Monday, April 28, 2014

Adepticon 2014: Eye Candy (Pic Heavy)

These should have gone up weeks ago, and are likely already posted on the internet by what I call "conscientious and timely bloggers".  I, good people, will never be accused of that sort of recklessness.

My favorite army of the weekend.  Highly coverted "bio-shock infinite" mega nob ork army.

The undersea drills were "trucks", and even the display board looked like the sea bed.

What's cooler than a dakka jet submarine?

TWO dakka jet submarines!  duh...

Sweet converted helo valkryie.

Probably go good with "Codex: Stormtrooper".
Some cat actually showed up with 100 Dark Angels, so if you were ever wondering what that looked like...
And here's some Crystal Brush badassery.  Not sure if they placed, but they caught my eye, and that's got to be worth $10,000 right?

Free hand banner?  Yes please.

Conversion Beamer?  Yes please.


Neat diorama

Yep.  Bretonian Ogres.  Nope.  My picture didn't do this army justice.
Coolest display board ever?  Yeah, that would go to this guy.  I believe it was created by the guys who runs GMM Studios.  Amazing.







Some guys were giving this Chaos Dwarf player grief since this wasn't a GW model, but screw them.  I think it looks badass.

 


Thursday, April 10, 2014

Adepticon 2014: The Friendly Part 2
Sexy Beasts waiting for war


Monday, April 7, 2014

Adepticon 2014: Friendly Tournament Re-Cap


So this year's theme for the Friendly Tournament was "The Dirty Dozen".  There were three rounds, roughly equating to the major plot points of the film.  Round 1 your lads didn't quite get along, Round 2 they were participating in the war game, and Round 3 was the final suicide mission.

I brought, what I thought was, a fairly "friendly" list.  I was a little hesitant to bring my three Centurion Devastators with Grav Cannons, they performed very well for me, but I don't think they ended up being over the top.  My list can be seen here.

My Storm Talon was only shot down once on the day...about three seconds after this picture was taken.
Rathnor used orders, and some timely "6's" to down the aircraft.  Who needs skyfire?
In the first round, I played a list that seemed eerily appropriate.  Rathnor's IG list with Space Wolf allies was my first opponent.  He brought a Creed, Kell, a command squad in a Chimera; a big blob of a platoon with a handful of dismounted regular squads, heavy weapons with lascannons, and 50 conscripts; a squad of vets in a chimera with melta guns and demo charge; Logan Grimnar, and three wolf guard in power armor.  It was an unusual list (for me with my limited exposure to games outside my own shop) with a lot of optimized quirks (Logan's abilities adding to the conscripts, Creed's boatload of orders, etc.) but it was well played and likely not overly optimized (more on that later).
This was "the end".  He had marched across the board, shooting up everything in sight.  The next round would
see a charge that left me with a combat squad and an immobilized Razorback.  The Gods would take pity on me
and end the game (and my misery) shortly after that. 
For this mission, players had to split their army in half, with each half counting as desperate allies.  This did almost nothing to my opponent, but was disastrous to me, as my play style involves castling up my entire army to support one another with short range firepower.  That, plus dice rolls so bad that Rathnor offered up his own dice for me to use in an effort to stop the painful torturing of probability that was my dice for that round.  In the end, I was trounced.  I "earned" a crushing defeat and garnered no points for my team.  Rathnor did have an entire 50 man squad of Rogue Trader era human bombs.  Some with the neck collar, and the rest with the backpack bombs.  Nifty stuff if you're into that sort of thing.  He says it only took him two years to get them all...

For my second round, I played The Bloody Chaos, who happened to be Chambers' opponent from round 1.  He normally plays chaos, but decided to do something different for Adepticon.  He brought a Carcharodons (space sharks) army that was awesome.  As none of you know, I harbor a secret desire to own a Carcharodon army, so this was a special treat for me where I got to live vicariously through TBC's army.

My crap pictures don't do it justice, but he had a Chapterhouse Studios "true scale"
marine with a gigantic chainsword (can't remember the company he got that from)
that was simply amazing.
TBC's list was as follows: Tyberos the Red Wake; a squad of assault terminators as elites, and another as troops; a scout squad in a Land Speeder Storm; 2 Tactical Squads; a Storm Talon; an assault squad; and finally, a devastator squad.  This round's special rule was that ambulances were placed on random tables and they scattered 4d6" every turn with the possibility of moving onto neighboring tables if they had the movement for it.  Any unit hit was either tank shocked or rammed.  We had an ambulance show up at our table during the game, but it promptly drove off with no effect.

This was my deployment.  Notice the gigantic hole for deep strikers.
TBC was easily my most fun opponent on the day.  Beer was exchanged & fun was had.  This was the epitome of what the "friendly" tournament should be.  TBC's army is obviously an assault army with some long gun & air support.  That's probably the type of opponent my list is best against.  He faced an uphill battle all game, but this...

...is where his fate was sealed.  He was only able to get one of his terminator squads in from reserve on round 2.  That meant my entire army, but mainly my Centurions, could focus on that close threat.  And believe me, getting a squad of Carcharodons in close combat was not a goal of mine.  He lost one to quad gun fire on the way in, and the rest were taken care of after that.  The next round Tyberos and his squad showed up, but again, I had no other obvious targets.  Even after all that fire, I still needed to assault him with my own terminators and Vulkan to keep the upper hand.  Some poor rolls in TBC's part sealed the deal.  After that combat, I ran my lads towards the relic and table quarters for the crushing victory.

