Of Mass Conscription and Plague

Conscripts going through basic training.

Ugh, I'm sick as a dog lately. I've spent almost the entire holiday season completely nailed by some ugly cold thing and congestion the likes of which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

I'm sick of feeling crappy, so decided to really get into the groove of working on my DZC Shaltari. Today I managed to completely base and put the wash on them. I'm still not completely sure of what my list is going to be for Adepticon, but I've got a good idea. I know that I'll always have 2 units of Pungari (A gift from my mother-in-law, that she jokes that they are miniature mother-in-laws), and likely 2 units of Firstborns. But I also managed to get a Shaltari Spire, Fire Drake, Coyote, Dreamsnare/Leopard, Jaguar, 3 Kukri, 4 Yari, 3 Haven Gates, and 2 Tarantulas all done up.

I really want to do up my Firebirds but I'm having a really hard time finding room for them in my list. I just LOVE how they look; like 2 tailed wasps. We shall see. Either way, it'll give me a chance to get the vast bulk of my Shaltari core finished and I can choose from there.

Firing up the War Forge

Gates! Pretty happy with how these look on the table.

Lots of activity over the last little while planning for Adepticon. First off, I placed my order for my Dark Eldar for Epic. I'm stupid excited about receiving those!

While I wait for them to come in I settled into painting up my Shaltari, mostly focusing on the ground forces for Dropzone Commander. In the end I decided to stick with a Fall kind of burnt leaves look which was inspired from the Blue Table YouTube video that they posted a few years back. I modified the paint scheme a little bit to add just the tiniest bit of flair but wanted to ensure that I didn't totally lose myself in the details, which I have a habit of doing. Afterall, I do have 3 whole armies to paint up in just under 3 months!

So with that in mind, at the encouragement of my wife (who was likely sick of hearing me agonize over this or that list detail), I started in on the core of the Shaltari stuff that I have that I know that I will be using every game; the Gates.

They painted up quickly too! With just 8 colours and 1 wash, I use four of those colours with my airbrush, which, at a stage, also gives me the opportunity to base some Shaltari DFC ships while I'm waiting for my wash to dry on my ground forces.

4 Eden and 4 Spirit Gates

In the end, in just a few short hours I did manage to pump out 8 gates! 4 Eden and 4 Spirit gates.

I was pretty concerned about using the dullcoat on them. Historically I've had absolutely terrible luck using dullcoat, as I'd talked about in my post in the Spring. This time though I stuck with the tried and true Testors stuff. It's worked like a charm.

Typically I enjoy using the Testors glosscote, which I receive no end of teasing about, but I don't care. I really enjoy that candy gloss, especially on stuff that has a lot of panel lines like the PHR. This time, however, I wanted to really show up the gradients in the shading up from deep red-brown up to a sunny yellow... Like a leaf in the Fall.

Here is the paint scheme for those who are interested:

Paint Scheme:

Airbrush Model Air  71.039 Hull Red

Wash with Dark Wash

Airbrush edging with Model Air 71.038 Medium Brown

Lightly Airbrush edging with Model Air 71.032 Golden Brown

Even lighter airbrush edging with Model Air 71.078 Gold Yellow

Paint the gem and canopies Game Color Electric Blue 72.023

Mix 50/50 Game Color Electric Blue and Model Color 70.951 White Stripe gem

Use Model Color White with a small stripe

Game Color Silver Detail lining

Small gem details Model Color 70.967 Olive Green

Lightly varnish with Testors Clear Coat/Dullcote 1260C

Adepticon 2018 Planning

Man has it been a while. I have been gaming, quite a lot. I bounced from minis to rpgs and back and forth.

But today I want to talk about one of my favourite things that I did last year; going to Adepticon. I registered again and this time I'm going to play in 3 events; The DZC scenario event on Thursday, the Dropfleet Commander tournament on Friday and the Epic Armageddon tournament on Saturday.

I'm excited about these events but I do have a pretty ambitious goal of getting three different armies/fleets painted up for these events in just under 3 months!

This year for DZC and DFC I'm going to have my Shaltari painted up, which will round out both games nicely with 2 factions complete. That will make demoing either game a great deal of fun with fully painted fleets.

I am SUPER excited about playing in the Epic Armageddon tournament! I'm going to play me some Dark Eldar from the Onslaught miniature range. These minis are very modestly priced, gorgeous, and I have to say that the company owner Don is a really nice fellow.

