Tag: Ultramarines

Our Horus Heresy Weekender Day 2

On 15th March 2016

I had to take a couple of days to recover before posting this, so sorry its a bit late, but I was absolutely shattered after the weekender.

I ended up going to bed relatively early on Saturday, but the rest of the guys for the most part carried on partying, the evidence of which Phil cleared up for us on Sunday morning because I ended up sleeping in. As a result I had to rush downstairs to put the sausages in the oven for the breakfast.

Aidan showed up after having to attend to his parents house being broken into, which was good news for me as it meant I got to play in the apocalypse game. So after breakfast myself and a few of the guys proceeded to rearrange the hall into two large tables for the games, one a 5 vs 5 and the other a 4 vs 4. Both games used the same scenario, the Loyalists were holding a building as a HQ on the planet and they had to keep the traitors from getting anyone into it.

My team decided to make our deployment zone an absolute fortress as we knew our opponents had in their army, Horus himself, and his ability to deep strike without scattering is pretty powerful. However we discovered as we started turn two that one of our team had interpreted our advertising the day as an apocalypse style game as bring as many points as you want rather than sticking to 3500 points as it was supposed to be, he actually had 5000 points on the board.

One of our team did have to leave to go home at lunch time, his army was a Raven Guard army that was bar an initial couple of squads of terminators was all deep striking, so he ended up not deploying anything else, and I decided to not deploy my Storm Eagles filled with Terminators and Invictarus Suzerains, or my Fire Raptor, to try and compensate for the initial disparity in the points. So that was a bit of a sour note for the day, and the player in question did annoy a few people, but I guess it means that I need to be far more explicit in my descriptions of games.

I did enjoy the large game and it did flow OK, but it wasn’t as good as the doubles games which seemed to work so much better, so next year I don’t think we are going to do them and stick to doubles as the largest games.

The narrative highlight to the day for me was Horus being killed by 10 Firedrakes, 15 Terminators and 6 Boarding Marines from the Salamanders and 10 Terminators from the Imperial Fists, it was quite an epic moment and was arguably the moment we won the game, that said it felt a little wrong considering the huge advantage our side started with.

Once the games were over with we did a little packing up and then had a small presentations ceremony. The final results were as follows:-

Winning Faction:- Loyalists – 507 Points
Losing Faction:- Traitors – 481 Points

Sportsmanship Award:- Jens Träff
Best Painted Army:- Steven Henry
Best Loyalist General:- Graham Campbell
Best Traitor General:- Steven Henry

So the Loyalists all received a winners medal, (no expense spared!) whilst the Traitors collected the coveted Wooden Spoon.

We also had a little raffle to raise some money for the British Heart Foundation, which managed to raise £50, so well done to everyone, and a special thanks to the chap who kindly donated the top two prizes an almost complete set of Citadel Air Paints and a paint rack, he asked to remain anonymous, but I want to give that chap a hand none the less.

The guys were absolutely amazing and unbeknownst to me they had a whip round and got some flowers for the girls, which left them both in absolute tears they were that touched by the gesture.

So with that the majority of guests disappeared and went home, whilst myself and a few of the other Raiders, packed up the hall, and well, it felt sad leaving Moor House again, its a place with a lot of happy memories for me, but we will be there again soon for Kings of the North!

But we had an amazing weekend, and the fact that people are asking to do it again next year shows me that it has been a real success.

Honestly I am still recovering a bit from it, and I am sort of hoping now that I have shown that its doable, that the club will take it on, and hopefully make next years event far better, already they are starting play testing of scenarios from Book 6 to try and find the perfect missions for it.

As for me and the girls, well we are having a short rest before I go do some demo work at the Newcastle Film and Comic Con, followed by hitting the ground with Kings of the North!

Couple of Games and Some Painting

By michael

On 29th February 2016

In Blog

This week I have been mostly painting Ultramarines!

