Inq warband

So, with several dozen models still sitting around waiting to be painted, I have done what every sensible modeller does, started another project!

This time it is the Inquisition that are the focus of the modelling. I have always wanted to model some Inquisition forces as they are the entity that draw all my other forces together. The force itself is a fair size compared to many Inquisitors force's that I have come across in the past, which usually comprise of an Inquisitor and maybe a small retinue. The reason the force is so large is because I intend to use this as the main force with other force's as support, be it one of the SM or IG armies. This is possible, as the force is currently over 600pts and can easily grow with the addition of warhead and upping the numbers in the Elite 1 squad to maximum numbers.

So what is in the list? Well there are two Inquisitors and three henchmen bands. Although in the fluff the Inquisitors are of the Ordo Hereticus variety, I will be using the Xenos Inquisitors profile as the basic wargear and upgrades are more in line with how I want my force to play.

So, to the actual forces in question;

Xenos Inquisitor w/Power armour,  Power Sword, Rad grenades, Psykotroke grenades

Xenos Inquisitor w/Combi-plasma, Power Armour, Psyker ML1

Elite 1 – 7x Acolyte’s w/carapace, hotshot lasgun, 3x stormshield

Elite 2 – 10x Acolyte’s w/carapace, bolt gun, 1x psyker, 1x Priest

Elite 3 – 5x Crusader’s, 5x Death Cult Assassins, 2x Priest

So the plan.

One Inquisitor, with the combi, will go with Elite 1 and be tasked with hunting the high profile targets from a far. With ML1 he will attempt to provide Prescience for the squad to up their killing ability and take the edge of bs3. The storm shields are there to provide some extra resilience to high strength or low Ap weapons.

The second Inquisitor will go with Elite 3. This will be the up close and personal lot, with the Rad grenades and Psykotroke grenades all affecting the enemy and hopefully reducing their effectiveness in combat. Combining this with the DCA's initiative 6 and twin power swords and 4 attacks on the charge (for a total of 20 attacks at WS5, S6 and I6) and the Priests special rules, reroll to hit and hopefully, reroll to wound, this should do a lot of damage. The Crusaders are there to soak up some damage with their storm shields and to die in place of the DCA's, they can also add a few attacks as well, if any models survive to the I3 step. There are two priests for a very simple reason, that being at Ld7 they are not the most reliable of characters. So in order to give some extra assurance of getting the war hymns off, which are very useful and if I get both hymns off, there is always somewhere to use it, i.e. reroll saves.

The final unit are Elite 2, and are the bolter boys. 10 Acolytes with bolters for plain old massed fire. These guys are just as simple as that, they are there to support either of the other squads achieve there goals, either by poring shots in to a unit before the others assault, or by screening and dying to enable the Hotshot guys to get in to range. They are in effect a cheap expendable unit, with just enough upgrades to make them survive long enough to do their job. The priest is there to make them fearless and keep them where they need to be and the psyker is there to try and give prescience to the squad.

This is a fairly simple list, one close combat unit, one shooty unit and one sacrificial unit, most of which is operating at Ap3, so no clues as to who the Inquisition are look at! 

death watch; overkill

Well, the latest game to be released from GW is Death watch; Overkill. While I have to say the models are very impressive, and look superbly detailed, its not going on my wish list. Why? Simple, I'm not a Nids fan and Genecults don't excite me in any way. If you are a Nids fan then I can understand your excitement, as this is something special. I can recal a friend, back in my youth, who had a number of hybrids and it was a shame to see that they had disappeared during my absence from the game.

Whilst having the Deathwatch models would be nice, they would not have much of a place in my armies, apart from maybe the Inquisition, but that wouldn't fit with the fluff. Although having said that, I may just have them anyway. With the new rules being in WD, (which I great that their doing this again!) I might just see about kit bashing some models up to fit the rules. This will have to wait a while though as getting hold of some of the parts will be difficult, namely the termie, bike and jump packs, at least without taking them away from existing armies.

I'm still a little unsure of how they work in 40k though. I get the complete formation, everything in one big unit, but this seems pointless in my mind. It restricts the two jump units, meaning that they can't make use of their full moves, the same with the bike, as both have to stay in coherency with the rest on the unit. The unit is also not optimised at all, with both shooting models and assault models along side anti-infantry and other anti-armour models. So I would like to field them seperatly, but how? Using the inquisition detachment wouldn't work as there is no troop slot and allied doesn't work as there is only one elite and hq slots. CAD can't work as there is only one troop choice. So what's the answer? Are you supposed to just sub them in to your army instead of other units? But that just doesn't work fluff wise, and nor does adding a unit to for a CAD legal force. Also as far as I can tell, all the fast and elite choices are units of 1, who can't join each other or anyone else as none are independent characters. I could be wrong here, but I thought that you had to be an independent character to join other units.

So this still leaves me  wondering, how do you field them?

One thing I really like with this game is the fluff that they have given each character, especially the BA guy, who's obviously succumbing to the Black Rage, which wouldn't be good as far as the inquisition are concerned. The white scars one is good as well, classic white scars, just doing things his (AKA the White Scars) way. If I make my own, I will probably make up my own fluff and have a number of them pulled from my own armies to represent Inquisitor Tullus forming his own hit squad from the units around him.

