Last Month's Painting: Space Hulk Genestealers, Chaos Space Marine Raptors, Haarken Worldclaimer

Gribble Gribble Gribble...

If you caught last month’s blog, you’ll remember that in June I’d begun painting some Space Hulk Genestealers. Here they are all finished; it’s not a great quality picture but you should be able to see I’d put on the top highlight of the carapace, the teeth, the tongues, the claws and the base. I doubt it’s the best you’ll ever see it done – I’ve not done Tyranids a great many times before this – but they’re good enough to do the job!

Let's see how these get on
in the game...

After that, I bought one more box of Chaos Space Marine Raptors to add to my 500pt Black Legion force. I’ve been banging these out since late last year and got into a kind of rhythm in painting them. I’ve quite enjoyed painting black Chaos Space Marines again; it means that the undercoat is generally all you need to do for the armour with just a bit of Abbadon Black to tidy up any splodges afterwards – I use dry brushing to do the top highlight on the gold trimmings, which is an effective but imprecise technique. I made a careless blunder the first time I painted a squad of these Raptors – I didn’t realise what the tops of the jump packs were supposed to match the armour and painted them silver. But I don’t like going back to correct models once I’ve finished them; I have far too many of the things to justify over-correcting my work! So, I just ran with it, and now the whole army looks like that. If it looks like you meant it, you’ll generally get away with it.

This time, I wasn’t quite as pleased with the special effects painting as I normally am. You can make out the plasma gun in the picture; I usually paint it neater than that. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the Power Sword either; I try to build this up from layers of green and light grey and then white at the top. It works, but not well, and even for this pretty tough technique, I didn’t make a very good job of it. Also, the Champion has the helmet of a Space Marine beneath his feet. Whenever I get this (and it’s happened five times so far!) I try to paint them as a different Space Marine chapter, to bring the idea across that the Black Legion have been battling Space Marines for millennia and have fought them all. You can’t really tell from the picture but that was supposed to be a Dark Angels helmet.

Death to the Iron Hands!

To complete the army I painted Haarken Worldclaimer (and incidentally, when saying that name I put a glottal stop in between the two “A”s and until someone tells me what that extra A is supposed to add to the pronunciation I’m going to keep doing it no matter how annoying it gets.) This was painted similarly to the rest of the army, with a couple of exceptions: The two weapons had an extra top-highlight of Runefang Steel and a bit of Stormhost Silver – I don’t usually do this with Black Legion as I want the Gold to be the brightest colour. The odd purple skull at the back was Screamer Purple with a highlight of Sigmarite, and the bright runes on the Helspear were build up from red to orange in the same way I would normally do the eyes. The blur on the photo makes it look a lot better than it is! I decided to paint the dead Space Marine from the Iron Hands chapter – partly because I haven’t forgotten being brutalised by them in the summer of 2014 and I want revenge, and partly because as the Raven Guard use black helmets as well, I needed something else to distinguish them. As the dead Space Marine has his hands, I decided to paint the Iron Hand’s Iron Hands, er, Iron.

That’s where I’m going to leave that army for now; until I know how the update to the rules of Warhammer 40K is going to affect the points values I won’t be adding anything new. But I’ve still got plenty to paint, and I should be finished with some more Space Hulk Terminators by next month!

Last Week's Games: Spelunky, Streets of Rage 2, Mortal Kombat, Battle Isle, Painting Chaos Raptors...

Spiders. It's always spiders.

This week, I’ve had to balance out my time for playing games with the fact that my daughter is around all the time now, so for that reason I’ve been spending a lot more than the usual amount of time playing Spelunky. This is a brutally hard game to play but as nothing worse than landing on a spike trap happens in it, it’s safe for me to play in front of a three-year old! She’s had a go with it as well, she’s not necessarily very good at it as she hasn’t got the dexterity to handle the controls of precision platforming, but she tries, bless her! I’m hoping to get a little further into the game than the mines, but so far, I’ve managed it twice and died almost straight away both times, so I need to be in it for the long haul. 

