I finally got to assault something.

Last night, I played a game with a longtime friend.  It was his first time playing 40k at all, so I guess it was more of an instructional session as opposed to an actual game.

It was helpful to the both of us.  My friend played with my Necrons, while I played an army that I've been working on for quite some time:  Chaos Daemons.  It was my first time actually running them, and I was really pleased with the results.  It was good to be able to teach someone how to play, too.  It made me feel like I'd come a long way in a few months.

St. Fedora's - 10.20.11

As I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, I'm a part of a league at Four Horsemen Comics and Gaming in Morgantown, WV.  The league consists of two opposing factions: the Imperium and the Xenos.  Each week, there are 1v1 matches between members of these factions, and the victor gets to claim territory on a hex map.  At the end of the campaign, there will be an Apocalypse game, and factions will get bonuses based on which territories they control.

Anyway, this league has been ongoing for about two months now.  My record thus far has been favorable, although almost all my games have been close.  One of my goals of this blog is to document these matches so I can look back and see how well I performed at various stages of play, what builds I used, etc.

As of late, I've been using the same weekly build for our 1500pt games.  Although there might have been some very small alterations along the way, it's looked like this:

HQ: Necron Lord
     -Res. Orb & Veil of Darkness
10 Immortals
5 Destroyers
10 Warriors
10 Warriors
5 Scarab Swarms
     -Disruption Fields
5 Scarab Swarms
     -Disruption Fields
1 Monolith

So far, it's worked for me.  I'm constantly fielding more Warriors than I'd like to be, but that's just because I, like any other Necron player, fear the phase out.  I really despise phase out, but that's... well, that's a rant for another day.

Last night, I went up a gentleman who was running Black Templars.  As a new player, I'm not terribly familiar with what all of his models were called, but highlights included a Vindicator, a Land Raider complete with dual twin-linked LasCannons, a Predator, a Marshall, and an Emperor's Champion.  I think he ran a couple of tactical squads, too.  The player was a junior in high school, which sort of blew my mind.  If I'd started playing back then, I might actually be pretty decent by now.

Something about my opponent's build struck me as odd.  As the Black Templars were explained to me pre-game, they're an assault-heavy chapter of the Space Marines.  That's cool.  However, my opponent neglected to give many models, if any, special assault weaponry.  To give an example, two of my Destroyers felled a whole tactical squad of his in assault.  That shouldn't be happening.  It felt as if he was trying to go for a balanced build among his marines instead of playing to their strengths, and I think that that ultimately cost him the game.

I went first.  I began by turbo-boosting my scarabs across the river in the middle of our board and surrounding his tanks.  He tank shocked through them, of course, but that was enough to prevent shooting for most of his units.  He took a potshot at my Monolith with his vindicator, but thankfully, it failed to pen.  Terrifyingly enough, both of his lascannon shots penned, but he failed to roll above a two with either pen.  Tough luck.

My opponent made a mistake here when he dumped a tactical squad out of a transport to engage my scarabs.  As I mentioned earlier, he hadn't outfitted this squad with any special assault wargear, so that group of scarabs, which cost 90 points total, kept the tactical squad in assault (and kept their objective contested) for four rounds.  By the time my scarabs finally went down, my other scarab group had munched through three vehicles and then quickly moved in to slay the remaining marines.

I took a bunch of potshots at the Vindicator, and I was lucky enough to get a few glances, one of which disabled its weapon.  Lucky break for me.  The game continued with me teleporting my Lord / Immortal squad around, as always, and disabling his vehicles one by one.  I blew up three vehicles that game - all transports - and when the squads poured out, they were already wounded from the explosions.  Finishing them off wasn't much of a challenge due to my superior range.

The land raider was the only thing that I felt really threatened me.  With its two lascannons, it's amazing that it never disabled the Monolith.  Furthermore, my opponent's beefiest squad, containing the Marshall and Emperor's chosen, were inside.  

However, my opponent didn't deploy them from his landraider until turn 4, by which time I had already all but disabled all of his other units.  With nothing to prevent me from concentrating from them, I got off a few particle whips and a few volleys of gauss fire, and they quickly went down.  I finished the game holding two objectives, while my opponent finished holding none.

Overall, I think my opponent just suffered from bad wargear choices.  He'd never played Necrons before, so I'm not sure that he knew how to pick apart their deficiencies.  If that were remedied, I think I'd have an extremely difficult time with his army if we were to play again.

Paintin'.

I get a lot of complements on my Necrons' paint job.  It's not the best, and my method is gimmicky, but it works.  It also allowed me to quickly put together a respectable-looking army.  When I first became interested in 40K, after hearing about a dozen conflicting opinions regarding what faction I should play, what sides were over/under powered, what was the most fun, etc, I ultimately went with my initial gut reaction and went with the Necrons.  I liked their lore - what else can I say?

