First Warmachine Battle

I finally got to play my first real Warmachine battle today. My opponent was a very nice guy who made a real effort to make sure I understood everything that was happening and every rule that came up, and to make the game educational by discussing strategies and giving me possibilities and options.

I had a 20 point list based on the old Kador starter box, which I picked up at my local hobby store. Right now I feel like I don't want to bother with infantry or high model counts, so I'm going for a jack-heavy list. Since Sorscha can support two jacks at best, I decided my next jack had to be able to run around on his own. That meant a Berserker or a Kodiak, and since the Berserker is cheaper and can also charge for free, I picked him. Then I stumbled onto the Man-O-War Kovnik. He can marshal up to two warjacks and can boost all their initial attack rolls. I figured if I put him in charge of both the Berserker and the Juggernaut, I could get the equivalent of up to 6 focus points out of him, and I could walk my heavy melee hitters up the board without putting Sorscha at risk - plus she'd have enough focus to actually cast spells. Thus my list ended up as:

Sorscha
- Destroyer (Fluffy)
Man-O-War Kovnik
- Juggernaut (Jughead)
- Berserker (The Abomination)


My opponent had just finished a larger game where he had been running Haley and a Stormwall, and he actually didn't have any other jacks with him, so instead he threw together a Cryx army on the spot using proxies and picking units from the main rule book (that I would have some familiarity with) based mainly on their points costs. I suspect he may have avoided picking too much infantry (going for a somewhat redundant second arc node instead) as he saw that I had very little anti-infantry in my list. For simplicity he picked identical light and heavy warjacks, and actually played a point down as well. His list was:

Asphyxious
- Slayer
- Slayer
- Deathripper
- Deathripper
Max Mechanithralls


We played a simple caster-kill game. I won the roll-off and elected to go second. He placed his jacks in the middle of his zone and his thralls off to his right. I deployed Sorscha and the Destroyer opposite his thralls on my left, planning to hit them with AOEs, and the rest a little to my right, planning to charge his jacks.


Round 1

He gave his jacks a focus point each and ran everything forwards, moving one of the Deathrippers to stand with the thralls on my left.

I kept all Sorscha's focus for herself, then moved her forwards with Fluffy towards the thralls. Despite being out of range, she cast Tempest on the nearest thrall, but it deviated in the wrong direction. She then cast wind-rush to move back away. Fluffy scored first blood by killing two thralls with a bombard. I knew it would get me charged, but I ran the other three towards his jacks since I had to get them into the the fight or else he'd just move everything towards Sorscha.


Round 2

Next turn he distributed focus, then popped Asphyxious' feat to give him seven focus again. He cast Parasite on the Juggernaut to drop it's armour to 17, and hit my Kovnik with Hellfire (he may have boosted the damage), but luckily for me he rolled and 8 and my Kovnik only lost half his health. Then his Slayers charged my two warjacks. By the time he was done rolling, I had exactly column 6 left on both their damage grids.

Proxies abound, with two empty bases beating the snot out of Jughead and the Abomination.

The game had just started and he already left my heavy hitters with a single functioning arm each. Things did not look good. While discussing my strategy, he suggested that now would be a good time to use Sorscha's feat. Hmm, good thing he brought that up, I had completely forgotten about it. One feat later (and a quick wind-rush backwards later) and the only models in his entire army that weren't frozen were Asphyxious and a single thrall.

Sorscha's feat: she froze EVERYONE! Using a variety of different markers.

After some explanations about how trampling worked, I decided the most important thing to do on my left flank was to kill the Deathripper, so I used a focus-laden Fluffy the Destroyer to do just that. Meanwhile, my two invalids warjacks, with a single functioning axe-clutching arm each, beat his Slayers to near-death. My Kovnik followed this up by precisely delivering the exact amount of damage necessary to finish one off.


