40K Reclamation of Orberus Crusade - The Defence of Python IV

 

I've signed up for a Crusade campaign at my club, Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts. We were slightly distracted by our usual venue, Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, being closed for some renovations. So, my opponent and I booked a table at The Arcanist's Tavern.

The Arcanist's Tavern is a new venue that has a few wargaming tables, a few D&D tables, and some tables for board games. They serve food and drink and I will definitely be going again.

I'm continuing the narrative of my old Astra Militarum, as the Tallarn XVI, fed up of constant victimisation by dubious Inquisitors, went to hide out on a Necron held planet. To avoid consequences, they've drawn an extra I onto the unit insignia to masquerade as the Tallarn XVII. Hiding among the mind shackled Guard, they found themselves under attack by another Guard regiment believing them working for the Necrons.

My force has quite a lot of tanks for its size, and my opponent was running a massive wave of infantry guard. The mission narrative was that we were fighting under horrible Necron pylons, so you had to try and hold territory and pass battleshock tests near the objectives.

The infantry advanced towards the Tallarn lines using the buildings and ruins as cover. Their lasguns started off outranged as artillery and tank shells took some pretty heavy chunks out of of their lines, but there were still a huge number closing in...

A large Cadian squad turned the corner to advance on the objective I was guarding with a Hellhound...

And a savvy Inferno Cannon gunner pulled off an overwatch shot to absolutely ruin the day of the squad in question...

That absolutely terrified the infantry guard and they poured all their fire into the Hellhound, desperately trying to take it out. It ended up holding together on a single wound due to a round of very lucky armour save.

Even a charge into the Hellhound didn't manage to take it out!

The Hellhound burned the attacking infantry to a crisp, but left a single officer alive. My nearby infantry squad charged in and cut him down. In turn, the Hellhound was finally taken out, while the infantry were badly shot up.

I needed to pass a Battleshock test to score . . . and completely failed to. I'd three different sources of rerolls, but could only use one, and just rolled absolute garbage. I could have auto-passed, but thought I'd be fine with the reroll and wanted to save my command point... The Commissar could end the Battleshock by shooting a surviving Guardsman, but that didn't count for the purposes of scoring . . . oh well.

Meanwhile, my Manticore and Leman Russ Executioner smushed a guard squad to a fine paste. The Enginseer survived and ducked behind a building to start looting Blackstone shards. With experience for kills, and narratively, wanting to please the local Necrons who were tolerating our existence, I lobbed a barrage of Storm Eagle rockets onto the poor Enginseer.

Meanwhile, a tide of Catachan crashed into my other infantry squad.

The Demolisher drove off to get blown up elsewhere, but the psyker stayed alive, cutting down Catachan left and right, but ending the fight in a bloody stalemate.

The Executioner got charged, but there just wasn't quite enough violence to take it out before the battle was over - but the loyal Guard had taken the field, winning the game overall 45-5...

White Company Expansion

 

I got another batch of White Company back from Tesseract Miniature Studios. First up is the Guija, the Yu Jing TAG that White Company has access to. It's a pretty standard TAG, with the advantage of Super Jump, to allow it to get some good firing angles.

I've not tried using the Guija with White Company yet. It's a little pricey, so using it would mean using less Heavy Infantry and other expensive pieces. It'll be interesting to see what compromises I need to make to make it work.

I've also got the Jujak box painted up. These Heavy Infantry pair with the ORC Troops to form fireteams. They have a slightly different profile to the ORCs, so you have a good opportunity to mix and match for the skill set you're after.

Finally, there's a few individual pieces. First there's the production model of John Hawkwood, the leader of White Company. I already have the limited figure of him painted up from Defiance. I've got two as White Company has a Holomask profile so I can deploy two "Hawkwoods". In the middle is a Beasthunter from TAG Raid. White Company can take two, and I also have an Ariadna Spec Ops I'm using for the other one. Finally, there's a Nokk Spitfire, who is a midfield piece who doesn't have Camouflage - its an aggressive attack piece that's quite fragile and needs supporting with other midfield pieces to prevent it being take out before it can attack. 

Infinity Battle Report: Firefight, Qapu Khalqi vs Imperial Service

 

At HATE the other week, we had a visitor over from the US. He hadn't managed to bring an army over, so some of the club members got together to loan him a list. They put him together an Imperial Service list with three Su-Jian. These are very powerful transforming robot minatures where you usually take one, or maybe two. Three is very very silly.

Meanwhile, knowing that our visitor hadn't played in a good while, and thinking through the painted factions I had lying around, I decided to break out the Qapu Khalqi. I'd been watching some Rob Shepherd videos where he talked about Qapu Khalqi and I wanted to play around with the list building a little bit.

