40K Friday: Orks, Grey Knights, and Dark Angels

 

The focus has not been super-strong lately but I've accomplished a little bit. 

The Grey Knights have been one main area and, feeling that I have enough infantry to play something fun for now, I have mainly been working on the Dreadknight situation. This is mostly because I have 3 of them sitting on the table not-finished and 2 more in boxes waiting to be built as shiny new -Grandmaster- Dreadknights with some of the new bits. It's been a fight in trying to figure out how far I want to go with each one versus what is "good enough" to call done and move on - and this army needs a lot of that last part. Hoping to get at least 1-2 of them into the case this weekend and then knock out the rest soon. That will make for a somewhat top-heavy force but I still have some Purifiers, Purgators, and Terminators/Paladins to build so it will even out. The real question is "how much of this can I get to DONE before their codex comes out and changes up a bunch of stuff?" We will see.

These heads are perfect for what I was thinking but once they are on ... man ...

The Orks were getting a fair amount of attention before and now with the Armageddon set having arrived they've been getting a strategic rethink. As I mentioned here I've been contemplating making a new separate Blood Axe force with a mix of older and newer models. I had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted to use in it - most of which I already had - so with a theme and the units it was just a matter of building some of the parts. I started sticking my 3rd-party heads onto my older boyz torsos and ... I do not like the way they look ... at all. It's rough. The alternate heads make the hunched-over ork boyz look even more off-kilter. I'm going to try building some from scratch and see if I can make them look better as I was adapting some already built models. I'm also going to see if I can make the heads work with the older monopose boyz or with the Armageddon monopose boyz as some of them have separate heads. If that doesn't work then the Blood Axe heads may get set aside into the Ork Bits box and used for vehicle riders or drivers or something and they all get rolled into the Goffs. It's disappointing but not every plan works out.

Digging through the Armageddon box also got me to thinking about the Marine half. For the first time in a while I really had few specific plans for that side of a big box. I figured the heavy bolter guys would probably go into the Crimson Fists because that's a thing with them but otherwise it was pretty open. I'll find a home for them eventually but there wasn't really any urgency about it. 

The intercessors in the box are especially ... mundane. My core, modern (meaning primaris-updated) forces are the aforementioned Fists, my Blood Angels, and my largely-unbuilt-but-always-in-the-back-of-my-mind Black Templars. Team Blue and Team Red already have multiple intercessor squads and Team Fanatic doesn't really care about them as I prefer to focus on Crusader squads as a unique Templar thing. So what was I going to do with a squad or two of a unit with no obvious home?

I thought about whether I could convert them to something else but that's more challenging with the monopose stuff. Even making them additional Sternguard could take some work to make them look right.

Then the wandering mind pulled down my Ravenwing box while moving stuff around and a new virus took hold ... 

"At one point you had an active Dark Angels army ... earlier this year you  set up a Ravenwing force and counted up enough terminators and Deathwing Knights to make a Deathwing army ... why not fill in some Greenwing units and just Primais-ize your Dark Angels?"

I mean ... I have the other stuff already - built and basecoated - and I wouldn't be buying anything new since the Armagedodn box was a done deal ... sure, it could actually work ...

I think they will look good in black. I like to use power swords in my DA army anyway so these will fit right in.

So now the latest distraction for 2026 is tweaking the kinda-sorta Dark Angel "wing" elements and bridging them with "regular" space marine pieces. I was also trying to figure out what to do with the Vanguard Vets as I don't really want them in the Fists and my Blood Angels are already well-supplied with jump assault squads of various types - where could I put them that they would make a difference? Well, they would make for a nice flexible element for a reborn Dark Angels force now wouldn't they?

Then of course the next thought is "maybe I should get another squad too while they're cheap - NO!

Regardless I already have a bunch of older characters in the Dark Angel box, plus some modern dreadnoughts, plus these new models, plus some other uncommitted newer units (Hellblasters?) and suddenly that's a pretty solid army. I'll save the potential structure for another post but it feels good to find a way to actually use some of the new units I was undecided on. Fortunately my Dark Angels paint scheme is pretty simple too so I might be able to get them painted up fairly quick - well quick for me anyway.