Round 3

With his heavy warjacks almost completely eliminated, and Sorscha (seemingly) safe behind a straw hut, things were looking up for me. But I was still to learn just how fast those evil little Cryxian arc nodes are. Moving Asphyxious up, he paid a focus point to get the Deathripper on my right moving and ran it down to where he had an angle on Sorcha. She was at defence 18, but I hadn't payed any attention to her facing after moving her so she had her back to the little mouser, He cast Hellfire and  boosted the attack and damage rolls to knock nine points of damage off her.
Having spent two focus on the Deathripper and five on the spell, he didn't have any left for his Slayer, and the rest of his army was left frozen.

I had a bit of a problem now. I wasn't going to be able to hide Sorscha from his Deathripper, leaving me with little choice but to try to kill it. I put three focus on the Destroyer, then spun Sorscha around and moved her into melee with the wretched little thing. Three focus points weren't enough to kill it, but they were enough to knock out it's movement, cortex, and arc node, rendering it harmless.

AN EPIC DUEL!

This freed up Fluffy to walk forwards and, ignoring a paltry four damage from a free strike, make a boosted attack roll to... completely miss Asphyxious. In retrospect I should have planned that better and not allocated Fluffy so much focus, as he was now left with two focus points he couldn't use. Oh well. The Abomination destroyed the last remaining Slayer with a single blow, and Jughead ran over the the first one's corpse towards the tantalizingly-close Asphyxious. The Kovnik, on the other hand, politely picked his way around it, then used his axe to shoot Asphyxious (as you do) for a little damage.

Revenge is a dish best served green!

Round 4

At this point I figured I had already won. He had nothing between his caster and my heavy hitters, and his thralls were too far away to pose a threat to mine. But there was a problem. In moving Sorscha towards his Deathripper earlier, I had given Asphyxious a line of sight. Moving forwards, he put all his focus into a single boosted Hellfire. Result? One roasted ice queen.

SNIPER! MAN DOWN!

"Asphyxious" wins! Fatality!

I really enjoyed the game, and it cleared up some huge misconceptions I had about the rules. Again, my opponent was a great guy who was clearly focused on making this game fun and useful for me. I was a little miffed I hardly got to use my Kovnik's "Drive" ability despite it being the basis of my entire list, but coming back from the dead to wreck his Slayers more than made up for it. Thinking back, I don't remember if he counted the "firing into melee" penalty on that last shot. We played the "what-if" game anyway, in which Asphyxious was instantly killed by a rampaging Abomination, so I don't feel as if it made any different either way to my enjoyment of the game.

I forgot to ask what points levels people in this club normally play at, but my current plan is to bring my army up to 30 or 35 points in the next few weeks. I know Khador's strength is their infantry, but screw it, I'd rather just add another warjack. Although, after the beating my jacks took in this game, some mechanics sound like a good idea. And maybe a dog to watch Sorscha's back.

First Warmachine Models

I haven't played 40K in quite a while - I'd been too busy for a while then when 6th ed came out for some reason the new rules put me off. I'm not saying that the new rules are bad or anything, but the increased randomness and tendency towards shooting over assault, coupled with the increased complexity (and in fact decreased randomness) in wound allocation, just didn't appeal to me. Plus I was sick of painting Space Marines despite not having completed a single cohesively-painted tac squad.

But a while ago I came across Warmachine. I read a few battle reports and got the impression that the game was somewhat more tactical than what I had seen of 40K, which prompted me to investigate further. I like how well written the rules are, and that they are less abstracted than 40K (a consequence of the different scales that the games operate at). The fluff doesn't appeal to me very much, and most of the models are not really to my tastes (although they are almost all of a very high quality), but there's a few that I really like. Perhaps most importantly to me, however, is that you don't really need large quantities of identical infantry models, and you can build an army almost entirely made up of unique character models. I don't know how well that would actually do on the tabletop, but...

