40K Friday: Grinding Away at Grey Knights

 

I should probably post something about all the new rule reveals but in my experience it's very difficult to draw any real conclusions when you only have part of the picture. Sure, we've seen the contents of the big box for the new edition, and some of the new combat rules, and WarCom is banging away every day now with details on some detachments and it's a lot of fun ... but it's not enough to actually play a game of 11th and until I can do that it's all speculative and incomplete. I may put up a post about it next week but I'm still not sure there's a ton of value there. I'm watching and reading for sure but it's a little early to say one army is going to be terrible or that another will be amazing. Nobody who knows anything can talk about it yet ... so we wait. Looks like the new stuff is coming out in June so we will all get a chance to check it out then.

In the meantime ...

• Primary focus has been the Grey Knights because theoretically they are the closest to completion. As often turns out to be the case, getting them from "almost" to "done" feels like a whole bunch of work because I want it to look a certain way and until it does it is not "done". It's not quite perfectionist - I outgrew that a long time ago - but it is still amazing sometimes how much more work a "90% complete" model takes to finish. Some examples: 
  
  
  

  

  Those extra antenna things stick up just far enough and are just fragile enough to be absolute nightmares over the lifespan of a miniature trooper.

  
  
• My Interceptor squads - I had 3 completed before - took a little bit of a beating, probably in the move and while one of them was good and is now in the "done" case the other two had some weapons break (@#%@#$@$ force halberds!), some arms pop off, and those little teleport nubs on their power packs broke off on multiple models. So now I'm very slowly working through the process of matching up broken weapon heads with broken shafts, weapon arms with bodies, and figuring out how exactly I want to deal with the power pack situation. Yes, it is very tempting to just remove the remaining nubs on the broken ones and call them Strike squads but I'm trying to make it work without throwing in the towel like that. We will see if my resolve holds.
  
  
  

  

  See without the gun the piston/support plugs right into the arm ...

  
  
• My "painted" Dreadknights took a beating as well so I am fixing broken bits here as well. One that was fully painted did not have a second arm weapon - in the age before one could save some points by not paying for a second gun and just charging them into melee. In the points-less now, you might as well load them up. The problem is that adding an arm-mounted cannon is blocked by one of the many cables on these things. If you put the gun on first, the support/piston/cable plugs into it. If you do not, the thing goes directly into the arm. So now I am working out what I have to cut to do the last damage to the paint and still get it on there. Of course I also need to paint the gun too. Cut and reposition the support? Cut off half of the gun? I may just give up and say there's an invisible incinerator there and not cut or paint anything.
  
  
  

  

  ... but to attach the gun that same support plugs into the gun - which is tricky to do when it's already there.

  
  
• The Paladins and Terminators - <sigh>. The variable number of these guys in a squad has kind of turned into a pain because I have multiples but some are 3, some are 4, and some are 5. You can still use them that way in 10th edition, but I know there is a big reset coming for the GKs in 11th and I hate to do work that won't matter in six months. Of course, that could apply to the whole army so who knows? I'm getting to the point now where I'm just going to finish them up in whatever numbers they are in and build some new 5-man  squads to try and be ready for the redux. My concern is that even if they leave most of the army structure intact - no guarantees there - that they might get weird with say, Paladins and put them in 3-man squads. There is no assurance that all of the current squad types and character types and vehicles will say as they are or even stay in the army at all so it's probably pointless to try and pre-game this stuff. Ah well, one of the perils of trying to update an older army going into a new edition. It will all be playable in older editions so that's my ultimate refuge I suppose. 

Anyway I'm working through this stuff and will hopefully finish soon. I have started looking at my orks and counting up numbers and types because yes, they are the poster-fungus for Armageddon and I'd like to get them on the table again. I expect some model and unit updates here as well so it's another battle of "what will still be useful" for the new edition - I'll talk about that next time.