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Sunday 29 September 2013

Western Clash

Well painting progress has stalled a bit. I've done a good part of the next Skink/Krox batch, but probably won't find the time to finish them off until later this week.

I did manage to get in a bunch of games on Saturday though, as I went out to D6 Gaming in Melton for a mini tournament they were having. It was only 6 players, 4 of them Hampton regulars, but it was 4 games in the day so it was a bit of extra 'hammers than a normal saturday. 2000pts made for slightly smaller games, but I'm finding the lizards to be really flexible at shifting between points levels.

There was no comp, so my list was:
Slann: Death Magic, +1 ld banner, Soul of Stone, Triple Channel, Becalming Cogitations, MRd3, Channeling staff
Tetto'Eko
2 * Scar Veteran on Cold Ones
4* 10 Skink Skirmishers
30 Skinks and 3 Kroxigor
3 Terradons
Ancient Stegadon, Sharpened Horns
Salamander

So basically chaff, a Steg and 2 Scar Vets for a bit of punch, and a death magic party slann to wreck things.

Game 1: Watchtower vs Ben Rantell (Lizardmen)
I hadn't played the mirror match up before, and Ben had a much better list for watchtower. The key though was that he only had a lvl 2 (Tetto'eko as well) so I got to cast lots of spells. Death magic wasn't amazing in this game, although I did manage to purple sun off a scar vet. Ben didn't take the opportunity to put his horde of saurus into the watchtower in the early game which ended up costing him. I held them up with my steg and killed his BSB while doing so which meant I didn't lose any points and kept him out of the tower for a few turns. I snuck Tetto'eko and some skinks into the tower in the last turn, which boosted a minor win up to a 16-4.

Game 2: Meeting Engagement vs James Brett (Vampire Counts)
This game got interesting right from the start when after I had deployed James rolled a billion 1's (including on both his lvl 4's) which meant half his army didn't start on the table. Tetto'eko was great here as he could vanguard himself 12 inches before the game, and move 12 before the magic phase, which gave me an effective range of 48 inches on spirit leech. This cost James his terrorgheist in turn 1, as it has fuck all LD and James had no scroll or +4 to dispel.

The rest of the game was fairly even, I baited a unit of vargheists into the steg and killed them with Scar Vets, did the same thing with the other unit but lost a scar vet and the steg doing so. James passed some good 5+ ward saves with his characters which kept them alive from snipes, and the magic res on my slann stopped him sniping me back effectively. I killed off chaff, he killed off chaff, I won by about the value of the things i killed in the first turn.
12-8 Win

Game 3: Dawn Attack vs Ivan Diaz (Ogre Kingdoms)
I've played Ivan like a billion times, which is a lot given he's only been in the country for like 3 months. We have a pretty even record, and always have interesting games. I scared the crap out of him by Vanguarding a Scar Vet and a Stegadon at his army and then moving them up full distance in the first turn. He had two Ironblasters so I figured both were going to die anyway, may as well get them up in his grill and force him to deal with them. The scar vet ended up being dealt with by maneaters, the Steg survived being shot, killed an Ironblaster in combat (very very slowly, sharpened horns didn't do shit). Could have done it a bit quicker and killed the mournfang as well, but didn't. Ivan pressured my mages and skinks, got a few skirmisher units out of it but I kept the mages safe. Comet killed the other Ironblaster along with some Ironguts, Purple Sun (lots of fun) then went through them and sucked off the BSB along with a few others. Then the game ended in turn 4 because we ran out of time, which was disappointing as I wasn't going to lose any more points, and there were plenty to be gained.
10-10 Draw

Game 4: Battleline vs Ben Leopold (Warriors of Chaos)
Ben had my WoC from Convic, and just fanged a Daemon Prince straight at my Skrox with the Slann and Tetto'Eko in the unit. So I just walked past him into the building and started misfiring purple sun all over the place (2 misfires in the first two turns). Then I sniped off his Deamon Prince with a spirit leech, and killed his Knights with my Scar Vets. The Steg got wailed on by trolls, but then I shot them with a zillion poison shots for like 4 turns until they all fell over and stopped getting back up again. Suckers.
15-5 Win

List did what it does and didn't lose any games, Death Slann is pretty rude. Ivan ended up winning because he got 20 in the last round, won't happen again though. Lots of fun was had, got to test out the list a bit and I'm really starting to enjoy the lizards. They have potential, a shit ton of flexibility, and the models are cool. What more could you want.

Next update should come in a couple of days and will be Dueling Paintbrushes related. In short this is a little painting competition that we do each year in an effort to actually get stuff done. Should be fun, although I'm not hugely optimistic of getting enough stuff painted in the requisite time period...



Wednesday 25 September 2013

Progress

Well some progress has been made, although not really as much as I'd have liked. I've probably spent a little bit too much time gaming over the last week rather than painting stuff, which has impacted how much I've been able to do.