So I've decided to give Warmachine a try. I picked up the Khador starter box and gave the warjacks a quick paint-job:

I'm not particularly fond of the aesthetic of most Warmachine warjacks, so I didn't really care about these two; I just wanted to get the painted in a hurry. It was a real rush-job; basically just basecoats and a shade. I used GW's new red spray paint for the base, and slapped on dwarf bronze and boltgun metal details. I didn't even bother to clean up the flash and mold-lines (although I did cut down the boilers on their backs so they didn't stick out so far).

I used the "chipped paint" effect as it's actually quicker and easier than an edge highlight ( basically just apply an edge highlight in metal instead of red but deliberately make it messy rather than taking the time to make it neat), and it also allowed me to work faster in earlier stages since I could just cover up any mistakes with "chipped paint" in the same step. Also it made any casting problems less onerous since they're supposed to be made of damaged and worn metal.

I used Army Painter Quickshade strong tone for the first one (the one on the right in the above photo), but I felt that it darkened the model more than I liked:

Shaded with Quickshade.

Shaded with Quickshade then varnished with Purity Seal

So as an experiment I used thinned Devlan Mud to shade the second one, and while the metals came out slightly brighter, I didn't really see that much difference overall once I'd varnished them. I actually rushed the varnish on the first one and it ended up with a crackled appearance. My fault; it doesn't really bother me too much since I'm not too bothered about these models anyway. I reckon it'll pass as battle damage anyway; he probably got too close to a bile thrall or something.

I magnetised the arms in order to allow me to play them as other Warjacks in the future, which took longer than I expected since the models were metal and took longer to drill into, but it probably made painting them easier and will hopefully pay off in the long run. I used 5mm ring magnets with a rod in the middle, which I think gives a slightly more stable join than simple disc magnets.

I always try to name models these days, but I often just end up picking the first name that comes to mind. Which tends to be some really stupid association based on the model's official name. In this case, the Juggernaut (the one on the right) is called Jughead, and the Destroyer is called Fluffy. Because when I thought "destroyer", the first thing that came to mind was this:

These guys actually took longer to paint than I had hoped. That's probably partly just a consequence of the size and the increased detail that comes with that size. I am glad to be done with them, but after putting the effort in I have to admit that they've grown on me somewhat. Anyway, here's some individual photos:

I don't think I can be bothered to paint Sorscha right now, but at least I won't be playing with a completely unpainted army. This doesn't mean that I've given up on Warhammer, I'm still enjoying the models and fluff, and I still plan on give 6th edition a go eventually, but there's really no reason to limit myself to just one system, right? Well, OK, time and money are two very good reasons, but oh well.

Sneak Peak

Here's a sneak peak of something I've been working on:

I don't normally like to post WIP shots, but in this case I'm very happy with how this has turned out so far. As I'm sure regular readers (hah, running gag!) of this blog will know, I've been experimenting with powered bases for a while, with only one finished model to show for it so far (in fact I have a second model with a very similar, but slightly more advanced, base that's waiting to be painted, but I... kinda lost interest). In this case, thanks to the larger size and depth of this 50mm base, it was much easier to install the battery and switch without having to make an entire custom base. Hopefully it won't be too long before I have a finished and painted model to show off.

While I wait for some stuff to dry on this one, I started experimenting with installing a battery into a 30mm base. 30mm bases are not only smaller, but thinner, and this is the real problem: it's very hard to put a battery holder underneath without it sticking out. However, I found that if you cut a hole in the top and add another layer above that, there's just enough depth. This works quite well because the top surface in these bases is actually recessed, so putting another layer on top looks fine and doesn't actually increase the height. It will still be a bit of a tight squeeze inside depending on the particulars of the model, but so far it's looking good for this test piece.

Here's a shot of the 30mm base so far, I'm waiting on some LED's before I go any further:

Dante the Crusader

I've finally finished a model that I originally bought several years ago, back when I was planning a Daemonhunters army: a metal Crusader henchman.