These were the characters when
me and Jessie played...

Another game that’s fun to come back to every now and then is Streets of Rage 2. Regular readers will remember that this is my favourite game of all time, and nothing has changed in the 26 years since I had it given to me. I hope, one day, to beat the game on Hardest difficulty without cheating; I’m not quite there yet but I’m not necessarily far from it either. Just a few more pushes… Also, it’s a good game to play with Kirsty and Jessie, since on the easier difficulties it doesn’t require much more thought than find someone and beat them up. I played it through with Kirsty one night in the week and got to the end of it, though Kirsty had run out of lives before the final boss rush.

I'll get there eventually. Maybe.

When I wrote about Mortal Kombat last week it probably sounded like I wasn’t enjoying it all that much, but I’m currently working from home and I keep putting it on every now and then. As a run only takes me about 20 minutes before I lose my final credit, it doesn’t take too long and I’m quite enjoying it now! It is a very difficult game though; I can get most of the way through the ladder, but as soon as I come to the endurance matches I get stuck, especially as they always seem to involve Kano – a very hard character to fight if you’re not on it with your blocking! I’ll keep trying though; it’s become a good pick-up-and-play game for me.

Reminds me of Advance Wars...

I downloaded and played Battle Isle, a very old strategy game on the PC. It’s a turn-based strategy game on a Hex grid; my kind of thing, but it’s got some old-style and very finnicky controls! To give an order you must click your unit, then hold the mouse button and move it in the direction of the order you want to give. Also, your shooting phase happens after the opponent’s movement phase – so you’re attacking where they were at the start of their turn; not where they are going to be at the end of it. That takes some getting used to, and I’ve only just discovered you can repair units in the buildings, but it’s early days with this one, so we’ll see how it goes.

It's been fun painting them but that's it for a while.

Finally, I finished painting my last squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. At least, it was supposed to be the last squad – I was always going to get another box of them but the intention was to build and paint three of them so I could have three squads of six. Having bought the new Chaos Space Marines codex and seen how the new points values affect what I’d planned for the army, it works much better to have another squad of five – making four squads of five – and have them lead by Haarken Worldclaimer. I’ll let you decide how to pronounce that name; my preferred method is to put a glottal attack between the two “A”s. I won’t be painting either of them for a while, as we’re in lockdown and it would be incredibly churlish of me to run around town looking for Warhammer models, but I’ve got plenty to be getting on with, including the Terminators from the 2009 Space Hulk boxed set…

Last Week's Games: Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy VII and Spelunky

I found the original Mortal Kombat trilogy on sale on GOG and remembering how much fun I’d had with those games in the past, I bought them and downloaded the first game. The first thing I noticed was that it handles quite a bit differently to the Sega Megadrive version of the game I was used to…

Not looking good for Sub-Zero, is it?

There’s no point in being polite about this; the controls are incredibly clunky, even for a Mortal Kombat game. The game was released for DOS and runs on DOSbox, which doesn’t support the game controller I have. This being a fighting game, I’d rather be using a controller, but from what I understand, that wouldn’t be much better: As PC controllers at the time weren’t expected to have more than four buttons anyway, whichever configuration of the controller settings you used would have meant missing out on at least one of the necessary buttons. I ended up rebinding and using some of the keyboard for the game. It works… but it’s very fiddly to remember what key does what button, and often I find myself pressing buttons that do nothing at all.

Elsewhere, the game is closer to the Arcade game than the console ports that came later. The music is different to how I remember it from the Mega Drive, but some of the tracks were used in the Gameboy port of the game! The fights work well enough, if you can get past the controls, and it would be churlish of me to suggest I’m not enjoying it at all, but there are better fighting games than this now.

A very sad moment of the game...

