The Deathwatch

So, he we are, jumping on the band wagon. The new deathwatch codex has been it and about for a few weeks and while I have the latest Battlescribe files and have eeen the codex, I have yet to get a, er, "copy" to look at. As talked about in a previous post, Battlescribe is not perfect and at present I can't see how to take a vet with boltgun and bolt pistol, in fact I dint see a bolt pistol listed at all. This seems a bit strange as boltgun and bolt pistol are the mainstay of a marine, and its pointless arming a marine with a ccw unless he has a pistol of some sorts. Anyway, hopefully I can get eyes on a codex and see what's right.

Ill post up a full list later, in another post and ill post up the fluff for it as well, again in another post. But I though I would put down some initial thoughts here.

The deathwatch will be fielded with my inquisitional force, to makes 2000 point list, as all my lists are. The current inquisition list is around 650 points, so I'm looking at around 1350 points, which should be easy to hit. In terms of setup, the inquisition list currently is heated towards taking out men's, with hotshot lasguns and power sword wielding death cult assassins and crusaders. The deathwatch will continue this theme, not only with the special issue ammo but in terms of wargear. None of my armies are particularly good, usually lacking in one area or another, such as the Hjaltland lacking any anti heavy armour, and the deathwatch will no doubt suffer the same fate, although there are a few chain fists and a dread ccw in there which will help.

In terms of teams, ill be going for a range to cover all the bases, using the Black Spear Strike Force, for universal deep strike, and then the Watch Company, to gain the additional reroll benefits, and finally ill be taking an Aquila killteam for general stuff, a Dominates killteam, a Furor kill team and a Purgatus killteam all for their special target types, (HQ, Elite and Troop). I haven bothered with heavy support or fast attack, as I figured the Aquila team can deal with fast attack and heavy support doesn't go far usually and can be dealt with by the the chain fisted termies in the Furor team.

I've got most of the bits I need to make this lot, as I'll be using the Betrayal at Calth boxset for the marines and the termies will come from my left over stock of metal bodies with BaC arms. I have pretty much got all the arms and weapons I need from the boxset and my bits box, the only questions are whether I have enough flamers to make the 3 Infurnus Heavy Bolters I want and whether I need jump packs for the vanguard vets, who are listed as jump troops but apparently don have jump packs listed in their wargear. I'm assuming this is an oversite and I'll need jump packs but it would be good if I could drop the packs, as I don't need them.

This army may well be on the drawing board for quite sometime as my priorities right now are to finish the Hjaltland LI, which only has a handful of models to paint including a Valkryie, and paint the rest of my Dagr Ormr MT force and that doesn't include the Eagle Knights, which are also on the list!

Northern Invasion

A few years ago now I attended Kings of the North, this year, in about a month I will be attending Northern Invasion 4, without doubt the most northern 40k tournament in the country! (It may also apply to AoS and Magic as well, as I'm not going to include the local Christmas tournament, as teats just a club thing) So what is Northern Invasion? Its a small and very friendly tournament held in Orkney. At last count there were 8 40k players taking part and this is the first year that trophies will be awarded. I've posted up the basics of the tournament below and then I'll have a look at my ideas for a list. I will go over the list in detail later, as a lot of the posts in the next few weeks will be about the tournament.

So what are the restrictions? 

The army must be 1500pts and must use the CAD and be from ONE CODEX. Formations, Allied detachments and models that are lords of war cannot be used including imperial knights. So BRB CAD from one codex only and no LoW, which is nice but maybe a little to much as LoW's tend to be quite pricey and in a 1500 point list take a good chunk of points.

The Battlefield will be the standard Dawn of War setup with the usual deployment, except the objectives which are fixed. 5 objectives, 1 at the centre of the table and 2 oother, 24” away also on the centre line. The final 2 are placed by the players (1 each) and c)he games is victory point based with the objectives being the primary, 2vp each for the middle objectives and the player ones are worth 1vp to you and 3 to your opponent. In addition you gain 1vp for every enemy unit destroyed, with IC's and transports being counted separately.  Secondary objectives are the usual 3, first blood, line breaker and slay the warlord. There will also be night fighting. 

So, in general there are not a lot of changes to the game for the tournament, mainly just restricting to the CAD, and changing the objectives. Its a bit of a shame they have gone with the eternal war missions rather than the maelstrom games. At least I assume they have as there is no mention of maelstrom cards. A modified deck, like those I've used at previous tournaments, are quite good as they get rid of a lot of the action type cards, weighting the deck towards to objective cards. 

