Monday, June 29, 2009

15Pt Pre-Wedding Mangled Metal

Jon and I got 2 15 point Mangled Metal games in the morning before one of our friend's weddings. He brought eDenny, Deathripper, Stalker, Slayer and Seether vs Reznik, Crusader, Devout, Dervish, Revenger. Basically the games went like this. Jon advances. I advance, try to arc some spells and fail. Jon pops his feat, charges wrecks some face. I can't move but do some decent damage to whatever is in B2B. Jon gets a heavy into melee with Reznik. Game Over. I got destroyed yet again, but I think I learned some more valuable lessons. 1) Fire is way more awesome that I gave it credit for, especially against low arm armies like Cryx. 2) I might be sticking with Kreoss for a while 3) The Crusader is so much better than it looks on paper, even without a choir. 6 points for practically a Khador heavy? Yes please.

In other news, I'm unloading Khador. I need to cut down on the amount of models I have and I really don't like the Khador playstyle too much. When I'm playing I feel slow and helpless, and when I win I feel dirty and cheap. So for anyone who is interested, here's a link to the bartertown post.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Crusader

I finished my first PoM heavy this morning, the Crusader. I haven't actually fielded it yet, which is odd that I have it painted rather than the reckoner or vanquisher, but it's a classic and I have plans to use it more frequently in the future. Oddly enough I only need to paint the repenter and I'll have a fully painted PoM battlebox. Look for some pictures of all of my painted PoM up to this point.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

35pt Battle - Kreoss vs eGapsy

We had our first 35 point game on Saturday. It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly not too long timewise. Anyways, here's a quick synopsis and such.
Game Summary:
Turn 1: PoM

Micah won the rolloff, so he started the game. He advanced and cast lamentation (stupid making spells expensive...). Other than that, not much happened. Since I was playing eGaspy, I advanced behind my rolling cloud of doom, 3 x 3" clouds to block LOS.




Turn 2: Kreoss advanced enough to get the clouds in his ctl range, and casts purification so that his Redeemer can shoot up my biles before they get too close. He managed to kill off 3 of them. The Monolith Bearer also popped his mini-feat to help out the Zealots, while the priest did the whole no spell targeting thing. That was annoying, so my remaining biles went up and one of them purged on the front line of zealots, giving 4 of 10 corrosion. The DJ then charged in and threw one of the zealots at the priest, but it missed and clipped another zealot instead. Since they couldn't take dmg that turn, none of them died, but 4 were going to at the start of Micah's turn. I was hoping that Micah wouldn't want to spend so much focus on both purification and lamentation again, so I roll out my clouds and advance a little more... oh the poor foolish cryxian.

Turn 3: Kreoss advances and once again casts purification and lamentation and then pops his feat. He also gave the redeemer 3 focus, so the redeemer now has LOS to a KD eGaspy. With the help of the vassal, the redeemer pops off 4 shots, but even with pretty high rolls, they don't do much to a arm 19 caster. Thank Toruk for Gaspy's beefiness. Too bad the zealots and KE's together took out the DJ. Roh well. On my turn, I use a skarlock to cast excarnate (wondering now if it actually can do that) and add a bile to finish off the rest of the zealots. My ripper then stood up and advanced up behind where the zealots were to be able to arc a spell, so it sac'ed its action and waited. Gaspy then moved back out of purification range and arced in a Death Knell to hit Kreoss, bunch of choir boys, reclaimer, and a devout. Not too much dmg to Kreoss or the Devout, but everything else died.

The next two turns consisted of Gaspy Death Knelling and Excarnating to add in BK's who charged Kreoss and finished the game.