Round three is where I lost all credibility as a blogger since I didn't take any pictures of my game with Cee Kay and his Tau-Dar list.  I'm not going to lie, this was the weirdest list I've ever played against.  At first glance it seems too optimized for the friendly, but when you look close, he made conscious decisions to weaken his list.
As penance for not taking pics of the game, here's a real life fire warrior that I saw.
He was pale, yet quick.


He brought Farsight with 4 crisis bodyguards with flamers, stim injectors, & vectored thrusters; a crisis suit commander with every piece of wargear available to him (354 points!), a 6 man stealth team; a single crisis suit with flamer; a three man crisis suit with bonding knife (no weapons?), Karandras the Shadow Hunter; & 6 guardian jetbikes.

His plan was to camp weaponless crisis suits & jetbikes on objectives, infiltrate Karandras with the stealth team, and deepstrike everyone else with Farsight et al.  I'll admit, I was pretty nervous.  I shot up the crisis suits as much as I could, but with nightfight, those guys are tough to shift.  He deepstruck right next to my castle (which I deployed with no room for deepstrikers behind my aegis) and proceeded to use flamers against me.  He was unaware of the Salamander's chapter tactic known as "lol flamers" and was disappointed to cause no wounds.  Everything in my army, minus the 145 point Storm Talon, then shot at that squad.  At the end of my shooting phase, he had one Stealth Suit left on that corner of the board.  I spent the remaining rounds getting line breaker, grabbing objectives, and killing his bikes and backfield crisis suits.  I have no doubts that had Karandras and/or Farsight got into assault that it would have been a different game.  This round's special rule was to have vortex missiles moving about just like the ambulances previously.  A vortex missile made it to our table about 5 minutes after the game was over, having no impact on our game.

All in all, I think this year's friendly was an improvement over last years.  Yes, I went 2-1 this year, while going a disastrous 0-3 (finishing dead-ass-last overall), but the lists I saw were more friendly.  My worry was that this was going to become just another 1500 point tournament, but it didn't happen.  That's not to say that it's out of the woods.  Many of the guys who showed up with quirky or overly friendly lists were saying that they wouldn't make that mistake next year.  The friendly walks a fine line, and I think they need to review lists as advertised.  Early list submissions would go a long way towards maintaining the trust of the community that rock hard lists won't be seen at this tournament next year.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Adepticon 2014 - There and Back Again, a Burnout's Tale

Just...try to relax...
As some of you might be aware, a handful of members have had associations of some sort or another with Adepticon since about 2006.  It started with the Team Tournament, sprinkled in a few rounds of Combat Patrol, and the last two years have been dedicated to the 40k Friendly Tournament.

Discussions about the Team Tournament could take several blog posts to cover.  I'll spare you that, or you could just look back through the archives.  Suffice it to say that it takes luck to even get in to this very popular event, and a great deal of money and time to not embarrass yourself when you see the titans of industry who will inevitably win.  These are the teams who have spent thousands of dollars and man hours to put together truly masterful works of art.  Average participants?  Don't hold your breath.  This event truly rewards those who go above and beyond.  It's actually worth coming to the event, just to see the display bases the teams put together.

Combat patrol has never really been my thing, but others have enjoyed it.  I have trouble making a 1000 point 40k army, so 400 points really is an exercise in futility for me.  To each his own, I'm glad some of the other members have had fun with it.

This will be the third year for the 40k Friendly Tournament.  I had some friends participate in '12, and they gushed about how awesome it was.  Laid back, thematic lists, a complete lack of douchebaggery, it received rave reviews.  I did not bring Team Snake Eyes to the Team Tournament in '13 because I was a little burned out from that hectic experience and wanted something a little more relaxed.  The Friendly was my choice. Three of us came up last year (myself, Chambers, & Grenn Dal) and although I came in dead-ass-last place (it's a real thing, look it up) it was a good time.  After hearing the staff repeatedly say they would disallow hard lists, I was a little shocked at some of the things we saw last year "What do you mean my drop Wolves list with four Rune Priests with Jaws isn't friendly?" Chambers and I are a little worried about what we'll see this year.

Vulkan and the lads take the field once more
Sorry for the poor quality of the pics, but I've been having technical issues.  My list, which I feel is true to the "friendly" theme is as follows: Vulkan, (5) TH/SS Assault Terminators, (2) Tactical Squads with flamers, multi-meltas, combi-flamers, & TLLC Razorbacks, a Storm Talon w/typhoon ML, (3) Centurion Devastators w/Grav Cannons & Hurricane Bolters, a Thunderfire Cannon, and finally an Aegis Defense Line w/Quad Gun.  It's got a moderate amount of shooting with a counter assault/harassing unit in the terminators.

Chambers assured me his army was ready to go...
 Chambers army looks pretty cool too.  He's got a Dark Mechanicus army that has ties to Nurgle and Slaanesh using the Chaos Marine Codex: A Chaos Lord in Terminator Armor, (5) Chaos Terminators with combi-meltas, a squad of 12 Noise Marines with Icon of Excess, 7 sonic blasters and 2 blast masters, (2) squads of 6 Noise Marines with 2 sonic blasters and 1 blast master each, a Helldrake with Hades Autocannon (yes kids, Chambers can beat you without the bale flamer), 2 awesomely converted Obliterators, and finally a Bastion that has the Imperial iconography defaced and replaced with sacrifices and icons of the dark powers.  We'll add an army pic when he's ready for me to take it.  :)

Random Pics from the game room on Thursday:

This thing is about 5' high and is likely someone's display board.  These people do not mess around...

Iron Hands charity raffle army, there are better pics out there on the internet, and they are worth seeing.


Sisters of Battle display chapel/board.

This close-up of the floor detail proves once and for all that
you can never have too much awesome in your life.
Stay tuned, more tomorrow!