With the corona virus gripping the country and a lot of my work put on hold, I have spent quite a bit of time playing Final Fantasy VII on my Nintendo Switch. This is another game that, objectively speaking, hasn’t aged particularly well, but is always a joy to play, nonetheless. At the time of writing I’m in the Corel Prison, (I got game over-ed in the fight against Dyne; I’d forgotten how quick he reacts!) which means I’m past the point I reached the last time I attempted a complete playthrough. I’d be surprised if any of you remember this as it was over five years ago, but I tried playing through the PlayStation version of the game which sadly stopped working en route to Corel. Whether I’ll see this through to the end I don’t know, and with the remake due out in a few weeks, I may not have to – but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts!

I carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2 when I could spare the time, and I’m working my way through the missions in Venice. Funnily enough there doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as much side activity to do in Venice as there is in the other cities in the game; maybe I’m missing something, or maybe the game wants to move the story on a little more quickly now.

Intense...

Then, when my daughter turned up, I had a go with Spelunky on the Xbox 360. This is a bit of an odd game for me as I played it after playing Rogue Legacy, and I didn’t think Spelunky was as good. But it is one of the better pick up and play games I own on the 360, and the controls are simple enough for my daughter to at least give it a go! It’s a very difficult game, but we have fun in the mines. In my case that means getting through as much of the game as I possibly can, in her case it means trying to get to the end of the level before the ghost gets her!

I also managed to finish painting my second squad of Chaos Raptors for my Black Legion army and bought another box of them. My intention is to get three six-man squads plus a Chaos Lord to make up a 500pt army and see how I feel after that. But I’m painting these models more quickly than I’ve managed in a long time, so while this would normally take me close to a year, this year may prove a different matter entirely.

Last Week's Games: Age of Empires, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2, SSX World Tour and Painting Chaos Raptors

I’ve had all sorts on this week…

Powerful, yes, but vulnerable in... wait,
what? What's happening in this picture?

I had another go with Age of Empires, playing the mission where you attack Troy with Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus and whatever army you can muster. I gave up in the end since all the heroes had died, and I couldn’t crack the enemy’s impenetrable wall of Hoplites and Cavalry. They had destroyed all my catapults, and I was getting to the point in the game where all the resources are starting to dry up so I wouldn’t have been able to mount an effective counterattack. I’ll probably come back to it at some point but those missions take anything up to a couple of hours to reach their conclusion, and I’m not keen on having another go just yet.

Funnily enough I'm several hours into the game and
I've only just started fighting goblins...

I carried on playing Arcania on the PS4. I stopped playing it for a while; not for any particular reason, I just don’t play the PS4 much these days for TV-related reasons. I remembered, whilst dealing with the clunky controls and the not-brilliantly-voice-acted dialogue, that it’s not a very good game. But I found it engaging enough to keep going, at least for a while. It got me thinking about the way I do review scores. Those of you who have been keeping up with this will know that I review games out of five, but as I only review games once I’ve beaten them, and that I will at least have had to have been engaged enough by the game to see it through to the end means that the chances that I will ever give a game the lowest score of 1/5 is quite low. The one game that I would have given that score to was Sweet Fantasy, a visual novel that took me less than 45 minutes to see in its entirety – a feat I accomplished before I started scoring my reviews. If I get to the end of Arcania that’s probably the score I will give it, but as it’s quite rare for me to do this with a long-form RPG, we will have to see…

I also continued my campaign on Assassin’s Creed 2, which I’m enjoying on the basis that I dip into it every now and then and not worry too much about the plot, or what in the world is supposed to be happening. In fact, I’ve bypassed all the plot missions and am in the process of doing all the side quests in the town I’m in now (I can’t remember what it’s called. The one with the port.) Coming into the game every now and again, rather than trying to defeat the entire game in one go, is proving a much more enjoyable experience.

At one point, my three-year-old daughter had a go with SSX World Tour, a game I’d downloaded years ago and hadn’t played for a while. It was amusing to watch her trying to control the snowboard (with a little help from me and my partner,) and I’m not convinced she knows she’s racing, but you know what, she’s having a nice time and that’s what counts.