More next week as I chronicle this poorly-focused journey into hobby madness.

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.

40K Friday - Continuing Distractions with Grey Knights

 

Not a lot of progress on the Tyranids or Praetorians these past two weeks as I've really been pulled towards finishing/updating some already substantial and mostly finished armies.

For the Grey Knights I've moved 20-odd figures into the "done" cabinet with more coming close behind - hopefully this weekend. All of these are already painted to some level. It's mainly sorting them back into squads, fixing any broken parts, a final clear coat and then re-doing the bases. This includes a few more marine squads and the dreadnoughts and dread knights . I also have to finish up my Rhinos/Razorbacks that I started a few years ago and a Stormraven & Land Raider  as well. This may all happen in stages as I jump around to different projects. The pull here is that this army is this close to being done-done, which is a good - if rare -  place for me to be on an army. 

Please ignore the Chaos Knights lurking below ...

Once I am  through these I will have some "from scratch" work to do as I need a big squad of Purifiers which I lack right now. I do have the newer Crowe model to go with them so that will be one effort. Then I also want to do a big squad of Paladins with all of the bling. 

The only new acquisition recently was the new upgrade sprue for one of the Dreadknights. I do want to finish up building and painting what I have but the only thing I might want more of would be the full-kit Dreadknights as everything else I've mentioned I already have. I think I'm OK with 1 grand master and the 3 regular DKs as I do have the Land Raider and Stormraven to bring big guns and take up a lot of points if I want to go that direction. 

I also expect much of this army, the infantry at least and probably the dreadnoughts, to be replaced in the next 3 years so I am not really feeling a need to spend more money on expanding it right now. One more new Dreadknight (to be able to field all of the cool new stuff) is about the only temptation and despite the new upgrade sprue those could get replaced as well so who knows? It's already more points than I could ever really field outside of an apocalypse game so it's not like I need more of anything.

So yes, the goal is to finish up the easily-finished stuff, take a look at the rest and maybe advance one chunk of that and then switch to one of this year's other efforts. 

40K Friday - 3-Day Weekend Distraction Edition

 I did make some good progress last week with the Tyranids. That's 9 Von Ryan's Leapers in the one tray and a pair of Neurotyrants and their little gribblies in the other. At this point I have a bunch of 'gants left to do and the Norn and then I am completely built ... 5000+ points of the 'Nids. Yes there are some units I do not have but I'm probably not going to push very hard to get more as I need to start painting these things. I do have a scheme mostly figured out but I need to start getting more of them going beyond a base coat of Wraithbone.

I had thought about working on more of the Guard this weekend. I try to break things up into chunks as I go so I don't burn out or get bored with what I'm doing which means I am usually working on at least two armies at any given time. This weekend though something came out of left field and bit into me hard.

That's right for some reason I went down the rabbit hole on Grey Knights. It's been a while since I posted about them here - that was 9th Edition 40K and here's where I started talking about them for 8th Edition and they have been an army here ever since those days but for some reason I took them off the shelves and put them in a box after the move and just let them sit. 

Now the distraction started while I was looking at my Iron Warriors and thinking I needed to do some updates as I have added parts and pieces the last few years but I haven't really sat down and hammered away on them. A lot of my stuff is old-school, my marines are mostly still on 25mm bases, and I haven't really finished out even the new stuff that I have added. So I was thinking I should put in some effort on them as I wrap up the Tyranids as there has been a lot of "new" for Chaos Marines recently and their rules seem to work pretty well so I should get some games in before 10th goes away - or at least modernize them a bit going in to 11th. 

While doing this I decided to make a "Conclave of Chaos" on the big table and drag out all of my other chaos stuff too - World Eaters, Death Guard, some of the daemon stuff - to see if I had things loosely assigned to one army that I could use in another. 