With our Horus Heresy Weekender now under two weeks away I stepped up my painting work for it. So I got on with and finished a Storm Eagle which completed my 3500pts for the weekend.

My list is now currently as follows using The Logos Lectora as a Rite of War

Captain Remus Ventanus
Master of Signals with Damocles Command Rhino

Troops

Legion Assault Squad with 9 Marines, Sgt in Artificer Armour with Plasma Psitol and Power Fist
Legion Tactical Squad with 18 Marines equiped with an additional Combat Blade, Vexilla and Nuncio-Vox, Sgt in Artificer Armour with Plasma Pistol
Legion Tactical Squad with 18 Marines equiped with an additional Combat Blade, Vexilla and Nuncio-Vox, Sgt in Artificer Armour with Power Fist

Elites

Apothecarion Detachment – 2 Apothecaries both with Artificer Armour
Invictarius Suzerain Squad
Legion Rapier Weapons Battery x 2 both with Quad Mortars

Fast Attack

Legion Storm Eagle Assault Gunship with Armoured Ceramite and two Twin-Linked Lascannons
Legion Storm Eagle Assault Gunship with Armoured Ceramite and two Twin-Linked Lascannons

Heavy Support

Deredeo Pattern Dreadnought with Armoured Ceramite and Aiolos Missile Launcher
Legion Fire Raptor Gunship with Armoured Ceramite and Reaper Autocannon Battery
Legion Sicaran Battle Tank with Armoured Ceramite and Lascannon Sponsons

Lord of War

Legion Fellblade with Space Marine Crew, Pintle Mounted Twin-Linked Bolter, and Armoured Ceramite

So lots of ways to mess around with the reserve rolls, but probably not a hugely competitive list, but its not about being competitive, the weekender is about fun, and some interesting narrative games, anyway we play as a team and we win or lose as a team!

I managed to get Leviathan Pattern Dreadnought painted up as well, a really nice model to paint, my ability simply doesn’t do it justice I am afraid.

I also got a the Corpuscarii Electro-Priests for my AdMech Escalation League army painted to the point of being about 95% finished and should get those finished at some point this week.

Games

I got two games in this week, the first was a 3500pt test game for the Heresy Weekender against Grahams Iron Warriors, a game I lost quite badly, Graham loves his tanks, and the Typhon is a very nasty tank to play against, and it did a lot of damage to me early in the game, and his Comms Relay negated the impact of my negative effects on his reserve rolls. Oh and there were lots of fliers on the board, 2 Storm Ealges and a Fire Raptor each, so there was some cool aerial combat going on.

But the game served its purpose, despite the pasting I took losing including losing my Assault Squad and Sicaran in the first turn, and stupidly sending my Suzerain up against a Leman Russ. I learnt some stuff, he learnt some stuff, when he played a game on Sunday, I saw he had taken the additional combat weapon that my marines always do and had dropped the Typhon for a Fellblade. All in all a very fun game.

Then yesterday I played in a 3 way apocalypse game with James and Arran, 4500 points each , which was a very fun silly game in which me and Arran used our Horus Heresy armies to take on James Chaos warband, we managed to play that game and near wipe out all 13500pts in 3 1/2 hours which was pretty good, a very very enjoyable game in which despite throwing absolutely everything at him, I failed to kill Vulcan, he really is a perpetual.

Its always fun to play a huge games now and then, its hard to get around to doing, but it makes me want to play another one sooner rather than later.

Audio Book

I personally find it really difficult to watch something when painting so I prefer to listen to a good audio book instead, and last week I got through Fallen Angels, the second of the Horus Heresy Dark Angels book, a huge improvement on the first book Descent of Angels. Anyway this book got me well on my way this week and was quite pleasant to listen to, though I do hope they return to finish off the story of Caliban because its been a number of years now and that part of the story feels a little neglected.

Anyway that is me for the week, hope you are all doing well and who knows what this week will bring eh.

Building up the AdMech and a Battle Report

By michael

On 19th February 2016

In Blog

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