Fire Raptor - components

So I have been working on preparing the fire raptor for base coating and there is still a ways to go but I wanted to get some pictures up of the components out there to help everyone appreciate how good this model is. It is going to take some time to get to completion but at the end of the day I am not really in a massive rush to get it done, much better to take my time and try to get it right.

These aee not all of the components but the majority of the large pieces, as you can see the large portion of the pieces are resin rather than plastic including three of the four main fusilage pieces.

I am aiming to get the cleaning done in the next couple of days and then I can get a small amount of adjustments made to the resin pieces which need it, the only real adjustment required is one of the side fusilage pieces needs bending fractionally to get a tight fit to the rest of the fusilage.
There is a good chance that I will prime the first pieces over the weekend and then I will start to base coat. At the same time I have dug out some old movement trays from my fantasy armies which I am using as nice flat surfaces to test different ideas for getting the lightning effects right, what I have been doing previously is not bad but I am sure I can do something better and I have some ideas of how to achieve that but I want to try out some of the different options on something less critical than the fire raptor.

So keep tuned there will be more pictures to come.

Night Lords vs Dark Eldar (7th edition battle 2)

So today I got to fight a battle against the dark elder and the result was interesting. My opponent had fielded his exact army against some Tyranids the previous week and had not had time to change it to tune it more against my force.

We started off venturing to the games store where we stage our battles and found that battles on the weekend are so much easier than on a weeknight, the standard week night features a gaming group taking up almost all of the table space meaning we end up crammed in the corner since we are almost the last to arrive and we have to rush the battles to get them completed in time. Today there was no one else in the gaming room and we had all the time we needed to go through the battle properly without rushing to the point that we make mistakes, miss rules and so forth.

The battle we fought was the deadlock maelstrom of war mission in which gaining victory points early on is comparatively easy but it grows increasingly difficult.

My opponent managed to win both the roll for selecting the deployment zones and for deploying first which he took, his warlord trait got him an additional strategic objective on the first turn on top of the standard 6 and with going first he was going to have an excellent chance to score a lot of points before I could do anything to stop him.

Turn 1 saw his get a lot of easily achievable objectives including a victory point for having three of his units in his deployment zone and d3 for having twice as many objectives as me (I had none to begin with) and the end result was he scored 6 points from objectives before I had a chance to do anything. His shooting also managed to blow a arm off my contemptor mortis dreadnought and a snap fired dark lance hit my command squad and I was forced to pass it off to the standard bearer to mitigate the damage slightly. In my first turn my outriders lunged forward aiming to drop the hellions he had brought, my objectives were for the main part unobtainable since they were general for objectives in my opponent’s deployment zone which he had troops on. The outriders twin linked flamer hit 14 models between the two of them, wounded 13 times and immolated the hellions to get me first blood. My jet bikes unloaded on a raider and managed to put two glances and two penetrating hits on it and after jink’s were resolved I managed to explode it with a unsaved penetrating hit, the explosion killed 5 of the warriors in the raider. I scored one objective and first blood but I was left 4 Vp’s behind before I had even got going. My biggest mistake was one of my assault squads were in to position to charge some jetbikes who had swept forward to grab an objective but I randomly shot them with bolt pistols, somehow got a wound past their 2+ cover save and then failed my 6 inch charge due to the removed model – great play by me not!

So by turn 2 I was pretty out of it and my opponent continued to get achievable objectives and I returned to form on failing saving throws. The low light for me was a venom putting 7 wounds on my assault marines and me failing 3 of the saves or the outriders being targeted big time and instead of soaking firepower they failed four of their first six saves and were obliterated. My contemptor also lost its second arm which was irritating to say the least. My opponent scored two more victory points in his turn. My turn was not amazing but I was able to take down a witch raider in the assault phase having surrounded it with assault marines as well as the armless contemptor – when it was wrecked the witches were unable to deploy within 3 inches without coming in an inch of any of my models and thus were destroyed. My other damaged assault marine squad leapt on to the warriors out of their raider and butchered them all in short order. My praetor and command squad tried to charge the grotesques with Rakath since I wanted to tie them up but they managed to fail their 8 inch charge. I managed to score a couple of VP’s this turn to try and keep in contention.