Note the Blood Angel that this Raptor has killed...

Finally, I completed some Games Workshop models for the first time in a while, in this case some Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I was inspired to paint these by playing the Horus Heresy: Legions game and wanting to build a Chaos Space Marine army based around the Sons of Horus. Their thing in Legions is that they like to attack the Warlord, or whatever the enemy is counting on in order to win, and I’ve always liked that idea, so I decided to paint some Raptors. I was quite pleased with how it worked out in the end. There may have been a top layer of gold I forgot to put on but other than that I’m enjoying how they look. The Champion’s power sword is the second time I’ve used this technique, and while it definitely went better than the first time, it’s still going to need some practice. But that’s what I like about my collection of models; they showcase what I could do at the time and tell the story of how my painting progresses as I’m going along.

Last Week's Games: Arena, Fire Pro Wrestling World, Spyro the Dragon

Larger than it looks...

I carried on playing Arena and X-COM: UFO Defense, but the problem with both is that they were developed during a time before games were paced and balanced at the level we expect them to be today, and I found them to be frustrating more than anything else. Arena is looking like it’s going to be a long slog indeed. I had forgotten that the first major area where there is a plot-related quest – Fang Lair – is in Hammerfell, and because I am a Wood Elf and therefore started the game in Valenwood, I need to travel across both continents before I find what I’m looking for. On the one hand, you can fast-travel from the very start. On the other, if you try to travel further away than the next town, you’ll be killed before you get there and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The result is that I’ve got a long way to go before I can move the plot along and will likely never get there without a substantial amount of scum-saving. The fact that having more save files appears to increase the likelihood of the game crashing is doing nothing to improve this! I’m having fun, but I’m not likely to see it through until the end.

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

I carried on with Fire Pro Wrestling World, which I’m finding addictive and a lot of fun. I’m still working my way through the Mission Mode, which is a good way to learn the key mechanics of the game but some of the match stipulations are rather odd, and I’ve had to go online to find out how to do it as the game doesn’t explain it to you. The one I remember is where you must win a Cage match having done a diving attack from the top of a steel cage. Even getting to the top of the cage without being interrupted takes a fair amount of work, and then you have to know where to do it and what button makes the attack – you only get one shot, and if you miss, you’ll be helpless on the floor as your opponent climbs the cage uninterrupted! The match I’m stuck on now is the one where you must let your tag team partner win the match. This is quite difficult to do as your partner doesn’t appear to be able to hold his own against your opponents, so you must do most of the work in beating them – but they’re pretty tough!

Dragoooon!

I had a go with Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 4. Kirsty bought this game roughly a year ago and hasn’t had a huge amount of time to play it. I played it because I wanted to be playing a game that I didn’t mind my daughter seeing when she woke up after her nap. But I really enjoyed it. It’s easy enough to play without getting stuck, (although apparently it gets tough later – I’m only at the second world!) and the bulk of the challenge is provided by collectables, which is where I’ve spent most of my time with it so far. I also liked Spyro, with his Sonic the Hedgehog-style ‘90s ‘tude. Having grown up in a time where pop culture was the domain of larger-than-life cartoon characters, it left me in a nostalgic haze, and was a refreshing change from the super-serious RPG characters or shooters. Speaking of my daughter, when she eventually woke up, she wanted to play, and even though she doesn’t have the dexterity to handle 3D controls yet, the game isn’t particularly challenging in the early stages and she had a fine time running around opening treasure chests.

With my hobby games, I spent some time in Phoenix Games while having my car fixed and started painting my Chaos Raptors in Black Legion colours, I’ll show you all when I’ve finished! I’ve also developed what I hope are some horror-based adventures for Dungeons and Dragons; short ones that will fit in to one or two gaming sessions but are paced well enough to give an interesting game to players wanting something a little different. I hope I get to run them at some point!

