Commendation: Elias Jakob

Private First Class Elias Jakob of the Tiefwald 14th Combined Arms Regiment received the Nikolaus Star for bravery, marksmanship, and perseverance in battle against the foes of mankind on Tiefwald, M41.61607. As his platoon attempted to secure defensive positions in the Wertherwald, his squad came under heavy fire and every other trooper in his unit was killed. Even after his nearby command element was wiped out in vicious hand-to-hand fighting by horrifying warp spawn, Private Jakob held his position and continued to engage the enemy with his plasma rifle, wounding a powerful demonic entity and destroying a traitor champion. He even survived a potentially dangerous weapon malfunction. For his inspiring display of skill and heroism, Private Jakob has been recommended to his commanding officer for HP (hinterhaltspflicht).

Battle Report: Chaos vs. Imperial Guard 6-16-07

Bully vs c2 - 2000 points - Secure and Control

For this game I switched out sharpshooters for a mortar squad. My other doctrines were light infantry, iron discipline, close order drill, and special weapons squads. C2 fielded her now classic khorne/black legion force: flying khorne demon prince, flying khorne possessed, big terminator squad, berzerkers, bloodletters, khorne bikes, obliterators, and havocs. We played a random standard mission, which turned out to be secure and control with 4 objectives.

Turn 1

Chaos: The bikes roar forward and gain an invulnerable save. The Terminators shoot up one of the infantry squads across the field and kill five of them. They hold their ground, encouraged by the nearby command squad. The Havocs destroy the chimera facing them down on the other side of the battle and the command squad inside tumbles out, entangled in the wreckage.

Imperial Guard: The basilisk fires indirectly across the battle and blows up the berzerkers' rhino, pinning the passengers. The hellhound and special weapons squad moves up to put their all into killing the approaching bikes. Somehow they survive numerous blasts of gunfire and different templates; at least the demo pack didn't fall back on the squad! The last chimera and the right side guard wing opens up on the terminators, killing 4. The tanks on the other side try to shoot up the havocs but only one or two are downed. Already by this point I'd already rolled plenty of ones that could have used a reroll.

Turn 2

Chaos: The demon prince decides to join the fight, heading towards the main infantry formation. The bikes charge the special weapons squad, wipe them out, and consolidate further into cover. The bloodletters arrive next to the berzerkers and they erupt from the forest, charging into the nearest infantry squad. Losing but one of their own number, they kill all of their opponents and consolidate into another 10-man squad. The terminators open fire on the members of a further infantry squad, killing everyone but the plasma gunner, who stands his ground!

Imperial Guard: The Leman Russ demolisher moves up to reach the havocs with his main gun; unfortunately his shot goes stray and misses the chaos heavy weapons completely. The command squad from the broken chimera climbs onto the wreckage to get cover and shoot at the havocs next turn. The sentinels, hellhound, and Leman Russ open up on the bikes, killing only two of them. Mass infantry shooting kills another terminator. The basilisk drops an ordnance round on the berzerkers and kills 6 of them. Lascannon teams and chimera shoot up the approaching demon prince but can't do any damage. However, the lone plasma gunner passes his last-man-standing test and fires his weapon, inflicting a single wound on the prince! The bloodletters wipe out another infantry squad in assault (my guys killed another one though - thanks, COD!). The demons position themselves to move into another squad in their own turn.

Turn 3

Chaos: The terminators move behind the hill and shoot up the infantry squad they can see, killing three more with reaper fire. The havocs and obliterators shoot up the front of the demolisher, destroying the main weapon and shaking the crew. The demon prince flies over a forest and lands behind the hellhound, exploding it with a swing of his enormous axe of khorne. The bikes and possessed again hold tight in forested cover near objectives. The bloodletters charge into the command HQ and lascannon squad, killing them all and consolidating into the second command squad just behind them. The last 2 berzerkers roll blood rage and charge out into the open.

Imperial Guard: The command squad rethinks their position and dismounts from the wrecked chimera. The demolisher rethinks its foolhardy charge and pulls its shaken ass back behind the forest. The last surviving infantry squads shoot the berzerkers, killing only one, with the plasma gunner barely surviving an overheat. Everyone else brings their weapons to bear on the demon prince and he is brought down in a hail of mass lascannon and heavy bolter fire from the sentinels, chimera, leman russ, and fire support squad.

