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

2018 Planning

Started with my Shaltari ground forces today. I decided in the end to go with a burnt umber kind of Fall theme. But first I desperately needed to clean my work space, and there is no time like the end of the year and with three major projects on the horizon.

So messy!

Now with 70% less mess!

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.

Iko Turso DFC Battle Report

It's been a bit of a while since I've had a chance to update the blog, but I've had a nice period of gaming lately! I met a new group down in Hamilton that I get to game with, which has been excellent. I'll blog about those in a while.

Here I wanted to provide an update on the Iko Turso campaign that James and I have been playing!

We managed to carve out some time to play our first DFC game for the campaign; a cool 800pts.

800pts is a tough list to create! I got slaughtered pretty hard, which I blame squarely on my list building in this game; so far that seems to be a theme in the campaign because I have been taking unusual units and strange combinations. In this particular instance I did not take my beloved Echoes and did away with my bombers. I think that was a massive mistake, because very quickly James was able to pull ahead on the ground game while also owning the air with his Amethysts (this inspired me to build some of my own for my growing Shaltari fleet).

Anyhow, see the video above for the details. So far the campaign is 2 to 0 for Shaltari and both scenarios had me losing squarely because of a lack of attention on list building. In the DZC game I clearly didn't take nearly enough infantry and in the DFC game I ignored the PHR strengths and didn't take anything to handle Voidgates sitting in atmosphere.

Iku-Turso Mission 2: Take the Mines!

MISSION BRIEFING:

It took a lot of time and effort, but we've finally extracted and decrypted the memories on our fallen scientist's limbic implants.  There's a lot of missing data, but from what we can piece together, the lab was taking some kind of mineral, or energy source, and using it to build a weapon - something so terrible it could very well tilt the whole war in the Scourge's favour if it is ever completed.  We don't yet know what this weapon is, or how far along in the build process the Scourge are, but our scans of the scientist's mind were able to reveal the location of the source of the necessary material:  Khonsu, Iku-Turso's own moon.

Our mission is to seize the mining facilities on this moon, and we need to do it quickly.  Our sources tell us that the Shaltari already have a head start.  They've sent in a scout party and managed to take over one of the defense cannons.  That said, we believe the mining facility they've already depleted is   They've sent a small fleet but if we get our butts in gear we should be able to get our fleet there in time to stop them.  We need to claim these mines and figure out what they are about, and we can't let anyone else get ahold of them until we understand what's going on. 

MISSION PARAMETERS:

Army Size:  805 Points

Scenario:  Scenario 1: Take & Hold (Pg 76) with all rules as listed including the Variant where the two clusters on the sides are worth double victory points.

Special Rules:

The Shaltari player gets one infantry token on one of the ground defense sectors of the middle cluster.

Every other sector gets a random Scourge token (infantry or armour) on it. 

When it comes time to fire defense weapons, the Scourge fires first.  Each defense weapon fires its weapons at the closet available target.

When scoring clusters, count the Scourge ground units as if they are a player as well.  The Scourge do not get points, but they can prevent players from getting points by control clusters.

Scourge tokens do not ever move, but will participate in combat if there are player units in the same sector.

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