First game of 2015

This was a few weeks ago, I've been too busy to write it up before but I finally found the time to post the photos and give a quick summary. I was running:
pButcher
-Beast 09
-Torch
Nyss Hunters
pAlexia
MOW Kovnik

I put together this list to try to deal with the kind of stuff my regular opponent has been playing that has been giving me trouble. Beast with Fury should do work against shield walls or heavies. Torch can wreck heavies, has some anti-infantry ability and most importantly, pathfinder. The MOW Kovnik is just kind of there; I'll be replacing him with Eliminators in the future but they weren't ready at the time.

My opponent played... some Skorne caster with Reach, Flashing Blade and Ashes to Ashes I think - I can't be bothered to look him up. He brought the Bronzeback, Gladiator and Gators, but left out the Agoniser. He had the Gators and some infantry with Reach and Reform.

Deployment:
As per the photo. I put Butcher in the middle, Torch and the Nyss on the side with the forest.

Turn 1:
He advances.

Nyss get Iron Flesh and toe the zone. Torch runs into a forest because I am stupid. Alexia (proxied by Laddermore) creates a thrall, who I put Fury on because I found the idea humorous and I couldn't decide who really needed it. Said thrall (proxied by a Paladin) hid behind the house.

Turn 2:
He gets into the zones.

Alexia and the Thrall kill a model each. Even with CMAs, Risen miss all their attacks. Beast runs up behind the house with his back to it such that he can get a free strike on anyone who walks past. Butcher ducks behind a wall. Nyss shooting kills a Gator. I realise that Torch can't handle forests very well because he needs a target in order to charge, and that target needs to be pretty close for him to be able to see it, at which point he might as well just run. So he's pretty much bogged down now. I also shift Fury to the Risen because I figure that they need it more than anyone else right now.

Turn 3:
He engages the Nyss and kills the Thrall and a bunch of Risen. He fails to kill the Kovnik.

Beast + Imprint + Thresher = lots of dead Skorne... who's ugly corpses are then re-animated and used to block charge lanes to their killer. The Kovnik also contributes a corpse token. One Risen is Thrall-ed and charges the Gladiator, putting a couple of points of damage on it, The rest miss all their attacks. Butcher slides into the spot recently vacated by Beast, leaving Torch high and dry and nervously waddling away from the approaching Bronzeback. The Nyss charge the Gators (despite still being under Iron Flesh... oops); they kill one but miss most of their attacks.

Turn 4:
He consideres trying to beat-back off the Kovnik to get the Bronzeback into Butcher, but decides that he won't make it past the house (phew!). He kills some more Risen (and the Thrall) and moves the Gladiator to (relative) safety behind the house. He fails at his first attempt to cast Ashes to Ashes, but the second try (cast into the back of a Gator) kills 5 Nyss, clearing the zone and scoring him two points.

So I can't really do much to stop him from scoring that zone, I decide that I have to clear mine and start scoring, and try to contest his zone one Nyss at a time. To that end I come up with a plan to clear my zone: Beast charges the Paingiver toeing the zone, which brings him into melee range of the Gladiator, who he can hopefully kill. Butcher, the Risen and the Kovnik then finish off the rest of his infantry on that side. Torch and a single Nyss contest his zone.

Unfortunately it doesn't quite work out that way; because I needed to activate Beast first  to clear the lane for Butcher I can't support him with Fury or the feat or even Full Throttle. So what ends up happening is that he misses the Paingiver and falls about 7 damage short of killing the Gladiator. The Risen do nothing, and sadly neither does the Kovnik, leaving 3 enemy models still in my zone.

I think I actually dropped Iron Flesh this round as I figured that it wouldn't save a Nyss Hunter from six attacks with re-rolls and I figured I might just need the focus on Butcher. I didn't, so that was a waste.

Turn 5:
The Gladiator charges Torch and by some miracle rolls a couple of snake-eyes on his attacks, crippling Beasts' axe but leaving him alive. Missing Khador jacks, I never thought I'd see the day. The Bronzeback has no such trouble and wreck Torch. The last Nyss Hunter is eaten by Gators. He's now on 4 points.

I want to make damn sure that Beast finishes off the Gladiator this time, so to make sure he can pull it off despite his crippled axe I give him three focus, Fury, and I feat. I attack first with the axe; I need a 5 on one dice... and I get it. He has 7 boxes left, with the feat I'm rolling two dice at dice plus 3. I roll a 7. I then kill the Paingiver with the fist, leaving Beast with full Focus but no targets.

Alexia summons 5 Risen... in circle surrounding the last remaining model from his unit. With a 5-man CMA originating in his back arc, the Risen FINALLY manage to actually hit something! The zone is now clear, getting me two points. I send the Kovnik and a freshly minted Thrall (proxied by a Nyss) to contest the zone.

Turn 6:
His Warlock kills both contesting models with a single Flashing Blade, bringing him to 6 points and winning him the game.

Postmortem:
That was a great game. We were both being very cagey, using terrain for cover and trying to out-maneuver each other.

