2nd 7th ed game and beyond...

Hey guys, well I finished playing my 2nd and 3rd game of 7th and in a word I am inspired.  7th edition has been everything that I wanted giving me my share of laughs, technicality, and most important fun.  Playing in a league definitely helps with this as playing at my buddy's house has its advantages namely alcohol, but also food, and a form of comradre that cant be replicated at a gamestore so easily.  With every wargame, its the community of friends that will determine the success of a game in an area.  With the closing of the gamestore that I played 40K at, games came hard to come by.  In relation warmahordes had a huge explosion of players lately and so I stared playing that as my way of getting my wargaming fun in.  Warmahordes is a tremendous game and something I will play more of whenever I get a chance as I have a great gaming group and thus never longing for a game.  But 40k for a couple of months was a dying game in my area which was sad for me.  So definitely I feel lucky that I have found a league to get my 40k fix.  In my next series of games I did find units that were allstars and that vehicles are still susceptible to be glanced out if you do throw several medium to high strength shots, (looking at you Tau/Necrons).  The definite allstar that I have seen are chariots especially the Catacomb command barge aka the douche canoe (thank you 11th company for a great name).  The fact that it has a 2+ 3++ in the shooting phase, can get up due to everliving, make it a very formidable unit.  The fact that right now it can sweep zooming fliers is a little over the top.  Hopefully this will get faqed soon as I do find this a little game breaking. 

So in my 2nd game I faced the wrath of the Necrons which is one of the older armies that have stayed as one of the top armies in these early days of 7th edition.  They have great transports, somewhat resilient troops, high leadership, and above all great shooting.  Having an entire army full of AV 13 vehicles facing you is pretty tough especially if you are not prepared for it.  On top of that 2 douche canoes that are no slouches in close combat makes for a great army.  The game was a great one in an atmosphere of great friends, good beer, and awesome homemade salsa.  It was close but in the end the Necrons defeated my 3 Juggerlord CC list 5-4 in an emperor's will, vanguard strike game.  The game was definitely going my opponent's way until about turn 3 when the power of the 3 juggerlords became apparent.  Huge disappointment in my CSM squads due to yet again morale issues.  They didnt get sweep due to necron lords having low initiative but really, a 20 man unit should be able to put down a necron lord in a command barge.  They did snapshot a necron flyer down though which was cool and I had 2 csm that were left from a 12 man unit melta bomb an annihilation barge to death before getting shot down by a warrior unit next turn.  The game was close and I still could have pulled it off if the game ended on turn 5 or 7.  Alas it ended on turn 6 and with it the juggerlords lost their first game of 7th edition.  The juggerlords still proved to me that close combat is still viable as long as you have great terrain and amongst all at least one line blocking terrain piece.

Week 3 40K escalation league, some more thoughts..

With the 3rd phase of the escalation league come and gone, my daemons are still going strong. At the 1000 points level, I wanted to add in another big threat to the army that is both scary and imposing. I decided to go with a Nurgle daemon prince with wings, noxious touch, cloud of flies, and iron hide. Expensive when it comes to Chaos Space Marine daemon princes for sure but with the ability to wound anything on a 2+ regardless of toughness and getting both defensive and offensive grenades, makes him quite a threat on the battlefield. So far my daemons are undefeated in the league with my latest opponent being a tyranid player. Great player who I wish I can get to play more games with, this game was just plain fun. He brought to the a field a tooled up hive tyrant with 2 guards, a big squad of genestealers with broodlord, 2 big squads of warriors, and a tooled up Trygon prime. We rolled capture and control and dawn of war with me going first. The game went on to Turn 5 with me winning the game 1-0 as I had killed all of his scoring units by turn 4. Props to the Tyranids though, I underestimated his genestealers who ended up taking out my horrors (of course) but also a squad of bloodcrushers. I had to multi-assault the genestealers with another bloodcrusher squad, my deamonettes, and my daemon prince to finally take them out. My deamon prince then went on a tear who with my fiends ended up taking out both warrior squads and his Hive tyrant who had a tyrant guard with him!! He just couldnt wound the daemon prince as I kept making my 5up invul saves. His Trygon finally got into combat with him and at the end of the game had put 2 wounds on him. I had the Trygon with 3 wounds left and probably would have killed him off if it had gone one more turn. More definitely happened in this game but as it happend several weeks ago, I forgot a lot of what happened, suffice to say my opponent and I had a great time which in the end, is all I am truly looking for though it nice when you win... lol. My daemons are still undefeated in this league but with the local FLGS closing (I am truely sad about this)it seems as if the league will end at this point. This brings me to my next thoughts or thought, (whatever) and the timing of this closure. I had wished that the store (GW store by the way) had stayed open to account for 6th edition as I had hoped they would do an all night gaming session to kick off 6th edition like it did with 5th. The closing of this store will also impact where we gather and play as the only other gamestore in town tends to close a little bit early. The good news is we and a bunch of the guys are busy building tables at our homes so we can keep the community alive and maybe host tourneys, etc. I would have loved to finish the escalation league and have a complete 2000 pt daemon army painted so now its on me to continue the momentum to get this done. With 6th edition on the horizon who knows where my attention will be. Pics are of my finished Daemon army at 1500 points, (2000 of course but not finished painted yet). Let me know what you guys think.

