How I Met Your Tervigon, Episode 3: Chaos Rising

Well, I decided that it'd be slightly more entertaining to have actual episode titles ripped off from actual stuff instead of simply episode numbers. Anyway, onward!

When we ended last week's entry, I had my Kill Team league's Week 2 challenges already lined up: two different players fielding Chaos Space Marine squads. The league was in full swing, with Chaos taking the lead.

In terms of win ratio anyway.

We were faced with a slight dilemma in terms of scheduling the throw-downs: a good chunk of the playgroup were weekend warriors, and were attending a wedding on February 1st. Last resort would of course be making good use of Sunday "overlap day" (a.k.a. catch-up for any unfought matches for the previous week while you're already allowed to start the new week's challenges/matchups).

The scheduling for my Week 2 matches actually ended up intersecting with my first WH40K order beyond the bigass Megaforce box.

There goes my original plan to save up by building only what's doable outta the Megaforce box.

See, it was announced to the league players that after the second week (and presumably after every two weeks of gameplay) we'd be allowed to change our army lists. After all, this is a three-month league where majority of the players are coming into WH40K for the first time, a.k.a. aren't really sure of what we're doing. After my first matches I realized that instead of a mashup force of Immortals and Warriors, I might be better off fielding a slightly smaller (from 13 models down to 11) team of stronger and more reliable troops instead.

And so I placed the order and by Wednesday morning, received word that I could swing by the Appraisery to pick up the goods: a welcome break from my usual routine of only showing up on weekends. To my misfortune it also turned out that I'd be able to meet up with one of my opponents that evening, getting our match in before I'd head out to work.

For purposes of context, this matchup was against the WH40K vet of our Appraisery crew: pretty much the man who got us into the game in the first place, taught us our tactics and came up with good army lists for a lot of the Appraisery WH40K gamers. It was bound to be a learning experience no matter how the match went.

I don't quite remember what mission we rolled anymore, but I do remember the very first warning sign form deployment: the dude with a missile launcher.

"Boom, baby!"

Remember that this is a 4' x 4' table. Everyone on my team had a range of 24" -- by now I've learned that it's pretty much the standard gun range in WH40K. I was immediately informed that this guy had a range of 48".

Aside from the guy capable of turning any of my Necrons into scrap at a moment's notice from anywhere on the board, I'd also have to contend with the Chaos Spawn: unlike most units that had a fixed number of close combat attacks these guys rolled for it -- two to seven swings at a time.

That and they towered over everyone on my team.

To put it simply, the match was pretty much a massacre. The missile launcher guy kept us too busy trying to avoid his line-of-sight while the three chaos spawn made mincemeat of my dudes. My biggest achievement for the match was one of my Immortals getting some hilariously improbable rolls and fending off three enemy models at the same time for three whole turns (that's six close combat sequences, one for each player's turn) before finally succumbing.

"Suck it!"

By the end of the match I was shot down to one model on my team (out of the starting thirteen), while he had suffered a grand total of two casualties.

I did learn one important thing about the specific map we had at the Appraisery: A lot of players opted to go for the side with the tall ruins on it, thinking to get some advantage by planting shooters up top. The usual result is someone simply standing there uselessly while people move away from them, or someone providing an easy target.

"Ooh, that's gotta hurt."
"We're robots, you dolt."

Thursday was another pleasant surprise change-up to my routine, because my other opponent -normally a fellow Weekend Warrior- turned out to be able to come to the Appraisery that day.

The mission we rolled was Alone in the Dark, and the whole "mission under the cover of darkness" bit is simulated by both players rolling randomly to see how many of their models spontaneously gain Outflank. For the non-players reading this: Outflank essentially means you deploy later than everyone else, and every turn after the first you still have to roll to see if your Outflank people are able to deploy.

Unfortunately both players got really into it and I was barely able to take any photos of the match.

And of the few I got, roughly half mysteriously turned out like this. Alone in the Dark indeed.

Complicating the mission further was the fact that three objectives were scattered throughout the map, and holding an objective (of course) gets you victory points by the end of the mission. The rolls for attacker/defender sides of deployment had two objectives landing on the opponent's side, and one on mine.

Fortunately the one on our side was very easily defensible and was pretty much ignored by their dudes.

The match itself was pretty much a back-and-forth between both players that in the end came down to the die rolls. It started out with me at a disadvantage thanks to nearly losing half my units to the Outflank roll (meanwhile only two of my opponent's were forced to deploy later); in addition an Infiltrated marine with a plasma gun (a.k.a. "sears through armor like it's wet tissue paper) managed to hide out right in our deployment zone, which drew our fire for several turns.

Once the Necron reinforcements came in, I seemed to start rolling better and it was looking like the advantage was ours -- despite the fact that these were harder to damage than the usual marines (for the WH40K players reading: Mark of Nurgle CSM's). By the end of the game, my opponent came out on top in our neck-and-neck victory points race.

And because one of his models had a Necron skull on a pike, we agreed that for story purposes that's Dave up there.
He's not dead, kids! He's just having a really hard time repairing himself.

