Warhammer Imperium Magazine

 So, I'm on a bit of a downwards spiral with new models. The aim this year was , as it was last year, to work on reducing the pile of shame, however, I have recently brought a number of models, with the reinforcements to the DKoK and the models for my allied knights and now, I've picked up some Imperium Magazines cheap! 

The local club had a second hand sale on the other week and while we didn't manage to get down until quite late in the day, when all the best bargains had gone, we did manage to pick up a few bits, namely some Imperium mags and a couple of random models for the wee one. 

Initially I wasn't going to bother but decided to grab the sisters edition before being persuaded to grab the inquisitor one as well.

The sisters mag, no.46, comes with three bolter armed sisters a Repentia, an Arco-flagellant and two Zephyrim. The three sisters will be useful for filling out my existing sister's squad, as hey were built for kill team and need some extra bolters to make a legal 40k squad, which given the new Agents codex is needed. Speaking of agents, the Repentia sister will be useful as a Henchman, enabling me to field at least one full squad henchmen alongside the Repentia sister kitbash I already own.  The Arco-flagellant was going to be useful as a Daemon host, but as they have been removed I'm less sure of it's role now. The two Zephyrim have both been converted in to Canoness' with jump packs, even though they have none to join. To do this I did a bit of kit bashing with the spare parts I had left from building my original sister's squad and while maybe not being exactly right, I think they look cool. 

Not much to say here, mag came with Draxus, I built Draxus. Just need to paint her, probably gold. I wasn't going to bother with this but for the price I couldn't really resist. I'm not a massive fan of named characters and it generally restricts what you can do with them in terms of personal lore and paint job.

In addition to my purchases, my son also picked up some magazines, namely two of the above to give him some cheap space marines to play with. He has wanted some that he could build and paint to test colours and generally play around with and at the price of these I could hardly object.

Overall, despite being late, we managed to actually pick up some decent and useful bargains. My wee one was happy as well as he got a couple of models and gets to keep the magazines once we've built the models. 

Imperial Knight Household Forces

 So, a couple of post ago I showed off the new models I purchased from Station Forge and I hinted at some of my plans for my Household guard for my Imperial Knights. The main idea here is to add some points to my list but also form a more cohesive allied force for my AdMech army. The big knight will be going to form a main part of my AdMech army, loaded with all the guns usually. Therefore I decided that I needed some unit to act as a buffer or blocking units to stop any enemy units from getting too close. There are various ways I could have done this but I decided to go with the Adeptus Arbites Subductor Squad with their shields and Mauls for a 4+ invulnerable save and combat punch. The additional shot pistols are also useful but not the main reason for fielding them.

I plan on backing up the two Subductor squads with two Inquisitors. This will give them a bit of support, it’s just a shame that they cannot join the squads directly as they can only join imperial battle line infantry or inquisitorial henchmen. 

The lore behind the force is going to be quite simple, there will be two squads, painted up slightly differently to represent two separate minor households, each oath-sworn to the lord within the knight and so a small number of arms men follow the knight around and will willingly give their lives to protect the lord and the knight. The Inquisitors will be representing more senior member of the household, maybe a minor noble or senior servant, such as a marshal or constable, I haven’t really decided just yet. 

One of the squads will probably be mainly blue and the other will be red but both will have their household banner held up high, with their own iconography. 

The game plan for most of the game that I play these in will be very simple, the knight will move around to get shots and the two squads and inquisitors will just move around keeping the big knight as safe as they can. 

 

Rough Riders

 This is a pos that I should have done a while ago but for various reasons I forgot to post it up, so here it is.  The photos are not very good, as they were taken quickly before I went away on holiday. 

The complete squad

There are two 5 man squads that have been modelled so that they can be run as a single ten man squad, which given my recent experience will probably be hope they will be run most of the time. Combined with the changes to the reinforcement stratagem there seems little use in 5 man squads, as the damage output can be so swingy. They have gone from doing 3 wounds on the charge through to doing over thirty after being charged. 

Goad, Frag and Melta lances

Two Sergeants 

The two sergeants have been modelled so that one is obviously a sergeant and the other can be either a normal model or a sergeant with his sword sheathed.

I really like these models, they are very dynamic poses, however, they are also very fragile and I have also had to repair a couple of the lances already! I can see these being a pain to store and I may have to find some sort of bespoke storage solution for them, as they currently don’t fit into any of my current storage boxes. I have thought about getting more of them, as they are fun to use, but i think for the moment I’ll just stick with the 10.

2024 league - guard vs orks

 So I played another game in the league, the fourth of five games and another victory, just! This was a very close game with the final score being 69 to the guard and 65 to the orks. There were a few mistakes made in the game but I'll come to them later. 

