Lazy Monkey

Well, this all seems to have died a death as far as Tale Of is concerned. I'm not too bothered - would have been nice to see all the armies come together in the end, but it's not the end of my blog. Far from it!

Planning to get some more work done on these girls over the christmas break. I have some plans to modify my Warp Spider conversions as soon as Ross tells me how he did his pipes. Until then I can finish off the Wave serpent and make a start on the Fire prism chassis.

And finish off the Banshees.

And Fire Dragons.

And make a start on the second Dire Avenger squad.

And finish the Farseer...

*sigh*

By Khaine, we shall drive back the children of Commorragh!

Right then, got my Fire Prism and Warp Spiders built. Almost finished some funky conversion work with my Warp Spiders, which I will post pics for when I get them done.

Also had a 1250pt game vs Jim's Dark Eldar - Space Elf fight! The scenario was C&C (4 objectives) with a Spearhead Deployment.

Some points of interest:

- Warp Spiders are amazing. Their kill tally was 5 Warp Beasts + Beast master, 5 Dark Eldar Warriors and a Raider. The ability to deep strike, fire, then teleport out of harm's way gave me an edge that helped the rest of my force pull the game back after an initial bad start. Very tempted by a second squad of these.

- Eldrad is broken. Seriously. 3 Psychic powers per turn took out a raider and kept my banshees alive for longer than they deserved when i (stupidly) threw them into combat with a squad of 10 wyches. He then spent the rest of the game dooming the wyches, guiding my fire prism and rerolling his 3+ inv save with fortune!

- Pathfinders are good... when they have cover. Due to some of my area terrain still sitting at Lex's place, i had to make do with careful positioning behind a ruined Stompa. They still managed to take out a lone Dark Eldar Warrior that was threatening to claim an objective, and managed to claim one for me, so they fulfilled their role.

- Fire Prisms are nice, cheap, manouverable firepower. Bs4 blast/large blast makes for a reliable swiss army knife. The only drawback is that it's a 12/12/10 fire magnet. Holo-Fields force the enemy to roll 2 damage dice and pick the lowest, but I felt that 35pts was too much. Suprisingly it survived until the end of the game! A 60" range glass hammer that should stay hidden until the time is right.

- Second Dire Avengers squad were a good choice. My opponent spent the first two turns throwing everything at them to stop me getting into cover and camping the objectives, which meant the rest of my army went relatively unscatched. They shot down an Archon and kept the wyches occupied long enough. I was terribly unlucky with my dice rolls with these guys and, in hindsight, should have cast fortune on them with Eldrad.

The game ended after 6 turns and the end result was 1 objective to me and none to the Dark Eldar - a Victory! This was a great game that (I think) both players really enjoyed. I learned a lot from my mistakes when facing an army that has manouverability equal to or greater than my own - damn those fast open topped skimmer transports!

Next month's purchases? Probably a second squad of warp spiders and an expansion to the banshees. They need more attacks and a few ablative wounds to survive the rigours of the front lines.

Feugan be praised!

Decided to keep the helmets on after all. The Dire Avenger experiment didn't turn out too well with white as a primary colour - they looked way too much like guardians. So, im going to mix them in with the squad im currently working on which have full helmets. It's an aspect warrior thing.

Still wrestling with the female farseer model. I think I need a full saturday to really get the robe sorted out, and probably a magnifying glass. The extra parts from the Dire Avengers I got last week will prove useful in this endeavour.

Second Wave Serpent is still only base coated.

Almost finished my Fire Dragons!

Rangers are finished, and have been for some time!

Warp Spiders are built now. Fire Prism is still in the box, unfortunately.

So, another deadline missed. I feel i'm being slowed down and, sometimes, put-off by the prospect of having to paint white. My Wave Serpent took me a good few hours an evening for a whole fornight, because one mistake meant an hour of fixing. It still isn't perfect. For a single miniature it's fine because you feel the motivation to commit the sheet amount of time and effort to the job. For an entire army, it's another kettle o' elves. I think I need to develop some kind of mass-paint strategy to catch up. My first plan will be to paint the additional members of the first Dire Avenger squad along with the new squad, along with the Wave Serpent along with the Fire Prism Chassis. Do the blue. Do the white. Rinse, repeat.