That concluded my Week 2 matches. Another highlight of Thurday night was my army's first 'casualty':

A reminder that superglue isn't perfect, and to always be careful of how you assemble.

It turned out I didn't apply enough glue over a large enough area of the model inside, which is why it suddenly popped off like that. Of course, I fully knew that this wouldn't be the last of such little mishaps -- plastic can only go so far, after all.

On Friday I was off to buy some more wall putty (a.k.a. masilya) for the third 4 x 4 table we were working on (the end goal being two tables at the shop, one at our Sunday venue), and maybe look around for brushes and some acrylic paint I could use to touch up the already-primed models in my army (common sense but it bears repeating one of the first things I was taught about painting: it's always good to have some paint to use and get the spots your sprayed primer misses, before the actual base coat comes in).

The plan was to make a quick shopping run to SM Marikina before heading home and getting my normal afternoon sleep in...except I managed to doze off that afternoon, waking up at the normal time I wake up before heading to work. I ended up making the SM Marikina run anyway, and in my sudden mad rush of efficiency I actually got the putty along with some spare super glue while actually arriving at the office earlier than usual that night.

Saturday was the wedding, of course. I won't go into detail about that (especially since those interested who weren't present have already seen tons about it over Facebook and Twitter), but after the reception we even managed to swing by the Appraisery for the usual hanging out. My Week 2 matches were done so I opted to get to work on the rest of the Immortals, in order to get my full post-army list change squad up in time for the following day and possible Week 3 matches with said squad.

"Group shot!"
"Say, where's Dave?"
"Those damn marines got 'im, man. Mounted his head on a pike and all."
"Ow, that's gonna be rough."

Sure enough, Sunday actually saw me getting both of my allocated Week 3 matches in. My first was against another Chaos Daemons squad, this one composed of daemonettes and a trio of Fiends of Slaanesh.

Not obvious in the photo: 1) The Fiend's more-or-less the size of those Chaos Spawn from earlier and 2) has ten tits.

I knew that this particular player had earned quite a name for herself during Weeks 1 and 2 for being undefeated (then again, the entire Chaos team only had one loss) with her completely melee-based army, whereas WH40K's current incarnation is known for favoring the shooty approach. Her post-changeover army list still had a bunch of those daemonettes, but the Fiends stood out: each one was a bigass monster with three wounds to it (a.k.a. HP), in a format where most models die to one wound. To make matters worse, all three of the Fiends were her squad's designated specialists -- one of whom ended up with Outflank.

To make matters worse, the mission we rolled was Head Hunt: the one that explicitly rewards you for offing your opponent's specialists (one point each) and leader (three frickin' points).

From the get-go I decided to try and delay the Slaaneshi horde's inevitable melee advantage by setting my Immortals up on some fortifications.

I'd fully integrated my practice of marking specialists/leader with Netrunner tokens. Brain Damage token for the leader!

Meanwhile, my opponent had the good fortune of simply hiding her leader inside the ruins. My side of the board had no such hidey-holes so my leader had to valiantly cower atop the highest tower with a couple of friends there as insurance via potential reanimation.

"We are like a shadows."

The first half of the match, to my surprise, was going heavily in my favor. Thanks to our range we managed to take out a significant portion of the enemy force during their approach, and even when the Fiends finally closed in we took out one of them thanks to a few lucky rolls. I got confident enough to try and make a high-risk-high-reward play (I like to call it my 'cojones play of the day') by having the Tomb Blade zip across the map to try and go for their leader (jet bikes fly around terrain, negating most of the ruin's advantages). The suicide run itself failed spectacularly but still worked to my advantage anyway since it lured a chunk of the daemonettes and the remaining Fiend on the board away from my main dudes (the third was still chilling out off-table, waiting to deploy via Outflank).

There was only one Fiend model so a coupla Chaos Spawn proxied for the other two.
Yes, we also designated her specialists via Netrunner tokens.

The game turned completely around when the Outflank roll finally popped the third Fiend onto the table. It deployed right next to my leader's tower, and thanks to the 'Beasts' unit type ignoring terrain it pretty much jumped up into the leader's grill and munched on him.

Time seemed to stop for a moment as I made the most important roll of the match, my leader's chance to reanimate. Unfortunately, he didn't make it.

The VP score went from 3-1 to 3-4, and it was mayhem from there. The enemy continued to give me trouble in melee while I desperately shot down anything that looked remotely threatening. By the end of the match my opponent maintained her point lead, once again reminding me that very few Kill Team missions reward you points for simply killing more units.

The mission ended with one model on the board left on their side.

My second match was against a completely new (to the league, anyway; she'd been in the Appraisery group ever since, of course) player fielding her Kill Team army list for the very first time: a squad of Space Marines, from the Dark Angels chapter. I asked our T.O. what I had to know about the Dark Angels: it was that they're best-known for plasma weapons.

You know, the ones that're known for going through armor like wet tissue paper.

