Ad Mech rolls on

So we are in week five of the 40K old school league, and last night I faced off against an armored cav Dark Eldar army. There were three raiders, three vemons, two ravagers, and a bomber thing, plus a squad of jet bikes. Kalabite warriors were the troops inside most of the vehicles. One contained some grotesques and his Succubus. Now my opponent had challenged me after last week's game. I had battled against a blood angel army stuffed in drop pods. So I knew I was facing DE. So out went anything with high toughness, as his poison was going to make short work of that. Instead, I tried to bulk up on numbers. Grav weapons wouldn't be any good against his low armor, so in came the breachers. My list was the following:

Dominous with upgraded weapons, and cognis armor with conversion field.
10 rangers with long rifle thingies and -1 cover gear
10 rangers with three arc rifles
10 vanguard with three plasma (Dominous went here)
8 vanguard with one arc rifle
5 stock breachers
3 ironstriders with autocannons
2 dunecrawlers, one neutron, one icarus array

So I will admit I loaded up on haywire and weapons that could take down light vehicles. But almost everything was modeled that way...so it wasn't a huge stretch. I just made sure I didn't take stuff that wouldn't do well vs the DE.

And it worked. He had one guy left on the table by the end of turn 5. He conceded instead of having a turn 6. I will say that my dice did well for me most of the time, which was a huge turn around from last week. But my opponent also made some pretty big mistakes. He didn't really use his speed to get to me when he had the chance. Also, he concentrated almost all of his fire on my breachers and dunecrawlers. Those were the two units that had the highest survival rates of my whole army. Had he spent only half of the shots at the breachers and put them towards my rangers or vanguard, I would have actually lost some units. As it was, I lost one dunecrawler and my breachers were down to one model. One of my ranger squads was down to two, and a few guys were off a vanguard squad...but that was it. I didn't lose a single unit.

I think the game could have been a lot closer had he been more aggressive. Instead, he hung back, and tried to out shoot me. My stuff was just tougher and I was rolling more dice.

There are at least three opponents I haven't faced yet, a nid player, a nurgle deamon player, and a sisters player. So I'll most likely be going up against one of them next week. I have three wins so far and one loss. Not doing that badly which is a big surprise for me. The format is helping to keep the game simpler. I've also expanded my Ad Mech collection a bit too. I just got some electro priests and will be adding more elites and a strider. I need to stop buying this army! :)

Warmachine V3

So the news has just dropped that Warmachine/Hordes is getting a new version of the rules, 3.0. I have to say I'm a little excited about this. A while back I had tried my third hand at warmachine. I even blogged about it. Since that blog ended, I haven't done too much with the old steam powered game. I did buy the Cryx All in One box. I am currently sitting on a decent Cryx collection and a starter for Menoth. I've actually been trying to sell my Menoth stuff, but so far no biters. However, with a new edition on the horizon, I'll have to come up with the tricky decision to keep it or sell it.

You know, because the Menoth faction might be super cool in V3 and then I'd want to keep it... :)

Actually, I've always like Menoth and wanted it as my first faction. But, most of my friends also wanted to run Menoth, so I chose Cryx instead (being the resident undead player).

I really dig the original infantry and rocket guys. If only the All in One box had had more of the stuff I liked, I probably would have picked that one up too.

The new battle boxes seem pretty cool. More figs than the previous ones, extra stuff tossed in, and cheaper! That is a great way to suck more players in. Plus I've heard the game will be faster and a bit more balanced as well. I'll be keeping my eye on the new release.

Ad Mech = Dwarves

So I've now played my second game with my Ad Mech forces. I didn't change the list at all and this time I faced a nurgle deamon army. The setup used opposite corners with a large night fight area in the middle of the board. We kind of forgot about it because it really didn't come into play for the most part. My opponent was rocking two GDs with Iron Arm for each of them (even his DP had Iron Arm). So my shooting just wasn't doing jack to them. That and he couldn't seem to fail a freaking 5+ ward save most of the night. When his softer stuff got in range, they were evaporated fairly quickly. And truth be told, by the end of the game, I had killed one of his GD, and his DP, as well as most everything else. However, my forces were equally bloodied.

What tipped the scales into his favor though was that the scenario was an objective grab. And that is when we discovered that the Ad Mech army on its own is like playing Dwarves. I simply didn't have mobility at all with my units.

Okay, so that really isn't a true statement due to the fact that my whole army is relentless and can move and shoot without issue. But that list simply didn't have any speed to it. The farthest I could go on a turn was 6" and only a handful of my units could run. The fact that he was running nasty CC units also kept me pinned into my corner. It is clearly something that I am now going to have to keep in mind while I'm playing. With limited turns, I'll need to make runs for locations fairly early.

Also, I'm adjusting my list a bit to give me some more speed. I've dropped the breachers and the kastelons in favor of some ruststalkers and ironstriders. I've also added a small unit of vanguard plainly equipped. Those Rad Carbines are just super nasty. They can toss out the wounds. I actually went out and got a Starter box for Ad Mech just so I could make another squad of vanguard. Plus, it gives me my third dunecrawler.

And don't worry, I got it second hand from someone getting out of Ad Mech, so no paying GW's prices. Which brings me to my opinion section of the day. I have seen the initial images of GW's Orruks for AoS. Holy Crap, they have finally ruined an army. I just can't believe how bad the models were. The orcs were always one of the best and most characterful armies that GW produced. It truly saddens the heart to see them now morphed into....this:

Look at me! I'm an angry green ape in a crab shell!

I am so glad I have a large orc army and that I did not sell off my extra models. Till next time.

All Hail the Machine God!

So I got my first game of 7th ed 40K in last night, and I got to play with my brand new Ad Mech army. My club is doing an old school league as described in my last post. I get to mash up the two Ad Mech codexes into one army list.

We played 1500pts last night as I warned my opponent that this would be a learning game for me. We had to use the standard org chart, so I had the following:

vanilla Dominus
5 breachers with arc rifles
4 destroyers with grav cannons
10 rangers with 3x snipers and ominspex
10 vanguard with 3x plasma
2 kastelans with power fists & tech dude
2 onager dunecrawlers with Neutron lasers

My opponent was running a chaos marine list with 10 levels of psykers. However, all of his units were fairly small, and he had no long range shooting.

I didn't record or take notes for a full battle report. Sorry. It was a long game with all the pauses for me having to look up rules and stuff. The forces of the machine god won the day, nearly tabling the chaos forces. Basically, the chaos guys came in too piecemeal to have any effective shooting, and when they did shoot, they went after the dunecrawlers. They were successful in killing one of them off, but they just didn't have the numbers to survive the massed fire that was returned. The grav cannons were a huge deterrent for my opponent. They really only ever shined by wiping out a 3 man termie squad. However, the sheer amount of firepower (24 shots each turn) was enough to constantly plink away wounds even when the target had a 2+ cover save. Really, that was the lesson learned last night. Ad Mech will put wounds on you, and you will roll ones. Since I never really had to split my fire, it was always enough to decimate whatever target had presented itself.

I was really concerned about the psychic superiority that my opponent had. First turn was 14 dice vs my 4. And it was only on the last turn when he was tossing one die at a power did he finally start to fail any. But he was too timid with Ahriman and always limited his targets due to LOS or range. He did nearly kill my dominus with three castings of psychic shriek, but between the 5+ refractor field and Feel No Pain, the Dominus only took one wound. That guy is a beast. (plus lots of 5+ rolls on my part).

It was a fun game and it definitely helped me figure out my army a bit more. Hopefully by the end of the league I'll be able to figure out some actual strategies for them other than "shoot", "shoot" and "shoot again".