 I made a mistake with Beast and it was only the balmiest of luck (I don't think I've ever used that word before) that he survived the Gladiator. I really should have prioritized killing the Gladiator over clearing the zone; with the feat and Fury (or perhaps Full Throttle for the free charge) he certainly would have managed it, and then the Bronzeback would have had a much harder time getting to Torch through the forest. I'm not sure, but I think that would have given me a fighting chance.

I never really thought about using Reach to attack around obstacles before; it really is very useful, I can see now why Beast is considered one of our best jacks. He made a mistake when he left the Paingiver there; he had used it to kill the Thrall, but he still could have moved the Gladiator farther away.

With Beat-Back and Rush, that Bronzeback really dominates the center of the board; I can't put anything important anywhere near it. Even using infantry to screen doesn't work unless you make sure he has to kill at least three or four (at least) or leave a big gap between them and your precious pieces. It doesn't help that he out-threats my jacks under Butcher. A Grolar would be nice here.

Ashes To Ashes hurts! I have no idea how to deal with it other than staying well back or REALLY spreading out. Need to have a careful read of the wording on that one.

I think a Kodik would have worked out much better than Torch here; it wouldn't have been slowed down by the forest and could have supported the Nyss. Also I could have just run it around the zone to keep away from the Bronzeback even without focus from Butcher. With Fury it's sufficiently hard-hitting. Also that would have saved me two points for Valachev or something. Definately something I'm going to try in the future.

Alexia is awesome! It's such a fun unit. useful too; a cheap replenishing screening unit, assassin-generator, and late-game heavy hitter in one affordable package. She clearly works best when she has support to kill models and keep her Risen count up, but it's a lot of fun building up corpse tokens then bringing all your models back. Killing enemy models is even more fun when it lets you add a token to the pile, and materializing models in enemy back arcs is funny. Also the range on the those Thralls is cool. Having said that, the Risen really are garbage. But hey, pile up enough garbage it starts to get difficult to wade through, right?

Unicron, Herald of the Sentinels Eternal

Ages back I was in my then-local hobby shop when I saw a very well sculpted unicorn miniature from Reaper. It was part of their new Bones line, and thus was extremely well priced. So I picked it up, with one simple plan: to use it to make the stupidest Space Marine ever. The project snowballed and eventually I ended up with this guy.

I tried to make him as over-the-top as possible, giving him massive shoulder-pads, a customised helmet, oversized light-up "crystal" sword, light-up scenic base, little belt gubbins, a banner... and a stupid name. Hey, first thing that comes to my head, that's the rule.

I had been working on light-up bases at the time and this model's larger base gave me an opportunity to experiment. As I have mentioned in the past, he was in fact my first true success, predating my light-up Cortana, I just put off painting him because I didn't have confidence in my ability to paint a horse. Plus, you know, I've been busy.

There was a lot of work involved in this model. I started by creating a flat surface inside the base using milliput, to make it easier to try to build a battery holder into. I fabricated a battery holding system from plasticard and metals bits from various button battery holders that I cut and bent into the desired shape. Before I could solder everything together I had to figure out where everything was going to go.

The biggest limitation would be the wires going to up the Space Marine. The unicorn is made of a rather soft and rubbery plastic, so I decided to reinforce it's legs with pins that would serve double duty by carrying the current. So I carefully drilled a couple of very small holes up through it's legs. I had to drill a second pair of holes that intersected the first in order to create a channel for wires to get to the "saddle" area where they could pass up to the Marine's torso.

I then soldered a pair of wires to some 0.8mm tailoring pins (which are the strongest pins I have, especially relative to their diameter) and smoothed the join with sandpaper so I could push them up the legs, and carefully worked them into place.

I then drilled holes in the clear resin base and plastic base for the pins. Finally I filled the extra holes in the body and smoothed over them, taking the opportunity to do some clean up of mold lines and the like (which I found were hard to fully get rid of without some liquid greenstuff and sandpaper).

The resin base was not as quite as blue as I had expected.

The top of the base was painted and holes were drilled for the LEDs, then everything was soldered up, glued down, and covered with milliput. I used white LEDs for the base and blue for the sword, although I don't think it made much difference in the end.

Probably the hardest part of the build was the sword. I used a blue LED that's roughly 1mm by 1.5mm, and let me tell you, those can be tricky to solder. I generally destroy two LEDs for every one that I get wired up and glued in place. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a picture of the wired LED (bottom right), and unwired LED (center), a 1mm drill bit (top left), the wires I was using (middle left), the soldering iron (top right), and the solder (bottom left). So yeah, tricky work. I eventually hit on the idea of holding the LED with a pin vice while working, which helped a lot.

I used a Black Templar sword arm with the iconography sanded off the hilt. I cut out the sword and drilled into the hand, then joined that hole with one drilled in from the shoulder. Despite how tiny the LED was, I still had trouble fitting it in the sword hilt, and ended up doing enough damage to need greenstuff repair work later. Part of the problem is that the wires I was using were kinda stiff, and hard to position the way I wanted. The sword blade was made from a tooth from a clear plastic comb. Unfortunately as I couldn't sit the LED as deeply as I wanted there wasn't going to be enough material to support the blade, so I had to attach it with two .6mm pins drilled through the sides, which ruin the look a little. Still, when glued up and plugged in it looked very impressive.

