Half A Week Late

Well, this is about half a week after I had intended to get this up, but here it finally is.  The Saturday night before last I got my second game of 8th Edition 40K in, this time against Cheef and his Orcs.  It was a very close fun game and I'm glad to finally get an edition where the focus was back on having fun rather than trying to remember 30 pages of special rules plus all the army and unit special rules.  I'm hoping to get a lot more games of 40K in now.  Once I get the BattleTech cleared off the paint desk to make some room, I want to get the Primaris Marines from the starter box assembled and give them a try as well.

Now this won't be a full battle report but rather an overview with pics with my impressions thrown in here and there.

Here is the force I took with a Captain, 2 Tactical Squads, 3 Contemptor Dreadnoughts, and 1 Venerable Dreadnought.  I love that there is a force chart variant that will let me fit 6 Dreadnoughts into a list but since we were only playing 1,000 points, 4 is what I got to take.  They felt very effective and easy to use in the game, but Cheef's unit of Tank Bustas definitely could put a hurt on them.  We played a pretty standard mission of kill points plus the few bonus VPs for first blood and such.  Deployment was the long table edge triangle one.

Cheef's force deployed in the pic above.  He had a mob of boys, a mob of gretchin, some gretchin artillery, a mek on a bike, an orc weird boy, his Matilda wagon full of tank bustas, Snickrot and some boys. and a trio of buggies.  He managed to steal the initiative and went first.

This is my deployment, I was concentrating toward my left flank to keep my force together to support itself.

I focused early in the game on thinning out the unit of boys and gretchin.  In hindsight, I should have put more into killing the wagon earlier to get more early wounds on it as at the end of the game, it kept hanging on by just a wound or two.

When I finally really focused on the wagon, one dread was already starting to feel the pain and then when I charged it, between the two I just didn't roll well enough to do the amount of damage I needed to do.

Cheef managed to use his orc mystical powers to jump his unit of boys into my zone and then with the sneaky boys ended up over running one of my tactical squads.

It was at this point that the action really got moving and I forgot to keep taking pictures.  It ended up just one point apart and he was close enough to scoring more points that I'm perfectly happy in calling it a draw.  It was definitely enjoyable and I'm looking forward to doing it again.

Now getting back to the BattleTech mentioned earlier.  I have 3 lances of vehicles almost done.  They're not fated to end up in the same companies of the militia unit, but I wanted to test the scheme out on multiple vehicle types with the first batch.  I've got another wash layer to do on them and then they need based.  I'm not planning on putting the large tanks on a base at the moment.

Now this is the part that Cheef has been waiting for, the start of the UrbanMech lance for the militia.  They've been primed and got the first wash layer over the green.  Next up they'll get the red stripe down the side and the silver highlights.  It's a good first progress on them.  My goal is by the end of the week to have the 3 almost done lances finished, the Urbies finished, and I'd like to get another batch of 3 vehicle lances started.  If I can get the 3 mech lances and 4 companies worth of vehicles done, I'll have enough room to start working on the Primaris Marines.

Speaking of the Primaris Marines, I'm still leaning towards a Lion's successor chapter for them and keeping it Primaris only.  This means I will NOT be collecting an entire other chapter, just a decent small group of Primaris to use in games. I am currently leaning towards calling them the Lions Rampant or Ghost Lions but I'm willing to entertain ideas if someone has a great one out there.

That's all for now and I'll see you all next time.