I love this miniature (other than the strange helmet, that I filled in with greenstuff), but it has a problem that isn't obvious in the official photos. You see, it's a one-piece model. As a result the sword sort of merges into the body rather than sitting on top of it - they really should have cast the sword a separate piece in my opinion. I wasn't confidant in my ability to hide it with paint, so I sculpted a huge mass of purity seals behind the sword to hide the problem, and tried to balance it with a couple of seals on the other side, behind the shield. I don't think it looks too bad; it's almost certainly better than it would have looked if I hadn't done it.

GW crusaders (photo from www.games-workshop.com)

I've been painting a lot of very dark miniatures, so I wanted to go the other way with this guy and make him a bright as possible; as a crusader I wanted him to look pure and incorruptible, so I tried to use lots of "pure" colours like whites, silvers and golds.

I used the same method of painting white cloth that I used for Sean; a pure white base, then a shade made from a mix of badab black wash and 'hardcoat varnish, followed by a white drybrush and some "repair" work as needed. It still isn't amazing, but it actually got the job done here as I was happy with minimal shading to keep the model looking bright.

I built the gold up from the bronze, but it didn't come out as bright as I expected. I think next time I'll start with a bright yellow instead. The metal was also darker than I hoped. While brushing the paint on works well for giving metals texture, I think it might turn out brighter to build up a base of Mithril Silver in a more traditional way (lot of thin layers of thinned down paint), which is what I'll try next time.


The model was just crying out for some freehand, what with all that blank cloth, especially around the back. So I looked around for a simple edge trim pattern that I thought I could handle. I found it, but I had a problem. I wasn't confident in painting gold directly over white; I didn't want to have to paint a line more than once since I would probably just mess it up, but gold doesn't have good coverage so you normally want to paint it over another colour. Besides, I have great difficulty painting fine lines as I either end up with too much paint on the brush or it dries too quickly (yes I know I need a drying retarder or something).

So I tried something new. I bought some metallic ballpoint pens and tried drawing directly onto a painted and varnished surface. The results were encouraging, but in practice I found there were too many crevices where a pen couldn't reach. Luckily I found that if I scribbled a bit on a piece of plasticard, the gold ink would pool a little and I could pick some up with a brush and paint it on normally. What's more, it didn't dry quickly, making it much easier to paint with. So I painted the pattern as well as I could along the edge of his cloak, and added a Sentinels Eternal logo on the back.

Drawing directly on a varnished surface with a gold ball point pen.

Then I discovered the problem with the gold pen ink. It was designed to sink into porous surfaces and rubbed off the paint far too easily. Plus, if I tried to brush 'ardcoat varnish over it the varnish dissolved the ink a little and spread it a around a bit. Luckily I had decided to run a test on my test model before varnishing the crusader. Luckily a spray varnish (GW Purity Seal) did not have that problem.

Overall I like how he came out. I'm quite proud of the freehand; even though it's a bit messy it certainly adds a lot to the model. I've decided to call him Dante, after the title character from the EA game Dante's Inferno (who is of course named after the famous poet Dante Aleghieri, but let's not worry about that). It is a relief to have finally painted him.

An idea for weapon selection in console games

In an old post I talked about a small idea for console shooters: basically instead of the current system of reloading, where you can drop an almost-full magazine without losing any ammunition, you would tap the reload button to quickly drop the magazine and lose the ammunition (which could be picked up again manually later) and load a fresh one, or hold the button to remove the magazine and stow it before loading the new one - this would be much slower but you would keep the ammo. The idea is for use in games where ammo isn't plentiful and resource management is a bigger deal, obviously.

Well, I just finished Army of Two: Devil's Cartel, and one thing I really liked about that game was the weapon selection system. I had an idea for a slight tweak to the formula. The basic idea is that the player can carry a number of main weapons and a handgun. It would probably be two main weapons which would typically be long-guns that can be slung behind the player's back, while the handgun fits in a holster; that seems reasonably possible in real life (not necessarily practical, but possible). In a similar way to Rage, a single tap would quickly switch to the handgun and back while holding the button would open a weapon-wheel.