Warhammer World Invasion: April 2013

It took a while to get there but for me, the 2013 season is now on! Last week at Warhammer World I finally got to play some full games of the new edition of Warhammer 40K. It was an Invasion event that runs there from time to time, particularly in the school holidays, and it being a doubles event I partnered up with Dave and took the Iron Scars clan to their inaugral tournament. Here's how it all went down:

Because I wanted to use a new army for this, I designed a new Chaos Space Marine army around a god that is used far too little - Slaanesh. Granted, they lack the brutality of Khorne, or the reslience of Nurgle, but having cut my teeth on Dark Eldar way back when I first started the hobby, I am very well aware of how useful that extra initiative can be. Here's my army list:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	120	600
	Jump Pack	15
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	10
Troops	Chaos Space Marines (6)	88	161
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Close Combat Weapon (5)	10
	Plasma Gun	15
	Veterans of the Long War (6)	6
	Mark of Slaanesh	12
	Chaos Space Marines (6)	88	155
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Close Combat Weapon (5)	10
	Plasma Gun	15
	Mark of Slaanesh	12
Fast Attack	Raptors (6)	112	164
	Meltagun (2)	20
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Melta Bombs	5
	Mark of Slaanesh (6)	12

Quite a lot going on there for a small army. What was supposed to happen was the Raptors deep-strike onto the battlefield either straight away or 1 turn in, use their Melta guns to destroy either the vehicles or whatever the enemy had sunk the most points on, and harrass the rest of the army until the end of the game, contesting objectives if at all possible. The rest of the force would support them by holding our objectives, firing plasma shots at hard targets, and in the case of the Chaos Space Marine Lord, jumping into any combat that needed supporting. Dave had taken a swarm of 75 Orks lead by a Big Mek, going on the assumption that whatever damage they took, there'd still be plenty more where they came from. We entered battle with all this in mind, and campaigned to aid the Dudley store in their victory...

A quick note about the games, as there were elements common to all of them:

• The games were all supposed to be Doubles games, with 600pts per player, using the standard force organisation chart. Now, the chart can be applied somewhat loosely in small-point games, but in this case the rules stood firm to stop people taking dirty, cheesey armies to what was supposed to be a friendly tournament.
• The games we played were all fast, dirty and scrappy, and with just the right balance between competitiveness and friendlyness; we couldn't have asked for a better set of opponents.
• Regular games of 40K can last for up to 7 turns, and more commonly 5, but because of the limited time constraints, none of our games lasted longer than 3 turns each.

Round One: Chaos/Orks vs Grey Knights/Blood Angels

When we found ourselves up against Grey Knights and Blood Angels, including some Death Company, I was convinced we were going do die a quick and horrible death. The scenario was Big Guns Never Tire (Objectives (in our case 4) with Heavy Support counting as scoring units as well as granting victory points) with Hammer and Anvil deployment, so we had a long way to go before we got into any kind of fighting. The Grey Knights, funnily enough, had a pinkish tint to them, their commander Ben attributing this to the time they spend fighting Slaanesh, and I was eager to continue the Rivalry!

They hadn't counted on the Raptors, and it was a good day for their Champion as he dispatched a Blood Angels Assualt Sergeant in Black Rage and a Grey Knight Justicar in single combat; not always a wise move to make but a necessary one since Chaos Champions have no choice in the matter. This cost our enemies the game, since the rest of the combat has no effect on the participants of the challenge, so by the end of the 3rd turn their objective was still contested as the Champion was still alive where his comrades had fallen. Elsewhere, the other objectives remained bitterly contested as the remaining forces of the Space Marines arrived via Deep Strike, but it was not enough firepower to move either the Orks or the Chaos Marines from their objectives. In the end, Dave and I won on Secondary victory points, and while it was not the decisive win we would have chosen, it was enough to get the day off to a promising start.

Final Score: Chaos/Orks win 2-0.