40K Escalation League Week 2 game

Sorry for not posting in a while, life has been very hectic lately. The 2nd phase started 3 weeks ago however I couldnt make it to the FLGS due to my wife being super sick with the Flu and other issues that came up. I took this opportunity to fine tune my list and to get some more painting done. I opted to change out my list in favor of dropping out 1 squad of horrors and adding in a squad of fiends of slaanesh to give more anti-tank ability as well as giving me another fast unit to chase down those speedy opponents. So my 750 pts list looks like the following -
Total Roster Cost: 749
 HQ: Herald of Tzeentch 1 Herald of Tzeentch, DGT: Master of Sorcery, Bolt of Tzeentch, Chariot of Tzeentch
Elite: Bloodcrushers of Khorne 3 Bloodcrushers of Khorne, Instrument of Chaos
Elite: Bloodcrushers of Khorne 3 Bloodcrushers of Khorne
Elite: Fiends of Slaanesh 4 Fiends of Slaanesh
Troops: Pink Horrors of Tzeentch 8 Pink Horrors of Tzeentch 1 The Changeling
Troops: Daemonettes of Slaanesh 9 Daemonettes of Slaanesh

I played my game against an Eldar shooty list that included both a fire prism, a small squad of Dark Reapers which I havent seen in a while, a striking scorpion squad, an Autruch, a squad of pathfinders, and 2 squads of dire avengers. I won first turn but opted to go second. My opponent setup his pathfinders away from his army in terrain (shocker) and moved his units up. His pathfinders were isolated, I dropped my horrors, my 2 blood crusher squads, and my herald around them and had the horrors open up on the pathfinders. My opponent thinking his 2+ save would save him didnt know what to say when I told him to make 18 saves. He lost 3 of the pathfinders making the squad pretty useless with just 2 guys remaining. My Herald took a shot at the fire prism and with luck on my hand, rolled 2 6's in a roll to destroy it!! I told my opponent that this was just a lucky shot as I had glanced it, he failed his cover save, and I rolled 2 sixs due to the halo fields. It didnt matter at this point as he was really discouraged and so the game was mine. His striking scorpions actually did some damage and took out one of my blood crusher squads and his squad of dark reapers were a bane to me as they kept putting wound upon wound on my units. We decided to call it on turn 5 as all he had left was his dark reapers and their was no way for him to come back as he was down 7 to 1 in kill points. The addition of the fiends really improved my list; having such a fast unit that hits as hard as they do really set my list apart. In the coming weeks, I might want to add the other squad of horrors to give me more shooting as my list has changed to a more close combat oriented list which might prove to be difficult to play once we get to the higher point values. Anti-tank is definitely a must for me as I mentioned in my earlier posts, I might go with minimum squads of horrors with bolt and another deamon prince with bolt to provide me with the anti-tank I will need.

40K Escalation League - Week 2

As I have 2 weeks to decide on what I want to do for the 2nd phase of the league, I am still trying to decide on what changes I can make to my list. As of right now, I am thinking of taking the following -
HQ - Herald of Tzeentch
Chariot, Bolt, Master of Sorcery

Elite - (3) Bloodcrushers
Fury of Khorne

Elite - (3) Bloodcrushers
Fury of Khorne

Troops - (8) Horrors of Tzeentch
Changling

Troops - (8) Horrors of Tzeentch

Troops - (10) Daemonettes of Slaanesh

So basically I am adding another squad of bloodcrushers and another unit of horrors to my 500 point list to get it to 750. I might still need to tweak some of the points but bottom line this is what the list will look like. I plan on testing this list in the next couple of days or so to see how it handles the other lists in the league.

