Weighing in on 6th edition

If you go around to various 40k blogs, you'll see that a lot of them this week have been talking about some 6th edition rumors to come out recently. That's right folks, 6th edition madness is upon us. At BOLS, you can read the rumors for yourself. I recommend checking them out. they're fairly interesting.

Personally, I don't believe a lot of them. There are some pretty major changes to movement and shooting that seem to complicate things. Mainly shooting is the most complicated change. Your chance of hitting something changes depending on what you're shooting at. So it's harder to hit a fast moving jet bike then it is to shoot a stationary squad of guys. While I like that added realizism, hopefully the way it's used is fairly easy to remember because I can see this getting pretty complicated pretty quickly. 5th edition seemed to streamline a lot of things so I find it hard to believe that would want to further complicate things.

There are also different ranks of eternal warrior and instant death. Enternal warrior 1 protects you from instant death 1 but not instant death 2. This, however, seems needlessly complicated. I thought eternal warrior was fine the way it was.

A big one for me that I was expecting but am still bummed about is the change from a standard cover save going from a 4+ to a 5+. This is really gonna hurt my trukks with kustom force fields and I'm gonna be expecting to see a lot more "issues" as I drive up on my opponents. But maybe since the trukks are fast they'll be harder to hit? we'll see how this works out for the shootin' and lootin' list.

I also wanna take a second to show the change to deep striking rules. Mainly because this effects my not blood angels. That's right, I'm mentioning my other army.

Deep Strike: mishab table as before, place squad leader,
if in 6” of enemy: 3D6” scatter, use arrow on hit symbol, if in 12”: 2D6” hit is hit, in 18”: 1D6”, outside 18”: no scatter
may only advance on turn of arrival, even with fleet or flat out, count always as (advance) moving, charge allowed

My blood angels are an interesting army in that I send them in with melta guns, blow up my opponents vehicles and then fly away. They're all combat tactic-ed out so there aren't enough of them to do real damage in close combat. So i grab objectives with fast moving guys while my opponent is forced to foot slog it or I take out their transports for the kill point and then get where they can't get me. I really like it and I rely heavily on d6 deep strike I get so I can get right up next to my opponent with meltas. But now it looks like I'm gonna have a 2d6 scatter if I wanna get where the melta. a d6 is risky enough, trust me.
To wrap this up though it looks like I can charge afterwards. Maybe it'll be time for a more close combat, big squad blood angel army. Ya know like the actual blood angels.
The main point with all of this is to note that the list you have no probably won't work as well in 6th edition so get ready for some re-writing, which in my opinion is gonna be pretty fun.

Alright, I'm off to mexican food.

DA WAAAGH!!!: the looted wagon...

So the last few days I've been looking for deals on ebay and considering actually building the Plasmanian Devils. Switching the 3 vindicators to 2 devistator squads with a couple other changes I'm bringing 14 plasma guns against my opponent. All well and good until I remember that they are scatter weapons and you can't mention scatter weapons on an ork blog without talking about the looted wagon.

The looted wagon and I have had a bit of a love hate relationship. I loved the looted wagon but the looted wagon hates me. It's a solid vehicle with armor 11 so it can resist bolters which the more you run trukks the more you'll learn to hate armor 10. It's also got a carrying capacity which can make it a cheaper transport for your burna boys if you can't afford (points or with real money) a battlewagon. You can also give it a skorcha to add a little more flavor to your burna boys. It can take all the usual vehicle wargear so you can add a good amount of customization. The big thing you'll see looted wagons for is their boomgun. Str 8, AP 3 and a large blast template. Not too shabby a stat line on that and it'll make marines shake in their power armor.

