The destruction of Chaos

This week I played a game of 40K against my friend Peter's guardsmen again, but decided to take my chaos space marines instead of my trusted Valhallans. Even though, to fill out the points, I took a deamon prince with the Lash power, I was massacred completely. After four turns not a single marine remained.

I brought 10 chaos marines, 8 berserkers in a rhino, 5 lesser deamons, 8 raptors, a dreadnought and a defiler, a Slaanesh sorcerer with Lash and a deamon prince with lash.

Peter's force consisted out of a company command squad, a platoon with 3 squads and a mortar squad, marbo, 5 stormtroopers, penal legionaires, a hellhound, a manticore and 2 chimera's for the command squads, and last but not least, a vendetta.

whenever I do not play with my guardsmen , I always feel outgunned when looking at my opponents armies. This time doubly so because I played with reasonably expensive marine units.

The mission gave each of us a single objective to defend. The battlefield consisted out of a eclectic mix of Peter's and my buildings, with a sprinkling of craters in the centre to give some cover to troops trying to cross no-mans land.

My plan was to leave my tactical marines on my home objective, confident they could hold of any pesky guardsmen trying to assault it. I decided on a pincer attack, with the berserkers, sorcerer and raptors forming one pincer and all my big models the other.

the Chaos warband before...

My assaulting units where whittled down by Peter's fire, and subsequently stalled by a few infantry squads, who were, apart from the manticore that was ripped open by my deamon prince, the only guard casualties. that combined with some abysmal charge distance rolls stopped my assault, quite literally, dead in it's tracks.

The might of Chaos and the imperial navy face off

In the meantime, on the other side of the battlefield, my trusty chaos marines were surprised by a combined assault of five plasmagun toting stormtroopers, the penal troopers and convict-marbo. After a single round of gunfire, a lone marine remained. Feeling desperate the marine charged convict-marbo, wounding but not killing the famous guardsman, who in the subsequent turn cut the marine down with his poisoned blade. 

Convict marbo taking care of business

This left Peter with complete control of the battlefield and all 9 possible victory points....

Lessons learned; need more bodies! this game has certainly inspired me to continue painting my cultists form the black-reach box. My next match with chaos marines will probably be with the new codex, so I need more marines to compensate for the loss of deamons.

Finishing Armies: setting a goal

As mentioned before I'm in the process of trying to finish my 40k armies. Both my Valhallans and my Hollanders (Mordian/Praetorians) are almost done. The Valhallan army is now at 1500 points, but I want to paint just a few more models so I can swap out Marbo's Valhallan Comrade for a normal special weapons team.  Below a pic of my painted Valhallans in pre-battle manouvres formation (eg on a kitchen cutting-board)

For my Hollanders (I should arrange them in the garden one time and shoot some pics) I need to paint a handfull of command models, three sanctioned psykers and finish converting and painting three Ogryns.

My Chaos marine just got a boost form the Dark Vengeance box, so as long as I haven't found anybody to swap my dark Angel marines with, that leaves me with 6 chosen, a hellbrute, 20 cultists and 8 possessed to paint.

I'm going to try to paint all the above before the end of the year. That may not seem very ambitious, but in between work, wife, kid, house, other hobbies and sleep, time to paint is scarce. I'll start keeping count once I figure out how to put a score counter on this Blog....

Dark Vengeance

Almost a month since my last post. Vacation and a dying PC does that to you apparently. This week I bought the new 40k basic set. Mostly because it contains the small rulebook so you don't have to lug the 2,5 kg tome around every time you want to play the game. But also because of the chaos space marine models. And boy are they something.

I'd seen the pictures floating around on Warseer and Faeit, and they look nice on the sprue, but only once they are assembled you get to really appreciate the amount of detail and posing of the models, which is absolutely fantastic. I think these are the best models ever put in a starter set by GW.  I've started to assemble them, and once i get around to painting them I'll post a couple of pics. for now you'll have to do with these (the pics don't do the mini's justice, I just wanted to show you I'm assembling them to give me a reason to continue working on them);

Cultists assembled

The hellbrute assembled

Chosen, to be used as champion(s).