The new direction of Games Workshop

I am back from a wonderful break with the family up in Scarborough. A refreshing holiday finished off with a visit to Warhammer World where I attended the Warhammer 40,000k open day with my lad. This was a great day and besides buying a Horus Heresy mug, the new ork codex and some paint I had some interesting discussions with all manner of Games Workshop employees.

2 things came across in these chats. The first is the new release schedules for miniatures, which I shall come to in a moment. The second is the type of game they are trying to create. This has been discussed on the web for a while, but to hear it from somebody at GW confirms what a lot of people thought.

Basically 40k as a competitive system is dead. Anything that resembles game balance for any unit is likely to be more luck than judgement on GW's part. They have published a rule set designed for people to have fun with and less about which armies are more or less powerful for any given points costs. Looking back this was probably inevitable. With such a complex game system that has so many factions it was increasingly difficult to avoid codex creep or the must have unit in any particle codex. With the advent of supplements and data slates the task was impossible.

I see this as a good thing, and I go to a fair amount of tournaments. I have never played Apocalypse, mainly due to not having the time to spend 8 or 9 hours playing a game. Plus I only have relatively small collections of any one particular army. But the opening up of Lords of War and also the potential that unbound armies gives means I can play with virtually anything made for Apoc in my normal 40k games. I can still play tournament style games and I can see organizers banning unbound lists and restricting lord of war selections. It also means I can bring a full army of storm boyz to a game if I wanted, with my opponents consent of course.

This last bit is important, and should be remembered. This is a game of 2 people and you both need to agree your rules of engagement before hand. I would never dream of turning up with a Stompa unannounced to my opponent at either of the gaming clubs I attend. It would be impolite to expect somebody to cope with such a mammoth vehicle with no warning. As it happens I am using Big Brian, as the Stompa is known is my house, next week against an Eldar army, which should be immense fun, although I expect him to get cratered early on by the Wraith knight on the other side of the table.

Now onto the first point in this blog entry, the release schedules. I would say that we will be seeing many more releases of both new miniatures and rules. The sculpters have been given a much free hand in what they design apparently. Once a miniature is into design, the games developers write rules. Previously this would all be done as a codex release. This is no longer the case and we can expect White Dwarf rule updates for individual models (I suspect these will also be available as data slate and formation rules) as they are released.

The one downside to this is we may be expecting less regular releases of codexes (This wasn't confirmed but was hinted at as a possibility). But if all armies are getting regular releases of new models, new dexes are less important.

So GW has changes the way it works and how they envisage 40k to be played. Only time will tell if they have got it right, but I do hope they have as I really love this new ethos and I am very excited about what will be produced over the next year.

Next time its back to the Nurgledar army and some pictures of my Wraith Beasts.

Planning the next step of Deamonhood

I was actually wrong last week about my Deamons. They can actually win. An entire round of shooting from a very shooty Dark Eldar army resulted in a lost Beast of Nurgle. The Grimoir of True Names and Endurance make for a very resilient squad when applied to Beasts.

My Nurgle Wraith Knight had its first outing since its build was completed. It did fairly well but once again the overly powerful haywire grenades did him in. It was a close Relic game and my superior survivability saw me through to the end. Surrounding the objective with Plague bearers in 4+ area terrain with 5+ feel no pain was enough to keep them in the game. I will be hard pressed to beat anything with a flyer but thats for another day.

Now as far as figures go. I have no pictures to show. Its been a bit hectic with one thing or another, but I have managed to make some great progress on my beasts. There are a number of bits to finish off but I hope to have them built by the end of the week. I have also put together quite quickly a squad of 10 plague bearers. This is mainly so I do no have to use so many proxies in my games. The quicker I can get them built the better (only 20 more to convert).

The plan is to build and convert 10 guardians to complete a 20 deamon unit, get 10 further Dark Eldar Kabalite warriors to make the wyches another full 20 deamon strong unit. They are the next on my to do list. The final pieces are 3 Heralds of Nurgle (1 spare in case of the super possession from the warp storm table) and a Great Unclean One converted from a wraith lord.