I've managed to smash out a few games though, and I'm getting to use a variety of army lists which is helping me get used to the Lizardmen book. Lizardmen are an army totally unlike any of the other ones I've used in the past, and have the ability to have a lot more chaff than I am normally used to. They also need to use said chaff, which is something I never needed to do with my Warriors of Chaos, as if they were avoiding combat something was going drastically wrong! I think I am still losing units of skinks unnecessarily, and I need to work on the timing aspect of using them to divert. Working out overrun paths etc can be a pain, and in some of the games I got a bit slack and that got things killed.

Two of my games have been against HE, both of those seemed to go fairly well and I don't think the match up is particularly bad for the lizards. I had trouble cracking a unit of Pheonix Guard in one game so that is something to work on, but potentially I would have been able to handle them had my Slann not cascaded on turn 3. In the other tried sending buffed Temple Guard into the middle of my opponents army, and they tore stuff to pieces.

I also played an interesting game against an empire army. This gave me a chance to try out he "cloud" version of the list, which is basically nothing but skinks, terradons, salamanders and a Slann. There are also two scar vets which go and do the killing, something they are rather good at. A bit of a boring list to play against, as the whole point is that it doesn't engage and just chips away at you with magic and shooting, but it is certainly very effective! This game ended up being a minor win to me, although I think the empire actually have the better of it in this match up.

The large skink-kroxigor unit on the right rolled up that flank, which got me most of my victory points.

I used the same list against some Daemons of Chaos yesterday for an entertaining draw. There were 6 purple suns cast for the game, which meant they were floating about all over the place and making a mess of things. I had the best one though, taking out 20 Plaguebearers and a Nurgle Herald.

Painting-wise I've managed to finish another third of the Skink-Kroxigor unit. I'm really liking how they are turning out, and I'm looking forward to finishing my first unit. I kinda want to go paint something else, but I'm going to finish this unit first. Plus I can't let myself get sick of painting Skinks, because there are another 60 or something to do after this unit...

From the front...
Apologies for the glare in the photo, didn't notice that when I took the picture, something to look out for next time...
Besides these guys I've also finished building my Bastiladon, not sure how often I'll use it but it does look cool.

Next update I'm hoping to start a report of how things went at the ETC, but I keep not getting around to writing that. It will either be a game by game report or an analysis of the Tomb Kings and the list I took along with thoughts on what I would do different next time.

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Back to blogging!

So after two false starts i'm giving this another go. Once again I have plenty of intentions regarding this blog, and hopefully this time some of them will actually be realised.

Its been a long time since the last post, and I've done plenty of work on my Tomb Kings since then. They're at an awkward stage where they are almost finished, they can be used on the table top and look nice, but there is plenty of fiddly highlighting and stuff to do, and honestly I don't know when i'll get around to doing that. This is a side effect of having to rush the army through for some tournaments, and just generally not managing my time well enough. A lot of the models were rushed up to a tabletop standard, as I'd made commitments to take the army to the ETC and couldn't exactly back out of that one and take another army. The wisdom of taking Tomb Kings to the ETC is another matter, and I will cover that in another post.

So now that the ETC is done for the year I have started a new project. The pace of army books this year has been really crazy, which is a great thing. That said it also has me struggling to keep up, I have a WoC army, a Daemon army, a HE army and a DE army (sounds like they're up next). Along with those I've been wanting to redo my lizards for a long time, as they were one of my very first armies. Ideally as each book came out I'd have liked to play with each army, but so far I still haven't played a game using the new daemons, nor the new high elves. I have used the WoC a few times as my WoC army is quite extensive and required minimal new models to use.Tourney results with them have been good, I took out ConVic in June which is the biggest fantasy tournament in Victoria, and had a few other strong results.

Now however it is Lizard time, bigtime. Since getting back from Europe less than a month ago I have purchased almost an entire army.  I'm a huge fan of the new book as it has brought a bit of balance to the lizards, particularly with the toning down of the Slann. I've always enjoyed the Lizardmen fluff and models, and now that I can actually paint with some degree of competence I'm hoping to paint up a really nice looking army. My old lizards were some of the first models I painted, and they suck, like really really suck.

But yeah I'm not even all talk about this project! I've been doing some painting during the last week and have finished my first little cohort of skinks along with a Kroxigor.


Ignore the movement tray, it is a leftover from when I was using Wood Elves and just happened to be a nice size...
Ignore the movement tray, it is a legacy from when I was using Wood Elves and just happened to be about the right size.

Obviously the basing hasn't been done, I'm still deciding exactly how I'm going to approach that. I've very happy with how they've turned out though and I've already started the next batch. Eventually these guys will become a unit of 24 skinks with 3 kroxigor in them, hence painting them in groups of 8 skinks. 10 would make more sense if they were skirmishers, and that will probably be what I do when I get to that stage.

At the moment I am investigating airbrushing and that sort of thing. Every model in the army needs to be basecoated in Liche Purple which means doing it by hand seems a bit inefficient. I've not used an airbrush before however so we'll see how that goes.

That's it for this post then, hopefully I will have one up in the next few days with another 8 skinks to flesh out this unit, after that I'm not sure if I'll finish the unit off or start on something like my Temple Guard or some Ripperdactyls.