I’m Gonna Stab the Next Person Who Suggests Altering 7th the First Week!

There, I said it. I’m going to stab the next person online with my magic internet knife that suggests altering 7th edition before we even play the damn game.

Oh yeah, I’m back by the way :)

7th re-ignited my excitement for the game and most of the….posts?...that are circulating about it make me sad. Remember, I’m a tournament player due to my availability so everything on here is pretty much from that perspective.

Indy Open this Weekend & Initial Thoughts on Upcoming Daemons

Well I left this morning at 530am for a 10-12 hour drive down to Indianapolis for the second Indy Open. I’m cruising down with some local players so it should be a fun trip.

This is what I decided on bringing for the event. For those that don’t know it’s a 1750pt GT that caps out at 64 players.

I managed to get it all painted up in the last three weeks (to be fair 28 of the IG were done before that). Haven’t had time to make an updated board for them though so it’s the same battle foam board I’ve had for the last year. I’ll be building my display now that my army is done and should have it done and pictures up before the Dark Star GT in two weeks.

The More You Know - Nova 2012 Edition

So last year’s article on how much and how I screwed up is officially my most popular post. It’s views doubled any other post since I started this blog so I figured why not go ahead and do a 2012 version. It’s going to be a little long. But we’ll start with what everyone wants to read about, me losing J (I’m only humble 95% of the time!)

The Source GT May 19-20 - I'm Going

Well I can't help but support another local GT that's coming up a week from Saturday. It does include re-rolls which since I've signed up so late I'm not going to get but that's ok. I'm just down for playing some more games. That being said I'm breaking out my Daemons for the event. I'm currently painting the 12 new fiends I've built and the 2 heralds of khorne. Here is the list I'm taking.

HQ

HoT in Chariot w/Bolt & Master of Sorcery
HoT in Chariot w/Bolt & Master of Sorcery
HoK w/Juggernaut, Icon, Rending, Blessing of Khorne
HoK w/Juggernaut, Icon, Rending, Blessing of Khorne

Elite

6 Fiends
6 Fiends
6 Bloodcrushers w/Rending & Musician

Troop

5 Horrors w/Bolt
5 Horrors w/Bolt
5 Horrors w/Bolt
5 Horrors w/Bolt & Changling
5 Plaugebearers

Fast Attack

12 Fleshhounds
6 Screamers

We Are the Champions!

Well even though one of my teammates beat me to the punch I’m putting up more of the details and breaking it to anyone who doesn’t read his blog or that hasn’t heard yet.

 In Order: Aaron, Nick, Brad(Me), Andrew

That’s right my friends. My team of ringers carried me to the top spot at the 40k National Team Tournament. The team consisted of Nick Nanavati, Aaron Aelong, Andrew Gonyo and myself. All of us have either won Best Overall or General at a GT in the last year. I met Nick two years ago at the first Nova and met Andrew and Aaron this year at the Nova. I got along great with all three and thought it’d be a great group to get together. Well, at least one that wouldn’t kill each other or inspire other teams to kill us (outside of pure jealously for our amazing good looks that is J).

Dark Star - Game 2

Dark Star: Game 2

General Info:

This is a 5-game GT that took place in Minneapolis, MN. It sold out at its target of 60 people. The codex breakdown can be found in this thread: http://hulksmash-homeplace.blogspot.com/2012/02/dark-stars-comin.html . Every missions is 3 Objectives with whoever wins the most objectives winning the game. It’s straight win/loss with tiebreakers. The tournament as a whole is closer to a gaming event than a tournament in that only 75/185 (or 40%) points are battlepoints.

Indy Open Incoming!!!!

For those of you that don't know the Indy Open is a first year event taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana on March 3rd & 4th.. A quick rundown is:


We will have a 2,000 point 64-man, 6 round win/loss Grand Tournament, with Separate prizes for the best Painted army, Best General, and Renaissance Man (best combined Paint and Generalship). There is a three color minimum for this tournament.


The format will be a Win-loss style (like NOVA Open) with prizes for the top person in each of the W/L brackets (5-1, 4-2, 3-3, 2-4, 1-5) as well as other door prizes. March 3rd we will have 4 games, followed by two games on March 4th.


It's shaping up to be an excellent event. I'm looking forward to meeting some new people and rolling some dice. I'm probably rolling with my foot GK's but I'll make the decision probably the day before I start my drive. Only time will tell. I'd encourage anyone who has the weekend free and can make to head out on. Even though it's a first year event I expect this event to be of a high calibre. This is mostly due to the guys running it and that they took a lot from the Nova format to get them going. Either way it's gonna be a good weekend so come on out! I'll be wearing They Shall Know Fear shirts over the weekend so I should be easy to find.

