Traitors Hate

Greetings all,
So Traitors Hate.  GW Surprised a lot of us with a new Chaos supplement that actually was specific to chaos space marines and not Chaos daemons.  I was at wargamescon when the rumors started to hit.  Of course you dont believe these things until your buddies start sending you pics of the cover of the supplement with Kharn on it.  To say I was excited is an understatement.  Finally GW was going to release something for us long "suffering" chaos space marine players to at least be able to compete with the other armies in the game.  For once, we are finally going to get a Chaos "decurion" and not just a series of formations like we got from the Crimson Slaughter and Black Legion books.  So what did I think about it you may ask?  When I started hearing about the contents I will admit I wasnt thrilled.  Everything seemed just Meh but once I got the book in my greedy little hands, it did something that I didnt anticpate.  It excited the crap out of me.  The formations were good, not great but good.  It allowed us to take out our old models off of the shelf and once again bring them on to the desktop.  These formations really were built with a dark mech/iron warriors frame of mind as we finally got a way to run an army of Oblits, an army of tanks, or an army of daemon engines.  Warpsmiths appear to be the common denominator in these formations which depending on if you ask the internet, just plain sucks.  I fortunately am not one of those naysayers, I love the unit and always bring one or two in my Dark Mech armies.  The fomations also give me something for my nightlords; the raptor talon being just amazing for them.  The core choices appear pretty good as well with the Chaos Warband being one that I cant wait to try as it makes all units ob sec.  Due to this book, I am again putting down my admech, (lol, i know) and working on my Nightlords to get them up to snuff with the new formations.  I also want to see how I can incorporate my Dark Mech with this new book along with the daemon engine pack formation from the black legion book as that is one of my favorites.  Below are my favorites from the book  -

In no particular order

1.  Raptor Talon - We finally get a formation that makes both raptors and most of all warp talons into something that could do well when taken.  The big thing of course is the fact that on deepstriking, you can charge.  This is a huge boon and something not to be overlooked.  The fact that the formation also contains a lord could make this a hard hitting formation.  The fear bonus is just that a bonus that will only come into effect again a 3rd of the armies that you face.

2.  Hellforge Pack -  Another daemon engine formation but one that actually allows you to take up to 5 engines and allows the hellbrute.  The bonuses such as making one engine the alpha engine and giving them a 4+ invul to allowing daemonforge to be used more than once is pretty good.  The warpsmith as the tax is ok, he can repair the engines if need be and adds a fighty character to a unit.  I just wish that it also gave the bonues of allowing an engine to use the warpsmith's BS or WS just like the daemon engine pack but i guess you cant have it all.

3.  Cult of destruction - Finally we get a formation for oblits.  The bonus of allowing the unit to shoot twice is very good but somewhat limiting by the Oblits rules of having to use a different weapon every turn.  If this allowed them to shoot whatever weapon twice, this formation would be amazing.  The other amazing thing of course is the fact that you can take up to 5 units of oblits.  if the formation granted fearless to them or allowed Multilators the abilty to run and this formation would move from good to great.

4.  Terminator Annillilation Force - Just like with the Oblits, we get a terminator only formation of a Chaos lord and 3-5 squads of termies.  This is something I wanted for a while now as it allows me to create a super elite army with tough as nails units.  I know that for a lot of folks, terminators are really subpar but their ability to fight in both the shooting and assault phase makes them very flexible.  Their ability to be armed with anti-tank and anti-troop weapons also helps and a 2+ save is nothing to sniff at.  Their best ability however is their ability to deepstrike which combined with the formations targetted for annillilation rule makes the formation a great choice.

If anything this book really brought out the excitement of using your old chaos armies.  Sure this book doesnt make them top tier but at the very least gives chaos players more options and hopefully will aid in encouraging more old chaos players to dig out their old armies.  

Fun with Ad Mech

Hi guys, ok so yes I havent been following my own advice with trying to get an article done weekly, My bad for sure.  At the end of the day as always I blame work and life in general.  Its been almost 5 weeks since my last post and in that time I got a Rogue Trader tourney in and a couple of small games in as well.  LVO 2017 is fast approaching and the plan this year is to bring the glory of my chaos armies, my Nightlords.  Our resident Nightlords teammate wont be making LVO next year and so I will be playing the Nightlords in his place.  The Dark Mech is fun but the army especially in the narrative format suffers from being a little slow or shall i say being too balanced.  With the team aspect, its more beneficial to build armies that cater to one style of play and help coordinate with your team.  But enough of that, the title of my post is havjng fun with ad mech and so I want to talk about my experience with playing my new ad mech army. 
When GW dropped the ad mech as a playable army I was extatic.  Finally I can play a fully realized ad mech army with its own unique units, rules, etc.  I am hoping that the next step will be for GW to release Dark Mech which will be fantastic.  I started collecting my ad mech army over the course of 8 months starting small and eventually collecting enough to run a war convocation.  I havent built the full war con just yet focusing on building my kastellan robots, kataphron destroyers, tech preist dominus, infiltrators, and skittarii rangers and vanguard.  Along with my knight atrapos I was able to have enough to field a nice little 1850 list for a Rogue tournament in my local area which was first major outing with the army and wow was it fun.  The army plays like no other with tough units that can put the hurt on units.  In one game just a unit of 3 kataphron destroyers put like 15 wounds on a blood thirster and took him out like a chump before he could do any thing.  I ended up going 1-1-1 which was ok but my lost was to a space marine battle company with his ob sec I really couldnt compete.  I killed a lot of his army but all he needed to do was have scoring units in the right places and since the mission was objectives there was nothing I could have done.

I plan on bringing the same army for the next Rogue Tournament which will be in a couple of days.  I am hoping that with the experience that the first tourney provided me as well as the couple of practice games im able to get in, I will have a better outing.  Speed seems to be a weakness though and with the ITC, a fast army will help in winning the all important maelstrom missions.  I love the Knight Atrapo but I might downgrade him to just a standard knight warden so that I can possibly fit either another Kastellan robot squad or a squad or squads of infiltrators.  These units will hopefully allow me to flood the field with more units and have a better chance of winning some objectives.   We shall see however..