Wishlisting The Right Way

I made a wish list on the GW site for what I think it will take to update some of my armies into 6th. Now we have this Embargo on and I can't buy any of this stuff for 6 months or a year (or Emperor forbid longer). I might sneak one or two under the radar but for the most part, these are tiny metal dreams.

The big change is 6th is flyers. If you do not have one, then you are going to get reamed and hard. I signed up for a flyer for every army that I am preparing to build. Gotta have the Ork Bomma. It is just such a cool model with great rules. I am planning to start Orks at some point. I've collected 3 Blackreach Ork boxes, some bikes, some special characters but still have giant holes to fill. I will have an Ork army and it will have a wicked Bomma in it.

While we are shaking the wishing tree, I wanted not one but two of the gleaming metal peaches of the Storm Tallon gunships. In 5th they were ok but in 6th they are indispensable. Great as a flyer killer and great to harass troops and tanks alike. Also, it is a great model and I don't care what its detractors say. It is cute and deadly and it will RULE THE SKIES!

After Richard stomped the crap out of me with his Veteran Trooper-packed Vendettas, I have lusted after them. I was holding my own with him while they were in reserve but as soon as they came on, in one turn her claimed two objectives and blew up one of my tanks. Valkyries and their Forge World sisters the Vendettas are brutal and, for right now at least, they are a steak at their points cost. I am sure that will change but I have always wanted a small detachment of air cav. Now, with allies, I do not have to start an IG army to have that.

My Necron force is still hanging out in the dark days of 3rd Edition. I have only painted two new models (The Catacomb Command Barge and the Ghost Ark). They are seriously hurting without flyer cover and so I need (not want but frelling NEED) one of their flyers. Night Scythe or Doom Scythe, I do not care. Mostly because I can easily magnetize them or at least i hope I can.

I also put a few vehicles on the wish list for armies that I have not precisely started yet. I have a very small sisters force and have not really decided on my paint scheme. You can only get Immolators and Exorcists from GW Direct these days. Eventual I'll need a ride for my girls to cruse around in and pick up shoot dudes. And the Exorcist is a great model. I need to get the metal versions before they come out with Finecast upgrades that are twice the price and half as good.

Most of the things on the wist least are new shiny things and not very fluffy or just filling gaps in my model collection and army. Just to show you that I am not a giant flaming hypocrit, There is some useless and fluffy stuff on the list too.

I want one of each of the Daemons Troops to go with my ten man Cult Troop CSM squads. Surely there is or will be an Apoclypse formation about having that, but regardless I want my Khorne Beserkers to have some Bloodletter friends. Also, this will challenge me to branch out with my painting.

To bolster my Iron Warriors, I just need some Basilisks. Those giant artillery piece have been a part of the Sons of Perturbo since the dark days. I can't wait to paint them up in metal and caution stripes with some Traitor Guard crawling over them.

Taht's all I have time to blog about for now. No time to finish the links or add pictures so this is going to be a vanilla post with no flash. I'll go to bed with visions of tiny metal angles dancing in my head for now and plot my spending spree.

Necrons in 6th

I just had a great game of 6th Ed with my Necrons against Richard's Eldar and IG. Though I have played one other game of 6th with Tony (What's up LC?), we pretty much ignored many of the 6th Ed rules that we did not understand (which was most of them). Richard was gearing up for a tourny and so was being a big stickler for the rules (which was awesome). I am not going to do a Battle Report but will hit the main points bullet-style.

• Eldrad is wicked! He stuck them in a unit of Harlequins and kept giving them 2++ saves and himself a 3++ save. They weathered so many hits it was silly. I had no flamers to take them out so they mauled me.
• War Walkers have to be dealt with early. They killed all my Scarabs and half of those were in Overwatch. Then they killed two Wraiths attached to my D Lord and put two wounds on him. I don't care what your save is, if you have 20 wounds put on you per turn, you will fail saves.
• There is no such thing as a guaranteed charge! I snake eyed with my C'Tan charging the Avatar from 4". On the other hand, I was able to charge over 6" several times. Never ever take it for granted that you'll get the charge and always have a unit backing up the unit that you want to charge for a counter assault.
• WTF! Vendettas are brutal! At around 120 points (I don't have the codex in front of me), it is a steal at twice the points cost. It has armor 12 like the Storm Raven and is loaded with twin linked Las Cannons. It can carry a bunch of vets or whatever that jump out and melta or flamer people's face off. It's great as a tank hunter, a fighter, a transport, and cheap to boot! I'm gonna get one as soon as this Embargo is lifted. Maybe sooner. 
• The Catacomb Command Barge is amazing! The new rules for Chariots are awesome. A vehicle that can charge, +1 save, 1d6 S6 auto-hits and Jink. What's not to love? Getting assaulted with such a big footprint is difficult. Also, do you have to attack the dude in the Barge or can you attack the Barge first? Enemies can attack the base or the hull, so does that mean the Lord can attack through either or just the base? Can the Barge fly off on its own if the guys dies? I'll have to look into this. 
• The Monolith has a Jink save. WTH? It is a skimmer and all skimmers have Jink. I can't find anything that says it does not. Weird.