Dark Star - Game 1

General Info:

This is a 5-game GT that took place in Minneapolis, MN. It sold out at its target of 60 people. The codex breakdown can be found in this thread: http://hulksmash-homeplace.blogspot.com/2012/02/dark-stars-comin.html . Every missions is 3 Objectives with whoever wins the most objectives winning the game. It’s straight win/loss with tiebreakers. The tournament as a whole is closer to a gaming event than a tournament in that only 75/185 (or 40%) points are battlepoints.

The Dark Star - Results

Well here we go:

Best Overall: Me at 5-0 :)
2nd Best Overall: Nice fella playing Deathwing from Toronto (4-1)
3rd Best Overall: Tyler (I can never remember his last name) (5-0)

Best Appearance: Ryan Carlson (my 5th round opponent)

Best Sport: I don't know his name

Best General: Tyler (by tie breakers, 14/15 Objectives to my 13/15)

Overall was a pretty good time. I'll have a full review up and some batreps in the next few days.

Dark Star - The List

Well now that I’m pretty darn sure I’m going to manage to get everything painted in time for Saturday it’s time I post the list I sent in for the Dark Star.

The Dark Star’s a Comin!

Well we’re about a week away from the Dark Star (http://darkstargt.com/index.html) and lists were due yesterday. I was saddened when I re-read the rules for the scoring as I noticed that if you don’t paint your own army you can’t win best overall or best painted. While I can understand not winning best painted I thought it was a little harsh about best overall. So that being said the Necrons that Reece from http://www.frontlinegaming.org/ won’t be making their first appearance. That’ll probably be reserved for a local RTT and maybe the Indy Open before Adepticon J

Since lists were due yesterday the field is pretty solid now with what people are bringing and it looks like this:

Forgeworld in 40k – My Thoughts

This was a question asked in my “What would you like to see” thread so I thought I’d throw out my views on this.

I love Forgeworld. The books are amazing and so are many of the models. I love the way it looks on the table top and I love the idea adding of new units into my various armies. Why do I say the idea? Well simply because I currently don’t invest in too many FW models that can’t be used in some capacity as a unit existing in a codex. For instance I’ve been considering picking up two Contemptor Dreads to use as Dreadknights due to how awesome they look.

The More You Know - Nova Edition

This is going to be an article to cover the glaring mistakes I made in my games at the Nova that led to my 9-5 record this year over the Nova weekend. I had a great weekend and almost all of my games were great against fun opponents. I’m going to preface the following with the fact that it was my mistakes that cost me all of my losses and had nothing to do with dice. Every situation I had where my dice weren’t so hot could have been mitigated if I hadn’t oopsied before the dice needed to be rolled.

I’ll include a brief rundown of the game I lost as well as the minor and not so minor mistakes I made during the games. Here we go:

Dash at the Nova Open: Tournament Review

Hey folks!

I just got back home from the Nova Open...I am one tired mofo. This blog post is for my thoughts on the tournament.

Venue:
The Whiskey Challenge, Invitational, and Nova Open were all at the Hyatt in D.C. There was a convenient shuttle from the airport to the hotel and check-in was easy. In terms of the tournament area, it was quite spacious and the hotel kept water coolers and cups available constantly. In terms of the hotel....it left quite something to be desired, and I hope Mike will pick a different hotel (like the Holiday Inn across the street) next year. Rooms had open shower stalls - no doors or curtains, just a half-glass panel, so that when you showered, water splashed out into the bathroom, and exiting the shower was deadly unless you put a towel down on the floor (there were no bath mats). On top of that, the shower-heads were awful. They were top-down "rain only" shower-heads, which is my least favorite shower mode. Rooms didn't have free internet, which is something I expect from any hotel I stay in, and at $10 per day for internet that was slower than dial-up, web-pages would time-out trying to load. My wife and I did watch "X-Men: First Class" Sunday night for the low-price of $17 on T.V. with a strict warning that there was no preview period, no refunds, and if we accidentally changed the channel, experienced a power-outage, or turned the T.V. off, we were out of luck. Room service was $37 for a small, undercooked poor quality steak and a glass of water, and the hotel nickel and dimed patrons EVERYWHERE. No microwaves in the room, no fridge either. The lights in our bathroom were shorted out, and kept flickering in and out, maintenance never made it up to replace them....

'Ard Boyz Semi-Finals aka: Screw this shit!

The last couple years have seen a definitive decline of the quality of ‘Ard Boyz, which was had a tenuous claim to any sort of quality in the first place. Prize support has gone down and down, while costs have gone up and up.