The final piece to the army will probably be another squad of 10 plagues bearers in case of a 12 on the warp storm table. So in all I need to build or buy another 34 models including spares  or  23 not including spares. My aim for a completed army by November may actually be possible.

A nurgle Knight is born!

So after a weekend of finishing off my Knight of Nurgle is complete. I need to get some better pictures together but I have actually made a short video to try and show it off. I'm not sure how well it works but I'll link to it anyway.



Generally I am not sure how well the Deamon army I am building is actually going to do in games. Its slow nature and low ranged damage potential means it just gets hammered before it can get over the board. The Soul grinder is the number one priority for all anti tank weapons. Zero anti air cover outside of the soul grinder means that's once its gone I am very exposed.

For all the chat deamon psychics breaking the game in 7th edition, I have not fund this. Even with 3 of them in my army I can very rarely get more than 2 or 3 powers off a turn, and I have periled so many times in the few games I have played.

Over time I will improve my ability with the army but I think mono builds are unworkable and should be only attempted if you don't mind having very hard fought battles that you are likely to loose. It should be noted I have only played Eternal War scenarios so far. I may try Maelstrom of War at some point but I have heard bad things about it so I shall wait and see.

The rest of the week will consist of working on my Beasts of Nurgle. I hope to have the conversion work done on these by the next time I post here. I should also have a few pictures of the Nurgle Knight. Oh and if you have name suggestions for the the knight let me know. Currently refering to him as 'Knight of Nurgle' is a bit long winded.

Time to revive the blog

It looks like I have been a little slack in posting here in the last couple of years, but its time to revive the blog. Maybe even attract some readers.

So a lot has happened since I last said anything on here. My ork army was completed and has competed in a couple of Throne of Skulls tournaments. I have got 'Prophet of the Waaagh' in 2 of these (best ork player for those who don't know). I also won Best Army at one of these. This is possible my greatest moment gaming wise and something I probably won't be able to surpass. I know I am not a Golden Deamon standard painter so winning this for my Mexian Waaagh Nids is something I am very proud of.

I have also moved jobs. I now have an hour or so commute each way every day. This gives me loads of time to ponder about stuff and I have a load to say about the hobby and modeling in general. But I will come to this in future blogs.

For now I have moved on from my very successful orks to a very tricky to use Deamon of Nurgle army. They are slow and cumbersome to use. I am enjoying playing them, but I think victories will be few and far between.

There is something else about this army that I should mention. I will be using Eldar models. They will be converted to be corrupted and I have already made a good start on this work. As normal for me, my favorite model is also turning out to be the worst on the table top. The soul grinder is a brilliant thing on paper. But as it is my only vehicle, it attracts so much fire power I have not seen it last past turn 3 in all but 1 game. But its looking pretty good from a converted model point of view. I have based it on the beautiful GW Eldar Wraith Knight that has been infected my nurglings. It is now decidedly less good looking. This is the work at a previous stage (I will take more once it is completed in the next week).

I'll post some updates a lot sooner I hope, and may even keep this up for more than a couple of weeks.

A bit of a hectic 2 weeks for me, hence my absents from making any sort of blog entry.

However I have still managed to get a lot of painting done, and the first week of the month saw me make this little  objective marker. Its got to be my favorite ones so far and I am looking forward to painting him up.

I have almost completed all my boyz, with the final 9 on the painting table. Then its onto the 14 tank bustas, 3 squig bombs, 5 megna nobs, the truckofex, 3 objective markers and the mad doc. I think 3 months is just about enough time to get this all done.

Mega looking orks!

A little bit of a delay since my last blog entry, mainly due to me being busy with other stuff. But I have made some good progress on the Orks, so a post is overdue.

Before I post about my Orks, I want to mention the new Warhammer 40K boxed set. After some negotiations with my better half, Oliver and I have purchased the boxed set from Triple Helix Games, for a mere £52 (that’s 20% off). Oliver is not sure what models he actually wants yet, although I get the Chaos Marines and the Hell Brute. It looks like a really good set and I cant wait for it to arrive.

