Death Worlds

Got a game in last night with the new Death Worlds missions from White Dwarf 388, which was a nice change from the standard 40k scenarios. We rolled for the Breakthrough mission, which had each side trying to break through the opponent's line in a doubles game where my Ulthwe allied with Chaos against Black Templar and Necrons.

The random tables for environmental effects were cool, though lack of familiarity slowed things down a bit as we searched the tables and tried to figure out how to use our shiny new effects, but I think with a few more games of practice we'd be able to fire through quick enough. 

Looking at some of the tables I'm pretty keen to fire down my Necrons with this at some time, since several of the rolls will provide good synergy with my Writhing Worldscape C'tan, but even with my Eldar we had some good results, mostly damage to enemy units coming across the field.

And in true Eldar style I managed to grab us a last minute win with a quick turbo-boost into the enemy deployment zone for a win of 14-11. Hurrah for fast skimmers and jetbikes!

The main thing I took from that game was just that it's nice to be playing something other than the standard 3 missions. Anything to shake up the game in these dying days of 5th Edition is good in my books, and I look forward to seeing what GW offer us in the way of missions for 6th.

Further Reading

Blood of Kittens: I bought a White Dwarf and I like it

Way of Saim Hann: Mission Burnout

Path of the Seer: Combat Patrol

Tovarisch!

So there's three of us around that play Aetherverse, a little indy-game from Triskele which is sadly no more. It's a "design-your-own-army" type of thing with some fun mechanics like drawing initiative counters to activate units and such like. Well, we'd tried some various 1/72 scale gaming with it before, and are now going to try setting about it in a more organised manner.

Given the sheer number of models available in this scale, WWII was the sensible route to go down. One of our players already has a good collection of 1/72 WWII stuff, so is just dusting off his Germans (possibly runnign them as Polish SS) and he'll be sorted. The other guy has decided to play British Commonwealth (just using regular Brit models). After briefly toying with the ideas of Italy or Japan I've now settled on playing the Soviet Union.

The one problem I'm having is settling on a TEK level. TEK 3 suits the period and the army I want to build, but since there's no way to increase the TEK on a vehicle my tanks are going to be stuck with sub-standard weapons. If I do go with TEK 4 for the tanks all of my infantry becomes overpowered. Alternatively, I could overpower the guns on the tank, as I'm setting them up as anti-infantry any backfire shouldn't do them any harm. Of course this is all still theory, I've got some more research to do into how the T-34/76 was used in combat (was it more infantry support or did they operate seperately using high speed?).

Anyway, I've got about 100 infantry, two T-34s and a pair of Zis-3 anti-tank guns showing up in the next few days, so I'll have to get my list sorted and organise a game.

Lining up the next game

So I'm looking to get a game organised in the next few weeks against a fairly regular opponent who's got no problem with the fact my army's not fully painted yet, in fact large parts of his are barely painted at all! Though I've been writing my list for 1500 points so far I'm going to see about pulling out some under-used models and pushing it up to 2000 for added joy.

I can do this from either the Eldar or the Terminators, and will be up against Black Templar. I think both armies are in a position to give some Marines a run for their money, though as both are also fairly genericly-built lists I doubt either will excel at dealing with the Templar.

Eldar will mean playtesting my new group of Jetbikes and Vyper for some fast response action, largely inspired by the tactics at Way of Saim Hann. I've also got a small squad of Hawks in there that will be used to drop in and haywire any Predators or Land Raiders lurking near the back. Guardian squads are bringing scatter lasers which combined with my Jetbike squads shuriken cannon and the shuriken cannon/scatter laser combo on the Vyper should give Rhinos something to worry about. Fire Prisms either bust up big tanks or fry Marines one foot (or those whose transport has been destroyed) and Dark Reapers fill the usual role; total Marine destruction!

With the Terminators I'll be trying to switch at least one Dread to pure tank-busting with a lascannon/missile launcher combo, other two most likely on lascannon/combat so they can fry armour for a couple of turns then wade into any Marines close enough. Terminator squads have a mix of cyclones, assault cannons and heavy flamers and all are set up with power fists so I'll be trying to flatten any power weapon squads before they reach me. Land Raider is likely to do the same thing as last time I played against him; sit up the back absorbing lascannon fire that could be aimed at my Terminators or Dreads. I'll have to go back take another look through the Space Wolves codex to see quite how I'm best kitting up my psyker, for all the awesome Wolf psykers are meant to have he was a major under-performer last time.

So, it looks like I've got about two weeks to settle on which army to use and how my list will look, and hopefully I'll get some more painting done in the time running up to it, but I wouldn't bet on that happening.