Old Stuff Day - Check It Out

I will be participating in this year's Old Stuff Day.

I will be scheduling several of my old posts from Yes The Truth Hurts that I'm particularly proud of to get re-posted here in honor of this day. If you have a mind to I would encourage you to participate as well.

Tyranids Second Wave - What Becomes of Our Conversions?

I've been hearing rumors that there will be a Tyranid second wave coming out around August. If the rumors are to be believed there will by a Tyrannofex/Tervigon kit included in plastic, as well as a Harpy kit.

This has kind of got me worried, to be honest. It will be great to have a buy-and-go option for new Tyranid players, sure. But what about us poor bastards that have spent months hawking our souls for old Carnifex kits to build our own Monstrous Critters?

I'll be honest, I was excited to play Nids from the time they first came out. But it's taken me quite a while to actually get this project off the ground, and I certainly can't afford to drop 200 plus bucks on new models if the new kits are completely disproportionate to what I already have.

I guess this is going to be a "moment of truth" in a way. If GW decides they want to "stimulate sales" they can make the Tyranofex/Tervigon much bigger than the Carnifex that most people have based them on. This would immediately invalidate every converted MC out there for tournament purposes.

It would truly be a form of cheating to take a MC to a tourney which is significantly smaller than the "official model."

Or they could, ya know, make them really, really gorgeous and awesome kits. Then I might find it in my heart and budget to replace say, just the Tervigons with their official model and keep my T-Fexes.

I sincerely hope they go the latter route.

Hobby Progress: Got Some Paint On My Tervigon

Hola.



It's not close to being done, some of the stuff looks kind of sloppy at the moment and no highlights have been applied, but the basic colors are pretty well represented so you can get an idea what the final product will look like.

NOVA 2011 Missions Primer

Mike posted up the missions primer here.

I've had a chance to give them a first read through, so I thought I would share my initial thoughts. I'll be sitting down with a beer later and giving them the attention they deserve.

Let me just start by saying the NOVA missions are the best tournament missions I am aware of today, in terms of ease of use, fairness of play, and strategic depth.

I know there were complaints last year about the lack of Kill Points. Most of the complaints centered around the allegation that Kill Points are an effective balance against MSU and the lack thereof unbalanced the missions in favor of MSU.

In Defence of the Heavy Venom Cannon

So I've heard a lot of talk about how useless Heavy Venom Cannons are. Let's talk about that. First of all, they ARE improved from their incarnation last edition. I hope everyone caught that. They ARE capable of destroying a vehicle on a pen, which is a bonus.

For the uninitiated, the Heavy Venom Cannon is a 36 inch range, Strength 9 AP 4 Small Blast Assault 1 weapon. Sounds pretty good right?

Well, the drawback is that against non-open topped vehicles it gets -1 to the vehicle damage roll.

Bummer.

Well, it is if you are using your Heavy Venom Cannons to kill tanks. That's not really what I plan to use them for in most cases.

Let's take a moment to do some maths around this topic. You all know how I love maths. If you have been following along with my little mini-series on basic Warhammer Probabilities, most of this shouldn't be new to you. After all, we are just doing a simple weapon damage calculation.

Reflections on Netlisting (Yes, I got netlisted)!

 Pic only vaguely related, but funny. ;D

It was the weirdest feeling... I backtracked a referring link to a forum and found someone talking about how they were going to be playing a Space Wolves player soon who was using MY Loganwing list, and then he linked to my blog.

I'm not going to link to the forum post itself for two reasons:

A) I don't necessarily think it's polite to expose some random forum thread to the whole internets.

B) I made a rules mistake there and I don't want anyone to know about it. I didn't think you tested for Dangerous on a run move for some random reason. Oh, wait, did I just tell everyone about it? Lol. I have a bad habit of exposing my mistakes to the world. Makes you tough. So really it's mostly about reason A.

My Nids - Fine Tuning

So, having gotten a game in with my test list and having given it a lot of thought of late, I have come to the following conclusions:

-Nids are a really, really fun army to play. They are just so different from Marines. They are just a pleasure to move around on the table, with so many "neat" things to do. Tervigons aren't just "good" - they are fun! Spawning gaunts, throwing around Feel No Pain (kind of a mini-target priority game in itself!), and ya know, being big and mean are just cool.

-Heavy Venom Cannons are staying. They aren't meltaguns, no. They are something else, but they bring a certain utility that is very nice. TL Devourers are also excellent, but against the threats I am MOST concerned with (Razorback spam, Blood Angels Jumpers, Dark Eldar Mech), they have what I need.

-The biggest thing I missed in the army was Preferred Enemy bubbles. I don't want to just add one and make a single Tyrant a priority. I know a lot of people question the double tyrants in general, and that's fine, but for now I'm staying with them.

-Monstrous creatures are quite easy to get cover for when you have Gargoyles and Hive Guard running around.

This leads me to the following thought:

If I drop the Tyrant Guard entirely, I have exactly the points I need to buy Preferred Enemy bubbles for both Tyrants as well as give them both a 2+ armor save.

Pros:

-Much more survivable versus Missiles, Poison Weapon, Autocannon, Multilasers, etc.
-Get Preferred Enemy bubbles.

Cons:

-Less survivable versus AP 2 weapons.
-More difficult to get cover versus AP 2 weapons.

I am forced to think about the threats that I may face. The scariest armies to me (and perhaps I'm missing some) are Space Wolves Razorspam, Marines Razorspam, Dark Eldar Raiderspam and Blood Angels Jumpers. Losing the Tyrant Guard makes me more vulnerable to the AP 2 but less vulnerable to torrents from poison weapons.

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.