably on the terrain role.
Turn 1 Eldar

Eldrad guided the falcon he was embarked in and fortune on both lords. In my movement phase I moved the EML-serpent with the DA 12" up towards his table edge, trying to get a LOS on his defiler, who hide in the shadow of the large building.

Everything else moved backwards, trying to keep the gap between our forces and denying him any cc-attacks on turn 2.

The EML-serpent missed the defiler with a rocket and the combined fire of the SC-serpent, both lords and the falcon only resulted in one penetrating hit and I rolled a one on the damage chart.

Turn 2 CSM



On the picture you can see the battle field before he started rolling for his reserves. He passed both tests for the lesser deamons and failed the one for the big guy. There wasn't any spilled blood yet, so no need for him to leave the warp.

In his movement phase we discovered that we didn't talked about terrain, which was crucial for him because the building had a door albeit a one glued close. We decided to roll a dice 1-3 for no door and 3+ save and 4-6 for a 4+ save and a door. He rolled a 6 and used his icon in the rhino to DS his deamons in the shadow of the building, moving them further into it in the shooting phase. The defiler moved towards my serpent and the other vehicles and the DP moved up straight forward, placing one rhino between the wall and the raider.

In his shooting phase he used the "run" rule to get the deamons into the building, popped smoke on the last rhino (which was in cover in turn 1) and aimed with the defilers cannon at my serpent. rolled a hit but thanks to the serpent field he only managed to stun it.
Eldar Turn 2

Eldrad cast guide on the falcon, fortune on the quins and doom on one of the deamon units in the building. My jetbikes didn't arrive that turn.

In my movement phase I used the shaken EML serpent to deny him the door (1" rule), disembarked the DA behind it. The serpent with the dragons moved 12" and placed itself in front of the rhino between the ruin and the raider, with his rear towards the raider. The dragons disembarked. The falcon also moved 12" turning itself with the rear towards my long edge an so blocking the direct way for his rhino placed between the raider and the edge. The quins moved up towards the dragons. The two lords moved towards his raider too but stayed well out of cc range.

My dragons popped the raider, his terminators disembarked out of the one side-door, because the other one was blocked by his rhino and the front ramp was blocked by the serpent/falcon/dragons. The lords popped the rhino in front of my falcon and the Avengers wipped out a squad of deamons even without using bladestorm.

Sadly the quins rolled a 1 on their fleet role. The falcon killed one terminator, which we revoke in turn 3 because I rolled for all weapons (and moved the tank 12").

Turn 3 CSM



That was the situation at the bigging of turn 3. His greater deamon stayed in the warp.

In his movement phase he run the defiler around the building, trying to get into CC with my EML serpent. His remaining deamons moved towards the blocked door, aiming for a cc too. The berzerkers from the boxed in rhino disembarked into the building and aimed their pistols on my DA.

His DP used his wings and moved on top of the destroyed raider, bellowing a challenge in the direction of my dragons. The terminators and the zerkers, who both lost their transports moved towards my falcon. The remaining rhino with embarked troops moved around the burning wreck.

In his CC-phase his defiler turned my serpent into a exploding wreck. The berzerkers in the building killed a few avengers and the CC between my helpless falcon and his two troops lead to a destroyed eldar skimmer. The DP won the combat against the dragons, killing half of them and the remaining 4 flew towards the closest table edge, which sadly was within 1" of his zerkers, so that troop died to.

After his CC phase the KP went from Eldar 3 : Chaos 0 to 3:3

Turn 3 Eldar

Eldrad, who escaped the destruction of his ride fortuned the quins and doomed the two units, who killed the falcon. My jetbikes arrived and moved onto the table getting a clear LOS on the berserkers hiding behind the wrecked falcon.

Both lords moved into the direction of the deamons&defiler. Yriel left the quins and moved around the wreck into the back of the berzerks. The quins moved towards the prince and the terminators. Eldrad left the 5 DA and attached himself to the quins. The large DA squad used the lords as a mobile cover and the other DA squad tried to get out for range from the berzerkers.