What is this going to do for my list? Well, it seems the movement will not be too important, and last turn objective grabbing will be the thing (scatbikes FTW). This means that sitting behind my defensive line until turn 4 before surging forward for the objectives and using the units in the flyers for a last turn grab as well. The main advantage will be that my list is very much a troops list,so lots of objective secured, useful for last turn grabs. Ill post up my first draft list next post, although I had a game the other day so the list has already changed! But ill write about that as well.

Initial thoughts though are that it will be a bit of a challenge to switch back to eternal war missions and the mindset that goes with them. I've been playing maelstrom for so long and think that the setup us a lot better. In looking forward to the tournament though! 

Terrain options

There ate still a few more battle reports to write up but I thought I'd have a little break and look at a few other bits,namely terrain and Deathwatch, and possibly some other bits and pieces. Anyway, in case you missed the title, this post is about the various terrain options I've been looking at.

Firstly the battle mats. Now there are several companies out there that do mats, some ofthemore known ones are gamematz.eu and urbanmatz, as well as deepcut studios, terrain mats and battleboards and the there are some of the less well known (well less well known by me anyway) such as tiny war games and cigar box battle mats, plus a friend down my club has just received his kraken battle mats,which are still shipping their Kickstarter stuff before general release. With so many different mats out there its hard to decide which to buy! However I recently came across Javis mats. Javis seem to have started as a model railway scenery producer but have expanded a little.

Javis don't do a standard 6x4 mat, but do 4x2 instead, and this got me thinking. They do urban, desert and field, all in the 4x2 sixe, so with 3 mats I can make a 6x4 mat, but one that I can change around for every game and terrain. The idea is like this, say 2 desert and a urban plus a few buildings and trees, equals town on edge of desert, or two urban with a field in between, equals a large open park area between the buildings. with say 2 of each, I could create a number of different situations, so every game would be different. The down side? Well, the mats are not nearly as robust looking or as nice to look at, as they are not printed like many of the others but are cloth. I don't know how this will impact of wear and tear factors, but I think that they should hold up fairly well to the amount of use that they will be getting. I don't know anyone who has them, so I cant go and have a look, and I don't really trust the online stuff, as you only every seem to get the two extremes, those that love things and cant praise them highly enough or those that hate them and want to burn every single one.

But a mat doesn't make a battlefield. So what of terrain. Well, after looking at several options and also getting my hands on a few different types, namely some plastic Mantic terrain, some very nice scratch build stuff and some MDF building, I'm going with the MDF stuff. There are several good packages on eBay. It can be hard to choose which building to go for as there are some really nice looking ones, and they range from old west to ultra modern and sci-fi. But I want something to fit in with the fluff of my armies, mainly the IG ones, so I've been looking at single story type building, build in a kinda middle eastern type style. I eventually came up with this lot (picture just in case the link doesn't work):

Ok, so not quite what I was looking for, but it covers every angle. Single story buildings plus some ruins, for making the little villages fitting the fluff of my IG worlds, some big buildings, mostly ruins for some off world action. They will also fit in with my plans for the mats, painting up the single story building to mostly fit the desert and grass areas and the bigger ruins for the urban areas, obviously I could chop and change a bit, but on the who I think that its going to be good. In addition, the same seller is selling off cuts/miss cuts that can be used to base other items, namely the trees/plants that will accompany the buildings. Again, these will be themed to the IG worlds and will there for be mostly made of fist tank plastic grass. Based up in small clumps, they will represent scrub and bushes and scattered around the board they can be used to represent the greener side to the planets, lots in the grass areas or just a few scattered around in the desert and urban areas.

All in all, I'm quite excited by this project and i'm hoping to get it underway soon. However, I may have to wait until funds are more available, which may well be after Christmas, when I've had all my present money (yes, no ones buys me present these days, I just get money and told to "buy something nice", so that would be little men stuff then.

Blood Angles

Well, there has been a few leaks of the new Blood Angles stuff. While I have yet to see it in the flesh as it were, its not looking great for my boys, I think there may need to be some serious changes if I need to move away from the Blood Angels Baal Strike Force. I'll wait and see what happens, but i'm safe enough until the 8th ed codex hits.