Turn 4:

Chaos: The bikes retreat back behind their forest, passing their dangerous terrain tests (damn!), and the possessed further consolidate onto the nearby loot counter. The terminators kill off the infantry squad they've been firing at to a man, but the man in question fails leadership (the command squads were all dead too!) and falls back screaming with terror. The havocs and obliterators fire on the sentinel in the open, shaking it. The bloodletters finish off their last infantry squad but their consolidation roll isn't enough to take them into the heavy bolter teams nearby!

Imperial Guard: The stubborn plasma gunner passes another last-man-standing and shoots down the berzerker aspiring champion. The Leman Russ kills two havocs with ordnance. The mortars, chimera, fire support team and one sentinel wipe out the bloodletters. Couldn't have done it without those two close combat kills I got earlier thanks to COD!

Turn 5:

Chaos: The terminators climb aboard the rhino wreckage and into the forest. The havocs explode one sentinel on their side of the field, leaving only a crater behind. The obliterators destroy the main weapon on the leman russ.

Imperial Guard: The Chimera kills one more khorne biker, leaving only the aspiring champion. Shooting from the heavy bolter teams (just barely too far away!) and nearby sentinel can't bring down the terminator champion visible in the woods. The second sentinel on the far side climbs into the crater made by his dead colleague.

Turn 6:

Chaos: The biker champion zooms away back into his deployment zone to deny the kill. The havocs somehow pick out the basilisk's obscured side in the distance and wreck it. The other two terminators climb into the forest and open up on the close sentinel, destroying it as well.

Imperial Guard: The tanks move to grab the nearby loot counter, demolisher and sentinel manage to drop one of the obliterators.

The game ends with c2 controlling one more objective than me, and together with the victory points she earns a solid victory!

Vivax Revisited #3

Excited about the psychic scream choir I’m building into Splinter Fleet Vivax, I refreshed myself on all things leadership. I couldn’t remember whether leadership was a kind of morale check or vice versa; fortunately it’s the other way around and all morale checks are specific types of leadership tests. That means those negative modifiers should work wonders when the enemy gets shot up, defeated in assault, whittled down to the last man, takes pinning tests from barbed strangler kills (yessss), or tries to shoot at the warriors or zopes hiding behind the mass gaunts. Even fearless troops have to worry about being pinned and subsequently rended.

Today I realized I actually over-counted the number of genestealers I own when making my last list, and was pleased to find that removing two from the broodlord’s retinue freed up enough points to give the sniperfex (ordered and on his way!) the reinforced chitin and bonded exoskeleton biomorphs. Sure, he would cost 208 points, but what a bad motherfucker! He’s got one pinning S8 AP5 large blast shot, two S10 AP4 shots, toughness 7, and 5 wounds. At initiative 1, I suppose his weakness would be powerfists, but if someone manages to maneuver an expensive multiple powerfist squad into a swarm of high-initiative rending bugs to get at him, they’re more than welcome to hack away at the big fella (I think I’m gonna call him Bumble). It’s also nice to have a smaller squad with the broodlord, as it will make things easier when I’m trying to infiltrate them behind cover 12” away from an enemy.

I painted up one trial genestealer and gaunt over the last couple of evenings, just to see how my paint scheme was going to come out. Here they are:




These are early versions, though, as I still want to brighten the yellow as well as add various black markings to certain skin areas to differentiate squads and give them more of a yellowjacket look. The gloss on the carapace is GW’s gloss varnish, which is really nasty looking stuff while it’s in the jar, but I definitely liked the finished effect. It does dry out pretty quickly, so I’m going to have to water it down more in the future. After I finish these, I've only got 97 more models to go!

Gazak's Ruse

Captain Josias nervously thumbed the camera control stick as the grim scene unfolded on the vidscreen. He had already dismissed his orderlies; they didn’t need to see this. With rank came responsibility. Josias wasn’t himself eager to watch the inevitable massacre, but he had to follow SOP and collect as much information as possible about the invading forces. They had repulsed three such raids in the last month and Josias was confident that with good intel, they could withstand many more. The camera’s point of view looked out past their eastern perimeter, towards the dust-shrouded Ghogan desert. It didn’t hurt matters that they always came from the Ghogan, he thought with a smirk. It was the only place left on the planet where landers could descend without being detected – the old radiation storms still blew through the Ghogan and on any given day they created a blind spot 500 kilometers wide and twice as long. Good cover for an assault, but anything that made it to the outpost gates had been whittled down by the elements, not to mention their forward guns. And yet here they were again.