Now back to the Orks. I think I have spent the last few weeks creating my Cyber Mega Nobs. I wanted all 5 to be done by the end of August for the Heresy Online Conversion Challenge. I managed it with a couple of days to spare. Actually I didn't because I wanted 5 models, and I didn’t have enough parts so had to settle for 4 completed models. I need to get a few more nid parts and a power claw to complete the 5th figure. But I entered the 4 completed models anyway.

As you can see my picture taking has improved. A different lighting set allows me to get some great detail, although I have found that the light is slightly too bright. My mate Rash has directed me to a sort of lamp diffuser for less than a pound on ebay which I will pickup. Then my pictures should be much better.

Painting wise I am maybe 2 days behind my schedule as I was distracted by another conversion project, but more on that in the next entry. I hope to finish of the orks in the next day so I can use them on Tuesday night. I also need to get busy and make the spare 10 ork heads to replace my Mexican heads from puppet wars. I'm still confident I can get this army completed before the end of the year.

Megaorks strike again!

Painting of my boyz is progressing at a reasonable pace. I have managed to get all the skin done and will move on to the clothing tonight. I have also made some great progress on the meganobz. I need to complete some 'wiring' on each model but this should not take too long. The biggest issue is making a combi scortcha. I have found several old style flamers that I think are from a chaos vehicle of some sort. These have been cut down and placed on standard shootas. To get the positioning correct I used took the shootas off the standard arm and placed on slugga arms.

These now look rather good and have overcome what was going to be the most difficult part of the model. My test model now has some back plating. I have had to cut down several nid plates to get this to work, and there needs to be some green stuff added to get the right effect, but overall the models are almost complete. Just need to maybe add a sombrero or 2 to the squad to tie in the look with the other units in the army.

Speaking of Meganobz, I had another game of 40k last night at the Sad muppet society. This was part of their ongoing 40k campaign which will be running till the end of the year. The game was a 750 point game with pre selected scenario of Purge the Alien. For those who don't know this is a victory point game so killing enemy units is the name of the game.

I took my standard Big Mek with Shockk attack gun, a squad of gretchin, 2 squads of 25 boys with a power clawed bob. My final unit was 5 megaorks. The few games I have used these in had confirmed my belief that these are the single most destructive hand to hand unit in the ork army. I armed this unit with combi rockit launchers as I had very little anti tank/flyer weapons so needed something to boost my chance of taking anything like this down.

Opponents were selected randomly and I got to play against Gavin, who I played 2 weeks ago. He had a space marine force (Crimson Fists). He force was a scout squad with a heavy bolter and bolters, tactical squad in a rhino with missile launcher and melta, librarian in terminator armour and force staff, 5 terminators with a power sword wielding sergeant and an assault cannon backed up by 3 scout bikers with 2 grenade launchers.

The game was pretty quick, taking around an hour and 15 minutes. A hugh fortress of redemption took up the centre of the board. A couple of quick kills against my gretchin was all could manage initially, whilst I wiped out the scouts. With the bikes and terminators in the lead, the rest of his force tried to sweep round the outside of the fortress. I sent in my meganobz backed up by what was left of a slightly shot up choppa boy unit.

I must still admit to being surprised at how good megnobz actually are. They easily wiped out the bikes on the charge. The return fire from the tactical squad, terminators and rhino killed one nobz and injured another. This was even after the librarian had cast the ability that reduces their toughness and strength by 1 (the name of it escapes me at the moment).

The terminators then charged. The librarian and sergeant with the power sword failed to kill any orks. The power claws (now strength 6) and power fists smashed each unit to pieces. I lost all my nobz, but reduced the librarian to a single wound and left only the assault cannon marine alive.

This single combat won me the game.  I had lost only a single victory point but I had already gained 3 by getting first blood and wiping out 2 complete units. My choppa boyz charged the remaining terminator and librarian. Losing a couple of orks to the librarian, the rest of the boyz finished off both models without the need for the nob to use his power claw.

The game was over at this point. I was 6 points up with Gavin having to wipe out my entire army to equal my point count. This was not going to be possible with just 2 turns to go and 3 of my units being behind the fortress of redemption. The final score was 6 points to me and 2 to Gavin. It was a fun game although it is the second game in a row against Gavin that my Megaorks have decimated his terminators.

I really need to get these models finished and painted. Such an awesome squad needs to been seen in all its glory!