How I Met Your Tervigon, Episode 1

Welcome to the first official episode of How I Met Your Tervigon! It's massive compared to my usual Gamebros entries -- we'll see if the rest of the series keeps it up with the long entries 'coz I plan to go for weekly updates. When we last left off I had just acquired the models for my army and was getting ready to start building.

First things first, an explanation for the non-WH40K-playing readers about army lists.

Similar to how you build a deck in your typical LCG or CCG, tabletop wargames have you select which specific units to field in your army. The army list is the wargame equivalent of the card gaming decklist: the player makes lists down who/what's being fielded.

Now, even before I acquired the box I was going over several possible army lists (with tons of advice from within the core playgroup of course). Thanks to biting the bullet and getting that hugeass Necron box of joy, I actually had some options. Not all the options available to a Necron Kill Team, mind you, but enough for some food for thought.

I fully intended to come up with a number of possible army lists buildable out of that box (to save me the added expense of buying more troops), and last Saturday was meant for playtesting them to get a feel for which army list was the one I'd take to the league.

The deadline for army lists was January 20th.

Of course, to actually play the game I'd need my models to place on the board. I had the big box, some side cutters and a tube of Mighty Bond with an old nailcutter as my cheap substitute for a proper file. Thus I set up the workspace for building my army.

Side cutters and Mighty Bond were bought on the day I'd acquired the box.

I'd also need some sort of small blade to help the file with prettying the models up (a.k.a. "getting rid of the mold lines and ugly-ass plastic bits sticking out). While doing the general cleaning to set up the workspace, I was reminded that I had this lil' guy lying around.

I don't remember who I got it from, but it was a Christmas present.

For those looking to get into the hobby, let that be a lesson: Before going out and buying tools or stuff, search the house first.

In no time at all I'd slapped together the first troop in my army. It helped that I started with the basic troop type, Necron Warriors, and the instructions were easy enough.

He wouldn't be named until a bit later.

It soon felt like I established a sort of rhythm to the process of cutting the bits out and gluing 'em together to form a distinct model. And hey, since hobbies are meant to be fun, I decided to get as creative as I could within the boundaries of several dudes in one pose.

From left to right; Steadycron, Eagercron, Runcron, Jebscron and Dave.

The next troop type for my army list(s) would be Immortals.

Necron Immortals are essentially the big brothers of the Necron Warriors. Slightly tougher armor, slightly better guns...and vastly more complicated models. Where the lil' thugs were essentially skeletons with guns, these are bigger dudes with spiked spines and...frickin' cables connecting said spines to their guns. Looks pretty badass, but...

Look at that. Look the fuck at that!

See those cable thingies? Turns out each torso matches a specific cable-attached-to-the-gun's-ass piece, which in turn corresponds to a very specific gun-with-arm-attached piece. You end up having to match them because the arms are all bent at their own angles, which corresponds to each cable's length (I hope that photo of the instructions depicts it well enough).

I found that out the hard way because I didn't see that immediately; I started gluing the gun assemblies right away, and ended up having to simply chop the cables off and glue them back to the guns themselves.

Alternative: Leave my immortals to have tails and just file the gun parts where the chopping off was obvious.

Brief digression: For purposes of counting the expenses so far let's make a quick side note that I also got a proper nail file (y'know, the sandpaper-y type) around this time; the old nailcutter's built-in file wasn't really doing much.

Anyway, back to the Immortals.

This had happened by Friday night before work. After slogging through my last shift of the week I ended up working on that 'emergency surgery' around lunchtime Saturday, before heading off to the Appraisery.

That didn't turn out so bad, did it?

I arrived at the Appraisery that afternoon to find it more crowded than usual (even for a Saturday). A book club's event had taken up the second floor, so the gaming and WH40K modeling (a.k.a. assembly/painting) were squeezed into the ground floor, with a few modelers spilling out onto the tables outside.

Time to get to work.

To be fair, being able to smoke while modeling is a huge added bonus (can't smoke in my room, household's rules).

