The Activities of a Security Kitteh

Planet 1-40-20 (Informal Name: “Murder”)

Reports are coming in of a desperate battle for survival on the surface of planet 1-40-20. Blood Angels from an initial scouting force and Emperor’s Children from a relief force fought against an unending tide of strange insect-like xenos. Battle companies from both chapters were able to arrive and rescue these initial elements due to Blood Angel commander Captain “Boo-Yeah” on the ground personally deploying powerful homing beacons, he has since been gifted a pair of the finest lightning claws in the chapter’s possession. Reports of heroic stands by Emperor’s Children tactical squads & a Dreadnought have been confirmed, along with a daring raid by Blood Angel scouts; these sacrifices managed to buy much needed.

Status: Planet Under Full Compliance

The Diasporex Fleet:

The Diasporex fleet, a traitor confederation in line with Xenos, has been dealt with in a series of ship to ship engagements and boarding actions.   The death blow fell when the command ship was boarded by Imperial Fists in a daring teleportation assault lead by Captain Navarra and supported by the firepower of the Dark Angels lead by Astelan.  The mechanium is said to be highly pleased by the large crop of technology rediscovered from these ships.  The very terminators who lead the assault have seen their weapons personally upgraded as a sign of thanks from the Masters of Mars.

Status: Traitorous Fleet Destroyed

Planet 4-25-18:

This new planet has been brought into the fold of the Imperium, liberated from the clutches of an Ork, a so called “Big Mek”, by the efforts of the Death Guard.   The Death Guard successfully fought though a most unconventional force of Orks, featuring many odd mechanical constructs.  The Death Guard are currently in transit to join the Warmaster himself after their latest victory.

Status: Planet Under Full Compliance

So my wife had two huge reports due this week, it seems almost fitting that I should do some as well.  I’m not going to try and do a report for the solo part of Adepticon, I can do a quick one: I fought drop poding Space Wolves, and won; Assault Cannon spamming Marines, and won; gun line Las/Plas Marines, and won.  Didn’t quite break top ten, but close 17th over all, 14th in battle score, out of 148 of the most stupidly competitive Warhammer 40k players around, I’ll take it.

There was a local tournament on Saturday, I won 2, drew 1.  I’ll get a full battle report up in a bit.  We have another tournament on Saturday, it’s of the team variety, HearldOfNurgle  and I are taking our Adepticon lists.  Our other two friends are fielding their loyalist lists (Blood Angels and Templar), more on that as it develops.

We started our pre-heresy campaign on Monday, week 1 was a total success.   Reports as best I can do (only a full report on the one I was in) incoming as well.

Lastly painting/building projects.  I finally painted my Adepticon turn counter, it came out really nice.  I’ll work on the objective markers soon.  I’m finally putting the finishing building touches on my Emperor’s Fist company (sponsons on one, some details on three to go), I’ll wait to paint it till the GW spray gun comes out, that will help me keep my sanity.   I’m building and maybe even painting some Eldar stuff I’ve had sitting around since May of last year right now.  For the future: Drop Pods, need to scratch build me (and some other folks) some drop pods; the scratch built Warhound, take two (this time with plasticard); Morlock terminators (go go Iron Hands) for the pre-heresy fun and maybe a fun fluff based (read non-tournament) army after; and lastly some Tetras for my Tau.  Good times indeed.

….I end up frantically painting the night before, and the tournament tomorrow is no different.  One would think that since I’m playing my Tau army that I took to Adpeticon (and I will post a battle report eventually, it will be a bit fuzzy, but better then nothing) it would already be painted, but sadly not.  I had one squad of firewarriors that I played half painted, they are now fully painted.  I had kroot that were barely three color, they are now almost fully painted (and will be done in a few hours as I get some free time).  That leaves the pathfinders.  They sat out Adepticon since they were not painted, and there were several games I wish I had them over the stealth suit team and second missle suit that took their place.  They sit at home right now, unpainted….and they are getting done tonight god damn it….or….maybe they will just be three colors….blargh.
Next week’s tournament will be better since it’s a team one and my 1k sons are already good to go.