Round Two: Chaos/Orks vs Necrons/Tryanids

This was a battle we were dreading. The only thing worse than an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object is having to take on a combined strength of an unstoppable force (the Tryanids) AND an immovable object (the Necrons.) To make matters worse, we'd landed a 6-objective Scouring scenario (Objectives, with Fast Attack counting as scoring units and awarding victory points) and the 1 specialised unit that we had was Fast Attack (the Raptors.) This wasn't going to change my game plan, but we'd have to watch our step carefully...

Losing the first turn to a seize of initiative cost us dearly, as we found several large blast templates on top of us courtesy of the Necrons which wiped out a significant number of the Orks before we'd even got started. My Chaos Marines made an immediate grab for 2 of the objectives while we concentrated fire on the Gargoyles. We wiped the unit out, denying the enemy a fast scoring unit and earning us a couple of victory points.

Notwithstanding the arrival of the Raptors, it then became a war of attrition, which with so many guns supporting an onslaught of Tyranids was always going to be a struggle to win. However the balance of power literally came down to the last 10 minutes of the game where 1 of 3 things had to happen in order to win:

1. The skeletal wreck of one of my units of Chaos Marines needed to score a high enough Run roll to get to the objective on the left hand side of our deployment zone,
2. The Orks holding one of our objectives needed to pass a leadership test forced by the presence and attacks of a Zonathrope,
3. The Raptors needed to defeat a squad of 6 Necrons in close combat and force them to flee from the objective they were holding.

Sadly, none of these things happened, and Dave and I lost that battle right at the end.

Result: Necrons/Tryanids win 7-5.

Round Three: Chaos/Orks vs Dark Angels/Space Wolves

While we'd never be so arrogant as to suggest we had this one in the bag, we did approach this particular battle with a certain amount of confidence. I had the firepower to take out heavily armoured units, and Dave had the numbers to overwhelm them. So much so that, even with Vanguard deployment (imprecise and hard to strategise,) Emperor's Will objectives (1 objective each) and staring 2 Vindicators in the face right at the start of the game, we were confident that we'd do a good job with this one.

We could not have been more wrong. Due to some appalling deployment on my part, 1 of my squads of Chaos Marines was left out in the open and was shot to pieces in the first turn, giving our enemies first blood. My Chaos Lord was not long in following. Dave had mercifully granted Outflank to his leader during the Warlord Traits stage, and he seized the opportunity to wreak havoc on the left flank of the Space Marine forces, with it must be said some success. We also put up a fierce defence of our own objective. The Raptors arrived behind enemy lines as planned, but were rattled firstly by the squad of Space Wolves in a Razorback, and secondly by the Vindicator they were desperately trying to destroy blowing up in their face and wiping out the entire squad. Both sides managed to hold on to their objectives at the end of the game, but the secondary victory points meant that the Space Marines managed to win the day quite comfortably.

Result: Dark Angels/Space Wolves win 7-3.

Final Result

Well, even if there was more than 1 position of Store Champion, we were never going to get it with only 1 win out of 3, so well done to Chris and Mason for their well-deserved victories!

However, after a gruelling and even battle, the Dudley store eventually won. It was level-pegging up until the last 5 games, which swung it in Dudley's favour, so well done to those guys for covering the tracks of those who didn't do so well!

What have I learned?

Because it wouldn't be proper to write all this without taking something from it...

Given that it was the first time either me or Dave had played a full game of 6th edition 40K, we were caught out by the rules changes a surprisingly small number of times. There were occassions where we made some tactically poor decisions that we could learn from, so here's a few things that had a significant impact on what was eventually decided, and how we can learn from it:

