SixEleven

Erk! It’s a bit dusty in here…

Posted on May 2, 2012

So it’s been a while, I let my hosting lapse quite badly (in the “oops, forgot to pay that.. oh well, not important at the moment” kind of fashion) and this site, amongst others, went down for a while. I’m sure my absence wouldn’t have been noted by anyone but myself so hey ho, here’s me waffling to myself on my blog with no one paying any attention :) I’ll be moving my hosting provider once the contract is up in July so there’ll be a period of downtime around then but until now, it’s all peachy.

Anyway, there’s a number of projects I’ve been working on over the past few weeks and these will begin to see the light of day very shortly. For starters, the MiniatureMonday site, in it’s current incarnation, will be coming down and a holding page will go up. Then there’s Project Snowball… the less said about that the better for the moment, keeping that one under wraps.

So.. I’m sure I should update with something hobby related but I just can’t be bothered, it’s too late in the day and I have work to finish off.. just hurrah, blog’s back and whatnot. Expect to see more regular updates in the near future.

The Shell Case Shorts Competition

Posted on February 17, 2012

If you’ve been living under a rock recently, you’ll be well aware that recently The Shell Case ran a short story writing competition in January.. this has been followed up by another competition! This time to win a signed copy of Dan Abnett’s ‘Embedded’

I did mean to write an entry for the first competition but having seen the winning entry now, don’t think I stood a chance! Either way, I’ve decided to start writing at the last minute for this one and I’m already about 20% of the way through the word count. I’m just at that point when I’m beginning to think I should stop writing and go and work out a structure of some sort as the story is floundering.. anyway, I thought I’d share a cheeky little snippet of the work in progress for you:

A young blonde man stepped from an opening in the opposite wall, with a short sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.

“Nothing down here but a dead end and some gnawed bo… what’s going on here? Getting a bit jumpy are we Mikael?”

Karl stared pointedly at the empty crossbow in Mikael’s hands.

“It was nothing, I saw a rat… a normal rat I mean… for target practice” – Karl didn’t look convinced with this lie, the raised eyebrows and cocksure grin said as much.

“Well maybe you need more practice, I don’t see that you’ve hit anything! Besides, you may need your quarrels later on, try not to waste any”

Usual disclaimers apply.. i.e. I’m a terrible terrible writer and it’ll probably sound incredibly ham fisted when re-read. Comments and criticism are more than welcome!

edit: Phil has increased the deadline for the competition, entries must now be in by the 29th of February! Gives me a bit more time to piece together my story :)

Mantic Games

Posted on February 14, 2012

I’ve just been thinking this morning, no other company has got me chomping at the bit to buy models quite like Mantic have managed. Their Kings of War models got me marginally interested (but I’ll admit the style is far removed from the GW style I both like and am used to) but the Warpath minis had me dribbling like a lunatic. So why don’t I find myself knee deep in oodles of Mantic Games’ miniatures already? Quite simply put, their release schedules just baffle me. With GW, a new release means a whole boatload of new models to pick and choose from.. Mantic don’t seem to embrace the tsunami like releases as GW do and releases seem to be quite sporadic. Taking the Warpath Forge Fathers as a perfect example, they’ve been released for what.. quite a while now and until recently, you had a choice of 2 units and 1 character to pick from off the top of my head. Don’t get me wrong, they’re really lush models.. but to commit to an army, let alone a new game, when only a fraction of the range is currently available is something I can’t find myself doing much of.

This does of course bring up an interesting point about proxies and converting / modelling suitable stand-ins… but without knowing what these guys are supposed to look like, it’s a little hard in all honesty and again, leaves me feeling cold.

Maybe once their ranges are really alive and kicking then I’ll pay more attention and buy more than a handful of models rather than picking them up for curiosity’s sake. I’ll admit that the recent corporation releases have definitely tickled my fancy and if the future releases in this range are anything like what we’ve seen already then just show me where to sign!