I think the biggest weakness I see is the lack of long range anti-tank; I only have one model with the ability to fire a long range anti-tank shot and in some of my early test games testing the 500 pts list, I fell victim to not being able to take out vehicles reliably.

As the point cost goes up, this is going to continue to be a huge problem especially once the AV 14's start popping out (Landraiders). For the next sequences of the league, I will probably switch out to minimum squads of Horrors with bolt and deamon princes for now, I might try out screamers once we get to the 1250 or 1500 point range. Now for some updated pics, I have finished the first blood crushers squad, my first horror squad, my herald, and 2 squads of daemonettes. I also finished building my 2nd bloodcrusher squad which includes my conversion of Skulltaker riding a juggernaut. Let me know what you guys think...

40k Escalation League

On top of all of the madness that I have to do in terms of painting, our local FLGS manager decides to hold a 40k Escalation league. The league will start at 500 points and we will be adding 250 points every 2 or 3 weeks until we get to 2000 points. The real great thing about these types of leagues is the fact that everything needs to be painted and so encourages players to paint their armies. I love this as it will help me with getting another of my armies fully painted that I have laying around as well as allowing me the opportunity to try new options. I was going to do my death company army but saw that 2 or 3 other players are going to do Blood Angels so I decided to pull out my half painted daemon army for this; also, nobody was doing Daemons which made this decision a lot easier for me as I wanted to do an army that nobody was doing. As the points level for this starts at 500, I really couldn't go with my go to guy, Kairos, however I wanted to stay with a tzeentch HQ. For the points, Daemonic heralds are a steal. Going with this idea, I am taking a Herald of Tzeentch on a chariot with Bolt and Master of Sorcery giving me a fire platform that can both move 12 inches and put out 4 shots a turn. As he is considered a jetbike as well, I can turbo boost him to contest objectives if I need to on the last turn and with 5 wounds, should be hard to kill. Accompanying my HQ will be 3 Bloodcrushers to provide my army with a hard as nails unit that can compete with the best assault units in the game. This unit not only serves as my hammer, but due to how scary they are perceived to be it gives you that psychological edge. Running out the 500 points I started with going with 2 units of 8 or 9 horrors and thus re ligating my list as a shooty one as horrors put out a lot of firepower.

After several test games however, the list was being outclassed by armies that had high mobility, great armor saves, or ones that could tie up or kill all of my blood crushers as my horrors hit like wet noodles in combat. To change it up I decided to go with one squad of horrors with the changling upgrade as the ability he has for 5 points can be game changing if it happens and a squad of 10 daemonettes. Having 2 squads that can dice up the enemy in a 500 point army list has paid in spades as the daemonettes helped me win all of my next test games that I played with them. Their high initiative, fleet, and offensive and defense grenades, and boat load of attacks makes them a real threat on the battle field. Of course, they are a glass hammer so if I roll badly or if they get caught out in the open, they fall over like blades of grass. My first weeks opponent was a Space Wolves player that had a wolf guard battle leader in terminator armor, a 10 man grey hunter pack in a drop pod, and a 10 or 12 man blood claws pack. We rolled up kill points with pitched battle and he decided not to bring on his HQ and blood claws pack as he was afraid of my deep striking units.

I believed this cost him the game as it allowed me to overwhelm his unsupported drop pod squad with my blood crushers, horrors, and Herald. He did manage to shoot my horrors on his initial drop reducing me to just 2 horrors however my bloodcrushers got a turn of not getting shot and butchered the squad after my herald shot them up. I won the game 2 to 0 and with it bonus points for having a fully painted army. I have 2 weeks now to add to my list to get it to 750 points so I am thinking of adding another squad of 3 Bloodcrushers and to re-add my other horrors squad to my list. I might go with a budget Deamon prince in order to get some more Anti-tank but we shall see. Pics are of my daemons about a week out before my first league game, I will post more updated pics in my next post. Time to get more painting done...