Connecting the arm to the body was trickier than I'd expected, and I made things worse for myself by being stupid and cutting out plastic that I should have used for support, but it came together in the end.

In addition to the electrical bits, there was some other work needed. The icon on top of the banner was made from two Black Templars vehicle decoration bits that I glued and blended together. I think the banner was another Black Templars bit. The shoulder pads and torso were Sanguinary Guard bits. The left arm was actually from a Warrior of Chaos that was in the right pose and had the kind of baroque styling that I was after. A lot of iconography had to be sanded off and/or covered up with the hourglass and shield icons of my custom chapter. I added some decoration in the form of symbols on his knees and random bits chained to his belt. I also had to fix the unicorn's feet where I had screwed up when cutting it off it's base, and also the mane where I'd cut it to make room for the rider. Of course I had to repose the legs to make them look halfway decent.

After all that I decided that I couldn't stand how bent the Unicorn's horn was after all. It had resisted all efforts to straighten using hot water, so in the end I cut it off, drilled a hole through the center (while carefully holding it in alignment) and inserted a 0.6mm tailoring pin to keep it straight, then glued it back on. I also took the opportunity to fix a problem area on the horn while merging the two back together.

Finished and primed, it looked pretty good. I covered the sword and base with PVA before priming, but in this picture I'd removed it from the sword:

And there it sat for something close to a year before I finally got it painted. Eventually I picked up an identical unicorn model to test painting techniques with, and finally decided upon a dry-brushed colour scheme that I decided looked good enough. I was originally hoping to use Quickshade, but I had my heart set on a white unicorn and I didn't want to introduce brown tones, and I couldn't get it to look good using the black quickshade, and I quickly gave up on the idea of proper blending (that requires actual skill), so drybrushing it was.

There was no question that the Marine's armour had to be gold. Anything less would just be silly. I picked silver for the decoration because, well, I couldn't think of anything better. I decided to use a purple wash to shade them both to try to tie them together and match the cooler tones I was trying to use (turns out using purple to shade gold can give it a really rich colour, it just didn't quite work out for me here). I'm not really happy with how the armour turned out; it just doesn't look as bright as I'd expected it to. Oh well.

I decided early on that the unicorn's hair had to be MADE OF FIRE. And of course a unicorn with FIRE FOR HAIR would obviously have a golden horn and hooves. Obviously. This was the trickiest part of the paint job, and while I think it looks pleasing overall, it's not as dramatic as I would have liked since the "hottest" parts of the fire are not noticeably brighter than the rest of the unicorn. Still I think it looks nice enough.

Purity seals were done with my standard recipe of bleached bone with white edge-highlights and brown lettering washed with Gryphone Sepia. I didn't give the red seals the usual final orange highlight as I didn't want them to be too bright. I went for a marble effect for the "parchment"on the standard. I settled on purple as the last colour, which I used for the banner and the barely-visible gems on the chest. The base was washed with watered-down Asurmen Blue then drybrushed white to try to give it more of an ice look, and also to try to better disperse the light from the LEDs and make it look slightly less like two spotlights.

I wanted to try to work rainbows into the model somehow, just to make it more ridiculous, but couldn't think of a good way to do it. I considered trying to do something on the flag, but couldn't figure out how to make it look good (and I was getting sick of the project), so I just went for a golden Sentinels Eternal logo instead, which I drew on using a metallic gold ballpoint pen. Saves a lot of effort for this kinda thing. I found it much easier to get a bright gold with it, so I used it for some highlights too. Next time I work with gold I think I'll do more edge highlighting with it.

The teeth were based with bleached bone, and the tongue with a mix of Fulgrim Pink and Elf Flesh, then both were washed with... either Ogryn Flesh or Gryphon Sepia, I forget. The sword was glazed blue over the varnish (to serve as a primer) then varnished again. A little more gloss varnish was used for the gems and mouth. I originally planned to give him an overly-long windswept cloak. Because, you know, MORE RIDICULOUS! But I couldn't seem to make it look good, so in the end I left it out. I suppose I could always add one later, but that's highly unlikely as I'm just glad to be done with him.

Overall I think he looks pretty good, though there's elements that didn't work out as I had hoped. There's a few things I might do differently if I were to do it over; I would try to use smaller wires to seat the LED lower in the hand, make the sword blade smaller and give it a longer handle, try to get a brighter gold on the armour, and perhaps use darker greys for the shadows on the unicorn. Also, I was thinking of painting the hair as fire, but in ALL THE COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW! I'm not sure I could pull it off with my current level of skill (and selection of paints), but I think it could look pretty cool with a fiery transition through the spectrum along the mane (as in, red near the head transitioning through the colours to purple at the shoulders).

The thing that's confusing me a little right now is that the LEDs seem much brighter in the earlier photos than in the finished article. This is probably because of the washes and glazes, though I'm hoping that it will look better with a fresh battery. Next up: a handful of smaller and less complex models.