There were some other interesting things that happened but that's all I can remember now. 6th Ed is a very different animals and there are lots of changes. I need to get more games under my belt. 

If you don't hear from me for awhile...

Just got my hands on a bunch of awesome video games. That are likely to soak up lots of the former painting and blogging time so posting may be down for a while. I still owe you an epic post for the big project that I just finished, oh my blog. 

Really Struggling with Purple

This is not the epic post that was promised. 

Against my previous promise, I am starting an auxiliary Sister army despite them being an all metal army. I went with a Husky theme of purple and gold. I've never painted purple before and I am having trouble getting what I want out of it.

I started with Hormagaunt Purple over a black primer. I did a heavy overbrush Liche Purple and I think that was my big mistake. There is nothing wrong with LP but it is a very dark color. The next step of washing everything black did not help. The modle ended up almost black. That would have been great if I was doing an off-black Dark Eldar army but I wanted my sisters bright. The gold and cloth turned out so bright that the purple is overpowered. I touched up the washed LP with straight LP but that did nothing to help. It is still a deep and lustrous purple, but it may as well be black next to the gold and cloth.

To try and highlight it, I tried to use Warlock Purple but it looks really bad and cheesy. WP has too much pink in it or something and the result looks like something out of Tron. So I tried to mix them and a 2:1 mix of LP to WP gives this nice glowy result like you can see on her left boot. I want to widen the area of the mix color and then do hard edge highlighting with straight WP but I still do not think that I am going to get the result that I want. 

From The Back 40k

I found a good article on painting purple that skips the Liche Purple step entirely. They do Hormagaunt Purple over black followed by a 1:2 mix of HP and WP. That gives a brighter purple base to work up from than the straight Liche Purple. From there, the paint on a black wash into the recesses. The next two stages of highlighting use the same 1:2 HP to LP but each successive stage adds in one part Skull White. I am going to give this a shot as soon as I finish this mini.

Rather than learning to paint purple with the old paints, I should get some of the new purples and learn to paint that way. Just eyeballing the colors, it looks like there may be a little more room in the purple department with the new paint as opposed to the old paints. In the long run, I'll have to switch over to the new paints anyway. Maybe I'll give the Black Shirts another chance.


UPDATE:
I highlighted all the hard edges with Warlock Purple and massively dislike it. It looks like a bad 80's commercial and still too damn dark! I started painting sans Liche Purple with this guide and already love it. More on how awesome that is when the mini is done and maybe after I've had a chance to paint one with the new colors. 

Shooting and Assault the New Way!

As we get closer to the release of 6th, the more reliable rumors start trickling out of GW. Now, it is hard to make any sort of assumptions based on even this information but it does make the mind race.

IT HAS BEGUN!

6th Edition has dropped and the nonsense has begun. SandWyrm over at the Back 40k already came up with combinations of allies that are broken. This is before the rules have even been read. Why would you even do this? I seems like SandWrym is trying to point out what a super-bad idea this is by point out how you can abuse the rules to make the game not fun anymore and that is a good point. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make these combinations before you even know how they are made.

Rumormongering

Just flippin wait.

The short: I don't like it.

The long: What's the point, really? Assuming that 50% of the rumors are accurate, there is still not enough information to make any kind of informed decisions. They is so much BS and chaff, that you can't separate the fact from fiction until after the official rules are out. Then even after they are out, it still takes months for every to get a grip on the changes to the game.

Take a look at this. This is The Back 40k and my new favorite community. They usually have their heads screwed on straight. In that link they are giving a review of some rumors for the GK Codex as reported by Blood of Kittens. You can read down them and see that even 4 months out from release the rumors are fairly accurate at least in kind of a general way, but not accurate enough to relate the subtly in some of the rules. None of that was readily apparent until you could get the codex in your hands.

And even then, the real impact of the changes do not come through until months later. That point was illustrated very well on World's End Radio in a recent episode. (I would link to it but that would mean re-listening to a 3 hour podcast.) They were talking about their review of the Dark Eldar Codex and how they were way off on how some things worked until after they had played many games.

The kids over at BoLS, blood of Kittens and everywhere else that reports rumors does a disservice to the community. I know why they do it. It is the same reason that they do the worthless "Caption Contests" and idiotic Goatboy articles. They generate hits and those hits are how they sell advertising. It is just like the local news. They do not care what they report as long as you read it and they can get real paid.

I can wait. I am gonna wait. Don't get me wrong, I have my pennies saved and I'm going to get the rule book the day it is available. Then I am going to read it. Then I am going to write about it. Them I am going to read what other people write. Then I am going to play lots of games and only after all of that will I have enough information to make any sort of informed decision.