Turn 3 saw some splinter fire on the command squad causing something like 8 wounds and the end result of it all was my praetor on 1 wound and another member of the squad dead, they were then charged by the grotesques. My praetor went in to a challenge with Rakath and his annoying clone field and this lasted for a couple of turns where I could not get a wound past either the clone field or the feel no pain which was really starting to get frustrating – in one turn of this fight the grotesques would pass 4 out of 4 feel no pain while in return I would fail 3 out of 5 3+ armour saves with the assault marines who charged in but I am getting ahead of myself.

Drazor and his incubi charged my largely intact assault marines and slaughtered them where they stood and my opponent managed to score a couple more victory points.

My turn saw me unleash everything on the incubi and it started with 9 tactical marines using fury of the legion, 36 shots resulted in 15 wounds which resulted 1 would on drazor (who had randomly already taken one wound to overwatch fire from the assault marines) and 2 dead incubi – drazor failed 3 armour saves but managed to pass two feel no pain to survive, the incubi also managed to pass a couple of feel no pain. The intact contemptor unloaded on them as well and just managed to finish off the incubi but could not do the last wound to Drazor. My fire raptor had turned up the previous turn and only managed in dishing out a couple of hull points and forcing 3 raiders to jink. This turn it got is act in gear and blew away two raiders, one of them exploded killing 5 of the warriors who had just dismounted from it. My armless contemptor charged and crushed the venom and in an attempt to protect the tactical squad the other contemptor charged Drazor who could not hurt it – for the rest of the game the dreadnought who smack around the dark elder but since it lacked a dreadnought close combat weapon it was unable to break his armour and they stayed locked in combat. My praetor fell to Rakath as I managed to fail a 2+ armour save (the second he had been asked to make by Rakath) and I continued to fail to get anything through in return due to the clone field and bad rolling, it seems 5 attacks may not be enough. This is the turn that the grotesques managed all of their feel no pain rolls which was a complete pain since I was counting on depleting some of their numbers to allow me to carry the fight.

The rest of the battle was pretty much moot, there was no way I could get points on the board to catch my opponent who proceeded to achieve at least 1 objective every turn with the mobility of the jetbikes and the fact I had nothing left to contest them.

The final position was 17 VP’s for the dark elder against 6 VP’s for the night lords. Points wise there was only about 100 difference between the two armies so the losses were pretty similar but the dark elder simply had a lot more units and a hell of a lot more mobility and they were able to exploit it really effectively to score a hell of a lot of points which I could not keep up with. It was not helped by the fact that the dark elder got objectives to claim points in their deployment zone 4 times during the battle and there was no way I could even get close to them.

So not a good battle for the night lords but I was very happy with the list and I think there is a lot of potential there, I just need to avoid making dumb mistakes like shooting the jet bikes so I could not charge them – they went on to score 4 victory points on their own and even with my poor dice rolling there was pretty much no way in hell they were going to be able to survive being charged by 10 assault marines the champion of which had the pair of lightning claws.

The fire raptor was solid and probably achieved the most out of anything in my army but without being show stealing like it was when I had tried it previously, after the battle while idly chatting my opponent commented that he thinks I should have two of them – this from one of the guys who felt it was a bit too much last time so I think more experience of what it can and cannot do was really important for putting it in to context.

Upcoming

So on Saturday I have another battle scheduled using the 7^th edition rules in which my revised night lord list is going to be taking on the dark elder. I saw them in another battle about a week ago and we discovered some massive issues with the new rules set for the dark elder – mainly the no escape rule which means template weapons not only hammer the vehicle but also inflict d6 hits at their normal profile on the passengers, the two Tyranid crones managed to butcher half the dark elder infantry before they disembarked their transports.

My army will not be anywhere near as much of an issue for the dark elder simply because I have limited range before night shields are factored in and I only have two templates in the entire force.