The first on the painting table will likely be my DFC Shaltari as I've already started some of the models and just about everything is assembled for them. They have been a very interesting faction to start playing and a big contrast from what I'm used to with my PHR. I got OWNED last year by a Shaltari fleet when fighting for top table and I'm now curious as to how balanced they are with all of the (welcomed) errata changes.

I've definitely chosen some finesse lists here. Shaltari are like the Commander equivalents of Eldar and Tau combined. Lots of firepower, but relatively weak armour and wicked fast. They use their speed as a way of ensuring their survival. They also have some great mechanics on the ground with teleport technology that should be fun to pull some sneaky tricks.

In the skies the Shaltari feel like playing a wolf pack of submarines. With their very long sensor range and their quite small signatures, they can absolutely use a long arm kiting tactic to pummel the enemy from range while their Voidgates take the cities and objectives.

The Dark Eldar are the pinnacle of finesse in that they are incredibly fast and maneuverable and absolutely deadly in close combat engagements, but they have paper-thin armour and will wither under any concerted fire. I've only played the Eldar in the Epic range, so it should be fun to be able to lean even further into the Eldar finesse philosophy.

Fleet Parade

It is a happy thing to reach a milestone when involved in a large painting project. Today I feel as if I've reached a decent milestone.

I now have enough versatility in my painted PHR fleet that I can field a variety of options, including more frigates and different configurations of troop landing ships.

I do feel a bit short on Medeas though, really I do need two more to round out the fleet number to a healthy eight.

1500pt PHR Dropfleet Armada!

I managed to get 2 Calypsos done in 2 days during the work week, so I'm pretty happy with being able to have that progress. With the Scipio that I completed last week, I'm now able to field a 1500pt fleet for the gaming session that I was invited to on Thursday. VERY much looking forward to being able to play!

I'm horrified at the thought of how many damned gravity nullifier panels I have painted in this fleet.

I'm also thinking on whether or not I want to get a pack of the normal Echo corvettes. I am not in love

Close up of the Calypso

with the aesthetic of them, kind of preferring my weird Alien-esque scratch built ones but I'll admit, they are a horrific pain to build and the thought of building another 2 to 8 of them just exhausts me.

What do you guys think? Do you like the weird Echoes or should I be a conformist?

The Scipio is a nice centre piece model, which I'll admit, I feel like I was lacking a little bit in my Adepticon list last Spring.

What are you guys interested in seeing me paint next? I have the following on my plate:

• Finish the PHR fleet.
• Start the Shaltari fleet.
• Start the Shaltari ground forces.
• Start the Warhammer 40k Tau.

I'd love to hear your comments.

Iku-Turso DZC First Scenario: Battle Report

I'm not great at doing after action reports but this one was a super fun game to play! James and I have been meaning to get together for weeks now to start our Dropzone/Dropfleet Commander campaign and we thought that we would start it off simply with an 800pt scenario for Dropzone Commander.

The idea is that the winner would gain some small advantage in the Dropfleet game that came after this initial kick off!

The battlefield setup. Buildings in the middle and forests
surrounding.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how I played, it really came down to list building in my opinion. My opponent rightly took 3 squadrons of infantry whereas I only took 2 of the Immortals, which are kind of known for withering under fire, or more accurately under falling masonry.

The PHR Force

Pretty quickly on I determined that James' Shaltari were going to occupy and possibly be able to search for one of the scientists long before I would even be able to respond, and I was outnumbered by way of troops. As luck would have it the rampaging Bullhorn ended up knocking out half of the building that James was occupying with an objective so I figured it was a good move to just blow that building up and force James' Shaltari to bunch up and focus on 2 objectives. After all, there was no way I was going to outmaneuver him and it let me, for the most part, ignore the Bullhorn on my right flank and focus on the task at hand.

The Shaltari Force

Unfortunately, it turned out that I did end up blowing up the building that had the PHR scientist in it but in the end I suppose that the scientist would just get resurrected back at base in a new body ala Cylon style.

I was quite happy with my anti-tank stopping power, I did manage to take out his Gharial, however

The Bullhorn enters the field

not before it totally cleared out my Immortal squad in a single blow!

In retrospect I wouldn't have relied so heavily on anti-tank stopping power, traded in my Helios for walk on Phobos instead and cashed in the Janus for another squad of infantry. Live and learn.

I'm a bit more confident at my skills in Dropfleet Commander, I seem to have a knack for naval based wargames, so I'm hoping that I can tie things up in the second game. Either way though, I'm very much looking forward to playing our next mission!

