January Army List Challenge

Welcome to the first Army List Challenge of 2010! This one taps in to the Tyranid feeling that abounds this month.

Overview of the Challenge
Your team has been tasked with landing on a Tyranid target planet that is in the early stages of infestation. All around, there are flying tyranids that are mobbing and killing the local fauna (i.e. gargoyles, flying hive tyrants, etc.). Soon, there will be more tyranid life forms present on this doomed world, but for now its still early days. If you can capture the Tyranid digestion pool (an objective), then you will delay the inevitable for a little while longer and enable other parts of your army to retrieve important artifacts elsewhere on the planet's surface.

The game is a standard mission: Capture and Control with a spearhead deployment (table quarters). You opposition features a tyranid list in which nearly all of the models are able to fly. That means lots of gargoyles!

Rules.
(1) Design a 1500 points army list for this mission from any codex.
(2) Post your army lists as a comment to this posting and suggest why they're well suited to this mission. In particular, specify why they'll be good at tackling a large mob of flying tyranids and well-able to capture both objectives despite the large numbers of the opposition and their ability to swoop in at the last moment.
(3) On Jan 21st 2010, I'll start a voting poll that will be open for 1 week to vote for what Warpstone Flux readers consider to be the "most effective army list that also best articulates the theme" (whatever readers interpret that to mean) out of all entrants.
(4) Winner will be tallied and announced on Jan 28th.

Remember, the real aim of these challenges is to help others design effective army lists that are both themed and effective. There are no prizes beyond honour and kudos!

Painted Possessed Chaos Marine

When I sat down to paint up my possessed chaos marine that I'd assembled earlier, I was thinking that perhaps I'd do another Night Lords colour scheme. Hence, the basecoat on this chap started out as blue.

However, my previous attempts at Night Lords colours still hung over me (I wasn't 100 per cent happy with it!). So, instead of looking at that model -- or indeed, looking at any picture I had of a Night Lords colour scheme -- I decided to just paint the miniature how I thought it should be.

After washing the basecoat several times in blue, I applied progressively lighter blue tones, interspaced with several more blue washes. The ridges of some of the most prominent surfaces are almost white in colour. But I'm very happy with the level of blending here. I actually took my time for once and painted slowly, and am very pleased with the outcome of the skin (armour?) tone.

The contrast colour for the should pad edges (etc.) was done in bleached bone. This may seem at odds with the photograph, but then I applied a deep was of chestnut ink to created a slightly rusty / bronze colour. I think this really accentuates the blueness of the main armour.

As can also be seen from the shoulder pad, I've carefully gone around the edge of the main pad with space wolves grey (using a treble zero brush). I'm yet to decide which chapter or legion this chap belongs to, hence I left the shoulder pad blank in the iconography department.

The base was painted in browns and creams to suggest broken ruins, but not so bright as to detract from the main paint job. Final highlighting on the miniature included dotting the eyes and the bolts around the armour in a slightly off-white colour.

White Dwarf and Exchange Rates

Happy New Year!

I've been away for a while -- visiting the UK for the first time in several years to see family and work with distant colleagues more closely. I've just got back Down Under and am a bit jet lagged! On another note, this year will see some changes for me as I'm taking up a new job soon and moving house.

Whilst I was in the UK, I visited a few old haunts and several Games Workshop stores to generally have a look around. As well as getting a good peek at the new Tyranid range (which I'm very excited about; despite being primarily a chaos player -- particularly the plastic gargoyles...!!), the difference in prices compared to Australia was also painfully obvious.

Let me illustrate this by comparing White Dwarf prices. Here in Australia, I just picked up WD361 today for AUD 11.95. Whilst I was in the UK, I picked up the previous one for UKP 4.50. Today's exchange rate is about 0.56 UK pence per Aussie dollar. So: I effectively just spent UKP 6.69 on WD361...!

Since exchange rates have been on my mind recently, here's a mini-list of White Dwarf prices for a number of different countries and currencies (apologies if I missed out your favourite currency!) and that same price in Australian dollars (AUD) using the exchange rate at the time of writing. Just to remind ourselves: WD costs AUD 11.95 in Australia.

UK: Cost = UKP 4.50; = AUD 8.04
USA: Cost = USD 9.00; = AUD 10.11
Canada: Cost = CD 10.00; = AUD 10.58
Europe: Cost = Eur 7.00; AUD = 11.23

As with most of last year, I reckon I'll be ordering in most of my Games Workshop products from the UK due to the exchange rate!

Summer

Dear Warpstone Flux Readers,

I'm taking my annual break from blogging over the Summer -- the Southern Hemispheric Summer that is. Therefore this will be my last posting until January 2010.

I hope you've all enjoyed the postings that have appeared here over the course of the year -- I've got a great deal of useful feedback from the FtW group. Many thanks!!!

To be clear: I'm not leaving blogging, I'm just going on holiday and taking a break!
See you next year and hope that you all have a happy and safe holiday season. :-)

Causing TOO MANY wounds?!

Today, I'd like to take a moment to talk about an issue that might affect a number of people's games. That is the issue of causing too many wounds in melee.

What? Causing too many wounds! Are you serious?

Why yes. Here's a situation that has happened to me, not once, but twice over this past year. Your opponent is fielding space marines or chaos space marines -- all with a 3+ save. On the other hand, you and I are fielding chaos daemons (example army list here). To be more precise, I'm going to talk about a squad daemonettes in particular, as this is the context that it happened in. Although I've talked about the relative merits of daemonettes before, the key to this particular situation is to note that daemonettes have the rending special ability and can therefore by-pass the marine's 3+ save with some fortuitous die rolling.

After having a lot (well ... a round or two, at any rate) of hand-to-hand combat, there are only a few miniatures left on both sides. Let's suppose that the opponent has two marines left, and the daemon player has several daemonettes remaining.

If our daemonettes manage to hit the marines a few times and then go on to cause 2 rending wounds, then there is assuredly only 1 possible result: 2 marine casualties.

But consider this. If our daemonettes cause an additional "normal" wound, then the two marines can allocate the wounds how they like. Unless my opponents and I have completely mis-read the hand-to-hand combat rules, the sensible opponent should allocate 2 rending wounds to one model (meaning 1 automatically dead marine) and the "normal" wound to the second marine. Chances are that the second marine will then make his ordinary 3+ save and survive. Hence by causing more wounds, we have placed ourselves in a worse situation than would have happened if we had only caused 2 full rending wounds....!

So as a chaos daemons player, I now tend to take daemonettes in slighter larger squads than I have been doing. If I'm going to cause more wounds than required, then I want to make sure that I cause many, many, many more wounds than are required rather than just a pesky extra wound or two. Perhaps a longer term solution would be for the next core rules re-write to explicitly talk of allocating "no-save" wounds before other wounds? (Although I'd be totally impressed if a GW staff writer was reading this and took notice!)

Shadow Sword: Part V. The Main Weapons

Having decided that I wanted to be able to field both the Shadow Sword and Storm Lord variants of this tank, I needed to be able to readily swap the main weapons around.With the Storm Lord, this is easy. The Vulcan Mega Bolter is able to slip in and out of the weapon housing with relative ease. For the Shadow Sword, however, the Volcano Cannon is not able to do so.

This is because the bit where the Volcano Cannon connects to the main weapon housing is supplied as a lock-in-place bit. To get around this, I have cut out a slot at the rear of the volcano cannon so that it can slide over the nub contained in the main weapon housing (visible just behind the magnet that holds the reversible hull bit in place). This should suffice to enable me to swap the main weapons over as required. However, I am considering further magnetizing the rear of the volcano cannon so that it doesn't sag due to gravity.