Because Qapu Khalqi can run two Haris links and a Core link, I decided to run with that. The first Haris used an Azra'il as an attack piece, a Druze link because I wanted a linked Pitcher, and then a Ghulam link. I hid my Lieutenant by having a Hafza pretend to be a Druze E/M Grenade Launcher.

Wait, I think this list is wrong. I swapped out the Druze HMG for an Odalisque Spitfire to upgrade the Druze Killer Hacker to a Hacker... Can't work out where I put the final list, though...

We picked Firefight as a nice simple mission, so we needed to shoot up each other's models, and hunt down Lieutenants, and score three random Classified missions.

I started off by dropping a Yuan Yuan behind one of the three Su-Jian and used smoke to drop a big ol' Chain Rifle template over a few targets. In this case I made the mistake of catching a Kuang Shi in the blast, which meant it shot back blindly through the smoke and took out the Yuan Yuan before it could do more damage.

The Azra'il went to try and take out a Su-Jian that was out on ARO, but a couple of unlucky rolls and taking a couple of hits from Panzerfausts, it ended up unconscious, then Rouhani had to run over and heal it up.

I left my Druze / Odalisque link a little too far forward, and a Motorised Bounty Hunter Duo with a Su-Jian ran up and smushed most of the link with a Chain Colt.

One of the Su-Jian then catapulted forward and shot up the Hafza, but I was incredibly lucky and survived the attack. I then had to bring my Azra'il around and shot the Su-Jian down.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief at this point as the mission scores additional points for killing enemy Lieutenants...

Another Su-Jian made it up the table and managed to smush the Total Reaction remote, but in turn got shot down...

I was desperately throwing models forward to try and survive the Su-Jian. I managed to get Rouhani into base to base with it to score a Classified objective.

The Yu Jing WarCor ran forward to take something from the panoply to try and score some points for the mission.

My remaining Al Hawwa had scored a Sabotage mission, but hadn't been able to re-camouflage, so ended up getting picked off. However, it wasn't enough to swing the the scoring around and I managed to squeak the win...

Plans for May

 

I didn't get any hobby done in April as I spent my free time on tidying up in the hobby room or LARPing. There are piles of half assembled projects scattered over the workbench. I'm keen to get them tidied up and sorted out.

I'm at UK Games Expo at the end of the month and have signed up to a couple of Pathfinder Games I want to take a character to, so I'm aiming to get this Gnoll wizard painted up in time. I don't want to start many new projects with so many half done things on the desk, but as long as I keep it to one model, I should be fine...

Infinity Battle Report: Firefight: White Company vs Torchlight Brigade

 

As I was pottering about the Interwebs last month, my friend RattlerNXT from the US mentioned he was in the UK for a few days, and was looking for games. I originally challenged him to a game of Resilience Operations, but we didn't have two decks of cards needed, so decided instead to go for a game of Firefight.

I was running White Company, while RattlerNXT was running Torchlight (although with proxies as the models hadn't arrived before he left)...

I opened the game by dropping a Tiger Soldier down behind Torchlights lines and opening fire on the Silverstar Prime - but sadly wasn't able to get through the armour.

I managed to reveal one of the Moonraker "Forward Remotes" that are basically Regular robot Libertos miniatures. I used a Pitcher to get it into my hacking network and Immobilised it.

My ORC Feuerbach got a bit unlucky trying to clear a Beasthunter, and wasn't able to withdraw very far, so I left it out as an ARO piece instead. Sadly, against Torchlight firepower, he didn't last very long!

My total reaction remote was swiftly taken out...

And the Silverstar Prime was able to loot a Panoply on top of everything else!

The second Moonraker went after my Karhu, took him down, but got too close to my Repeater network, getting isolated... 

I was able to get my Lieutenant to take out the Moonraker to let my Kaplan Doctor get the Karhu up for a classified. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough orders to get the Lieutenant particularly well hidden, and a Nightshade was able to get behind them and take them out, leaving RattlerNXT with the win.

It was good to see RattlerNXT again after I first met him in Mallorca at the EIC tournament. Hopefully I'll manage to make it over to the US for a tournament over there at some point. In the meantime, if you're an Infinity player visiting the UK and are looking for a game, don't hesitate to get in touch, and I'll try and give you a game!

Product Review: Dungeons and Lasers PrismaCast Pre-Painted Dwarven Mine

 

While I was clipping the pre-painted Dungeons & Lasers scenery out from the sprue, I thought I'd write a short review. There wasn't quite enough space to lay everything out, but hopefully this will get you enough of an idea of what you get.

The painting quality is really good - someone's hand painted everything, which has then been scanned and painted on the sprue. This is a better quality paint than you could get for the money if you bought it unpainted.

You get six sprues like this - four painted with the centre of the floor panels brown, with another two with the centre of the floor painted blue. This gives you some variation - you could have it not matter, or have the water be deeper and inhibit movement.

