Monday, March 24, 2008

Plastic Legions, Looking Ahead.

Kind of a light month on the blog for me, while I have several updates in the works they just aren't ready yet. I've recently been following up on my attraction to Warhammer Historical games buying both the Ancient Battles and Legend of the High Seas core books. I plan on a LotHS update first which will start with my Pirates crews and their 10 gun Brigantine primed and based with alater follow up with everything painted. I got about half my crew based on the some resin wooden deck bases I bought from a Austrailian company called "back2base ix", and I need to put the masts on my Brigantine and spray prime up the lot, I don't see this happening until after Adepticon however, Ancient Battles will have to wait until sometime in the future when I find someone to play with and decide on an army. I of course will be following up on my WFB armies, rounding out my Empire to 3K and moving on to the Vampire Counts, which will be my second fantasy army slowly creeping its way to light later this year. You'll probably even see some 40K out of me this year. I plan on buying the 5th ed book as soon at its released, and I have a nice 1000 points of Ultramarines totally done, I just need to build up a couple of vehicles and paint my Heavy Support Squad to round it out, I don't plan on playing it alot, but since I know so many people that play 40K I'd be remiss not to get some games in this year when the new books out and everyone is excited and not bitching how broke "X" army is.

My third installment of my photography articles about ready to go This one goes over your ISO setting and some other tricks I picked up since my last writeup..I just need to make the time to take the test photos and finish it up..hopefully very soon. In the immediate future I will definitely be blogging from Adepticon. Hopefully getting a lot of pics posted on Friday 4/11 with a couple reports on the various events I am in and then again on Sunday 4/13 with a report about the the Warhammer Fantasy Championships.

I've been pretty busy with real life of late and all my hobby time has gone to working on the new Mighty Empires Campaign we are about to start at my our local shop and well as working on finishing my tourney army. I hope to post pics of my finished 2250 Empire Army on its display base in the next couple weeks, Half the problem in getting is finished is figuring out what I am running. I built the Helstorm rocket battery this weekend on the real potential of adding that to the mix. I am down to painting my Pistoliers and either the Rocker Battery, my Greatswords or Flagellants, which ever makes it in the finished list. Against my better judgement I am probably going to end up gambling putting my General back on the Griffon and using him as a Flanker since he and the griffon are unit strength 5, the only hassles this creates is that I will also need to paint a foot model of my general for when the griffon gets shot out from under him by every enemy warmachine gunning for the large target. I am considering dropping both my Greatswords and Flagellants and running 2 cannons, the Helblaster and the Helstorm rocket battery, while that is a lot of artillery enough to make you immediately have to deal with it, my foot troops are going to be limited and games are basically going to boil down on whether I score big early with the Artillery, how my knights do and whether or not my General gets run off the board or gets gunned down. The upside is I'll be done painting weeks early instead days early. I had some problems running my Army of late only winning about 25-30% of the games I play. On big issue I've had recurring is my main block of swordsmen losing combat due to shit dice rolls on my part, so even their static +6 CR bonus has them losing combat way too early. Nothing is worse than having a unit of 20-25+ guys getting run down after crappy 1st turn of combat and flubbed flee roll. I am going to have my BSB start using the "rod of command" it will cut down on his melee effectiveness, but it seems surviving a crappy first turn of close combat has more value in the long run. My friend Bil thinks I should run my General in the main block like he does with his VC, and I see the wisdom in that conservative approach, although its not really my style I will be trying it in our upcoming campaign. As for Adepticon, my tourney army is definitely going to have alot less theme, and a lot more flash...but since the organizers have changed the direction of Adepticon's tourneys to emulate the more traditional tourney scene I just have to roll with the punches.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey John, how has Adepticon changed from the past?

Also, I think your Swordsman unit is rock hard (although I seem to recall it being 6-wide, which is pretty pricey for one extra attack); I am a little surprised that it's been a problem.

Are you not getting off counter-charges with the detachments? I would have thought that combo would be winning you combats like gangbusters.

JPL said...

Adepticon, tourneywise, has changed in that the standard format has moved to mirror the rules of the GW circuit tourneys. Last years and previous Adepticon tourneys rules have been more stringent and promoted balanced armies and had comp scores that rewarded theme and penalized flash over substance. Special characters were banned in former version of Adepticon tourneys, and if you brought two steamtanks, and 4 cannons as an Empire player you were justly vilified in scoring department. That pretty much changed now and while it wants to thematically hang on to its previous reputation, you can get away from they changed comp scoring and removed the special character restrictions.

As for my army, I like six wide for the extra and you need to lose 8 guys that 1st turn to force a panic
(that never happens) I have been thinking about moving to a 5 X 6 formation, as I like that extra rank over the extra attack...That doest really matter, when I have just been cursed with the wretched dice on key rolls of late.

Actually I dont get alot of counter charges off as most people will charge one of the detachments first with smaller unit in order to break up the formation, its tough to navigate around when my whole formation is 16 wide plus a couple inches. I am probably going to back to screening with 5 archers and a single 10 man detachment, as I've been reading up on some stuff and I wasn't really doing it right when I tried before...So I will continue to play around with it until I get comfortable with what works..see you tomorrow.

 

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