Much reminiscent of my match against our group's vet, I saw a marine with a plasma cannon placed on the tower: and was immediately informed that the plasma cannon is essentially the missile launcher I encountered earlier, but with an AoE a.k.a. "I sneeze at you and you die along with your friends."

Aside from the plasma cannon to contend with, the Dark Angels also had a trio of marines on bikes: easily capable of running circles around us.

Not that visible from this photo, but that plasma cannon's there.

We rolled Head Hunt for this mission too.

The plasma cannon posed my greatest dilemma for the match: the Reanimation Protocols wanted my Necrons to bunch up together, but if I made any wrong moves just one model exposed out of a group would mean a plasma shot coming our way and likely evaporating the entire bunch -- thus denying our chance to even try reanimation. Worse was the fact that for the Sunday games we decided to set the board up with less terrain pieces around, meaning less stuff for me to run and hide behind. I did manage to roll to deploy on the side of the board with the ruins in it (and thus hid my leader there like the daemonette leader from the last one), which kept my leader safe.

I ended up breaking my Immortals up into two groups who tried to inch across their respective sides of the board while the Tomb Blade made another 'cojones' rush for the leader chilling out behind the tower...and promptly got shot down by her bikes, instantly bringing the score to 0-2 (First Blood and the jetbike was one of my specialists).

"Not on our watch, speedy."

The match was a slaughter from there. Her forces could afford to simply chill on their end of the board; meanwhile, my advance was effectively halted by the plasma cannon that was fully capable of killing anyone on my side. The bikes made their approach and one of them wiped out all the Immortals approaching on their side thanks to a flamer.

After frying his friends, they stopped the reanimation by simply shooting that last one down.

On the other side of the board, one unlucky roll during movement had one dude peeking out...and the plasma cannon's blast radius pretty much smoked his group from there. By the end of the match I was literally down to just the leader, with the bikes parked right out the door: I decided to try to at least kill one of them out of spite...and missed. That match ended with the final VP count at 0-9.

That match taught me an important lesson about my habit of bunching together for Reanimation Protocols, as directly called out by the T.O. during the post-match banter: "I'd rather lose one model than a group."

In other words, time to reevaluate my strategy.

The rest of the night saw me working on the Annihilation Barge.

"It's like an Enchanted Kingom ride!" -Actual IRL comment while the others saw me putting it together.

I can describe the experience of assembling this model as one of those things in life that's simultaneously tiring and rewarding. As a vehicle it's a lot more complicated than the ones I'd assembled prior, its parts divided across two entire sprues. Several times during the process I seemingly committed an error that would've ruined the model forever, only to stop for a moment and double-check the instructions and keep going; at one point one of the tinier plastic pieces fell off the table and it took me several minutes to find it.

But that's one of the many things I love about this hobby. If you screw a model up, you can simply customize it with what you have (if you hear WH40K players talking about 'conversion', a converted model is AFAIK one that's customized a.k.a. assembled in a way that it's not meant to be in order to achieve a specific look). I've got my own plans for conversions in the future once I've got enough experience with modeling and painting (whenever the latter's gonna start), but for now I'll keep productive by assembly.

Fortunately I managed to assemble the whole thing in the end, and even unpainted I like what I'm seeing.

Annihilation Barge, Catacomb Command Barge.

The model's handily designed so that you don't have to glue the twin-linked Tesla Destructor  or the Necron Overlord (with that command console...rail...thingie) on. Just to keep the model swappable, I've decided against gluing the Necron Overlord to its infantry base in favor of some Tack-It (Faber-Castell, easily found at National Bookstkore; Blu-Tac is also commonly used for this sorta thing when magnets aren't), just so I can swap between the different versions of the barge.

The left arm's also been tacked, since when he's riding the barge he instead has an arm that's holding the rail.

All in all, last week was definitely a learning experience for the WH40K part of my life: I learned a ton tactically (thanks to four straight losses) and quite a bit for modeling. The Kill Team league's almost at the halfway point and I've got a lot of game time to go before the final tallies; I definitely intend to make up for those defeats. On the assembly line, my next agenda is the Doomsday Ark: a model that's notoriously hard to put together.

Brian was born in Marikina but swears that Katipunan raised him. On weekdays he's pretty elusive thanks to his night shift job, and on weekends you'll generally find him wherever the Meeple Power Kill Team league has converged; on Saturday's that's pretty much always at the Appraisery.
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Tracker of the WH40K expenses so far for my army:

Necron Megaforce - P9975
Side Cutter - P320
Mighty Bond - P50
Nail Files - P30
Plastic Container (Japan Home Centre) - P66
Bahco Extra Slim Taper Saw File - P99
Bosny Spray Paint (Flat Black) - P95
Necron Immortals - P1377.50
Mighty-Pid Pack - P149.75 (contains 2 Mighty Bond 3g and 1 Mighty Bond Xtreme 3g)
Faber-Castell Tack-It Multipurpose Adhesive - P56.76
Elmer's Glue - P34.75