What I will be fielding in the battle is as follows…

Praetor – jetbike, boarding shield, melta bombs, paragon blade, trophies of judgement, digital lasers

Command squad (3) – all on jetbikes and all with combat shields

Contemptor-mortis dreadnought – two kheres pattern assault cannons

Contemptor-mortis dreadnought – two kheres pattern assault cannons

Assault marine squad (10) – 1 x power sword, 1 x power axe – sergeant – combat shield, artificer armour, thunderhammer

Assault marine squad (10) – 1 x power sword, 1 x power axe – sergeant – combat shield, artificer armour, pair of lightning claws, melta bombs

Legion tactical squad (10) – additional chainswords - sergeant – artificer armour, melta bombs, chainglaive

Rhino as transport for the tactical squad

Outrider squad (4) – I x power axe, 2 x twin linked flamer

Fire raptor – reaper autocannon battery

This is my revised force for 7^th edition, as stated previously the massive nerf to the impact of night fighting removed one of the main justifications for playing the night lord rite of war and with terror squads being massively up priced to cover the fact that they cause fear which is massive in 30k and irrelevant in 40k I simply was not getting enough out of the force. Plus with tactical objectives I felt I needed to move to something more tactically flexible and mobile than the terror squads, especially since they cannot easily redeploy once they are on the battlefield.

This is a bound list meaning I get to reroll for warlord trait which combo’s very nicely with the master of the legion rule allowing me to roll twice and pick which one I want so I should almost be able to guarantee getting a trait which is useful for the mission that we play.

On top of that the assault squads and the tactical squad being my troops are able to grab and hold objectives without having to worry about opposing jet bikes and the like jumping on to them which should help me score some victory points.

The fire raptor is in since I am going to be using it a lot, I have the actual model on my desk at the moment in all of its many pieces having been delivered earlier in the week. I will be continuing to clean it over the coming days and do some adjustments to some of the resin pieces to try and ensure a really good dry fit before I start to work on painting and assembly. While doing that I still need to complete the second contemptor and doing some practicing on my lightning painting, I have a ton of ideas on how to make that work a lot better I just need to get my arse in gear and actually try them out and see what works and what does not.

If anyone is considering getting the fire raptor I can really recommend it, the model is amazing and I was really surprised by how much of it is resin. I knew it is based on the storm raven kit but it only uses about 26 components from that kit and only one of them is from the fuselage, the vast majority of the body of the fire raptor is resin. The connection between the resin and plastic is logical and makes great use of the storm raven kit as well as leaving tons of material for use in conversions later on and as always the sculpting on the resin is top notch. It does need a hell of a lot of cleaning due to the volume of resin but hey you kind of know that when you order it anyway.

The assembly for the side batteries is very clever and I think will work really well, I have dry fitted everything together and there are a couple of pieces needing adjustment and a couple needing a small amount of green stuff but for the main part it looks like it is going to come together really easily. I have of course ordered and received the KR multicase tray for the storm eagle (they do not do a fire raptor yet) since there is no way I am going to spend a lot of time and money on this model and then ruin it but transporting it in a box lid with a bit of bubble wrap.

Pictures of the components and the evolution of the fire raptor towards its completed state will be uploaded probably on Sunday for the initial post and ongoing until it is completed.

7th Edition – first battle

No camera since I was focused on learning the rule changes.

Recently I got together with the guys and we tried out the new 7^th edition rules – well something like them, we were really just trying to get to grips with it all and I know we made mistakes – and in this battle we decided to ignore the normal ally rules and both of us went unbound just to see what happened.

My army was as much as possible models I could field from the night lords list without too much proxying. A librarian turned up accompanied by the terminators in to order to allow me to test psychic powers, the jet bikes turned up as a standard fast attack unit with a mulit-melta for some tank busting.

I took one contemptor since I still have to not gotten my arse in gear and sorted out the second one. I also brought 10 tactical marines in a rhino since I thought mobility would be useful (we decided we would try one of the new maelstrom of war missions) and I also had a unit of 20 tactical marines on foot since I was running out of options. I did proxy in a fire raptor using a vendetta model, I am aiming to add a fire raptor to the army soon and wanted to see how it handled.