Ok, so it’s 11:30 where I am as I start this, my body thinks it’s 1:30 AM, oh, and I got up at 5 AM, so if this is a tiny bit incoherent, that’s why.

Murphy’s Lawmen battle report for 2008 Adepticon after the jump:

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So Adepticon is finally over, and I think it’s time for a blog post.  I’ll save the battle reports for later, needless to say, Adepticon was FTW, huge FTW.  I’m in Portland, OR right now for work.  I get to do something tonight I am singularly unqualified for, deal with/help customers.  It’s sorta the perfect storm of suck:

1) I have to travel away from my wife.
2) I work night shifts.
3)  The shifts are 12 hours.
4) I don’t like taking taxis, so I’m walking everywhere.
5) People are calling me Mr. Schuchard, I HATE IT when people seriously call me Mr. Schuchard, that is my dad, not me.  For chirst sakes I was playing with little toy soldiers last weekend…
6) Crappy internet connection for the weekend (aka no WoW).
7) Couldn’t really bring much in the way of models to paint.  I brought my kroot to finish, but that is it.

Yeah, could be a long weekend…..arghghgh.  Adepticon reports incoming (maybe tonight if I get a break in which to type them).

Hrm, so updates.

Adepticon stuff is going smoothly, I need need need to spend some time with my Tau, both painting and playing, we’ve been having so much fun with all things chaos that there has not been an opportunity for me to work on them.  My Thousand Sons are “alive” and well, both squads are built and primed, and one squad has a little bit of paint on them (more just to tell them apart then anything).  My brushes are old, really old, so I’m picking up some new ones on Monday.  Arhiman just keeps on owning face, serious face.  He tried to fry himself with perils of the warp last game, but then with one wound left he and an aspiring sorcerer took out Ghazghkull in hand to hand.  To top it off his paint job is better then I normally do.

We’re having an apocalypse game at my apartment tomorrow.  I have to swing by after work and pick up boards and terrain from Pegasus.  Should be a fun time, I’m playing Eldar since I want a break from my usual apocalypse army (Tau & IG), I’m hoping to provide a few nasty surprises for people.

In the same week I got both my netherdrake and my epic flight form, so I have choices coming out my ears as to how I want to ride in style.  I joined a raiding guild a few days ago in WoW, which so far has been laid back and nice.  After going without a guild for all of the BC, it’s nice to see green chat again.  Oddly enough I think I might end up doing raiding more for seeing the content then the gear, as I’m discovering that the gear I want does not always come from raids, I’ll work more on figuring that out later.  Claire is in it as well, in fact she is almost 58, which means she is almost to the outlands, which will be so very nice, WTB hunter to roll with in PVP….

So I’ll not even try and hide the following fact: I am not a web developer. Oh dear lord no. Ironically one of the first major projects I worked on was Movielens. A brief aside: go check out Movielens, <ArnoldVoice>Do it now!</ArnoldVoice> Go here: www.movielens.org and give it a whirl. Trust me on this one: Collaborative Filtering is for the win.  Anyway I digress, my first project o was rewritting the search engine in it.  Which went slowly, but smoothly…until I hit the part where I had to interact with the interface.  XSLT, style-sheets, javascript….yuck.  I hated it, I write good technical code, good systems code, my idea of a UI is a command line.  It was a really traumatizing experience, but honestly it was the last time I’ve had to write UI code.  Until now.  I was starting to work on my web page for a software project, when, low and behold, I realized I don’t know how to build crap in a webpage.  I know basic circa 2000 HTML.  That’s it.  To be honest I really don’t want to learn anything more either.  I want to spend my time writing stuff I enjoy more.  So I guess it’s out to the interwebs I go to hunt for something premade.  Anyone with any suggestions can throw them my way.

One last note SVN + HTTP is slick, easy and awesome.

Seriously, there are other armies in your universe, give them some love (and datasheets that are cool and not bland) as well….kthxbai

So 20,000 points a side Apocalypse game over, my feet/legs are sore (I never sit enough when I play 40k), my throat hurts, and I couldn’t have enjoyed myself more. After the dust settled I can for sure say there were some units that excelled and some that might be over-rated.

