Christmas break is here...

And that means free time which I can only hope means WARGAMING! I've made a tentative plan to play the following with Mark, my brother:

Space Hulk

Battletech (using the intro rules and plastic minis)

Future War Commander

That's all so far, but I'm hoping for more time permitting!

Space Marine Epic Army

I've decided to sell my Epic space marine force so I'm posting a pic so people can see it...

Battle Report! B5 clash!

So Dave and I decided to have a friendly B5 game since during the summer I also have off during the day. I didn't realize it would be a 12 battle level free-for-all cage match in hell!!!!

Dave wanted to play all his fleet and I wanted to play just a few but it was so tempting to field everything so I went for it. The fleet was arranged in more or less 3 sections as can be seen in the first picture. On the left front (second picture) I had 3 raid level up against 3 battle points (boy was I thinking) and it as you might expect would eventually end up with the massacre of my ships.

On the right front it was my Victory, Marathon, Warlock and one of my Omegas up against the Mothership, a cruiser and the numerous ships disgourged from the mothership (it's soooo fraking huge!). The Victory and the Omega would eventually get it (third picture) but the Mothership and cruiser wouldn't last but 1 turn more. What's sad is the Victory got one shot of it's lightning cannon and that was really about it. And it was a pathetic dice roll too.

In the center mele an Omega, Delphi and 4 Chronos frigates went up against his carrier and it's contents (fourth picture). The Chronos frigates were the stars here as they acted in Squadron formation and were doing pretty good in AD.

In the end Dave had to call it quits and head on home so we counted up the dead and I won by like 1 battle point! (7 to 6). The end of the field viewed in the last picture shows how it was when we left. If the game had gone 1 more turn it would've been a decisive win for Dave so I lucked out.

In retrospect I learned many lessons:

1. Learn the rules better. nuff said.

2. don't pit small ships up against big ships unless I really don't expect them to do anything other than hold off the enemy.

3. AD. AD. AD. The more you roll, the better the odds of scoring a critical. And with the Drakh it's all about critical hits.

4. Don't use the lightning cannon on the Victory unless you have plenty of room to drift the next turn. (ie: don't do it if you're surrounded)

5. fighters are good... use them.

6. Gravitic Energy Grid is the Devil!!!

We plan on fighting again next wednesday. An 8 battle point scenario from the rulebook called "Carrier Clash". Should be interesting. More next week.

Updated: B5 Earth Force!

Here's my Earth Alliance Fleet (with a couple of ISA allies) finished (except for fighters) and ready for play. Not likely to get any more ships since they discontinued the line and my economy being what it is, but still it's 12 battle points so I'm pretty content with it.

The fleet includes:

1 Victory class destroyer

1 Warlock class destroyer

1 Marathon class advanced cruiser

2 Omega class destroyers

1 White Star

1 Hyperion class cruiser

1 Explorer class ship

1 Delphi class scout

4 Chronos class frigates

and the fighters seen (I'm still 5 stands of auroras short!!!)

Painting update

So since summer is here I have a lot of free time and thus I've started painting up my Imperial Guard finally (especially since I have the new codex).  In the pictures you'll see the vehicles with the masked city rubble paint scheme I was going for (still needs lots of work). I also broke the leg of one of my sentinels and am not happy about that.  My entire guard force is now base coated... let the monotony of painting hordes commence!

I also picked up the Catachan Command squad and boy did I make use of that!  Although it only came with 5 bodies it has tons of arms and what-not and I needed those.  I was able to affect over 8 minis!  It was great.  

I also discovered that the Krylon Camo Flat Black really isn't black.  More like dark brown.  But it does go on very nice!

2nd Brimtok game.

Been a while, I know. My brother and I just had our second turn 0 Brimtok game and let's just say it didn't go well for me.

I had 1000pts of Tau and he had 1500pts of Space Marines. It wasn't much of a contest as his troops pretty much walked all over me. My tanks didn't do anything except die. I disabled a few of his vehicles but only wiped out one unit (a land speeder) while he took out my two tanks (1 destroyed, the other immobile and shaken) and left me with just a lone crisis suit on the table at the end.

It wasn't pretty and I'm sure he's working on the battle report for his blog. That means I'm now 0-2 which doesn't bode well for Tau supremacy on the planet.

Battle Update

My brother and I finally started playing one of the turn 0 games for the Brimtok Campaign last Saturday (pictures are coming). We didn't finish the game on Saturday. Nor Monday. And still not finished yet. We're hoping sometime soon to finish it. We finished turn 5 with me losing most of my guard in one squad forcing them to withdraw. Since I thought we were going to end the game on Monday I decided to assault a scout squad of marines with my Commander Tau Battlesuit and he took out 3. So they ended in a pile in forcing a turn 6 if we were to continue. Which we decided to do. Where it will end??? Pretty sure the marines are gonna finish me off easily in turn 6 but we'll see. On saturday we had only gotten to the end of turn 2 and our victory points were only 5 apart.

Which brings me to why this has taken so long. Whenever Mark and I play we play with someone who intimately knows the rules. We don't. Not really even close. This was just me and him and 1 copy of the rules. The learning curve is slow and hard but we are learning. The game is complicated enough with all the special rules and not helpful rulebook that we both see why avid 40k players don't play any other games: They don't want to get distracted from the 40k rules and forget them!