I also persuaded Knight commander Pask in a leman russ punisher and another punisher to accompany the force since I had run out of night lords and wanted some more firepower.

My opponent brought dark elder and demons – this could have been savage but he did tone things down with only one flying monster (a lord of change) and no venoms – we both had kind of soft lists.

The battle itself was strange, as I say we made lots of mistakes but I absolutely demolished huge swathes of his army despite the demons trying to exploit the maelific powers to get lots of summoning of pink horrors in trying to cascade the nastiness. A prime example of the brutality was when on turn 2 the squadron of punishers finished obliterating a unit of 19 pink horrors and herald, they did not even get round to firing the heavy bolters, the punisher gatling cannons (especially with Pasks BS 4) did more than enough damage.

The fire raptor stayed out of the battle until turn 4 but when it arrived the effectiveness of its fire power was so savage at least one of my gaming group has declared it ‘broken’. It did exploit power of the machine spirit and the reaper batteries independent targeting to allow it to butcher 4 dark elder vehicles on the turn it arrived but I suspect that opinions of its fire power were slightly overstated by the fact that I could not help rolling 6’s on the vehicle damage tables when I got pen’s resulting in half the dark elder being immolated in their exploding vehicles.

At the end of the battle we ran out of time closing turn 5, I was behind on victory points due to not getting anything I could score in the first turn and my opponent getting one objective awarding multiple VP’s but my opponent only had 1 bloodletter and 18 pink horrors plus 3 witches, most of that was locked in combat with the last surviving jet biker but aside from that I had lost one leman russ and the contemptor, everything else was more or less intact and I felt I was either positioned to table my opponent or to be able to sweep out and grab multiple objectives in the following turn (I already had first blood and slay the warlord and was going to get linebreaker).

As I say I know we got things wrong due to misinterpretations of the rules but overall it was a good game and very interesting, I think I had a slight edge in the dice rolling but nothing unbalancing. I think we should have arranged it for a day when we would have had more time and not had to rush towards the end in a desperate attempt to get the game close to completion.

The maelstrom of war missions really do change things up enforcing a need for a mobile force, I do not like the fact that it is almost impossible to plan ahead since you often do not know what your objectives are until the start of your turn. It accurately represents the flux of combat but it removes some of the tactical planning of the game, you cannot do a refused flank for example in case the strategic objectives you draw all end up on the flank you refused.

It does reduce the effectiveness of gun line armies, I do not think an exclusively gun line army is viable in the maelstrom missions unless you somehow think you can table your opponent but I think have a balanced army with static elements emplaced while other mobile elements are trying to grab objectives does work. I am certain that I will always be playing bound armies just for the secured objective rule on the infantry.

7^th edition has had an additional effect in that it has killed my intention to use the terror assault rite of war, night fighting is something of a joke now in my opinion simply giving stealth across the board and with the requirement for mobility in maelstrom missions I felt the terror squads were simply too expensive and the rite had lost most of its effectiveness.

This has caused me to change up my planned army list massively, I will still be having the praetor on jetbike with command squad, I will still have the two contemptor mortis dreadnoughts and I will be having a fire raptor and the main reason for that is that I own all of the models or I have them on route having placed the order. Aside from them though the terror squads are gone and in their place I am going to be running a couple of 10 man assault squads pretty tooled up since they count as bulky meaning they can really take advantage of the night lord special rules and they have the mobility to objective grab. A 10 man tactical squad in rhino is also planned – making the most of troops for objective secured seems sensible and I love fury of the legion on these guys. Finally I am now planning for a 4 bike unit of outriders a couple of which will have twin linked flamers, I like the idea of these guys since they have scout they can get a head start towards isolated objectives and from what we have seen recently flamers are hilarious against open topped vehicles like the dark eldar’s due to the no escape rule and the flamers also give them the wall of death rule to make people less willing to charge them – at least that’s the theory.