After many, many, many loses with my orks I realized that if you're gonna run boyz forward you're gonna need a firing base behind them to harass your opponent a little bit, a tactic employed in the shootin' and lootin' list. My initial idea was to use my looted wagon I built when I started playing and use that for support. The AP 3 really makes marine players worry about it and they'll actually spend a good amount of time shooting that instead of your guys, which has it's own advantages. However, they need not spend that time because the boomgun is rubbish. There, I said it. Ok the stats are impressive but the main thing to remember that it's being fired at BS 2 so you're probably gonna scatter pretty far. Even if your opponent is clumped together, the gun is never going to hit where you want it to. Sure it's orky to just throw explosions at your opponent but there are times where you want it to hit a tactical squad out in the open and it'll instead hit a dreadnought. This actually happened to me and even though I killed the dreadnought, I still had a tactical squad blocking me. Worse yet, the gun may end up scattering onto something like a land raider and bouncing off completely or completely miss. Never forget you can just all together miss.
Take into account it scatters 2d6 which on average is a 7. Subtract the BS and you've got the template scattering 5 inches in a random direction. Now you can roll a hit on the scatter die but you'll only get that 1/3 of the time which is maybe two turns out of the game. Think about terminators for an moment, whenever they need to make that 2+ save, the player rolls a 1. I believe the same thing applies to looted wagons. Sure you might get it every once and a while but what I'm getting at is you can not rely on looted wagon.
Looted wagons can be a lot of fun and when they work, its usually spectacular. I've killed 8 marines in a single shot and had the rest run off the board. Good day! But most of the time I fire the battle wagon, roll my dice and proceed to place my palm on my forehead. So needless to say, I don't think I'll be building the Plasmanian Devils

Plasmanian Devils

GAWD I'M CLEVER (the name of the army, not the model above. Kudos to whoever made that)

So I'm shifting a little from my usual Orkiness to present a marine list I thought up yesterday. I know, MARINE LIST after all my gripes with the imperium?! It's a cop out but if it makes you feel better this is probably one of the orkiest marine lists possible.

HQ
Pedro Kantor- 175

Troops
3 Tactical Marines w/ plasma pistol, plasma gun and plasma cannon - 600

Elite
3 dreadnoughts w/ plasma cannon and TL autocannon - 375

Heavy support
3 Vindicators - 345

comes out to 1495 I believe. I was aiming for 1500 and I'm sure there are some upgrades I can give to a tac. squad but it won't really matter too much.

So the idea with the list came out of two things: 1) is my love of plasma weapons. Incredibly powerful, good chance of hitting with marines and comes with a chance it'll take your guy out too. Sign me up for one of those guns. Well maybe sign the guy next to me up for one. Regardless, str 7 ap 2 is too awesome pass up in my humble opinion. 2) I wanna spam templates at my enemy. I want to punish them if they think for a moment they can huddle up behind cover. BLAM! AP 2 coming at you full force.

For 1500 points and no test play it's not too shabby if I do say so myself. I would like to do devistator squads with plasma cannons instead of vindicators but they cost way too much and push me over my self imposed limit. Pedro Kantor makes a little more sense. He gives everyone within 12 inches an extra attack so that makes my guys a little more threatening in the assault. He also has orbital bombardment so there's another template to bring to the battlefield. Really no HQ makes a ton of sense for the army but I'm a fan of Pedro Kantor so he'll work. Now if I could just sneak some sternguard in the list...

On a side note, I'm playing a friend tomorrow in a 2000 pt game. Earlier in the week he asked what I was running and I said I wouldn't tell. He only has one army so he argued that I knew he was gonna run dark angels (and probably deathwing.) but he's notorious for writing anti-killa kans' (me) armies so I said I wasn't telling. Then I thought about bringing this and realized this is totally an anti-deathwing army. So i think I'll be bringing something else so I don't seem like too much of a hypocrite. Or maybe I should just blow him out of the water...

Thanks Topless Robot

No matter how fuzzy this picture is, you can't tell me you're not excited right now.

found on Topless Robot

Sisters of Battle rumors (part 1?)

IT'S ARTILLERY AND AN ORGAN! HOW CAN YOU NOT BE EXCITED FOR SISTERS OF BATTLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A quick post before I begin my journey into learning spanish, I found some Sisters Of Battle rumors over at Bell of Lost Souls. Basically they have a link to a link but I like BOLS so I figured I'd send you there first.