In my shooting phase one lord killed the defiler, the other used his twin flamers to turn 4 deamons and one or two zerkers (in the building) into grilled chicken. The DA used storm on the zerkers in the building, killing another one or two of them.

The jetbikes and the 5 DA aimed their guns on the other disembarked zerker squad, resulting a few more dead traitor marines.

Yriel then charged the zerkers, the lord who flamed the deamons passed his terrain check (the exploded serpent) and attacked them. EU+quins started a multiple combat with the prince and the terminators.

Yriel chopped the zerkers down to four, saving all the wounds in return but one. (Thank god that my opponent didn't put PF in his zerker squads!). The lord wounded one deamon but my opponent passed his 5+ save.

The prince lost 2 of his wounds to two quins, the other 6 killed all but one terminator. Eldrad then managed to steal another wound from the prince, in return only one quin was slain. His DP then failed two out of 6 NR wounds, resulting in his untimely dead. The last terminator botched his LD test and was overrun.

That turned the 3:3 into a 6:3

Turn 4 CSM

His greater deamon arrived, enough blood was spilled on the battlefield. The champion from the zerker squad in CC with yriel turned into a great hairy monster. The last squad of zerkers disembarked. In his shooting phase he used his two rhinos to kill some quins and his zerkers in the ruin to kill another DA.

The greater deamon then charged the helpless squad of 5 DA, the 8 zerkers with the PW champion moved into CC with yriel, helping their fellow brothers in red.



The lord managed to wound a deamon, he passed his save. 3 out of 5 DA died under the merciless attacks from the greater deamon. Yriel then plugged his pirate patch of and triggered the bomb, hoping for 72 naked eldar women in the afterlife. 10 zerkers died and the last one succumbed to the 10 NR saves...

That raised the score to 8:4 and the game then ended, because time was running out...

Finished my two prism tanks

Here they are (or at least one of them, the group picture turned out to be blurry)...

I'm not 100% convinced of that conversion, but as a stopgap they are okay. Only problem is the size of the gun compared to the turret. The cables at the rear and the fins on the front are touching the body, guess I need to increase the height of the turret ring somehow.

The gun is magnetized. I glued a 5x2 round magnet over the hole in the d-cannon and a small metal strip on the gun casing. Drilled a hole into the turret and placed a 1x5 cylinder magnet into it. Both magnets on the gun and the hull face a metal strip, keeping the gun from rotating downwards.

Assembly schedule for the next 4 weeks

After my attempt to repair Jain Zar (her triskele broke off) was sabotaged by a empty tube of super glue and the fact that all shops have closed now here in germany (11pm at the moment), I found a solution for my "how to magnetize serpent weapons without glueing the magnets with the wrong polarity on".

That means that I will finish magnetizing a lot of serpent/falcon and walker/lord weapons tomorrow, after I restock on super glue. There will be a tutorial coming along with that because my approach is a little different.

Anyway I also used a paper and sketched up my work schedule to keep me focused.

I will finish this week with magnetizing those weapons with top priority for my walkers/tanks. Which means skiping starcannons entirely and only magnetizing some few lances and EML.

After that I will do a "easy/no conversions" first approach. This means glueing all those remaining shees and quins on their bases first. Then start the with those models from a line, who don't need much cutting/greenstuffing.

15 DA > 10 SG > cloaks for Shees/dragons > Yriel conversion
6 Jetbikes > 3 SC jetbikes > jetlocks > autarch&seer on bike

With this roadmap having an assembled but unprimed 2k army on the table in less that 3 weeks should be doable. Jetbikes&jetlocks will be week three/four, the normal infantery will be weeks 2-3 and the tanks&walkers should be finished until sunday.

Putting primer on and starting to paint the tanks will start parallel to that when a) my paket with primer arrives per courier and b) I manage to make an appointment with a friend of mine who owns a air brush kit + compressor.

The last things on my assembly plan are 10 heavily converted warp spiders and 10 incubi-style "count as warlock" conversions, but that really can wait up until the rest stands finished (in terms of glued/stuffed together) on my table.

Striping models with PVC-cleaner

Today I will show you how I get the paint off some metal and plastic models.