1. Objectives give you points, Secondary Victory Points win games. What you have to do in order to collect these secondary points (be the first player/team to wipe out 1 unit, kill the enemy commander and finish the game with models in the enemy deployment zone) appear to favour aggressive tactics, and while my Raptors were conducive to this, the other squads weren't doing much more than hold on to the objectives. That's fine; everything was useful to one degree or another. Just keep in mind that the game now seems to favour agression. Use it!
2. It didn't always help but the Mark of Slaanesh was a real bonus against the Grey Knights and Blood Angels. The higher initiative gives you an edge; a way to tip the balance against two fundamentaly similar stat lines. Space Marine Armies are never going to be large, which means losing even 1 of them will hurt. If they're lost before they've even had a chance to fight back, it's worth the extra couple of points that the higher initiative will give you. You won't necessarily hit very hard - giving a Power Fist or such like to a model with the Mark of Slaanesh is meaningless - but power weapons and lightning claws should work well enough for most situations. Build on it!
3. One thing I didn't realise about my Raptors is that they cause Fear. While this doesn't cripple you in quite the same way that it does in Warhammer Fantasy, it can still be effective in reducing the weapon skill of your opponent. Given the opponents we faced, it would only really have helped in the Tyranids/Necrons battle, but it's worth remembering for the future, I think.
4. The next stage for the army is to add some more Raptors, which will come as no surprise given how much I've been banging on about them throughout this blog. I discussed my 'Tank Hunter' tactic above; it worked, but not well. I simply couldn't bring enough firepower to one squad to do enough damage to a vehicle to take it out in one turn. The solution? Another squad of Raptors. Arming them in the same way will double the firepower I can bring, and if one of them gets a mishap during Deep Strike, at least my tactic isn't totally lost. I'll also be taking their Melta Bombs away, as their firepower makes it less than necessary, and also I'm taking Veterans of the Long War away from the Chaos Space Marine squads. It's a useful rule against Space Marines, and brings your leadership up to 9/10, but it didn't make much difference in practice. I'm not saying they'll never have it again, but I want to see how the new Raptors work out first...

So, there you have it! My first few games of 2013. Looking forward to seeing how the next ones go!

My thoughts on the new Chaos Space Marines

So Games Workshop have hit me with another curveball; they're putting out the Chaos Space Marines ahead of everything else for the new edition of 40K. This was a bit of a surprise, I was convinced it was going to be Dark Angels, but there you go. With this and some shiny new models to build, there's no way I'm not going to have an opinion on this, so...

(Apologies once again; it's having a lot of difficulty uploading the photos...)

Chaos Space Marine Codex

My initial thoughts on this are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand it's about time Chaos Space Marines had an update; they haven't had one since 4th edition and were long overdue. On the other hand, as a returning player I'm not sure how I feel about all the new things that will be involved in it. We've got several new units out on release - more on them later - and even more stuff once the Dark Vengeance models go out on general release. I'm hoping they will, rather than being relegated to Deffkopta-style 'you must drop £60 on Dark Vengeance before you can use Cultists' spiel. But there's a lot of new stuff now, some of which I suspect is replacing old stuff. Which is great except that I've actually spent a load of money on old stuff that is potentially no longer relevant. I say potentially...

Here's the thing: Where GW seem to be going with all this is taking Chaos Space Marines in a new direction. It's no longer enough for them to be able to say "Like Space Marines... but bad guys," give them a couple of different units and put a couple of armies on the table that fight in a very similar way for the most part. No, they seem to want to take Chaos in a different direction entirely. Hence the Cultists. Hence the Maulerfiends and Heldrakes. They want Chaos to be their own, very distinctive force.

Now in some cases this is quite welcome. Take the Cultists, for example. One thing that I noticed Chaos Space Marines struggle with was numbers. Particularly armies that were based on a mark of the Chaos Gods, would number at full strength around 30 models. My Khorne army, when it's finished, will have 31 models in it. And what we find is that we just don't have the numbers to cope with things like Tryanids, who attack in hordes, and even things like Necrons, because losing even 1 Chaos Space Marine is going to hurt. It would be good to field an army in numbers.

They also have given them two huge models, the Maulerfiends and the Heldrakes. Having the biggest stuff in the game is not going to last, judging by the precedent of Warhammer, who seem to be trying to put out a bigger and better model every time they release a new army, and with Eldar and Tau surely not far away from an update, the idea that Heldrakes will dominate the skies in 40K due to it's sheer size will last at most a year. So I think this is setting a precendent for what is to come in the new edition of 40K.