I wanted something different for their aesthetic.  The black / green combination is great and all, but I feel like most folks go with it just because of the green rods that are pre-packaged with almost all Necron models.  After a lot of debate, I decided to go for a red / rusted look.  I could mass produce pieces this way, and the technique that I was to use didn't require all that much painting talent.  I was pretty happy with the result.

Rust.  Although I'm a lawyer now, I have a technical theater undergraduate degree, complete with props training.  I remembered a few (a few) techniques for how to make rust.  The technique that I would use was simple:  apply a coat of rust-colored spray paint, let it dry, create a salt mask, then spray over the whole thing with silver spray paint.  Scrape the salt away, and bam, I had rust.  I did this to all the models in my Necron army, but I think it's best illustrated with my Monolith, where I could use sea salt because of the increased size of the piece.  (I apologize for the quality of these pictures - all I had with me in the shop was my Droid.)

If you look closely, you can probably see bits of salt left on.  I didn't mind that - it gave some texture to the finished product:

As you can see, I used red tubes from Hobbylinc instead of the stock green tubes that normally come with Necron models.  I like the way it turned out.  Instead of the crystal at the top, I crushed up some cheap red faux-gems that I found at Walmart for about $4.  I went out and beat them with a hammer.  Like a boss.

I used the same gems at the base of my (extra blurry, ugh) Necron Lord.  The only other motif I went with was that of metal - shards of metal, leaping up from the base.  I accomplished this by cutting the wirefram that bits came on, twisting it, and spraying over it with silver.  Easy to do, and it gave the pieces a really unique look.  The most extreme example of this would be on my Nightbringer:

This was when he was almost done.  If you look closely, you can see some gaps missing in the red, and you can tell that some of the red was bleeding into the bottom of his robe.

As of the end of last summer, this was my whole army:

I really, really need to give these guys some TLC.  I've been playing with them a lot, and, being Necrons, they're really fragile models.  They're falling apart.  I'm waiting to do repair work until my Chaos army reaches 1500, which should happen very soon.  Here's an adorable preview:

Hello.

I'm finally starting a blog to document my 40K / tabletop gaming exploits.  This is something that I meant to do a long time ago, but due to the bar (read: Dark Souls) and several other considerations, I haven't really had much time until now.

I don't really expect all that many folks to be regular readers here.  This blog will mainly serve as a medium to reduce my thoughts / match records to writing as they happen.  I've learned a lot about the game in the past... uh... gosh, since June, so four months since I've started playing.

A little about my 40K history:  I'm a Necron player.  I started assembling and painting my Necron army in summer of 2010 at the behest of one of my friends, who was confident that he was going to start assembling an Ork army.  We both got off to noble starts, but seeing how I was employed and my friend wasn't, he quickly ran out of money to finance his prospective horde list.

I, however, kept going.  I first painted a pack of Warriors, and that prompted me to buy the Necron Battle Box.  From there, a Monolith, and from there, generally whatever I could get my hands on.  By the end of that summer, I had around 1500 points of Necrons, totally painted.  My unusual burst of productivity was helped along by the fact that I was i) in southern west virginia, ii) living with my mother, and iii) away from my girlfriend.  There wasn't much else to do.

At the end of that summer, I took some pictures of what I'd accomplished.  Thankfully, I still have access to these, as I posted them on forums.somethingawful.com, which actually has a pretty respectable Model Painting thread, which can be found at http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3210214.  I'll copy and paste my post from that thread, with pictures, here in a subsequent post.

As much fun as I had at my Beckley FLGS Lost Legion Games and Comics, I never got to play there.  Most of the guys who frequented the shop... well, I don't know really.  It was weird.  Everyone loved to paint, assemble, and theorycraft, but I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I saw folks actually playing the game that summer.

I feel as if I should throw out a disclaimer: Since then, I've noticed several facebook posts and other mentions that folks are, indeed, playing a ton of 40K there now, so if you're in the neighborhood, you should definitely stop by.  Not to mention, they're usually well-stocked with 40K stuff, and the employees are very knowledgeable / helpful.

Anyways, what I'm getting at here is that I didn't really start playing until I heard of an Escalation League starting at my Morgantown FLGS, Four Horsemen Comics and Gaming in June, 2011.  I somehow thought it'd be a good idea to start playing a few weekly games while in the midst of bar prep.  It was.  Playing in the league got me out of the house, and I got to know a lot of really cool people.  Since joining, I've become a (semi) proficient Necron player, and I'm anxiously looking forward to the new Codex / Models.

Let's see how this goes.