The seven 'P's

I am away from home on a course starting on Thursday next week, nine days including the weekend, so I will be pretty much incommunicado. I'm building up a block of troops to take with me for the week, and I reckon an hour an evening should see me through them all in that time.

So what have I got?

• Two squads of Wargames Factory Shocktroopers (EY2 and EY3); a total of sixteen lasguns and a couple of grenade launchers to go with the sergeants I painted a couple of weeks ago. Only one in the image above; the other squad was hiding somewhere... 
• A veteran squad of Games Workshop Cadians (V08) with Pig Iron packs and heads; a sergeant, three grenade launchers and six lasguns, and also a missile launcher stand.
• Two more veterans (V03) to allow me to swap the heavy bolter out of the previous squad.

The interesting bits are the missile launchers (two to a base; I want them for Kill Team, and they have the 'relentless' USR, which I reckon can be represented by extra missile tubes) and the sergeant, who has an Empire torso to replace the Cadian one.

I also played around to make cheap plasma guns for the next veteran squad; this is made from a bolter and a plasma pistol. [edit] And here is the original source of this conversion - thanks 'Other Kevin'. [/edit] Looks pretty good to me; I just need to wait for my next delivery of Pig Iron heads and some more backpacks before I do the rest of the squad. The only unfortunate thing is that you have to use the lasgun arms where the left hand is on the arm and not the gun, so you only get two suitable pairs per box; still, it's not as if I'm short of arms...

Oh yes - the seven 'P's - Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Pi$$ Poor Performance.

Veterans under construction

It's been an odd week or so, but I have managed to get the first of my veteran squads constructed. They're made from GW Cadians, with heads and backpacks from Pig Iron. The heads fit pretty well, though I have drilled and pinned them to the bodies. The packs were a bit more awkward - I trimmed the little block off the back of the Cadians' torso, and joined the pieces together with a superglue-greenstuff-superglue sandwich. Seems pretty solid. I'm still not 100% happy with the heavy bolter loader's left arm; it may be removed and replaced. Still, that's one half of my Kill Team for the club tournament starting in September.

I also finished the hack-job on their Chimera; I have moved the turret backwards about an inch. Which left me with a hole where a hatch should go; I looked through the bits box, but I seem to be pretty much out. I have been using my spares on the KV2/Ragnarok tanks, which has left me short. Okay, we can fix this; one RTV rubber mould made, several grams of resin mixed, one never-ending supply of hatches created. It's pretty indistinguishable once you have primed the lot, which is the stage I have reached now.

I have also started to put together another building - this is the 'Bell Tower of Lost Souls' - I have still got to add a bell, but you get the idea. This time it's a 6"x6" base; if you look back through the blog to find my terrain mat, you can see where it's intended to go. The pencilling on the base is to let me line up the paving slabs, which is the next job.

And finally, a Land Raider I've been playing with for a while. It was an Ebay purchase, very cheap (about £8 including p&p), and came with quite a mess in places, especially the sides. I constructed coffin sponsons from plastic card and attached what was left of the lascannons to them; it's not perfect but it's more acceptable than it was. I still need to paint the heraldry - a big Dark Angel winged sword across the hull, and the symbols on the sponsons - but it's basically there.

Oh yes, my Chaos are a Fallen army - I started painting DAs under Rogue Trader when they were black, and when I got back into the game, I just stuck with it.

Not a bad haul for a week and a half, really...

Never give up...

I played another couple of games of the 40k Kill Team (40KT from now on) mission on Monday night. One that has stuck in my mind was a game of my Daemons against Mike's Orks. Orks are a really tough army in 40KT; not only can they take masses of figures to bump up their breakpoint, but they can take heavy weapon squads (Lootas) as well. Anyway, Mike's list was something like ten grots and a runtherd, ten orks, four lootas - it was certainly 25 figures, so he needed to lose 13 before he started taking leadership tests. My list comprised five bloodletters and seven horrors, so I would be taking tests after losing six.

Things started badly, I lost a couple of horrors very quickly, and I was down to seven figures before I had closed for combat. Horrors can shoot, but their ballistic skill isn't very high, and the cover saves were costing me kills. Anyway, I got into combat and started to do some damage, but not being able to consolidate into combat is painful and leaves you exposed to massed firing.

To cut a long story short, and to finally get to the point, I was down to a single horror, backing off and throwing out shots at the orks. I had just taken my 4th leadership test (at a -3, no less) when I managed to kill another grot to bring Mike down to twelve figures remaining. Of course, Mike failed his leadership test straight away, and I won the game... despite me having only one model on the table, and him having as many models left as I started the game with!

And the moral of this story? Never give up, and always keep your eye on the objective. Mike could have easily won the game by dropping back out of range and letting the leadership tests take me out of the game. Instead he kept pushing forward, allowing me to target his grots and eventually fluke a win.

We have been enjoying 40KT, to the extent that we are going to have a tournament after the summer; everyone submits two lists (though I think there were going to be some additional restrictions on vehicles and monstrous creatures) and plays all the other players...

Mission: Kill Team

We played a few games of the Kill Team mission from GW's new mission book down the club last night; my new scenery got a quick run-out and all was good fun. I did intend to take my camera along, but somehow it slipped my mind at the last moment, so these rather poor efforts were snapped on my phone.





The tanks were acting as scenery, and did quite a good job of keeping my troops alive! I went with Imperial Guard (though I don't have any troops yet, so they were WW1 German figures. The list I took was:

Veteran Squad Alpha:
1 x Sgt with plasma pistol (feel no pain)
4 x lasgun
1 x heavy bolter (relentless)
1 x flamer
2 x grenade launcher

Veteran squad Beta:
1 x Sgt with laspistol
4 x lasgun
1 x heavy bolter (slow and purposeful)
1 x flamer
2 x grenade launcher

That gives me move-and-shoot on the heavy weapons and the specials are assault weapons anyway, so this is a quite mobile army. In hindsight, I could have happily replaced the flamers with more grenade launchers (S6 is very effective), but they did well enough.

We had fun; nice scenery helps, but the fact that we could play three games in an evening made for a nice change of pace. I think we'll play again...