The day was spent assembling more models. Progress was a bit slower because my infantry troops were down, and it was time to move on to the Necrons on jetbikes: Tomb Blades.

One of the playgroup's Space Wolves players likes to call 'em his wolf's chew toys.

The models looked a bit harder than the Immortals at first, but at this point I could also feel the experience piling on. There was also the added benefit of being around the extended playgroup (a.k.a. the WH40K players in my core Appraisery group along with a few other WH40K-playing friends of theirs in-shop that day): the banter and advice definitely helped.

Worth noting: The pilot is not glued in yet, because painting the whole thing as one'd be a bitch.

Here's where we get into the topic of swappable models. Notice how the guns and fins are obviously meant to reattach to those spheres under the Tomb Blades? Several WH40K models are like that; some, like the Immortals, can actually be fielded as a different unit type altogether (in their case their entire torsos can be swapped out for those of the Deathmarks: instead of a slightly beefier Necron Warrior you'd end up fielding dedicated assassin units).

Generally the recommendation for variable models is to magnetize; you literally bore little holes in the models and fit them with tiny magnets. The less budget-friendly option is to simply buy that unit more than once and assemble them with glue as appropriate. The (hopefully) temporary solution that I went with is Blu-tack, of which we fortunately had a supply within the group. 

The Tomb Blades were the last remaining units to be assembled for the main Kill Team roster I was toying with in my head.

Meet the troops. Unpainted but itchin' for a tussle!
(Photo actually taken in my room the morning after Appraisery night, but there.)

After that I went on to assemble additional models for my alternate roster(s). Unfortunately, a few of those involved fielding additional Immortals, and the Megaforce box only contains five. Thanks to the Meeple Power Kill Team league being a casual player-friendly one, our T.O. said that I'd be allowed to proxy units; a.k.a. field one type of unit as another similar type. Just to make that easier, I decided that it'd help to build my extra-Necron-Warriors-proxying-as-Immortals to be very distinguishable: in this case with the one-eyed Deathmark heads left in the Immortals/Deathmarks sprue, and with very distinct poses.

Unfortunately I stopped naming the units after the first five Warriors.
(Still from my room.)

By the evening the book club's event was done and space was clearing out in the store, which would only mean one thing: Time for playtest!

Game One was against Tyranids: the best description I can give for the non-WH40K-playing readers is that they're the faction that inspired the Zerg of StarCraft fame. This, of course, could only mean one thing: swarms.

I was surprised to see that the guy wasn't fielding a squad twice as large as mine: turns out the player spent his points on some upgrades instead of simply massing the troops. (For the WH40K players reading this: Three Warriors with some 'gaunts and genestealers, though biomorphs limited their numbers somewhat). To my dismay, they were mostly melee units; Necrons have a tendency to be a bit on the lower end of the scale in terms of melee prowess because we're just that slow (a.k.a. people tend to hit us first).

Also to my dismay, we rolled a mission whose objective was for the attacker to get past the defender's deployment zone. The roll had me as the defender: in other words, they were coming for us no matter what.

"Hey Dave?"
"Yeah?"
"This is gonna suck."

The important thing to remember about Tyranids is their synapse mechanic (non-WH40K-playing StarCraft folk will find this very familiar thanks to the fluff for Zerg overlords). The idea is that they're a hivemind and there are specific Tyranid creatures that posses synapses which allow them to 'broadcast' the hivemind and maintain control of the swarm. You kill the synapses, the Tyranid forces generally screw themselves over.

Knowing this, I started the mission out deciding that it'd be best to shoot down the damn synapses. While my Immortals and Warriors did their job and shot down the little guys as they advanced (at least, whenever they popped into our line of sight; very cinematic, all things considered), the Tomb Blades ranged ahead to try to take out those synapses...and got shot down for their efforts (for those who don't know, several types of Tyranid do have biological 'guns'). One particular unit tried to go for entire clumps of my troops with an AoE attack (one can imagine it was lobbing big globs of acid or bio-plasma), but the dice saved my dudes from that (imagine throwing a grenade and it either landing off the mark or bouncing away).

The Tyranid advance. Notice their active effort to avoid line-of-sight.