The units that impressed:
Eldar Vampire Raiders, Nightwings, and Tau Tigershark AX-1-0s: Dear god, fliers with Strength D weapons are a sick, sick combo.  Hell, fliers in general.  The ability to get them exactly to where they need to be at any time is simply godly. Plus they can soak up more firepower then the equivalent walker, yeah, definitely worth the points. Christmas cash might be going toward one of these bad boys http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/Tau/tigersharkII2.jpg after how they did today.

Sunstorm Squad & Cloudstrike Squad: Yeah, they are exactly as good as you think they are.  If I had to pick I still like the Cloudstrike slightly more, they fit with my general style of play (mobile, mobile, mobile (or as HeraldOfNurgle calls it: pansy, pansy, pansy)).  But yeah, these two formations kick some tail, and honestly it makes me want to tack on some eldar to my Tau/Human Auxilia.

Any infantry squad with Meltaguns and PFist/Chainfist/Melta bombs:  I will encourage folks to look at how much it costs to field one of these simple squads in loyalist or chaos flavors, then I will point out how well they handle 800 point titans.  They may not kill them spectacularly in one turn true, but a ~200 point squad over 2-3 turns can slowly kill a titan, then sit on an objective.

Pylons: They ignore HALF of the super-heavy damage tables, plus a good number of shots to boot, plus anti-air, plus living metal…yeah, it’s as good as you think, only downside is the fact that they are non-scoring…

Units that are overrated (in my opinion) (or that we just don’t have figured out very well in apoc yet):
Warlord Titan:  There was one on the board.  It got in one turn of shooting, didn’t really do anything spectacular against a revenant titan, then had my Emp’s Fist tank company flank march into it’s rear and cripple it, then some falcons chipped in and combined they finished it off.  Void shields are great, if you can keep your foe at arms length, but they don’t do much good when they come right next to you.  The big titans are awesome, much like air-craft carriers in real life, but what do ACs need?  Escorts, tons of them, just like the big titans, how many points are you willing to drop to protect the huge titan, I just don’t know if it’s worth it…

Tons of drop podding troops: Too many nasty templates are floating around to make these really effective in my opinion.  Flank march, honestly, just flank march.  No…don’t think about this too much, just do it, please….(this is just my opinion, I’m sure there is a way to make it work, but flank march just seems so much better to me).

Void shields & Holo-fields (see warlord titan): things get close, or stuff doesn’t move, and these critical (and costly) protection items go right out the window, Tau have it right with energy fields (too bad so few units have them).

All in all it was good, I think a couple of weeks down the road we’re doing a slightly smaller battle and allowing ZERO super heavies.  We want to see what these formations can do against each other, should be a good time.

So we are having a rather large WH40K Apocalypse game on Saturday, and truth be told, I’m totally un-prepared.  Yeah, it’s crunch time boys and girls.  Stopping by home depot tonight to pick up polystyrene as I promised I would have some bridges, more then likely some spray paint as well for a quick paint job.  Need to call Rob tonight to figure out what time we’re setting stuff up on Friday.  Need to try and come up with a scenario based rule or two as well.

On an even more important note, I have to figure out my f’ing army….  We downsized it to 5,000 points and 6 structure points.  Not going to lie, this puts me sort of at a loss as to what exactly to do, all of my previous ideas were centered around 8,000 points and 10 structure points.  I know roughly what some people are fielding, and it scares me honestly.  For example, HearldOfNurgle (who sadly won’t be on my side because he is filthy chaos scum) can get a squad of 10 plague marines, upgrade one to a VSgt with a power fist, give two plasma guns, and shove the lot of them in a dreadclaw for roughly 365 points.  Now one of those pods is nasty, but he can have ten of them and still have roughly 1,500 points to spend on superheavies.  Yuck…..

I think that Friday night might involve the designing/rough building of a Tau super-heavy walker (well it’s Tau, so jumper, you get my point….).   Gotta figure out a way to kill marines as well….this might be interesting….