Tentative steps back towards the dark side

Posted on February 10, 2012

The emperor’s children project was put on the back burner pretty early on in its life thanks to that other little project I started, but now I’m starting to take another look at the Epic UK list to see where to take things. At first glance, it’s obvious that the devotees of Slaanesh excel in getting up close, not close enough to be hit, and letting rip from short range. Their FF values tend to be higher than their CC values and a lot of the specific marked troops carry the all important first strike ability. So it boils down to getting in close before the enemy can do the same to you and overpowering detachments before they can strike back.

Luckily the Emperor’s Children have plenty of tricks up their sleeves to get close to the enemy in good time. Inspired by Chris’ world eaters army dropping a bunch of angry berserkers in my back lines (along with an angry daemon prince in amongst the terminators), I’ve decided to try this army out as a primarily planetfalling force, with minimal forces on the ground. That should speed up turn 1 a bit.

This is the list I’m looking at at the moment:

DAEMON POOL [140]
7 Lesser Daemon

EMPERORS CHILDREN RETINUE [330]
6 Noise Marines, Daemonic Pact, Sorcerer Lord, 6 Dreadclaw Drop Pod

EMPERORS CHILDREN RETINUE [330]
6 Noise Marines, Daemonic Pact, Sorcerer Lord, 6 Dreadclaw Drop Pod

DAEMONIC KNIGHTS [275]
4 Daemon Knights

DAEMONIC KNIGHTS [275]
4 Daemon Knights

TERMINATORS [475]
4 Terminators, Daemon Prince, Daemonic Pact

CHAOS SPACE MARINES [275]
6 Chaos Marines, 3 Rhinos, Daemonic Pact

HELLBLADE FLIGHT [200]
3 Fighters

QUESTOR TITAN [275]

QUESTOR TITAN [275]

DEVASTATION CLASS CRUISER [150]

The two titans and daemonic engine formations would start the game on the board, along with the tacked on chaos marines unit. Keep them out of sight, behind terrain and get them moving on the enemy’s blitz objective (and one of my own objectives in the same board half at the same time) – spaceship arrives in turn 2, hopefully, and dumps its payload of angry noise marines right in the midst of the opposition. Terminators teleport in the same turn, most likely in the same region if it looks like the fighting will be messy. Chaos marines unit skulks about and keeps itself handy to contest any objectives if needed in the final turns of the game. Hellblades are there purely for CAP and keeping enemy aircraft on their toes. I’m painfully aware of the fact that this army is distinctly lacking in AA firepower!

Anyway, that should be relatively simple to pull off but the army is also terrifyingly lacking in activations at the start of the game but against slower moving armies, I should be able to still keep them on their toes. The Questor titans have a base move of 35cm and the daemonic engines 30cm. In effect, the questor titans could reach the far edge of the table with a single march move, assuming they’re set up at the very boundaries of my deployment zone. That kind of threat isn’t easy to ignore! There’s always the option of swapping them out for subjugator titans as well, which frees up 50 points in total and allows them a few more CC abilities (whereas the questors are pretty much entirely ranged specialists)

Codex to Blood Angels

Posted on February 6, 2012

As I posted earlier today, for the next epic tournament I’ll likely just add a few extras to the FSA army and turn them into a fully fledged BA army.. at the very least this requires the addition of 4 stands for the death company and an additional 2 stands for the assault detachment.

This is the likely list I’ll use, weighing in at 10 activations, I’m still half tempted to ditch the warhounds, try and find an extra 100 points from somewhere and replace them with a reaver titan but that takes me down to 9 activations and I’ve never taken a WE bigger than the warhounds previously… all that extra firepower would be nice though… then there’s the option of a spaceship for the dubious tactic of a planetfall.. oh dear, too many options! :(

DEATH COMPANY [400]
4 Death Company unis, Chaplain, Jump packs

TACTICAL [475]
6 Tactial units plus Transport, Hunter, Supreme Commander

TACTICAL [375]
6 Tactial units plus Transport, Hunter

ASSAULT [300]
6 Assault units, Chaplain

TERMINATOR [400]
4 Terminator units, Chaplain

SCOUT [150]
4 Scouts plus Transport

THUNDERHAWK [200]
1 Thunderhawk gunship

THUNDERBOLTS [150]
2 Thunderbolt Fighters

WARHOUND TITAN [275]
1 Warhound Titan

WARHOUND TITAN [275]
1 Warhound Titan