The State of my Armies - Mechanicum Edition

This is a fairly recent army, I only started it at Warhammer Fest last year, and it's grown rather quickly, but has also been painted quite quickly too! I think it's my only army where everything has at least one colour on it! It's also the most completed with exactly half the units being fully painted!
The plan is to get this fully painted by the end of the year and hopefully expanded into a full 2000 point list with another unit of Thallax and a few more Castellax with Darkfire cannons.

The State of my Armies - Grey Knight Edition

I started my Grey Knights army when they were revamped for 5th edition. At the time I wasn't aware of how powerful they were, I just loved the sculpts, and the new Dreadknight.

As I knew it was going to be quite a small army I took my time to do a high quality job on the painting front, and started painting every component individually. I think it took me about 3 months to finish five marines! Because of this, the army never really took off and has been languishing.

My GK force also includes Coteaz, and a Chimera, as the plan was to build a Blanchitsu style Inquisitor detachment too, but that's a pipe dream at the moment. Not photographed is the unbuilt Storm Raven, I'm undecided what to do with it at the moment. If there were rules for it in the Forgeworld Heresy books I'd repurpose it!

The main thing I need to do is re-base the force on 32mm bases, and at least get some silver only the Purifier squad!

All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

To my knowledge it started in the recent Stormclaw box set, with a regular power armour marine being put onto a 40mm Terminator base, and the Broodlord thing going on a completely new oval base.

This was followed up with the Blood Angels tactical squad coming out with a brand new 32mm round base. GW have said that it's only an aesthetic choice, and they do make marines look really cool. For ages now the packs of these bases have been going out of stock to order from the website as soon as they've made a batch, but I managed to get my hands on two sets of ten. That's coincided with me working on some Necron Lychguard which just got a new codex, and were shot with the new bases on. I thought I'd give it a go, and I love them. I'll definitely be using them for my marines and select other models going forward.

This lead me on to looking at some of the other models in my collection, specifically my Tau army. The GW XV8 Crisis Suits come with 40mm bases, and with their bulky torsos and skinny little chicken legs, they've always looked top heavy to my eyes. I'd remembered that the Space Marine Centurions came on a new base, a 50mm one, so when I ordered my other ones I grabbed a pack of three to see how they worked out. I'm thinking that it'll be the way to go, they really seem to balance out the models, let me know what you think!

The State of my Armies - Eldar Edition.

Well, the title of this post is a little deceiving. It's not actually an army, those in the know will recognise this as a small allied contingent! The Eldar were my first ever army, before I traded them away for a Genestealer Cult army, and the Wraithguard models have always stood out to me as a classic. So when they re-did them, I had to grab a box just to build and paint!

Aside from needing to finish painting the actual models (I'm not looking forward to doing the gems) I've decided that I no longer like resin bases. Not specifically these ones, they're lovely, I just want all of my armies based in the same way on grey cork type bases.

Maybe down the line I'll expand this into an army in it's own right. I've always loved the Phoenix lords, Asurmen inparticular, and I could probably do with a Wave Serpent to put these guys into, but that's a long way down the line, and assuming that I can finish painting these, the Mymeara paint scheme is quite a challenge for me without an airbrush!

Forge World Mechanicum Krios Tank

This was my second finished model in one month, I'm on a bit of a roll with my Mechanicum force. In game I'm using this as a second Venator, but I fancied owning both models, just for variety. I think that's enough tanks for now, I'll be going back to finishing up my tech thralls next I think, unless I get distracted!

Forge World Mechanicum Krios Venator

I finished this tank towards the middle of January, and it's been on the battlefield twice since then. The strength nine plasma fusil is turning out to be an absolute killer, and it was a really fun and easy kit to put together.

I tried out a little bit of weathering on it, with smoke from the exhausts, chipping and dust down the sides, and I tried out a Tamiya weathering pen on the tracks.

The State of my Armies - Necron Edition

Following on from last weeks post, here's a quick look at how my Necron army is shaping up. To be fair it's probably my most complete army, with only a few units unbuilt, and a handful of models needing to be finished.

The trouble I have with actually getting this army finished is all of the edge highlighting! I went for the classic bright green look, and so it takes forever to painstakingly go around every single edge. By the time I've done an hour or so I'm bored and tired of concentrating too much and just want to cry.

So this year I'll chip away at the army, the list of what I've got to finish is...
5 Lychguard
5 Flayed Ones
Monolith
Command Barge
Ghost Ark (almost there)
A few special characters
Capontek Wraiths
Canoptek Spyders
Canoptek Acanthrites
Night Shroud Bomber (needs washing in dettol, the primer hasn't stuck!)

Actually, now I've listed it that's quite a list, I'd better get cracking!

Tactical Objectives - Initial Thoughts

I guess some of you might be thinking "but Tim, why are you only just talking about this? 7th edition has been out for ages!" and you'd be right. But me and my mate Dean have pretty much only played Horus Heresy for the past two years straight, so we've just been using the missions out of the Forge World books.

We had a game today, and as I was packing up my KR backpack I hunted for my templates. They'd fallen behind a stack of Visions, while I was rummaging I found my pack of tactical objectives cards! So I thought I'd take them along and see how we got on with them. We set out the six objective counters on the board, and rolled for our starting three cards.

The first thing that stuck me was how handy it is to actually have the cards and not needing to write stuff down is a huge help to speeding up our game (something we struggle with!). There seemed to be a fair amount of repetition in the deck, but found the discard function helped with this.

There were only a couple of cards that we didn't have any use for, I think I drew one that had something about psykers, the council of Nikea put the dampeners on that one. The objectives made the game feel very up in the air, neither of us knowing who was really winning or losing until the roll at the end of turn five. This game was eventually won by Dean, who on his last turn got one that was 'get D3 points if you kill or have killed the warlord'. He then proceeded to double out my Magos with the lascannons off his Storm Eagle, four points in one kill gave him the game!

Despite me losing this game was incredible fun, and we'll definitely be using these in many more games. We've got the new Cities of Death Tactical Objectives to try out too that came out in WDW recently. And I've grabbed a few of the datacard sets with each of the 40k releases. There's definite possibility to customise these decks, and in my head I've even started thinking of making my own 30k centric cards!

If you haven't tried them out yet, you definitely should!