He panned the view downward, twisting the top of the stick to zoom. A Rhino-frame transport vehicle and several armored warriors on bikes had smashed through the outer gate just minutes earlier. Once inside, the Rhino had disgorged a full squad of traitor marines, and now they were running rampant inside the outer perimeter, taking his men apart for their own sadistic pleasure. As he watched, some of them could be clearly seen removing and collecting the heads of their victims. Only followers of Khorne were bloodthirsty enough to brave the Ghogan radstorms. While they were extremely dangerous up close, they were too small in number and could be quickly surrounded. A judicious application of fire supremacy and it would be over. It had been the same story three times already. With his eyes still glued to the horrific images on the monitor, his other hand calmly reached for the nearby commlink.

“Sergeant Gregory, Sergeant Tooms, prepare to counterattack on my signal.” The speakerbox crackled with static for a moment before he heard the two answer in affirmatives. “Captain Yueh, keep your armor on standby until my order.” He waited, and after thirty seconds with no response he repeated his message. Then, after thirty more seconds, “Yueh, pull your head out of your ass and come back already. What the hell is going on down there?”

Suddenly, the shielded port windows to his left side shattered inward, and a shockwave threw him out of his chair. Josias opened his eyes groggily and found himself on the floor. He blinked his eyes and shook his head to clear that familiar cotton-stuffing feeling he knew signaled a concussion. All sound had been reduced to a thin whine. Taking a deep breath, he willed himself to his feet. Looking in the direction from whence the explosion had come, he saw that the large armored company complex was bulging on all sides, with flame and smoke billowing from the bay doors, themselves blown open. Suddenly, his hearing was restored.

“Captain!” Someone was calling him on the comlink. Yueh? What was happening? He felt like he was moving through molasses. Some of it was dripping down his face, he noticed absently.

“Captain – saboteurs in the hangar and foundry – all units destroyed. I don’t know where my crews are, I don’t…”

The comlink connection was dropped and the speaker went silent. Josias could hear the pop and boom of boltgun fire from somewhere below his command tower. He limped over to the shattered window frame and peered down through the cracks of the viewshield. Space marines in black armor were crouching near the base of the tower, affixing something to the side. Stylized yellow eyes on their hulking shoulder pads stared back up at him. Black Legion! Where could they have come from? This sector wasn’t even a…

He watched, confused, as the infiltrators finished with their task and scattered backwards, away from the tower. “Oh hell,” Josias had time to mutter, before the meltacharge exploded and brought the command spindle down in a shower of fire and plascrete. It was going to be a long day for the Imperial forces stationed at Jaswin. A very long day.

Sherwood Forest Landed On Us

At the Battleforge tournament I heard a lot about the changes coming in the new chaos codex, to be released sometime later this year. This Bell of Lost Souls blog installment describes some of the major stuff. Tonight I was reading through the Eye of Terror codex, specifically the quote from Eldrad at the beginning, and I was thinking how much more entertaining it would be if they actually wrote the fluff and unit descriptions in the new chaos book from the point of view of a traitor marine. The classic story of the heresy has always maintained the good (emperor loyalists) vs. evil (chaos-warped traitors) framework; what if instead they emphasized the betrayal or weakness Horus and his disciples perceived leading up to the whole debacle?

As far as the structure, I still don't really know how I feel about the new codex layouts (Eldar, Dark Angels). This fellow Andy Hoare, who is apparently involved in development at GW, discussed in his interview here how the big plan behind the new codex structure intends to "rationalize all the lists," but honestly I really don't get what he means by rationalize. Does he mean rationalize, as in, to make rational? What was so irrational about the old lists, I mean, besides them being completely fantastical works of fiction that augment a complicated system for simulating battle between a multitude of factions represented by science-fiction miniatures using dice to determine the major sequence of events? I think all of the books since fourth edition have been just fine, outside of a few missteps where they could have (and sometimes did) fix things up with a note in a faq. How exactly does putting the unit/wargear descriptions and their cost/statistics in two separate places make the books more rational? I'll say this, it's rationally a pain in my ass to flip back and forth until I memorize all the shit, which depending on how much they've changed can take a while.