Just some thoughts based on the rumors I read, I like the acts of faith and I hope Games workshop does a good job with it. And by good job I mean doesn't over power them but instead makes them interesting. I'm also kind of excited for SoB (<---ha) because it's not space marines. Sure it's still an imperial army and there's still a good amount of power armor but I get a vibe that it'll be a little different. Imperial Guard is definitely a different army then Space Marines and they're both imperial. Not that it doesn't mean Imperial Guard isn't insanely good but it's a nice break from the power armored super soldiers you're used to seeing on table tops. That said, I still rather see Necrons or another xeno army before SoB but it sounds like Grey Knights sold pretty well so I can't blame GW for wanting to put in another (very similar) imperial army.

I'm also glad to see there are some rumors floating around. There always are and there probably always will be but I'll admit I was a little concerned after my last post about GW tightening the marketing screws. Sure, I have absolutely no idea how accurate these rumors are but I've read stuff from BOLS before and it's at least been interesting.

Lemme know what you think about all the SoB stuff so post below

Gripes with gamesworkshop (markets, price increase, and hoardes)

Wargamers having issues with Games Workshop is nothing new. Don't get me wrong, GW has done a lot for table top gaming over the years and both 40k and fantasy are pretty solid games. Even so, there's a problem with the size of GW's control on the market. I don't know how much of the market share they have but it's extremely substantial from what I've heard (I've heard in the 90 percentile.)

You've probably already seen that GW raised their prices at the start of the month. GW raising their prices is nothing new, they do this more often then their fans would like but we continue to buy so they must not have raised their prices too high. However, there is something about this price hike that bothers me. I feel fed up with the constant prices going up. My biggest problem with this price hike is the cost of hoard armies. A box of 10 boyz is all the way to 30 dollars. With Assault on Black Reach costing around 100 dollars too, running a green tide is becoming a less feasible dream. It also kinda killed my dream of building a Tyranid army. I'm still gonna play 40k but it's just a bummer. Especially with the next bit of news.

Over at Bell of Lost Souls , GW is changing their marketing strategy.
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2011/06/gw-marketing-tightening-screws.html
Basically, they're going to keep everyone in the dark until right before they're gonna release something. There are some valid reasons to do this but not enough in my opinion. The one reason I can figure is because of codecies getting leaked before they come out. It seemed like all across forums everywhere people were posting their Grey Knight armies months before the models and codex were released. No company wants their stuff leaked so they don't get paid for it but I must admit that the leaked codex built a lot of hype. I spent hours talking to people about what grey knights might have at their disposal. It was fun and I actually ended up building a little inquisitor army. While I'm not a big fan of Grey Knights but I've been looking forward to what's gonna come out next. But alas, now Games Workshop is gonna keep us in the dark. We'll see how well they do it, I'm hoping not very well especially with Sisters of Battle and Necrons to come out this year.

Easy post of nerdiness

Xmen first class. Pretty good. I wouldn't turn it down you really hate blue people, which also means you won't be see the smurf movie either. Needless to say, you'll be missing out

The WAAAGH!!!: Da Boyz

So lets get the basics of ork tactics down with the basic Ork unit: Da Boyz. If you're gonna play orks, you gotta use da boyz, which may sound limiting but as far as troops go da boyz are some of the best. They're 6 points a piece and come with a stat line guardsmen can only dream of. If you can ignore some pretty low stats, like their 6+ t-shirt save, it's not too shabby. They're STR 3 but the entire ork army has furious charge so you're hitting as hard as Space Marines. Sure their inititive is lower but see if I care when I'm sending 30 dudes with 4 attacks each.

There are two ways to run squads of boyz. You either put twelve in a truck or you put them in a squad of 30. You can mix and match wargear from there but those are basically what you wanna do. One main stay, regardless of how you field them, is to ALWAYS have a Nob with a power klaw and a bosspole in the squad. It's 40 points well spent. The bosspole lets you put a wound on your unit and lets you re-roll your leadership test which is incredibly valuable since losing combat means you're aiming for at best a 6 or lower. So you need that re-roll. The power klaw comes in handy for dealing with more armored targets. You can kill rhinos, dreads, and even kill a terminator or two. On top of that, in massive squads, it's as if that Nob has an extra 30 wounds before your opponent kills him. That's a lot of attempts instant death your opponent's hero. Gotta love Str 8.