Gharial and Hera get into a pistol fight

Iku-Turso Mission 1: Distress

Iku-Turso.  Haven't heard of it?  Few have.  Small, with a few cities, and even fewer defenses, the Scourge took it swiftly, and those UCM fools haven't even taken a second look at attempting to take it back.  To be honest, it wasn't even showing up on our starcharts, metaphorically speaking, until today. 

We just received a distress signal from some of our scientists, claiming to be captured by the Scourge.  This in itself is strange - the Scourge typically turn all captured lifeforms into hosts, who are then just hollowed husks of their former selves.  To leave them intact is unheard of.  To add to this strangeness, we have also detected Shaltari and UCM messages sourced from the same location on the planet.  They're encrypted, and we have yet to decipher, but at this point we are assuming that they are similar distress calls.

We need you to go in and investigate.  This could be a trap, and we could have Shaltari or UCM visitors as well, so we need a small team to in, to reduce the risk.  Extract our science team if possible.  If other teams are there, feel free to "liberate" them as well - any intel we can extract from them will be most useful.

MISSION PARAMETERS:

Army Size:  800 points

Scenario:  Targets of Opportunity (Page 55, core rulebook), with the following changes:

1. There is a base in the middle consisting of 3 buildings.  The rest of the area is woods and rocks.
   
2. There is one objective in each building - one is a UCM science team, another is a Shaltari science team, and the third is a PHR science team.  "Liberating" any and all teams can be helpful, but obviously our own scientists will be a lot more open to share with us what's going on.  When an objective is revealed, randomly determine which team you found.  Holding or extracting your own faction's science team is worth 1 extra VP.
   
3. There is a Bullhorn in the area (Reconquest Phase 2, page 45), who will come on the scene starting in Round 2.  He follows the normal rules, but will also destroy any trees it runs through.
   
4. Round 6 - The Scourge Respond!
   In Round 6, before each activation, a single Scourge unit (randomly a Hunter or a Reaper) will arrive via a random side of the board at full MV value, and attack the closest Shaltari or PHR unit.

"Scourge Respond!"  Fine Print:

 - Scourge Unit will go after target closest to side it's coming in on.

 - Scourge Unit will go minimum distance required, and then fire available weapons at it.

 - If no unit in range from that side, will attack building in range.  If no building in range, will go full Mv distance towards closest unit, and will go into "overwatch".  It will fire once with +2Ac against next available target (whether land or air.)

 - Reapers prioritize Air targets, then buildings, then ground targets.

A New Project: Robots of a Different Make

Starting with some Fire Warriors. Always a good choice.

It's been a good while since I've updated the blog. I went into a bit of a busy period just after Adepticon having changed employers and we had a garden to build.

Now that the dust has settled though I have a chance to update you all on some things that I'm doing:

• Adepticon: It was amazing! I'll definitely aim to go back next year. All told I came in about middle of the pack for both Dropzone Commander and Dropfleet Commander. At one point I was competing on the top table for Dropfleet but got my ass handed to me by a (Ahem) fairly beardy Shaltari list that really focused on gate spam. I met some really truly great people though and had some excellent games! Well worth all of the effort!
  
  In the end I got Best Sportsman in both tournaments! So I'm pretty chuffed about that!
  
• Dropzone/fleet Campaign: My friend James and I have decided to make a little bit of a campaign for ourselves utilizing some of the campaign rules for Dropzone/fleet. We play our first game on Thursday. I'll post separately on this as James has written the first scenario and it's pretty awesome! We're starting off small and then escalating into full scale tiny war!
  
• Robots of a Different Make: I LOVE DZC/DFC but I'll admit, it's pretty hard to find a community of regulars and I miss the hell out of being able to drop into a store and get a pickup game on the fly. After doing quite a bit of reading and hearing some seriously good things about the new 8th Edition coming out for Warhammer 40k I have decided to pull the trigger and get back into the hobby! After quite a bit of deliberation I opted to get back into one of my very favourite factions: The Tau. I LOVED the Tau when they first released and seeing their range of models now has only solidified that for me.
  
  I have started off with the basics: Troops and transports. Since I don't know what the options are going to look like for the Tau going into 8th, I figured that you can't really go wrong with painting up a bunch of troops and Devilfish. One would presumably always want abundant amounts of both! Plus troops can really wear on a person after a while so I figured I would get a head start and work on them in earnest while my enthusiasm is high. That way I can reward myself with the cool robots later.
  