Perhaps this month's deadline will yield something miraculous!

Lileath Forgive me

Well, two months and nothing to show for it. I'm a bad mon-keigh.

Well, not that bad. There have been various reasons why I haven't been able to make the necessary purchases for this period, but theres no excuse for not finishing the first 750pts. *Slapwrist*

Anyway, picking up the next 500pt installment tomorrow evening after work:

1x Fire Prism
1x Box Warp Spiders
1x Box Dire Avengers

Some much-needed fleshing out here as well as a second solid offensive troops choice. Rangers are nice but they are damage dealers first, surgical distruption second and objective holders 3rd. Stealth is nice but gretchin can beat them up in cc... :(

After talking to the manager of GW burton over the phone I am very tempted to upgrade my Farseer to an Eldrad clone. He is essentially a discount farseer with all the bells and whistles and it's strategic insanity to take a farseer-based army and not use him.

Painting marathon this week. Watch this space!

Completed Wave Serpent

Month 2 Expansion

Right, my army needed hitting power in cc. Unable to resist the keening wail of the Banshee, and having already planned to incorporate them into the the army from the start, a box of Isha's finest: Howling Banshees.

You get 6 in the box, including an Exarch, which makes a nice squad size. The Banshee Exarch powers War Shout and Acrobatic seemed way too cheap to pass up, so in they went. They needed transport so I bought a second Wave Serpent with the same loadout as the first. With points still spare I swapped my Farseer's singing spear for the Crackshot power for my Fire Dragon Exarch.

The new list:

HQ: Farseer (55) Doom (25)= 80

Troops: 6 Dire Avengers (72) Exarch (12) Diresword and S. Pistol (10) = 94

Troops: 5 Rangers (95) = 95

Elites: 6 Fire Dragons (96) Exarch (12) Crack Shot (5) = 113

Transport: Wave Serpent (90) Eldar Missile Launcher (30) = 120

Elites: 6 Howling Banshees (96) Exarch (12) Mirror Swords (10) War Shout (5) Acrobatic (5) = 128

Transport: Wave Serpent (90) Eldar Missile Launcher (30) = 120

Total: 750

Feugan makes Toast.

So, how did I get on last month?

Dreadfully. Between barely any time to paint, a new colour scheme, unfamiliar models and white, I failed spectacularly to meet the deadline. I pleaded with Mat. Begged for forgiveness. Tried to bribe him with bottled water. He slapped me round the head and sent me to detention to do lines on the blackboard.

My game performance wasn't spectacular, either. Eldar take a bit of practice to get right, especially from an army like Orks. I had a few victories against Mat's Sons of Orar and Wigg's Space Sharks, but with Fire Dragons in my initial list, this wasn't too suprising. Daemons gave me a run for my money, scoring one loss and one draw (iirc), as did Ben's drop-pod Space Wolf army. Didn't get to play Orks unfortunately! Let's have a look at each unit's strengths and weaknesses and see what's what:

Farseer

No picture, since i'm scratchbuilding a female versionand it's nowhere near ready. Possibly the most awesome HQ choice in the game. I armed her with Doom, which is a psychic power that allows all friendly units to reroll to wound vs a target enemy unit until my following turn. In tandem with massed shooting from lots of units, this power overcomes the high damage mitigation of other races by heavily increasing the number of successful wounds inflicted. As an Ork player, I know that most things will die if you throw enough dice at it!

The Farseer also provides LD10, which is fantastic for psychic tests and ensures that her accompanying squad will (usually) fight to the last elf. She also wields a Witch Blade, which when combined with a Shuriken Pistol gives her 3 ws5 str 9 attacks when assaulting a vehicle, or 2's to wound all others - handy defence against walkers!