Twitch: My thoughts: 35 pts was waaay too much fun. Micah's list could have used some tweaking. He didn't ever use his revenger, and he didn't need 10 KE's. Probably too much casting of purification too. One round would have been good enough I think, then hand out good buffs to the rest of the army. I really enjoy eGaspy, especially at the higher point level. A good lesson to remember is that if your enemy is willing to pay the focus for a few spells one turn to rid you of cover, why wouldn't he the next turn. *shrug* life goes on. Good thing for me that Gaspy was tough enough to take it. I also liked the long range spellcasting of Gaspy to win the game. I didn't ever use his feat, which is a first for me with eGaspy. Lots of holy crap moments in there, along with joyous victories. In all, t'was fun.

Jolly Angus: My thoughts: 35 points is a blast. Since we never played more than 500 points in mk1 or 25 points in mk2 I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of playing our largest game yet. I was worried that things would take too long or my army would seem too unwieldy. Fortunately that was not the case. The game really opens up nicely at 35 without being cumbersome. At 25 points I felt like most of my army was support (choir, vassal, wracks, heirophant, blah blah blah) with no room for more heavy hitters. I definitely have different plans for my next 35 point army and I feel like I learned a lot from this game (aka got my ass handed to me). Some things I learned/realized this game: 1) PoM is better played as an attrition army than an assassination army. I need to focus on decimating my opponent's army more than opening up a hole to their caster. 2) I play reactively, which works decently for Trollbloods but instead of spending all my focus counteracting what my opponent does I need to be setting my own plans into motion. 3) every one of pKreoss' spells is useful and I need to take advantage of PoM's ability to gain dominating amounts of focus so I can cast all those delicious spells. So even though I got omgwtfbbqpwnd I am really excited for our next game to see how I can improve. I expect many more crushing defeats before I get the hang of PoM but I'm hoping once I do it will all be worth it.

Bane Knights Again

So I finally finished the paint scheme on my model Bane Knight. I've been trying to bring them all along at the same rate, which kind of negates the usefulness of a "test model"... roh well. Anyways, here are some pics of my "finished" bane knight (still needs basing and such), as well as a group shot of Tartarus and some almost finished banes.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Finished Zealots

I finally finished a unit that has been hanging over my head for a long time. I used a zealot as a test for my scheme and wasn't 100% satisfied with the whites so I didn't want to do it on a large (10 model) scale. Ever since then for some reason I haven't had the will to return to them. I finally sucked it up, told myself that these were zealots and they're most likely going to die a sacrificial, and explosive, death anyway so who cares if they're slightly below my normal standards. So here we are, my tabletop quality zealots.


Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Choir Boys and Revenger

Ok so I don't know why these guys never got put up on the blog, but here they are. I finished them about 2 months ago, and now since the MkII beta I've got another choir priest and acolyte that need painting...hooray.














pKreoss

After a brief fling with Khador and some long delayed work on my Kilt lifter I've decided to return to my Ottoman themed Protectorate of Menoth. I had a blast with Reznik but I couldn't quite tackle his learning curve at the same time as I was adjusting to MkII so I've decided to return to Kreoss for a bit. I spent about 3.5 hours painting this model and I think for that amount of time the results are pretty good. I'm not very satisfied with the white robes as painting a good white is still giving me a lot of trouble, but I'm trying to not be a perfectionist and just try to get a fully painted army on the table. It's quite exciting to have a couple units/models painted up in the same scheme and be able to line them up on the table and see a hint of the visual impact of a fully painted army. So I'm trying to let go and just try to crank out the rest of my PoM models to a decent standard and hope that the overall theme of the army makes up for mistakes on individual models. Anyway, here's pKreoss. Currently on the painting table...a return to my Zealots.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

M0r3 Bane Knights

So I got motivated to start painting again...finally. I've got several Bane Knights in various stages, but this one has the most paint on him. I figger I'll use him as a kind of test model, something I should have done with the bile thralls when I painted them. Oh well, live and learn. So far, I've really only got a basecoat of the base metal and the bone and cloth. I need to go back and put brass on the parts that won't be a dirty steel. As it is, here are the pics.
This last pic was with autowhite balancing in GIMP. I was too lazy to try and fix the background, but you can see the model a little better, so I left it as is.