Used items:

- Mellerud PVC Cleaner (Technical Data)
- Old plastic box
- toothbrush
- surgical gloves

Step 1:

Fill the PVC cleaner in the box. Or use a jar if you only want to strip of a small amount of models. Put those models in and let them rest. 12-24h should be enough.

Step 2: Take one model out and use the tootbrush to scrap the paint off. If you don't want to have sprinkles all over the room or in the cleaner, use the kitchen sink or another plastic box filled with water. Hold the miniature under water, brush over it.

That should do the job nicely.

Here are some pictures. I threw my badly primed walkers and some warlocks, seers, maugan and some other miniatures into my IKEA storrage box and poured the PVC cleaner over them.



Maugan before I tortured him with the brush.



Maugan Ra after gettint some brush-love.



My badly primed walkers, as you can see I started brushing the primer of some days ago.



~95+% of the primer went off rather easily. Sadly most of the magnets from the hardpoints came off too, seems like the cleaner weakens the super glue.



And here is the total result of my cleaning session up to now: 1 upper body from a walker, maugan, 8 seer&locks, 4 old shees and 3 guardians (2xmetal, one plastic).

Decisions to make, challenges to overcome

My first idea was to use "problems to solve" as the headline, but then I remembered a sentence my tutor for english&information markets said: "Don't say problems, think about them as challenges!"

Well, let's talk about those decisions I have to make and those challenges I have to overcome. First of all I need to sketch up a roadmap, to stay focused. Guess I start with those things first, wich can be done in a quick and easy manner. That would be finishing my serpents: Canopies, fitting a magnet in the chin-mounting and magnetising those weapons I need for the turret. Next thing would be to glue those models together, which need no complicated conversions or no conversions at all. All those things should be doable over the course of the week.

The hard work will be making those eldar and dark elves bits fit together. Lots of shaving&cutting interfering parts of and closing any gaps with GS.

But before I can start with that, I need to make some hard decisions in terms of force composition. As I've already written in my last posting, I have ~50 corsair front&rear bodies (cloaks, yeah!) and 20 cold one knights. Glueing those saurians together is no big deal, 'cause I won't convert them anyway.

I set my mind on building 9 guardian jetbikers (3 of them with cannons), one bike autarch, one bike-seer and 8-9 jetlocks using those 20 saurians, the legs from their riders and guardian&DA parts for the upper body, weapons and heads. That leads to the following two questions:

• do I want to pin a guardian rider wielding a shuriken-cannon like a death jester on a saurian for "count as jetbike with underslung cannon" or do I want to use a saurian with only the weapon plus some sort of targeting device for creating a "remote controlled weapon count as GJB with shucannon" conversion? The second solution may look a little strange, but it would allow me to use the saurian as a weapon plattform for a guardian squad (the grunt corsairs, compared to the DA elite corsairs)
• I will magnetise the council, allowing me full WYSIWYG in terms of spear or witchblade armament. If shining spears would beat beat seer council in terms of C/B with a new dex, I could easily use them as count as spears. But what if the perfect solution would be to use both of them? Should I go through the pain magnetising those 6 GJB not wielding cannons to, allowing me to build some lance armes in the future and use them as spears?
  

For the 50 corsair models I thought about building 20 DA, 10 normal guardians and 10 storm guardians. This would leave me with 10 spare guardians (+most of the cold one knights bodies and helmets) and a decision to make. Do I want to...

• have another squad of guardian or storm guardian. I could get more flamers with a council and I'm not a great fan of 8pt guardians with a support weapon anyway.
  
• own a squad of spiders, which would increase the amount of S6 weapons in my army considerably.
• Build a serpent mounted council with those bits. I own 6 warlocks (4 with spears) and 2 old seer, which I could use as a 8 guy strong council, but I have the fear that those 8 pointy elves with their robes won't fit the style of a army wearing dragon cloaks (I will try to GS those on my Shees&Dragons too) and a craftworld council leading a corsair force into battle looks rather silly. This way I could get rid of all those metal seers/locks and use them for trade.