Hosting locations are fewer, the missions…while never very good or balanced have gotten worse…and now we don’t even get them on the traditional ‘Ard Boyz stationary. Talk about a dump.

I elected to participate in the preliminary round of ‘Ard Boyz solely to get a bit of practice in before the Nova Open. Attending ‘Ard Boyz required a 2.5 hour drive to my nearest store…and having acquired my pass to the semi-finals, I look to my accumulated experience and seriously wonder if I should even contemplate going.

Dark Eldar for the Nova Events!

Hey folks!

The Nova Invitational and the Nova Open approach, and with army lists coming due, I decided it was time to think about what to do. The Nova Invitational is a one day, 5 round event at 1750 points, followed by two more days of the Nova Open at 2,000 points.

My traditional Dark Eldar army doesn’t much change – my 2,000 point army roughly looks like this:

HQ: Baron Sathonyx
HQ: Haemonculi
Troop1-5: 5x Warriors, Blaster, Dual Splinter Cannon Venom
Troop6: 9x Wyches, Haywire Grenades, Raider
Elite1-3: 4x Trueborn with blasters, Dual Splinter Cannon Venom
Fast: Beast Unit
Heavy 1-3: Ravagers

'Ard Boyz for Dashofpepper

Hey folks!

Tomorrow is going to be an interesting experience. As you probably know, I'm a big fan of efficiency. I'm a systems engineer, process engineer, industrial engineer...different parts of the military and civilian world call it different things, but it all boils down to efficiency. That includes my hobby. All my hobbies in fact. When I'm at home, I'm often playing 2-3 video games at the same time on my computer (Flash games at Kongregate type of thing), while watching a movie with my wife.

But that's tangential to this: Hulksmash and I don't always agree on everything, but we have always agreed that Dark Eldar don't belong in 2,500 points. And yet...here I sit with a 2,500 point Dark Eldar list in hand, regretting having made it, and knowing that I'm going to be miserable playing it because of it's inherent inefficiencies, but with no better alternative. I had four choices:

Dashofpepper Strategeries: On Changing Point Levels

One of the great things about co-authoring with Hulksmash is that we bring such different perspectives to the table on so many issues. This particular issue is something we’ve chatted about from time to time, and our opinions differ.

In short, if I pick an army…take Orks for example, my 1500, 1750, 1850, 2000, and 2500 lists all follow the same theme. I might even call them modular. If I want to bump from 1850 to 2000, I can add another unit of XXX. If I need to drop from 1850 to 1500, I can cut a unit of YYY. I play Battlewagon Orks led by Ghazghkull Thraka – and at every point level…that theme is readily apparent - a solid army core of my theme with modular additions and subtractions based on point level.

Hulksmash on the other hand subscribes to the theory that an army’s playstyle changes at point levels. Tyranids at 1500 are different than Tyranids at 2000. To some extent, I agree…my Necron theme works at 2,000 points – but I can’t keep the theme below 2,000 points, so I would have to change it. So I don’t play Necrons below 2,000 points. =p

Return of the Professional 40k Gamer!

Hey folks!

Having been catapulted back into the #1 ranked position, I wanted to take this opportunity to shamelessly soapbox the rigorous daily routines that all the elite gamers engage in. In my last article and routine outline, I talked about unit flash cards, drills, META-honing, internet searches, multi-table simultaneous gaming…

In this article, I wanted to explain the true secret behind a successful gamer: I call it the “Futuristic Action Gaming Simulation.” The key to success with any unit on the tabletop is to truly understand what it is like to BE that unit. How can you truly understand the potency of a Space Marine if you’ve never stood in the shoes of a genetically engineered super-human with massive weaponry? How can you truly understand the terror that a Dark Eldar wych can inspire if you’ve never stripped almost naked and tortured someone to death? Or of a chaos marine if you’ve never mutilated yourself and engaged in every excess imaginable?

SONAR! Submarine Detected!

Submarining in Warhammer 40k is an interesting concept. Just as a submarine can cruise below the surface, surfacing to destroy a target – a submarine in Warhammer 40k is someone who cruises through the middle/upper layer of the pack without surfacing at the top until the end.

Since my 40k career began, I’ve discarded this idea – I prefer to win big or lose big. And ultimately, almost every GT experience I’ve ever had has been identical: I start off strong, get to the top early, and the rest of my games are fending off whomever has the closest number of battlepoints / strongest wins. Every massacre pits me against another player who’s doing as well as I am. In the end, I’ve either defended myself against all the other top performers, or I didn’t.