Dire Avengers

Another excellent Troop choice at the Eldar's disposal. They have the firepower of a Space Marine, and can hold their own in close quarters with the support of the Exarch. Even so, they still die to most kinds of shooting, taking the brunt of most of the enemy firepower. A very very good all rounder infantry option.


Bloody Plasma Cannons...

Rangers

My biggest regret, which in 500pts have a tough time justifying their 95pts sink. As a troops choice they can hold their objectives, but don't support the army well enough to be any more worthwhile than Guardians or Dire Avengers. They seem to work well with Doom, but I often have a better target to use this power with. I think if I upgraded them to pathfinders they will pay off more often in larger games. We will see.

Fire Dragons

Beautiful, beautiful. These guys can kill anything, and always seem to do significant damage before being mowed down. The first few games saw their best performance, and the Exarch in particular proved his worth by defeating a wounded Lord of Change in Close Combat - Initiative 6 is nothing to sniff at! Mounted inside the safety of a Wave Serpent allows them to reach their ideal target with ease, which more than compensates for their short range fusion guns.

Wave Serpent

Initially, rubbish. I armed it with a Shuriken Cannon and quickly realised I had no proper ranged AT whatsoever until I committed the fire dragons inside. This often meant that I would disembark, blow up a Rhino (woo.) and be shot to pieces by a squad of 10 or 11 angry space marines in the following turn. Crap, I thought. Waste of 100pts.

I then gave it a Missile launcher, increasing the pts cost to 120. While I was forced to drop a couple of dire avengers, I realised the benefit immediately, knocking out transports and wounding greater daemons, all while protecting it's precious cargo from melta weapons and str 10 psychic nastyness until the time was right.

So, while overall the army wasn't as bad as I thought it was, I didn't use it to it's full potential until later in the month. But this is all part of learning to use a new army!

Here is the army list at the end of month 1:

Farseer (55) Doom (25) Singing Spear (3) = 83

Wave Serpent, EML (120) = 120

6 Fire Dragons (96) Exarch (12) = 108

6 Dire Avengers (72) Exarch (12) Diresword and S. Pistol (10) = 94

5 Rangers (95) = 95

I'll interweave some pictures of each squad in it's current state later on this evening...

**EDIT** Pictures added.

Asurmen mows the lawn.

First (almost) finished Eldar Dire Avenger. As usual, my crappy camera skills present the generic colour scheme for the army as a whole. There are a few parts I haven't done, like the camera/sensor thingy on the backpack (wtf is that exactly?!) and the stones need to be redone with greater detail, and the white needs tidying up, and the bone needs highlighting, and the blue needs improving, and...

I plan to build the entire army without helmets, Exarchs aside, and so I made use of some Wood Elf heads courtesy of Mr. Golding. I was hesitant initially, but decided that the half-masks really make stylish alternatives to helments*. With the hair colour, I juggled between blonde, brown and grey tones until I gave convention the proverbial poke in the nipple and went with radioactive anime green. 40k fanboys might seek my demise, but I want to explain my position. I feel that many hobbyists get overly concerned with being completely loyal to the fluff of whatever game system they happen to be playing, and this often turns budding creativity into obsessive canonism. I've never gotten on well with the dark, gothic, overly 'real' theme of the 40k universe and usually seek to break away from/bitch about this whenever I can**. So my girly Space Elves have anime hair.
Anyway. white takes forever to paint. This prototype taught me a lot about using white as a major colour:

• Study your miniature in great depth before you commit to painting it. By contrast to more paint-by-numbers models such as Space Marines, Eldar armour is functional and stylish*** - or in other words, it's psycho-reactive and is both clothing and armour simultaneously. Specifically, I found that the rear-knee 'trousers' flow into 'armour' as it approaches the ankle which wouldn't be too difficult to shade were it not for the fact that i'm painting white. White cannot be highlighted, but exaggerating the lowlights of the recesses worked for 'Eavy Metal Biel-Tan Guardians, so I went with that.
• Use a seperate water pot for white. Polluting your white-water mix isn't at all obvious until the paint dries on the model. Certain sections of the guy you see above used to be slightly pink.
• Paint white last. That way, you avoid having to repaint several layers to cover up any mistakes.