Other solution would be to only assemble 10 SG, which would leave me 20 whole guardians and 20 corsair bodies (don't need the legs&most arms). This could be 10 spiders (no cloaks) and 10 footslogging warlocks. With the remaining 10 cloaks I could equip 10 dragons (cutting the body of and greenstuffing only the cloak onto the dragons). If I would skip on the warlocks cloaks (making them look more like DE incubi) I even could equip my banshees with them.

Feel free to comment on those challenges...

Thought of the day: Unprimed grey is disheartening

My 6 walkers and some miniatures I bought at ebay are soaking in PVC-cleaner, so I turned my attention on those models, who far away from being ready enough for a nice basecoat.

Two of the guys from the TOS used the event to skip the postal fee and handed me over those bits I traded and 15 DE cold ones they got for me with their last club-internal omnibus order at wayland. I now have everything I need to start converting my eldar corsair army with full force.

I still need to find some solution for a couple of minor problems, but more about that later.

What you can see (or not see thanks for being packed in plastic bags and boxes) are:

• 5 Serpent tanks, all lack canopies and magnets for the chin-weapons.
  
• 2 Falcons lacking magnets for the weapon points. I also need to magnetise two D-cannons for "count as prism tank" purposes.
• One Falcon which needs to get converted into a FW Nigh Spinner (those parts need to get their mold lines removed too)
• 2 Lords, one is still unassembled, the other one needs a scratch build wraithblade (lesson I learned at the german TOS).
• 2 Vypers, but those will be the last models I will glue together...
• 20 cold one knights, need to solve the question of how to use them first.
• 50 WHF corsairs, which will be used in my DA, guardian and stormguardian conversions.
• 15 unassembled DA models + a lot of spare bits like heads and guns I traded together.
• 30 unassembled guardians from the eldar force boxes
• 3x6 fire dragons
• 8 Shees, one exarch and jain zar
• 5 reaper + maugan
• 10 quins lacking jester&seer

Lots of work and if my performance this weekend wouldn't vex me that much that I want to redeem myself with two tournament attendings in november, I would faint over the view of so many unpainted and unprimed models. ^^

TOS is over...

Played the remaining two games of this years "Throne of skulls" tournament. My final placing was 28 out of ~70 players. Guess it could have been around 2-5 ranks higher, but I chatted to much with my last oppenent, which costed me my part of turn five (he won the dice and I didn't manage to steal the ini). That last turn would have been a quick one, but I was leading with 8 vs 4 killpoints and so we only packed up (no chance he could have won that in the next cc phase). Guess I'm too nice for competitive tournament play. ^^

I managed to take some photos each game, the first 4 with my buddies cam and my last opponent will send me his pictures per mail, so stay tuned for some battle reps.

Short summary:

First game: 3 markers, spearhead...necrons phase out in turn 3
Second game: 2 markers, mech-sm...lost 0:1 marker
third game: mech-sm, killpoints and dawn of war deployment... 2:4 KP loss
fourth game: 5 markers, pitched battle against Eldar: 1:1 draw
fifth game: KP against a mono-khorne csm army, spearhead deployment... 8:4

72 out of possible 150 points

I'm off now writing some short notes for the upcoming battle reports and do some kitchen work.

First news from the tournament

So, day one and 3 out of 5 games have passed. I'm not really satisfied in terms of tournament rules, avaliable terrain, my list and my performance.

After my epic fail with the 6 walkers I patched up my 1750 force with 2xBL/EML lords and a squad of quins.

Terrain is really bad, the german GT/TOS is infamous for his lack of proper LOS-blocking terrain, but this year tops it all. I managed to get cover saves for troops in one out of 3 games. Playing against SM using 40points RBs to provide cheap 4+ saves for their tripple typhoon-speeder squadrons doesn't make things better.

Rules are somehow crazy too. The win/draw/loss/forfeit matrix is just 30/10/1/0, KP difference and hold marker form a secondary value. So 1 win, one draw and one loss will net you 41 points. If you lost the 3 marker game 0:3, scored a draw on the c&c mission (contesting all markers) and won a KP mission 5:3 your secondary score would be 2.