While doing that I had to move my Grey Knights Holding Facility (a big cardboard box) and while looking down into it I realized I had been ignoring them this entire edition and they were far more "modern" than the IW's. Well, they're at least on the right size bases. The path of distraction is insidious ...

So I made some room next to The Conclave and started sorting through my Knights of Titan and discovered things I had picked up in the last round of GK interest and never finished and some things that were - I have a painted Kaldor Draigo! Of course it turns out they took him out of the latest codex! But I have a Draigo! Also more normal powered armor guys, more termies/paladins, and more characters than I remembered. I also have 4 dreadnoughts ... not sure why I went to 4 but OK. I have an unbuilt Dreadknight which syncs up perfectly with the one new model the Grey Knights got for 10th which is an upgrade kit to more readily distinguish a Grand Master Nemesis Dreadknight from the regular Nemesis Dreadknight. 

The main thing though is that there are a couple of thousand points worth of painted GK's that just need to be sorted out. I am fixing some of their bases along the way - I painted for several hours this weekend and it was all snow base updates. They were not super-unified before but they will be now. The vehicles need more work as there are a lot of "well it's silver at least" vehicles right now but it shouldn't be terribly hard to improve on that. Right now the plan is to tune up what's done/almost done and then based on what that looks like get some of the other stuff finished. I did manage to pick up the codex for 10th and read through it and I have ordered the dreadknight upgrade sprue so I am fired up about it all. 

The downside of all this is twofold:

• This army has not done particularly well in 10th edition and the way they work now is *significantly* different than what they did in earlier editions. They used to be the all-psychic space marine force where each squad had powers and each character had powers and I can tell you the cognitive load of running them in 8th or 9th was massive. It was challenging, it was fun, but it was the most complex army in-play that I have ever tried to run. They had potentially 5 different melee weapons in each squad, plus a choice of 3 different support weapons at 1 or 2 per squad, and then each squad could pick from at least 1 psychic power out of 6, then the characters had a different set of powers to choose from ... it was a lot. But it fit the lore!
  
  Fast-forward to 10th and all of that has gone away. They do still have the 3 support weapons to pick from but all of the melee options are now "Nemesis Force Weapons" and have a single statline. The psychic phase is gone and the various abilities are just pre-set per unit as a special ability if they have one at all. The psychic down-tune is a general 10th edition thing but it hit the psychic-focused armies pretty hard. The GK's signature feature now is teleporting - every unit has deep strike, they can pick some units up off of the table during the opponents turn, and there are ways to jump on and off and around the board more than any other army in the game. Hey, mobility is a huge thing in this kind of game and they have a ton of it but it is a very different thing than what they used to be. A lot of long-time Grey Knight players are not happy with this take on the force and have pulled back from playing & building and talking about Grey Knights. It's a shame but that's where a lot of people are these days.
• Secondly there have been rumors for some time that the GKs are getting a full refresh in 11th edition - that's models, not rules. So I am diving in and building/painting/prepping a bunch of models that are going to be "obsolete" in a year or two. I will be sad to see them go because I absolutely love these things. They are just about the coolest of the firstborn era plastic marines with their awesome helmets and inscriptions and weapons and the GK color scheme just lends itself to making these things look amazing. That said they are from 5th edition, circa 2010, and a lot of that stuff is getting replaced now. They do look tiny compared to all of the primaris stuff and the new scale for marines but to me that doesn't mean they look bad - they just look small. Also, scaling has never been a strong suit for 40K, right from the start, even among the same army, so it really doesn't bother me. 
  
  So sure, we will see all-new models for the Grey Knights in the next few years. OK. Right now I have a pretty nice pile of the current ones, and I have rules to play them, so that's what I'm going to do. I am hoping that when the update comes they don't change the structure of the army a whole lot so that what I have will still work and I can keep playing with what I have while I contemplate if/how/when I want to upgrade to the newer stuff.
  
  They might not! They might turn it completely upside down! If they do, well, Blaster has been making some noise about how strong Eldar were in 5th Edition so we might have to have a retro showdown and see if they were really all that tough. 