  It's always such an agony picking out colour schemes. In this instance I have opted to do a variation of StrikingScorpion82's scheme. I'm still undecided if I'm going to go with an orange or a turquoise scheme at this point. My original Tau way back in the day were turquoise and looked fantastic but I've also never really used orange as a main colour before and in keeping with my projects over the last few years I've been trying to use colours that I don't usually use.

Dropzone PHR Army Finished!

1500pt PHR Army for Adepticon

Well it was a bit more down to the wire than I'd initially anticipated but I finally got my PHR Dropzone army done for Adepticon.

I'm pretty happy with it, I did manage to at least get one game in with one of the best players that I've faced since I started playing DZC.

What I enjoy about this list is it has all the toys I want, more or less. 1500pts is a point limit in Dropzone where you still have to make some hard choices in your list; at least that's what I've always felt with the PHR at least. I imagine that Shaltari will show a similar meta when I start painting them.

This list essentially allows for a nice, solid brick of anti-tank assets in the Command squad to jump around, throwing some decent railguns at targets up to 36" away. It also has a strong anti-aircraft core in 3 Phobos to put up a back and mid field anti-air umbrella, and 2 Helios to either go hunting or plug up gaps where they might crop up in the umbrella.

Command Squad: Hera, Guardian with 2 Apollos in escort.

My Mercury Drones, a unit that is often fairly under-appreciated, can provide me with 3 potential
objectives:

• Aid my infantry in searching for Objectives or Intel markers.
• Provide ancilliary AT support in the Triton's indirect fire Sky Hammer Missiles and,
• Scout for my 4 Thors.

The Thors are beautiful. In a group of 4 those Thors can do decent amounts of damage to a building (The Njord that transports my Heras and Apollos can help, if not firing at targets), but also threaten a decent number of tanks, infantry and the like.

Decals on the Hera demark Commander's
and Guardian's Walkers.

While I find the PHR chronically out-matched by other faction's infantry, I do have a decent core of Valkyries, Sirens and Immortals to go grab objectives and bring them home. Obviously the Valks occupy Scout slots in my army list so they can also help scout Thors, through this is a distant secondary objective to finding objectives.

You'll notice that I put some decals on the Commander's Hera and his Guardian companion in order to differentiate between the two.

All in all I'm pretty excited about Adepticon! So soon!

Dropzone Commander Tournament List for Adepticon

With my Dropfleet list almost finished, I've started to shift my focus over to Dropzone and consider what I want to take for the ground game on the Friday.

Even though everyone (myself included) is focused on Dropfleet lately, Dropzone is in its golden years, in my opinion. There is a healthy amount of units to select for each faction, lots of tactics that people can choose from, and the Critical Locations mechanic has really fleshed out the game from a competitive play aspect.

The original list that I wanted to take wasn't going to work out points wise. I've never had a chance to use the Erebos walker, especially with the new rules they got and anything ECM kind of gets my nerdy engines revved.

But in order to invest those kinds of points in that walker, I felt like I also needed ot have something decent to protect, I knew that I wanted to field a Njord and also make the Odins work viably. In the end though, with 4 Odins, Njord, 2 Erebos and their Neptune the unit was quite expensive. I also wanted Thors because they're fricken sweet, but there was just no way I could cram all of that into 1500pts.

So in the end I opted for some tactical flexibility. I invested in a Hera and a Guardian backed up with 2 Apollo As in a Njord as the main anti-tank block. I also invested in a healthy amount of AA assets in the form of Phobos and Helios; these are always performers for me.

Walk on Thors were a must. 4 Thors can throw out a punishing amount of damage and I know that they will be a focus for anyone with Fast Movers, so I dedicated a walk on Phobos to keep an AA umbrella up for them.

Thors need scouts to designate targets so I ensured that I had 2 Valkyries running around to get eyeballs on targets while they are occupying buildings and causing my opponents to groan.

Valks tend to be the focus of attention though, and I'm asking them to do double duty so I wanted a bit of redundency. I know that people don't like them but I've always had my Mercuries perform quite well for me. Not only can they scout for the Thors, but they offer another Indirect weapon for me to surprise opponents with as well as providing a much desired +1 to check for objectives or a reroll on 1s rolled for Intel. Both of those abilities can really help protect my valuable troops. Since I only have 4 infantry units, all the help they can get will be a good thing.

Anyhow, so this is what I'm thinking for my list. Let me know what you think in the comments below.