First game was a 3 marker mission, game to was c&c and game 3 was killpoints. game 4 will be marker again and game 5 are KP. Some guys got lucky, won the first to games and faced a 15+ KP army in game 3, others played against orks with 6 KP. So winning the tournament isn't that much about having more skill than the other top5 players, it is about getting a good opponent in the KP mission, because with one good matchup you can score 2-3times the amount of secondary points that with the first two missions combined.

Won my first game against necron, lost the second and third game against mech SM with ass terminators and lots of Rbacks. I'm not saying that I played really well, made some faults, but you can't get a draw if you need 4-5 turns of shooting with 2 EML/BL lords and some shots from a guided BL-falcon to kill 2 out of 3 typhoon speeders. And getting 9 normal and 11 rending/p-weapon wound against a squad of SS/TH terminators, resulting only in two terminators dead and the other three killing 3 fortuned quins doesn't help much either.

Good thing is that I learned a lot about eldar force symbiosis and took some great pictures with my friends digital camera, so there will be coming up some bat reps next.

Need to grap some sleep, hopefully getting some better results in the remaining three games

About primer and walkers

Talk about things starting bad...

Yesterday I stood up early, grabbed my can of "army painter" white primer and started putting a nice coat on my 6 walkers.

Well, that was the play anyway, but it didn't worked out as I thought it would. I used the patio of our home, hoping to escape the sun that way (25° in the shadow). Covered the garden table with tons of newspaper pages, marked the 20cm spraying distance on them, shaked the can like a maniac for 2+ minutes and started spraying. The result were 6 walkers covered in white primer with the surface looking like sandpaper. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, or if it just was a bad day to spray those guys.

Anyway, after brushing all the white dust off from the walkers I gave it a second try in the late evening, when the temp was dropping. Used a shorter distance between can and model, but the result was the same.

Got mad today and used the 5+ years old can of GW black primer, which I found two weeks ago. The irony is that I used it so put a coat on the walkers weapons, which turned out to be perfectly fine and todays weather is roughly the same as yesterdays one. Doh...I threw the nearly empty army painter can into the bin, the black one I also own will be used to prime terrain pieces, nobody cares if theres an uneven primer on a hill or ruin.

Bottom line is that I don't have enough time to strip the color from my 6 walkers, prime them with a new can of white primer and get them painted until the weekend. So basicaly I can't field them at the tournament, which means that I either change my list (won't be easy to get a proper GT/TOS list done with the spare models left) or swap it out totaly for a SM-mech force.

My own self-made army case

Any fellow eldarplayer, who loves playing a mechanised list, knows the pain. The GW army cases don't work very well with a force build around lots of tanks and rather few infantery models. And those cases aren't cheap either.

Some guys in germany use cases from the Feldherr (german word for commander) Line. Those cases offer a better cost/balance ratio compared to GW but they aren't cheap either. And for me they don't get the job done, which is getting a whole 1750-2k mechanised eldar force into one case.

To make things even more complicated: I don't own a driver's license, so I need an army-case which can be carried around rather comfortable. By hand because I need to keep my back free in cases that I either carry my shoulder bag (laptop, books for university...) with me. I commute to university by train each day and the local GW store lies on he way between my home and the local central station. So if my courses end late in the evening I rather prefer to stop by at the store for a short game once in a while instead of driving all the way home first, just for getting my army and leaving my shoulder bag at home.

I searched around the web until I found a powerseller who offers aluminium cases for RC helicopters at the bay. Took me two weeks of biding to get my hands on one but I got it for ~30€ (incl. shipping) in the end. The measurement inside of that case is 65cm long, 24 wide and 15 high. A falcon is 16x12x4 and a serpent is 18x14x5. After fooling around with google sketchup I came up with a blueprint. I went shopping in a DIY store (got a thin metal sheet and some glue) and a store offering foamed plastics for sound isolation and padding chairs&couches. After the shopping spree I spent ~20€, raising my total investment up to 50€, which is the price of a single black army case from GW.

I worked in the case during the breaks between swotting for my exams last week and that's how it looks after I finished it:



That is the case closed. Doesn't look like much, but the beauty lies within...



