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..

Games Workshop and why I love you so...

Sup guys.. Right on the heels of my last post regarding Khorne Daemonkin, I wanted to go ahead and start talking about something else that I believe Games Workshop is doing right.  After many years and wishes, GW has finally graced us with the presence of an actual adeptus mechanicus army complete with multiple codexes and several different kits that not only look awesome but actually fit the motif for mechanicus.  About a year ago, several internet celebs actually spoke about GW bringing out several mini armies complete with their own codexes and mini's.  When I first heard of this I thought that this was more wish listing but now after seeing Harliquins first, Skittarri and now Mechanicus cult, we are seeing that these rumors are actually coming true.  As you guys know, I am a huge mechanicus fan and these new kits and rules are a dream come true.  Yes I prefer a Dark bent to my mechanicum forces as evident by my "dark mechanicus" themed army but now we actually have rules and kits to actually play mechanicum forces.  Everything that has come out thus far have been amazing except for the old school robots which I am still deciding on if I like them or not.  With Skitarri we got the common mech foot soldier with the vanguard and ranger kits, a "stalker" tank, and some elite units that fit the theme so well that they seem as if they were always part of the 40K "model" universe.  This week we see the release of the cult mechanicus which included more troop choices, some more melee units with the electro-priests, and finally an HQ unit with the Dominus.  Of all of the new models I have to admit that my favorites are the Stygian walkers, the rangers, and the new Dominus.  The Dominus just reeks mechanicus with his many limbs, power ax, and servo skulls attached to him.  I am definitely going to be picking him up as soon as I can, paint him up in my dark mechanicus colors and have him join my arch magos in my dark mech army as either another warpsmith or sorcerer.  With the great rules and models however I do have some complaints.  My number one as you have probably guessed is what happened to the chaos love with these new units?  We all know that the dark mechancius exists and GW should have allowed chaos players to take any of these mechanicus models as battle brothers or at least as allies of convenience.  A new army list that allows you to take daemon engines as heavy support along with a dominus or warpsmith as your HQ would have been amazing.  For now all of us chaos players can do is to take them as count as and try to fit them in our armies after we have chaosified them a bit.  My second complaint is whats the deal with bringing out 2 books for these releases?  All of these units could have been put into the same book thus eliminating the need to have to wait for each book to come out or forcing us to have to carry 2 books every time we decide to play the army, of course the big compliant is more of a money one as even though these books are cheaper than full sized codexes, your still shelling out almost 70 bucks to just start playing the army.

I do have hope in forgeworld though, last week at their open day event we saw a chaos knight shown.  It appears to be an upgrade kit to the standard GW knight kit like their Magera kit that came out a couple of months ago.  From the early pictures, the kit looks pretty detailed and will look great in any chaos army.  Of course their are many out there that converted our knights to have a more chaos feel to them and with this release means is that we will finally get rules for chaos knights.  I am really hoping we dont have to wait for an imperial armor book for these rules however and they release the rules as a free download similar to what they have done with several of their kits.  

In the world of 30K, I am awaiting the arrival of the Dark Mechanicus.  They have already graced us with a Dark Mechanicus character kit which I absolutately love built and painted for my dark mech army but what I am really waiting for is models for the rank and file.  Dark Mech troops, possessed Thanators, etc as well as the rules to use any of the daemon engines that we have models for already such as maulerfiends, forgefiends, etc.  As I stated earlier, GW we would be happy with you just allowing all new mechancius units to be taken in Chaos armies as battle brothers.  This would go a long way to rejuevenate chaos for a lot of players and make people like me extremely happy.