This means you've got 72 squares of floor tiles that can be used as corridors or rooms, and each of the six sprues has a door, two torches, a free standing lamp on a stand, four short walls and one long wall. That gives you a bunch of flexibility and plenty to make a small encounter room. For a larger encounter or quest I'd be tempted to get somewhere between two and four sets if funds allowed.

The Dwarven Mine set wasn't designed for Prismacast, so there are spots where it falls down a little. Obviously, they can't paint anywhere that the sprue connects to the miniature. There's also a few spots of mould lines that are unpainted. They've put the base material as a dark brown plastic so it mostly gets away with it, but there's a few places where it's a little more obvious when you look closely.

The free standing lantern poles are the most obvious. There should really be, you know, light there! But the quality line is far, far higher than the Wizkids pre-painted models, so if that's your line, you'd definitely be fine.

So the technology is clever, but at least for this set that wasn't designed for it, there's limitations that a hand painted set would surpass. It's good for the money but not perfect, so if you want it perfectly, you'd need to get the unpainted and get it done the old fashioned way. But for the money, the pre-painted option is very very good and will get painted scenery on your RPG tables very quickly.

Mantic Northern Alliance

 

A few years ago, I won a sprue of ten Mantic "Northern Alliance" Tribesfolk at a club raffle. I'd assembled them up and then not gotten around to paint them. I found them while going through a case and resolved to have them painted.

I asked Squiggle's Studio to paint them for me to a simple tabletop standard. Squiggles Studio has painted both my Deathwatch and Stormcast armies, but these days is taking smaller commissions. He's done an excellent job on them, and they'll make excellent opponents in roleplaying games - I'm particularly thinking of using them as residents of the Land of the Linnorm Kings in Pathfinder.

Infinity Tournament: Red Star Blues - The Anniversary

 

Back in March, HATE hosted another "Red Star Blues" tournament. The first mission was Resilience Operations, and I was drawn against Heshore who was running Tohaa.

I discarded a card that required me to hold the centre of the field as I felt like two capture territory cards had too much of a risk of being very swingy. I also needed to target HVTs and kill points of my opponent's force.

The early attack from the Tohaa game from Jaan Staar, a special character Impersonator. Heshore was proxying a lot of the Tohaa with Combined Army models as the Tohaa have been out of production for a while now. The proxies were well thought out and pretty obvious as to what was what.

Jaan went on a bit of a rampage, going after my Lieutenant, but fortunately hitting the decoy, not the real one. I eventually managed to take him down before he did too much damage.

It was a very cagey, back and forth game, and we ended up ending the game not knowing who'd pulled off the win! Once we compared objectives and added up points, it turned out it was a 5-5 tie, which felt very fair in the circumstances.

The second game was the old mission Hunting Party, and I was up against Jimrod, running Star Co. Hunting Party is a mission from a previous tournament season that's about immobilising and isolating specialists and Lieutenants.

There was a big core Riot Grrl link team running around pushing buttons and being a terrifying threat...

Unfortunately for Jimrod, I'd taken the Heckler with E/Marat - a large E/M template weapon. I ran him up to them and managed to drop a big template over most of them, but some key models had managed to set up around the corner so weren't caught in the blast...

I spent my third turn running Pi-Well up to drop an E/Marat template over the first Lieutenant who had been knocked unconscious in a previous round. This isolated them and meant I'd "hunted down" more Lieutenants.

Fiddler managed to fight through to get a shot on my Lieutenant, but on the last dice roll of the game, she wasn't immobilised. This meant I won the game 6-5, but if I hadn't won that roll, I'd have lost instead. Another close fought, cagey game that was great fun.

For my final game, it was Supplies against Alicat. It was a punchy looking Tunguska list with a Szalamandra, and I was pretty glad to have won the Lieutenant roll and chosen to go first...

I ran my Heckler up, and had it deploy a Fast Panda, covering both Mary Problems and the Szalamandra. I had Jazz Trinity Mary Problems and take her out, before taking a swing at the Szalamandra...

And I managed to possess the Szalamandra, and in turn, had it walk backwards and shoot up the Interventor who, it turned out, was the Lieutenant.

This was a pretty rough turn for Alicat, but things got much worst! She had two of her back up attack pieces try and take out my Reaktion Zond, and due to a terrifing run of critical hits on my part, both went down...

At this point, you'd think the game was done . . . but no.

On Alicat's second turn, she ran her Vertigo Zond up, and managed to find quite a few creative angles across the table . . . and basically took out every major attack piece I had with area effect missiles catching them in the blast of someone else.

With me having very little left on my third turn, I couldn't get much done, and Alicat was able to get up to capture some boxes and pull a 5-0 win out of the bag, despite an absolutely catastrophicfirst turn!

Overall, I finished 10th out of 18 players - which you'd kind of expect with a win, a loss and a draw. I once more managed to keep my record of comfortable mid-table mediocrity!