Broken Paintbrush

Although I’m not sure if I will ever build up a full army, I succumbed to the desire to own a mecha army.  I like the idea and look of the Tau army so I thought I’d try out painting a few before committing.  After buying the codex and spending a few days searching Google Images I decided on the blue suits but wanted a worn and dirty look. I was inspired very much buy this guy on Advanced Tau Tactica.

Although I enjoyed painting this model, the battle suite models (I built another to escort the Shas’O) it is poorly designed and had a bunch of voids that needed filling. Even discarding the minor conversion work, I still needed to use a great deal of green stuff to smooth out the armor.

The armament was chosen more out of looks and “coolness” than perhaps competitiveness. I like the idea of the ion blaster, although (and maybe perhaps because) it is unpredictable and using the droid as the shield generator just looks cool.

Although  I was hoping to finish my bane wolves (which really are as good as they sound!) for this challenge but I haven’t got that far.  The next challenge is for fast attack and elites so I’m hoping to finish both my bane wolves and this fellow’s body guard.

Painting Points for this round:

• Large Model: 2 points
• Hard Challenge: 15 points
• Meeting Deadline: 2 points
• Total: 19 points

So I haven’t really been that active in the 40k world this last month for many reasons, one of which was a low excitement for the hobby. This was in part due to not playing a game in nearly 2 months. In the last two weeks though I have had the chance to play my traitor guard twice and took part in a ridiculously huge Apocalypse game.

My traitor guard played brilliant and pulled off a win in the last turn in both games. The first was against a small, elite space marine bike army that hit hard but was brittle. Highlight of that game was one of my platoon commanders surviving an assault of 3 bikers and in return cutting all three down with his power weapon! Game two was against a drop pod army hurt the turn it came in but lacked any mobility. Highlight of that game was my banewolves coming in from reserve and toasting an entire tactical squad. In revenge my opponent dropped his sternguard squad with 8 (yes eight!) combi-meltas next to my poor, innocent bane wolves and destroyed them both in a fiery, toxic blossom.

As for the Apoc game, I brought 3,500 points of my Iron Warriors with some of my traitor guard vehicles (I didn’t fell like pushing around 50+ guys in the 15 minute turns we would have). The game used all 5 of the store’s tables to create a 6′x20′ board! The mission was themed around the space wolves (surprise!) attempting to escape after stealing an artifact from the Thousand Sons, so the Space wolves and company setup on the three middle boards and were trying to make it off the small board edges. The enemy team (me being part of it) could set up to 12″ along any board edge. As you can see in the picture below I set up in one of the corners, determined to keep any of those loyal fools from escaping.

Next to me was a huge hoard of Dark Eldar (I was surprised any one still plays them!) and holding the other corner was some Thousand Sons.

Directly in front of my was a spear head of Space Wolves and various other Space Marines. This picture was taken about 1/2 before the game started and before most of the rest of the board was filled. Turn one say this force surge towards my line and 8 drop pods land next to me, disgorging a dreadnought from each. My defiler, Land Raider and vindicator never had a chance to wreck havoc. In fact the only thing I had left at the end of the game was two of my Basilisks and a Rhino with a troop squad hiding inside. I did my job though and only one enemy squad made it off the board.

What can’t be seen in any of my pictures is the 40+ people crowding in around the table trying to push there men along and blow things up. Needless to say I left with a splitting head ache and a desire to play more 40k!

ToEMP challenge #6 is due in about a week, and after the high of an Apoc game I am determined to not only meet the challenge but to finish my banewolves as part of the bonus challenge!