OK so here is my first hobby post in a long time, but here goes!
At my local gaming club, the Durham Raiders, we are running a little escalation league for Warhammer 40,000, you start at 500pts, then 850pts, followed by 1250pts, and finally 1850pts. we are doing this in order to encourage people who got a new army for Christmas, or might have a long term project that has sat on the shelf for a while unstarted.
I fall into the later category, when the Skitarii and later the Cult Mechanicus armies hit the shelves, I ended up buying a load of units for each, I had always wanted an Adeptus Mechanicus army, but like many things it got put on the shelf, though they did get further than most of my stalled projects in that they got built and primed, well all bar the Kastelan Robots which are still sealed in the box on my shelf.
And so they sat unloved in a box with just a few units getting painted, specifically the Kataphron Destroyers which ended up being used as allies to my Space Wolves in a cheesetastic list so that I got some Grav weapons in my list, and being the cheapskate I am, I just used the Magos Dominus with Rad-Cleanser from Forgeworld, from my on-again, off-again Mechanicum army for The Horus Heresy, rather than go out and buy the admittedly quite nice Tech-Priest Dominus in plastic.
So for the first month, I present my army!
So we have here a Tech-Priest Dominus, and two units of three Kataphron Destroyers, one with Heavy Grav-Cannons and Cognis Flamers and one with Plasma Culverins and Phosphor Blasters, and these all together come in at 470pts.
Played three games with them, one against Tyranids in which I was quite quickly beaten mostly by a flying Hive Tyrant and a Carnifex all on their own which was fairly brutal. My second game was against Dark Eldar, in which I pretty much dominated the game, despite losing the three Grav Kataphron Destroyers in turn two, I ended up tearing apart my opponents Archon, Kalibite Warriors, Raider and Venom in the following two turns.
My last game was one where they really shone, I fought against Space Marines, for which the army contained a Chapter Master, Sternguard Squad, Drop Pod, and two squads of Scouts, one with Sniper Rifles, again I lost two Kataphron Destroyers quite quickly, this time the Plasma ones, but after that my Grav Destroyers just rolled around the board sweeping up the rest of his army. I really felt bad about it, but there came a moment when he had an objective, I had none and we had to roll to continue the game, had it ended there I would have lost, but thankfully for my, the game continued which allowed me to clear the objective of that last troublesome Scout squad and claim victory for myself by tabling him.
So the games went well, and I still get the feeling that Cult Mechanicus is very much a glass hammer of an army, when it hits well, it hurts my opponents badly, but when it takes a lot of fire, it can struggle to stay in the game.
Moving Forwards to 850pts
For the next stage I am adding a unit each of Fulgurite Electro-Priests and Corpuscarii Electro-Priests as well as add a detachment of Skitarii with a unit of Vanguard and a unit of Rangers.
So onward with the painting and this week I started with getting the Fulgurite Electro-Priests painted up whilst I watched The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime.
I am not going to even pretend to be a great painter, or even a good painter, but I am rather pleased with these. And if you look in the background you can see the next unit, some Vanguard in various stages of completion. I had already completed 5 of the Vanguard in June last year and figured it would be easy enough to work on these and bring them up to full strength, so that is what I did, and I am pleased to say that I finished them tonight.
This unit of Vanguard have been equipped with an Enhanced Data Tether, Plasma Caliver and Arc Rifle, whilst the Vanguard Alpha has an Arc Maul and a Phosphor Blast Pistol. I know its not an optimal set-up, but I liked the way the bits looked on the models and for me that is quite important.
So that’s where I am at the moment, sitting on the painting tray right now I have an Ultramarines Storm Eagle, something I want to finish off for the Horus Heresy Weekender I am putting on in 3 weeks time, for which there are still two tickets available if anyone fancies coming along to it, you can find info on the event Facebook page here, or on the Folkvangr Events website here.
Oh and my Ultramarines were featured on a battle report by the Dark Artisan yesterday, which you can view below.
I picked the scenario for this one, purposefully giving myself a huge disadvantage, but it fitted the fluff of our game, and that’s something which I love, I don’t play Horus Heresy to win, I play it for fluffy narrative games, and this was a particularly good one.
Until Next Time
Today has been a rather fun day, firstly we drove to Newcastle to see my adorable little nephew who was born on Christmas Eve, and as per usual I was a puddle of mush with him. We left him with a Serenity plush toy, just to make sure we have a future browncoat in the making.
Secret Hitler is a secret identity deduction game, much like 
Secret Hitler successfully /pic5164305.jpg?w=629&ssl=1)
So we set the game up and had a little game, I focused on collecting the 11 and 12 sets which Lindsay was handing over to me without issue, but I wasn’t winning many day cards, so I ended up passing some 11 cards to Megan, and playing some low cards too early on./pic6973669.png?w=629&ssl=1)