More to come.

40K Friday: Grey Knights for 9th Edition

 

Pretty fired up about this one - the Grey Knights have been around since Rogue Trader  where they were a very specialized unit - not an army - that dropped in to fight big daemons typically. They are Space Paladins after all and they definitely look the part.

This continued on into Epic which is where I painted my first batch - the requisite 4 squads of terminators that were something any Imperial force could use. That was around 91-92 when the second edition of that game came out so I can say that on some level I've been playing Grey Knights for 30 years, right?

So I've always liked them but I never built them up in 40K, even after their emergence as a separate army and subsequent domination in 5th edition. I finally decided to fix this gap a few years back in 8th edition and I am very happy about it - I love the lore and I love the models.

Lots of good news this week with a new codex coming next week:

• New Stuff
• New Psychic Abilities
• A bunch of updates to units and strats and powers

I think it looks very promising  - it's always hard to tell with isolated chunks like this but I like the pieces I have seen so far. 

I have probably 4000 points total now with around 3000 of that painted so I'll be ready to go when the book comes out but it is a good reason to dive in and finish the rest of those units too. I don't really need anything new at this point  - maybe the new Crowe model - but it would be nice to have another one that I could call "finished" with a shiny new codex.

BatRep of the Week: Grey Knights vs. Tyranids

A new one from Miniwargaming that's fun and shows off some of the new Urban Conquest Rules

40K Weekday: Grey Knights Update

I really really like the Grey Knights lore in 40K I remember them being an interesting unit in Rogue trader and then in Epic where they were a single unit you might take if fighting Chaos but not an army on their own. Then came 5th edition when they received a separate Codex and suddenly they were a whole separate force with some really nice miniatures all their own. It's a great look, a great theme, and a great concept for an elite strike force in the game.

In 5th they were a top-tier army.

In 8th ... they are widely regarded as the bottom tier army of the game.

This is sad on one level but it also opens up some possibilities as there have been Grey Knights all over eBay for the last year. It occurred to me that since they are an elite army and there are a lot of them showing up for sale online it might not be too hard to acquire them in nicely painted form at a reasonable price.  I've been interested in adding them to the house armies for a while so this seemed like a great opportunity to do that.

So ... the goal: Build a fully painted Grey Knights army without ever lifting a brush to paint them myself and without paying a premium for having it done. This was to be a total refugee army.

I started looking last January, and this first month of 2019 has seen the final acquisition needed to make my Grey Knights army really playable in 8th edition 40K: A third strike squad! This opens up the Battalion option and a decent number of Command Points when fielding them. It's a nice milestone to have achieved.

The force now:

• Grandmaster Voldus
• 2x Terminator Librarians
• 2x Grand Master Dreadknights
• 3x Strike Squads
• 3x Interceptor squads
• 1x Paladin squad
• 1 Venerable Dreadnought
• 3x Razorbacks*

Now I like the silver look for these guys, not the literal grey look, and that seems to be the default color scheme along with red and white heraldry. It's been fairly easy to acquire and there are still a lot of options out there. I don't have any air units, I don't have a land raider, and I could always use another Dreadknight and some more Paladins. 

*I'm cheating a little bit on the Razorbacks. They are not painted. I brought them over from another army and I will probably end up painting them myself.

It's around 2300 points right now so I can play pretty much any normal scenario and have some options on what to bring. The core of the force is 3 strike squads in the razorbacks who sport lascannons to give some usable heavy firepower. Pretty much anything in the force can deep strike either from the unit rules, a psychic power, or a stratagem so the rest of it is pretty flexible. The dread is also carrying a double lascannon as well. The recent buff to bolters makes everyone in the army a little better too.

I've been collecting them for a year but I have yet to play a game with them so I cannot tell you how they play - but that should change this week! I'll put up a report when it happens and hopefully it will be the first in a new series.

Grey Knights vs Harlequins; 8th Edition Warhammer 40000; Battle Report o...

SkaredCast again with two Elite armies you don't see as much these days.