Trouble is what about my current armies that have only got Chaos Space Marines in them? What are they going to do? I'm hoping for some updates to the rules that might complement the currently existing rules, but I'll have to read the codex to find that out. I just hope what I don't read is that the armies I have spent the past 4 years collecting have been made redundant.

I think for the first time I'm starting to see what the bitter veterans rant about when their game gets updated, and while I'm not going to take one look at the army book and write it off straight away, I can sort of see why people do. This isn't news to a great many people, but to me it is the first time I sat one iteration of a game out from start to finish so it is a new and not entirely welcome feeling...

Anyway, on to the models:

Maulerfiend/Forgefiend

I quite like these, actually. They look outlandish, as though they just about belong in the Chaos army, but painted up with the rest of the army with a similar colour scheme and it should look really good as a centrepiece for a much larger army.

Heldrake

These look to me like flying stained glass windows. Not that that's a bad thing, but they don't look very... durable. I don't think GW has had a concept of aerodynamics since the Valkyrie, so it looks somewhat unbalanced. It'll be the token flyer of the 40K game for Chaos, a set of rules which I have yet to experience to be honest so I'm not sure how it's all working. I think in terms of colours, the same thing applies as does to the Maulerfiend...

Raptors/Warp Talons

This are quite welcome! I've got some of the old Raptors, and while they don't look bad, the models do look a bit dated these days. I'm hoping these new Raptors will be easier to stand, for a start! Assault troops aren't that easy to come by in Chaos Space Marine armies; Raptors were metal and lacked the flexibility of some of the other models and Bikes aren't actually all that good anyway. I think with the advent of these models we should see some more Fast Attack orientated forces in an army sorely missing some speed...

Warpsmith

Well lookey here, they've gone and put Dr Octopus in 40K. Not sure what I think of this. I like the model and the concept of having someone to repair tanks is useful for Chaos Space Marines but I can't quite see what he's going to do on the battlefield that the Techmarine isn't already doing. That'll be a chapter to look forward to in the book; just what is this guy's deal?

Mutilators

Oh dear, there's always one. Sorry but I don't like these models at all, I think they're absolutely hideous. I think they look overly chunky and barely capable of moving, never mind performing CQC manuevres they're clearly purporting to be able to do. And that 'Flesh Stretched Over The Power Armour' thing they've got going on makes me feel physically ill just thinking about it; why would even a Chaos Space Marine do that to himself? I know these models were probably conceived as a close combat equivalent of the Obliterator design. Funnily enough, I never liked those models either.

All the other models are stuff that was out in Metal before and has now been updated for Finecast, with the exception of the Aspiring Champion who I'm pretty sure was in the Dark Vengeance boxed set.

So all in all, it's not looking too bad at all, and I could definitely come up with some army concepts from what is on display here. I just hope it's not going to be at the expense of the armies I already have...

Edit 24/9/2012

It's just come to my attention that Khorne Bezerkers and Plague Marines, plus the kits to make Thousand Sons and Noise Marines, are now in the Elite section of the Chaos Space Marine bit of the Games Workshop Website. That, to me, is a pretty strong indication that those models are going to be in the Elite section of the army list from now on.

This means 1 of 2 things:

1: We're going back to the old rules where those units were listed as Elites, but if your army was lead by a Chaos Lord with the appropriate mark then they would count as Troops. So if you took a Chaos Lord with the mark of Nurgle, Plague Marines would count as Troops, otherwise they would count as Elites.

2: They're going to be purely Elite choices.

I sincerely hope it's the former. It would fit in more with the background, I guess, and shut down or at least limit some of the more vomit-inducing tournament combos like 2 Daemon Princes with the mark of Slaanesh leading a force of Plagues Marines. Also I've got an army full of Khorne Bezerkers at the moment and I do NOT want to be told that I have to also take 2 units of Chaos Space Marines before the army is going to be legal.

We shal see...