I also tried doing NMM (Non-Metal-Metal) gold on the handle trim of the catapult. I think it looks like 'metal' but also a lot like toffee cheesecake (there isn't a very clear picture of it above) and not at all like gold. Something I will need to research properly before I attempt it again...

I'll post more pictures as I produce them. I plan to finish another four Dire avengers, then a Wave Serpent, then probably do at least one Fire Dragon and a special Farseer conversion.

I'll also be posting a step by step guide on how to paint the above Spelf, complete with shaky camera pictures. Watch this Space!

*Us girly Elves just love to accessorise!

**If I ever do a Space Marine army, i'll do Ultramarines, except i'll call them UberMarines, call their Chapter Master Mr. T, and declare that the Games Workship fluff is incorrect and that my protrayal of the Emperor's finest is much better. And i'll be right.

***I should be on 'Changing Rooms'. Christ, I didn't realise painting Eldar would require a camp alter-ego.

First 500pt List

So, to my pleasant suprise I found my old post as a 'draft' - Blogger rocks! :D

My toys finally arrived!... and then I went to Download. Had the day off for recovery yesterday, so I got everything built. The dire avengers are still missing an arm and heads, but thats because I need to paint the torso's* before I attach the other arm, and green stuff the hair on the helmetless heads i'm using. Oh, and one of the Rangers' rifles was broken in the box, so that's gonna need some greenstuff-glueing!**

List:

HQ: Farseer (55) Doom (25) Singing Spear (3) = 83

Troops: 5 Rangers (95) = 95

Troops: 8 Dire Avengers (96) Exarch (12) Power-Weapon & Shimmershield (15) Bladestorm (15) = 138

Elites: 5 Fire Dragons (80) = 80

Dedicated Transport (For Dire Avengers): Wave Serpent, Twin Linked Shuriken Catapult, Energy Field (90) Twin-Linked Shuriken Cannon (10) = 100

Total: 500 Points
This is a list that I know will not win every game. It's implicity weak because it realies getting fragile units close to the enemy in order to do any damage (apart from the rangers) without any cc support. The mainstay squad is the Dire Avengers, who will be resaponsible for doing most of the damage. The idea is to use them in combination with the Farseer to fly close to the enemy, decimate them with a combination of Doom and Bladestorm, then escape in the Wave Serpent before the reach me (Unless the enemy have fleet, this is easily done with an 18" range). I took a power weapon + Shimmershield with the dire avengers so that they can deal with smaller/remainder units in cc if desired.

The Rangers are there to sit on an objective and, if they are lucky, pin down low-ld enemy squads that I don't want to deal with (Ork nobs for example).

The Fire dragons are cheap Anti-Tank choice that are also effective against elite infantry like nobs and marines.

Finally, the Farseer represents the leader of the expedition. Young, inexperienced, but full of determination and constantly thinking, she sees the future and utilises this knowledge to exploit her enemies' weaknesses.

*Tip #1: NEVER build a model without first considering how it will be painted! I once built a whole regiment of Grave Guard, then pondered exactly how I was going to paint the chestplates after I had attached the shields -_-

**Tip #2: Putting metal models together with superglue works ok, but can often prove brittle and break during transit. A good solution to this is to apply glue to either part, then put a tiny blob of green stuff on one surface before pushing the parts together - a bit like bricks and cement. The green stuff reacts with the superglue and turns hard as rock, but also tough enough to withstand minor shock.

The Flymo is impatient...

Received an email from Wayland Games saying my order was dispatched yesterday.

Yesterday was sunday 0_o

I head to Download on wednesday, so whether is turns up tonight or tomorrow wont make too much difference... I'll have built a prototype dire avenger at best.

*sigh*

The Garden is empty...