I would be interested in playing the game though, as the last few games have been enjoyable to play (not that I've played BoC yet). I'll have to see if anyone down the club shells out for the game first though.

Space Wolves

I've been thinking a little about the space wolves and the emperors disciples. It all started when the new SW models we're released and I started thinking about the wolves as an army, not a new army but as a replacement for the Imperial Fists based disciples. I had thought about this in the past but had dismissed it as I thought that SW's were a little to unique to really build anything other than a space wolves great company, something I didn't want to do as it does limit you a great deal in what you can do, both in terms of models and paint scheme. However, with the new releases I though I would have another look.

My thoughts revolved around changing the fluff slightly to base the army on the SW codex rather than the vanilla marine codex, now I know that the wolves don't have any successor chapters so it would just be a chapter of unknown origin. Also I would have kept away from all of the units unique to the wolves, such as the thunder wolf Calvary and lone wolves and also from the special characters, such as Ragnar and Bjorn, sticking to the more generic units and hq choices, such as using a Wolf Guard as a Captain.

My interest was originally peaked by the new Blood Claw box of 15 models and all the options in the box, including bolters. Great, I thought, 15 man tac squads with bolters, just what the disciples would love, massed fire power. Ok, so you'd loose bolter drill but you'd gain 5 extra bolters, so I think it would work well, if blood claws can actually take bolters, which according to the codex, they can't. So that was one spanner in the works, the second being that they are only bs3. This means that even with the extra shots, there would be roughly the same number of hits. So, no advantage other than bodies, which, while useful isn't really enough of a reason to change a whole army for.

The other issue was that SW's don't have any form of Sternguard, which form a central part of my force at the moment. They have Vanguard equivalents in the form of Wolf Guard packs, as they are able to take all of the options for melee weapons and also jump packs, but there are no units within the SW codex that can take special ammunition, which is something that I'm not willing to loose.

So the more I looked into the whole SW's thing the more I found that it wasn't really going to work for the Disciples. Sure there were a few good things in there, such as Grey hunters being able to take in extra CCW, always handy for those times you get in to combat, ad also Long Fangs, I means who wouldn't like an extra heavy weapon in a Devastator squad. The fact that you can take them from just a Sgt and one Long Fang is also good, as it gives you a lot of flexibility, more so than combat squading the Dev squads and at a lot less cost. For the Disciples having the option to take smaller teams would mean that I wouldn't have to max out the Las/Plasma Dev squad to split the weapons, I'd just take two units of 3 Long Fangs, and same the rest of the points for other units.

So after some deliberation, by which I mean, the length of time it took me to find the Blood Claws entry and find that their BS3 and cant take bolters, I have decided to continue on with the plan as is. Which is probably not a bad thing.

Betrayal at Calth

Well I've put my Christmas money together and forked out for Betrayal of Calth, mostly for the models for my DA Dark Guardians. I want a nice force of archaic looking marines, mixed with some newer stuff, to give a feel of a force that's been out hunting on the edges of the galaxy for a long time. Hopefully with the older chaos models and dreads along with the Calth box set should be able to do this. I might not end up using all the models for the DA force, some may find their way in to the Disciples army list as Sternguard vets, after all the Sternguard are supposed to be the best and oldest warriors in the chapter.

Getting this box set is going to mean that my Dark Guardians will need a slight rethink in terms of their list, as it 2000pts, adding in an extra squad of termies does cut down points, and I am hoping that I may be able to get hold of another squad of terminator bodies cheap, probably from eBay, to add another squad, using the extra arms from the box set. The main squad will be armed with lightning claws, with a heavy flamer on one model and the Sgt with  Sword and Strombolter, to give some shooting pre assault. This will leave at least 5 sets of weapons, including 2 sets of lightning claws which will go with the other flamer squad.

This doesn't leave a lot of space for troops in the rest of the list, so it will be a bit of a juggling contest to see where the other points are used. I will have to have a good look at the DA codex to see what I can use and where, but one option is to get hold of some more bikes or speeders but I will have to see, as I can't really justify more purchases at the moment.

However, one thing that I am pondering in painting up a minimum strength Demi-company or Lions Blade Force. This is mostly to keep current with the new DA codex more than anything else.

As you can tell, this force is very much up in the air at the moment, and I'm not entirely sure what I want. The other issue is that being 30k forces, do I want to keep these as playable in the 30k universe? At present, no one up here plays 30k, so is it worth it? Its something that I really haven't decided on yet. If I do keep them as 30k playable, I wont be doing DA though, so I'll have to pick a colour scheme from the Heresy, probably a traitor force using pre-heresy colour schemes, which at the moment are World Eaters or Word Bearers, the latter would be closer to my original colour scheme. One thing that I will have to look in to is the scope for alterations to the colour schemes, or are they very much set in stone for 30k?

Quick question?

Now i have just picked up the new White Dwarf, mostly for the new Deathwatch rules but I'm a little confused.

How do you play them in 40K outside the formation? None of the elites have independent character, so does that mean there a unit of 1 and can't join other squads? And what do you play them under? You can't use the Inq detachment as it only contains Elite slots, no troops. And you can't use allied detachment as there is only one slot for HQ and Elite. Do you just sub them in for units in whatever army your using? Or have I missed something simple here?