I used the metal sheet for securing my tanks from any vertical movement. The same magnets will be used for a better hold onto the flying base, which will contain a bolt head. The topmost layer holds 3 serpents and a falcon/prism tank and still has enough space left for all the turrets and 7 converted "jetbikers" on 40mm bases.



I'm not satisfied with the layer between the lid and bottom ones, but it should have enough room for ~60 infantery models on 25mm bases. The bottom layer is separated into compartments for two serpent tanks, another falcon, one lord, 3 walkers and 10 jetbikes. There is also the second half of metal sheet glued into the case, keeping my tanks save from sliding around.

The whole capacity adds up to:

• 7 tanks, allowing me to carry 7 out of 8 tanks I own
• 3 walkers
  
• 1 lord
  
• 60 infantery models
• 17 jetbikes

That means I can carry around enough models to even choose between 2-3+ lists, depending on the points played. And that all for less than 50€ which is quite a steal, compared to a GW case which only has enough space for less than half of my DIY case.

Bottom Line: DIY pays off, esp. if you don't want to play a horde army, carry around a mulitude of GW cases or battle force boxes fieled with kitchen paper tissue for savety purposes.

Warwalker + Magnets = saved money

Anybody who stayed with this hobby for one than one edition knows the game: GW will very likely push those units in a codex, who don't work or rather sell that good. And sometimes they nerf down some choices.

For example Starcannons, who where the bane of any MEQ units back in ed3 and early ed4 days thanks to 3 shots and a rather low price. Anybody who glued those guns on their falcon turrets either ripped them off again or put the whole falcon back in the showcase, hoping for a revival with the next eldar codex.

Back when I started sketching out my eldar force, I made the following decision: swapable weapons are a must, regardless of the unit carrying them.

Magnetising Serpents and Falcons is rather easy, as you can see in this blog. Warwalkers are somehow tricky, that's why some people use pins for them. I first thought about following their approach, but last week I stumbled over a post in a german board and the solution offered there may not look as neat as the "drill&pin" one.

The original solution was something like this:

1. cut a part out of the frame, which holds the weapon in place. It should be large enough to fit a small magnet. Fill the frame with greenstuff and put the magnet into the hole you cut.

2. clip off the connector of from the weapon, use a file to smooth the surface.

3. Use the metal part from filing fastener, clip it down into small stripes.

3. Glue those stripes underneath your weapons, where you clipped off the connector.

Well, I'm lazy and I already cut myself twice yesterday while removing all the casting seams from my walkers, so I found a more rustical approach. I can't offer you any decent pictures, because I don't own a decent digital camera and my mobile phone doesn't work very well without sufficant daylight (it's 11 pm here in germany now).

1. I clipped of both the connector from the underside of the weapon and the frame from the mount using a side cutter.

2. I filed both down, creating a smooth surface.

3. I glued a stripe of thin metal (cut off from a filing fastener) underneath the weapon and a 3x1mm round neodyme magnet onto the filed down mount.


















And that how it looks like without the guns attached...you can see the round magnet glued onto the filed down mount.
















The walker with the weapons attached...I hope that small tutorial was easy enough to understand even without any decent pictures from the work steps.

Cheers, Karnstein

Vow of the month

Kay, I will be playing at the german "Throne of Skulls" tournament this weekend. One of the rules is "painted models only", so I'm borrowing an eldar force from a friend of mine, who travels through half of germany for this tournament each year.

Sadly he don't own any painted walkers and yriel, so my vow of the month is:

• prime and paint 6 walkers (3 colours, details like gems will come later).
• glue my female Yriel together, prime and paint her.
  
• Prime all my 8 skimmer tanks and call a friend of mine, who will apply the base coat with a airbrush pistol on them.

Walkers&Yriel will be done this week, because I need them for that tournament.

Finaly...

... my examination period is over and I found the time to start my own blog and work on my eldar corsair force.

My goal is to get everything I own glued together over the course of this month and put some paint on. I vowed to myself to get ~500 points painted each month.

If I get a grip on how vassal works, you will see a short report on a battle I fought against a fellow eldar player some weeks ago.