The twist is that when performing this quick-draw the player doesn't put away his primary weapon, instead he keeps carrying it in his off-hand while shooting the handgun one-handed. Because he doesn't need to hang up the primary weapon the draw can be extremely fast, but because he's firing the handgun one-handed he won't have as much control, meaning accuracy and rate-of-fire suffers. Of course he wouldn't be able to reload the pistol with both hands full, so hitting the reload button would holster the pistol and reload the primary. unless the character has some kind of rig that holds magazine up so that the handgun can be brought down onto them to reload, like Lara Croft sometimes uses - that could be an upgrade item you pick up later. When selecting the pistol using the weapon wheel, he holds in in both hands so he can fire and reload it normally of course.

If the primary weapon could reasonably be used one-handed - another pistol or perhaps even a small submachine gun - then quick-drawing the pistol would allow the user to dual-wield the two weapons. I think it would be reasonable to be able to reload while doing so (the animation could involve tucking one pistol under the arm while reloading the other, for example).


This probably all sounds quite complicated on paper, but I don't think it would be that complicated in use, and it would complement my older reloading idea. So why bother with all these complicated micro-management systems? Well, because they add depth to the basic shooter gameplay. They force you to make rapid tactical decisions on the fly: do you reload and risk getting shot or killed before you can return fire, or quick-draw a pistol to fight your way out of trouble but delay getting your primary weapon back up? Hopefully it would make the right game more engaging. At any rate I expect it would appeal to some gamers; unfortunately those are probably PC gamers.

Sean the Overzealous Cricket Player

The model is Dynamic Ray from Hasslefree Minis. I'm calling him Sean for no particular reason whatsoever.

My colour palette was based on some reference photos, so some of the colours were not quite what I might otherwise have chosen, but I really like how it turned out so no complaints.

This was my second attempt at black cloth; I used a black base, grey/white drybrushes then a mix of Badab Black and 'Ardcoat to shade. It came out a little better but next time I'll use a dark grey base rather than true black, which should look better. Not too happy about the white cloth either, but it looks good enough I guess.

The skin was the basic elf-flesh base followed by a mix of Gryphone Sepia and 'Ardcoat, then a pure sepia wash was applied in select areas (like inside the ears and between the arms) to further darken them. It looks good enough to me so I'm happy. The eyes were white with black dots but as usual the white disappeared after adding the sepia; still this is probably the best looking face I've ever managed, though that's largely down the to miniature itself having so much detail there (most models don't actually have eyebrows, for example; this one does).

I initially painted the hair in the same Elf Flesh as the skin, then drybrushed it white and glazed it yellow; I was trying to make the hair seem light and thin by using the same tones as the skin, but I decided it didn't have enough contrast. So I washed it with Devlan Mud, brushed it with more white then glazed yellow again, to get those darker areas. It's not perfect, but I think it's as good as I could have hoped for seeing as I haven't really tried to paint blonde hair before. I did make a mistake by trying to sand a little bit of the hair off the top before painting - it looked a little like a mohawk to me at the time, but I think it probably would have looked better if I hadn't as I created a solid ridge along the centre.

I mixed various browns with bleached bone until I found a colour I liked for the cricket bat. It's not obvious in the photos (or in real life for that matter), I painted on a subtle wood grain effect. It's hard to see, but I think the result looks very close to a real cricket bat so I'm very happy with it.

The watch doesn't look great as it lacks detail; in retrospect I think I could have added a bit more details with the paint (or possibly modelled some on) if I had thought things through better from the start. I think the tie and the belt came out quite nicely actually. I painted on a red name tag with white spots and a metal pocket clip; it's a bit flat up close but from the distance it adds a nice bit of detail.

Some bits do look a bit glossy; it's a problem I've been having lately, I'm not sure if I'm using too much Purity Seal or too little, or if I'm not quite using it right or something.


So yeah, overall I'm very happy with the model. I'm really starting to like the idea of more "recognisable" miniatures; though I do feel a little guilty about buying unlicensed ones - obviously if there were licensed models of the characters I want I would buy those.