This soon degraded into a simple slugfest as the Tyranids got into range for my shooters to switch to Rapid Fire (non-players:  in WH40K's rules, Rapid Fire guns can shoot twice at targets within half of their maximum range; I don't know yet if it's a common trait to most armies, but as far as Kill Team's concerned most fieldable Necron units have Rapid Fire; everyone in my squad does). Couldn't exactly focus on those synapses with the horde up in your grill, after all.

By the end of the game I managed to eke out a win by victory points; the primary objective on the defender's side was to simply kill as many of the attackers as they could, and the attacker's was to get past the defender and 'escape' their units off their end of the map. Though it was a painful win because I only had two units left on the board.

Important life lesson: The mission objective is more important than your army's numbers.

My second (and last) game for the night was against the Tau. Before this one I changed my army list up slightly: took out one Tomb Blade and the Tomb Blade accuracy upgrade to free up enough points for an extra Immortal and Warrior.

The revised army list, starring one of the 'poser Immortal' Warriors.

The Tau as a faction serve as the technologically-advanced 'shooty' army. Their basic troops have better range than all other basic troops, and they're best-known for having motherfucking giant robots.

And for the long-running gag of said robots being Robotech rip-offs.

From experience against them in Dawn of War, I knew that I'd pretty much be getting shot at from the get-go. I also knew that the trick to beating Tau is to get into close range -- usually right though their line of fire. However, the Necrons themselves are also a very 'shooty' army: we just don't have the range advantage or all-around superior firepower that the Tau do.

The Tau firing line deploying to the battlefield.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take more photos of Game 2.

We managed to get into a reasonable distance (a.k.a. Rapid Fire range) thanks to some unlucky rolls on the Tau firing line. The clash itself played out a lot like a cover-based shooter: both sides shooting away at each other with folks darting in and out of cover. The turning point came when both sides whittled each other down enough to the point of breaking.

I've only played Kill Team so I don't know exactly how the mechanics for it work in full-size WH40K, but as far as this format goes it's like this: when your forces are knocked down to less than half their number, your designated leader (you choose one in your army list along with three Specialists, who get nifty special abilities) makes a Leadership (the stat used for morale-related stuff) roll: if they succeed nothing happens, if they fail your troops make their own Leadership rolls. Failure for a model forces it to be taken off the board like a casualty, presumably screaming like a little girl.

All that back-and-forth shooting got both of us into the threshold for breaking. I managed to avoid it thanks to the Reanimation Protocols (practically all Necrons have a 1/3 chance to get back up from the dead at the end of a turn, and the one troop that 'died' to take me below half managed to get up before the morale check). The Tau, meanwhile, lost practically all of their troops.

The last few turns were my forces picking off theose stragglers while those left on my side made a beeline for the objective...and failed to get there before the mission's time limit ran out. The Tau won the day even after they were completely wiped off the board.

Again, back to that previous lesson about numbers and objectives.

All in all, it was a good Saturday of modeling and playtest for me.

My WH40K playgroup's routine for Sundays (a.k.a. the one day the Appraisery's closed) is to gather at someone's house and do some modeling/painting together. Due to some other business I arrived late to the session and only got a few more models assembled (a couple more Warriors). However, I did manage to start my squad's paint job by getting my Immortals (including the Warrior fielded as an Immortal) primed together with the batch of models getting the primer treatment that night.

Crack all the "Negron" jokes.

That's been my first week with the hobby so far. I'm definitely loving the experience: the amount of commitment, the tightness of the community and even the mechanics of the game itself (which I'll gladly explain in more detail, to the best of my ability as a new player, if anyone asks).

I definitely know that I'm in WH40K for the long haul.



Running tally of how much I've spent on the hobby so far:

Necron Megaforce box - P9975
Side Cutter - P320
Mighty Bond - P50
Nail Files - P30


Brian was born in Marikina but swears that Katipunan raised him. On weekdays he's pretty elusive thanks to his night shift job, but on weekends you can generally find him at the Appraisery first, and Xocolat if he's not there.