Contacted Wayland Games who said they were awaiting stock before they could send out my order for the first month. They said they should be able to send it before the end of the week which means I wont be painting until the start-middle of next week? Since i'm heading to Download Festival for 5 days on Wed 10th June, this eats half the month...

Gardening in the 41st millenium

Hello and welcome to my lovely, well trimmed Tale of 6 Gamers Eldar blog. Enjoy your stay and, please, stay off the grass.

Well now. Where to begin? I suppose I came to the decision to start an Eldar force because of process of elimination with regards to playstyle - that is, they are the only army that truly suit it. Despite my success with Orks I often found myself limited in the way I smash the enemy to bits by their one-dimensional approach to warfare, and that is Power Klaws. Attacks bouncing off of tough armour? Power Klaw. Nearby tank causing trouble? Power Klaw. Tupperware lunchbox lid? Power Klaw. The nob with the power klaw truly is the swiss army knife of the 41st millenium, and after a while it gets a tad... dull.

I had a look at the various races and wanted something different, but not weak. I had some criteria though:

• No hordes - can't stand painting hordes because it lowers the quality of each paintjob. Additionally, hordes win by attrition, or "I have more dudes than you have bullets". I don't like this because every time you play a game, most of your army must die before you win...
• At least 4+ saves for basics - would love to have an armour save versus boltguns on my troops instead of relying on cover which might not even be there.
• Manouverable - I like to control the battlefield and use tactics to achieve my aims, because it's more rewarding than simply deploying more soldiers, tanks and guns than the other guy. If one squad, used well, kills 2-3 times their pts before dying, I am having a good day.
• All-round capability - I want to perform in the movement phase, shooting phase and assault phase. No more one-dimensional armies, no more gunline vs hordes.
• No humans. Everyone knows how much I detest the fact that the Imperium is central to every event in the WH 40,000 universe and feel that the xenos need more attention - specifically, alone, with no mention of any humans. This would make a nice change! No, i'm not a fascist.

So I decided to go for Eldar. I wanted an elite-heavy army that functioned like a very intelligent toddler who knew exactly which hole to put the square peg into. In other words, i didn't just want to deploy an 'army'. I wanted to form the army from smaller elements who each specialised in dealing with certain types of threats. So, I would need a unit that could go tank hunting, a unit that could go for heavy armour, a unit that could deal with hordes, etc etc...

To this end, I decided to go for Swordwind. This is styled around the Biel-Tan craftworld and their aggressive stance against the rest of the galaxy - but it isn't Biel-Tan. My particular force is centralised around a Farseer and her cadre of warriors as they fight to reclaim one of the lost Maiden Worlds from a bunch of confused, trespassing aliens.

INITIAL PURCHASES

Say it with a loud, booming voice. It's fun.

So, Mat (AKA God, for all intents and purposes) decreed that we each put together a force consisting of the basics - 1HQ, 2 Troops. He also decreed that we spend around about 4-500pts. This posed an inital worry for me, since I didn't want any Guardians - they suck ass, they are expendable (more attrition - BAD!) and quite static. So instead I went for the more l33t Dire Avengers to fulfil an all-rounder choice. With BS4 Avenger catapults and bladestorm, they can dish out more ranged damage than a Space Machine Tactical Squad, and the Exarch can get stuck in with his power weapon and 5+ inv save (across the squad) in close combat. They also have 4+ armour saves, giving them a fighting chance vs boltgun fire and other AP5 nasties.

The second choice had to be rangers. With shots that occasionally count as AP1 they will be helpful in whittling down key threats, or otherwise able to pin down larger, low ld squads, they are ideal for sitting on objectives and harassing the enemy until they go out of their tiny little minds. They also have stealth (+1 cover save) which will make them extra-difficult to shift.

Finally, the HQ. A Farseer ought to do it, since the expedition is led by one, and i'm still debating whether or not to use an Autarch later on.

I still needed some anti tank, and since I like them so much, a squad of fire dragons in a Wave Serpent fitted the bill. Even if they run out of rhinos and wartrukks to kill, meltas are just as good as popping the odd Ork or Space Marine :)