Hobby Update: Gamesday 2011 and other stuff

On the hobby front, I'm now half-way through the Space Marine Command Squad. It really should have been finished by now, but I've not been painting as much as I'd like due to different things.

I got both the Plasma Pistol/Power Fist and Plasma Gun marines done fairly quickly, but then hit a hiatus on the Apothecary due to a lack of actual white paint. This has now been rectified, and I have now made a start on getting this one done as well and am currently about half way through.

Once the Apothecary is done, I just have to do the Standard Bearer and the Company Champion, then that's the whole Command Squad completed and it's time to move on to the two Commander models!

On a different subject, last week I attended GamesDay 2011 at the Birmingham NEC Area for the first time since 2007. Overall it was a good day, but I couldn't help thinking that it wasn't as busy as the previous two that I've been to. Not sure if this is because they have moved to two larger halls instead of three smaller ones, so people are more spread out, or if the attendance was lower than previous visits. Maybe a combination of both? There also seemed to be a pronounced lack of free marketing material sloshing around than there has been previously. No free t-shirts being thrown at me, or posters or much of anything else either. must be the economy.

Sadly didn't get near the GW Retail or Forgeworld Sales stands as they appear to have been very badly placed and demand much underestimated. The queues were a least 2 or 3 hours long for most of the day and the staff were only letting in a set amount at a time. This is a far cry from 2006/07 when the retail sales were in their own hall and much more accessible. In fact the problems that they had have actually led Tom Kirby to send out an email apologising for the mis-handling of the sales area and promising that lessons will be learned for the next time. I'm quite impressed at this as it's not often that GW publicly apologise for many things.

The Licensee stands were however, far more accessible and I picked up a copy of the Deathwatch RPG core rule book and a pre-release copy of Blood Bowl Team Manager from Fantasy Flight Games.

Most of the other stuff that happened at the event has been publicised elsewhere on the internet and I'm not going to bother repeating them here; except to say that according to the man at the top Forgeworld do want to make a Warlord Titan, but they may not do it for another few years as they can only do models of that size every 2 or 3 years due to the amount of time it takes.

Nova Storm Units: HQ Choices 2

This time I have more time to spare, so it's an overview of the Force Commander; a Space Marine Captain and his attendant Command Squad.

The Captain is the first HQ Choice for the Army and is accompanied by his free Command Squad.

He comes in at 170 points and counts as 1 Kill Point in Annihilation Missions.  He is kitted out with a Combi-Bolter/Flamer with Hellfire Rounds and an Auxiliary Grenade Launcher, a Relic Blade, Melta-bombs and the standard grenades. On the armour front he has Power Armour and an Iron Halo giving him a 3+ Armour Save and a 4+ Invulnerable Save against the bigger guns.

Originally he was fitted out with a Combi-Meltagun and a Thunder Hammer, but the introduction of the Relic Blade in the new Codex was too tempting, and I can't remember why I swapped the Combi-melta for a Combi-flamer....

With his Ballistic Skill of 5, he shooting is hitting a 2+ and thanks to the Hellfire Rounds the Bolter shots always wound on a 2+ regardless of the targets Toughness. On a good day this means an almost guaranteed 2 wounds per turn. Should he choose to fire the Flamer he may only do so once per game and that uses the Template marker and hits anything under it on a 2+ and ignores Cover Saves. If he fires the Flamer he can then still choose to charge the target unit in the Assault Phase, which should finish them off!

On top of this he gets to fire the Grenade Launcher every turn against the same target, dropping a Small Blast template on a unit with significant scatter on happening on a 2D6 roll of 8+. The Frag Grenades are fairly weak with little armour-piercing capability but may mop up a few survivors; the Krak Grenades allow him to get an extra wound on large, Tough opponents or to potentially get a Penetrating hit on AV10 vehicles and Glance AV12 if needs be - but there are other units for anti-vehicle attacks.

In Assault he can raise a decent amount of Strength 6 attacks that ignore Armour Saves; good against most opponents, while his Melta-bombs give him a decent defence against being Tank Shocked by enemy vehicles.

He has the standard And They Shall Know No Fear rule which allows him to automatically regroup if Falling Back (even if under 50% unit strength), and Combat Tactics which allows him to voluntarily fail a Morale test in order to Fall Back.

Being an Independent Character I can move him from the Command Squad (when it is dead, although this is a point of debate thanks to typical GW wording of rules) and join him to another unit.

Enough about him. Onto the Command Squad.

218 points worth of Command Squad.

From left to right - Company Champion, Standard Bearer, Marine, Sergeant, Apothecary.

The Company Champion has slightly better stats and is armed with a Power Sword so his attacks ignore Armour Saves. Originally a bad-ass model with twin Lightning Claws, due to the total dumbing-down the Champion got in the 5th Ed Codex I had to remove them. I was not impressed.

The Standard Bearer carries the Company Standard (amazingly!) which allows any unit within 12" to re-roll failed Morale and Pinning tests. He is armed with a Storm Bolter allowing him to move and fire two shots. He should really have a chainsword but there's not enough room on the model for it (and since it doesn't really have any in-game bonus effects I chose to not model it at all. I may include it impaled in the floor - I've not decided yet). He has a custom converted bionic leg which you can't really see in the picture. I needed to do something to put him in a running pose to match the rest of the squad, and in the previous Codex he had bionics so I converted up a running pose and made a custom bionic leg from spare Necron parts I had laying around.

The Marine with the Plasma Gun had the arm positions tweaked with Green Stuff to get a more natural 'sighting down the barrel while running' type pose. He has been included to give the squad some high Strength ranged firepower should it need it.

The Sergeant has a Plasma Pistol for hard-hitting shooting before the charge, and is modelled with his Power Fist raised to strike. This gives the squad something powerful enough to threaten high Toughness opponents and small vehicles.

Finally, the Apothecary allows the squad to potentially shrug off several otherwise fatal wounds every turn, before any Armour Saves are taken. (Although in the few games he has had a part in so far he hasn't helped much!)

They all get the Space Marine standard ATSKNF and Combat Tactics, as normal of course.

To wrap up - if you combine this squad with the Captain, and the Chaplain you get an assault unit that won't back down and can take some serious pain while dishing out a large amount of attacks, several of which ignore the opponent's armour.

The down-side is they have to actually reach combat and not get shot to hell like they did last time I used them!