The big squads are a lot of fun. I've always enjoyed putting 4 times as many models as my opponent and watching my opponent fall asleep as I spent an hour setting up. In big squads they've got an ability called Mob rule which makes squads of 11 or more fearless, which makes getting shot easier but presents a couple of issues with the no retreat rule.
Sadly, I've been a bit of an idiot about running this list so I usually get blown off the table. I'd be more sad but the level carnage is pretty great. I'll post my new greentide list someday but what you wanna remember when taking squads like this is to at least make a line with one squad or something to give the rest behind cover saves. Meat shield tactics and that 4+ is gonna make a massive difference.

Boyz in trukks my current favorite. Sometimes the speed of the trukk makes up for the much smaller squad. A big thing to remember though is never send a trukk full of boyz on their own. Unless you're sending them into Fire Warriors or Guardians you want every boy you can get. The only downside I have found is that in melee your squads are not fearless and that 6+ causes a lot of casualties on your side so a lot of the time is seems like you need to win combat by destroying the enemy completely other wise you're gonna have all your squads running away and getting sweeping advanced and all sorts of other badness.

Last little bit here is the wargear. I usually take slugga boyz because I'm all about the close combat. If you're more of a Dakka Dakka person, shootas are not a bad choice either. Str 4 assault 2 in a big squad can give you 60 shots at something. Sure it's all at BS 2 but 60 shots is still 60 shots. You can take either a rokkit launcha or big shoota as extra weapons but neither really comes in handy. I was hoping this was my answer to the no melta guns but alas rokkits are one shot and you're probably gonna miss. Big shootas are a little bit better but with your slugga boyz you wanna be running not shooting. So if you take shoota boyz, add big shootas. STR 5 aint too shabby and the ones on my trukks kill a model every once and a while.

The biggest tip as playing orks is to expect to take casualties. If you're looking for units that are gonna be unstoppable with you're opponent's brain melting trying to think of how to kill you then you should be reading a Grey Knights blog. You've got to adopt an ork mentality if you're gonna play orks. Go big, make a lot of noise, kill a lot of dudes and have a good fight.

GEARS OF WAAAGH!!!

Found this little tid bit of information here at Beasts of War and oh boys and boyz am I excited.

For anyone who is a big Gears fan and a wargamer, it's pretty safe to say that this has been in the back of your mind for years now. The Gears of War Board Game. I know, the name sounds lame but this ain't yo daddy's board game. It features over 30 plastic figures, 200 cards, 17 double sided map tiles and more. There's also something called locust AI cards which effect how the enemy works. I'm wondering if this means that no one is going to have to play as the bad guys. I guess we'll see as part of me does want to play as the locust.

It all reminds me of Last night on Earth, a zombie board game where survivors fought zombie players and played out various missions. They both have a card system with dice, miniatures and pretty cool maps. I really like Last Night on Earth and I'm expecting The Gears of War Board game even better. Whether I'll shell out the 80 dollar price tag for it, we'll see but I'm totally open to anyone who wants to buy it for me.

Pre ordering madness

So I'm changing the 40k gears from the table to the TV. The Space Marine game is available for pre-order. Like a lot of games nowadays, you pre-order you get cool stuff. Space Marine though I feel is taking it a little far

http://www.spacemarine.com/buy

If you check the link you'll see that each different retailer has a different option that you get from pre-ordering. Wal-mart? Get a GOLDEN BOLTER! THQ? POWER SWORD (you also get a free copy of dark siders but that games sucks. I can see why they're giving it away.) I'm pre-ordering through gamestop. 1) because I like to get my game ASAP. 2) because you get both Black Templar and space wolf armor. We can only hope the space wolf armor also gives you 15 missile launchers. There are also a ton of other options so check out the link.

It all seems rather silly to me to have each place have different stuff. I personally want it all but you can't always get what you want. I'm not gonna think about it too much. There could be no pre-order incentives and I would still be at gamestop throwin' down my 5 dollar pre-order.

The game consumes my life September 6th of this year. I'm expecting all of you to have it consumed with me.