My opponents list was quite scary to look at, as it had a lot of combat punch and his previous game had been against the World Eaters, and had been a resounding victory 78 to 33, so I was really worried. His list included; a beast boss, two beast bosses on Squigosaurs and three warboss' leading two units of beast snagga boyz in kill rigs, two units of squighog boyz and three units of nobz in trukks, plus a unit of Gretchen at the rear.

So lots of mobility and close combat punch, which meant that my plan was to stay back as much as possible and force him to come at me piece meal. 

Take and hold, search and destroy, chilling rain

Mission and terrain layout were rolled for randomly.

Terrain layout 3 

Deployment 

Ork deployment

I didn't get any pictures early game, but during this time.my opponent made, what I think, was his biggest mistake, he held back, worried about my deep striking units. He pushed up with his kill rigs but bottle necked himself in the central terrain pieces. He did manage however to remove my DKoK squad that I had sent up the middle and a cadian squad on the left flank, which had claimed objectives for VP, plus my rough riders that had pushed up the right flank. However, this was over two turns and so the DKoK and Rough Riders returned as Reinforcements. 

By the start of turn 3, the game was still very close, with orls now in my lines, with the majority of my units pinned in my deployment zone. I had forced my opponent to move back by bringing the DKoK in behind him but that was it. My scions were still off the table, along side the rough riders. My knight finally did something this turn and chopped up a squad of Squighog boyz, although he failed to take out the Boss. This also saw the start of the battle between Tank commander and beast Snagga boyz. I lost the other tank to kill rig shooting which was unfortunate.

Looking a bit grim for the guard

Nobz out of position after taking on the flanking DKoK.

At the beginning of turn 4 we were still only separated by a few points and I was struggling to score primary points but doing well on secondary points, my opponent had the opposite problem. The scions had dropped in previously but some poor positioning from me and dropped me some easy primary points this turn. The rough riders also reappeared this turn in the far corner to charge down some trukks but failed the charge, twice. The knight however had no trouble dealing with the kill rig that had charged my infantry squad sitting on my home objective. The scions on the top objective were less lucky and were splattered all over the place, luckily for me another (identical) unit was waiting ready to redeploy! 

Rough riders pinned in by trukks

Turn 5 saw the knight move up and take on the last kill rig and the rough riders hit both the trukks. With both charges successful and the resultant damage enough to destroy all three units, the rest of the firepower from the two squads of scions was directed at the remaining orks and was enough to destroy all by one lone ork warboss. 

There was very little for the orks to do in there turn, having only one model left. They were however able to score a few points. The end result of 65 to 69 for the guard was a pretty fair score for the game, even though I had significantly more units left at the end, although most of these did come from reinforcements.

There are a couple of notes to make though. There were a couple of mistakes made during the game, not just in terms of decisions but also rules wise. 

For the orks, the main mistakes were tactical, with pushing both kill rigs in to the ruins turn 1 bottlenecked himself meaning one has to move back to allow the other to move forward. The second mistake was charging the squidosaurs unit into the knight rather than the squad on my home objective. They did some damage but not enough to take.out the knight, although the knight did fail to take them out in return. The last mistake I think was holding on to bring it down for so long. I think that after the second turn it should have been dropped. However, there is a caveat to this, one that is my mistake. 

I think I only really made two mistakes, one minor one was holding my knight back so much. I think I should have pushed it up further turn 2 but ultimately it worked out as it was. The second mistake was with "big guns never tire". When my tank was charged I checked the rules as I had a feeling there were restrictions about blast weapons. Having a look through the main rule there was no mention about it, just pistols, so I checked a few.other bits but found nothing, even though I was sure that there was something. Anyway we played on and I shot the plasma guns in combat even thought they were blast. I later found the bit I was looking for and confirmed that blast can't shoot in combat (in the rules commentary). Why they can't just add the restriction to the main rules I don't know, they have stuff about pistols after all. Anyway, this would have meant that I would have pulled the Russ out of combat and fired all the infantry in to the unit and probably done more damage, as they didn't shoot that turn anyway. I don't think this would have affected the game either way however, as even if they had scored the points it was only worth 3 points. There are also a couple of points in the game where I missed out on scoring points. The first was when I dropped in my scions. I dropped them in close to the enemy but if I had dropped just a few inches back, I could have claimed an objective during my next turn or two, without having to move, potentially scoring myself up to 10 extra VP. I also had cleanse for one of my cards in the last turn but got carried away with shooting. If I had done cleanse I could have picked up 3 points myself, for one objective and possibly the full 5 if I had dropped the above squad on the objective.

Overall I don't think any of these rules mistakes would have made a difference to the overall result even though it was a close run thing. Some of the tactical decisions would have had a bigger impact on the game overall and could well have changed the overall result. 

Last Ork Standing

Overall this was probably the best game of the league for me so far, not just due to the win but in overall fun and enjoyment and the ork army was very nicely painted as well. I have one last game to try and play but I'm not sure when or even if I will get around to playing it.