Off to Adpeticon!

So I'm off this morning to Adepticon. Leaving around 6am for my 7-8 hour drive. Looking forward to getting there and getting myself set up. For anyone reading this that's going don't be afraid to say Hi! Look for my dakka avatar on my T-shirt:

I fully expect some hellos from you bastards :)

On Saturday I'll be in the Team Tournament with my buddy Reece and some other peeps from the Dakka crew in the Dakka Detachment #2 and running my all foot guard. Gonna be a blast.

Sunday is gonna be a hangout an bounce relatively early day unless I somehow manage to wind up in the Championships on Sunday.

Gonna be a good weekend. Hope to see some of you guys there!

Hell, Everyone is Doin It!

So I’ve been looking around the internet and oddly enough I don’t agree w/the way 90% of people are building their start-up lists for GK’s. Now don’t get me wrong. Most of these people are using the lists as purely a starting point and no one I’ve seen is pointing to a single type of list being the best or that they’ve found the perfect list even for them. They are quite obviously starter lists and people are treating them as such. That being said the direction most of them are starting from makes me a sad panda.

Weekend Hobby Update!

So this weekend has been a heavy weekend for hobby stuff. In case you missed the news Adepticon is coming up on Friday! I drive off Thursday morning to a full weekend of drinking and gaming. But for that weekend I needed my Nids for the Championships and my team tournament IG all infantry force. So things I needed to do this weekend:

Initial Impressions on Grey Knights

So everyone and their mother across the internet are writing about Grey Knights. Well I finally managed to sit down with the book yesterday and give it a good solid read over and unfortunately I'm insanely excited. Not that I didn't expect it since I played GK's since they originally came out but my attention has definitely shifted J

This doesn't mean that I'm not going to be writing about Tyranids anymore. It'll probably slow down as I start to build my 2011 army (Grey Knights) but Bugs are near and dear to my heart so there will still be articles. Hopefully this will include Batreps from Adepticon in the next few weeks. Also any questions or email regarding our favorite critters will generally get me writing.

So this first article about Grey Knights. I'm going to focus on the strengths and weaknesses as I see them. . Then I’ll probably do the same w/units in the near future. I’ll upgrade to actual lists later this week/early next week since I’d like to give a bit of a foundation to my thought process before I get rolling. This will naturally have mostly to do with Grey Knight units since I'm just not interested in Inquisitors or Henchman. Let's get started!

Interesting Discussion on Bugs Part-2

So my first part in this series is right here: http://hulksmash-homeplace.blogspot.com/2011/03/interesting-discussion-on-bugs-part-1.html

Buckle in, this one is a bit long. So we've established where I start when it comes to the core of my army builds and my final question was where do I go from there. Let's start by looking at the 3 types of units we need to add:

-Disruption
-Hammer
-Speed

All while balancing the above and the core w/target saturation. All 3 of these aren't required but they go a long way toward building a proper balanced Nid list.

Hobby Update!

So yesterday and today I’ve been taking care of the wife who’s recovering from some surgery. Which has given me the chance to get my Adepticon team army built and started on painting. So yesterday I put together:

2x10 Vet Squads

2xAuto-Cannon HWT’s

2xInfantry Squads

1xPCS

My version of Yarrik

I also got all of the above primed as well. Today:

I plan on getting the 5 Ogryns I wanna run built as well as getting started on the painting. I’ll put some pictures up either later today or tomorrow so you guys can see what I’m working on. I swear I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet J

Evolution of my Hive Fleet Pt. 2

Brought on by this thread: http://hulksmash-homeplace.blogspot.com/2011/03/local-rtt-mini-batreps-and-my-oopsies.html?showComment=1300199574457#c9218466947178391390

Basically it’s my army list. Currently what I ran looks like this:

2xPrime w/Dual Boneswords & Toxin Sacs

3x2 Hive Guard

2x10 Spinegants

2xTervigons w/Catalyst, Toxin, Adrenal

18 Genestealers

2xCarnifex w/Dual TL-Devs

Trygon

Local RTT Mini-Batreps and my Oopsies!

Well something happened to me yesterday that hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I actually had a losing record at a local RTT. That’s right. I went 1-2 yesterday w/my Nids. So this article is going to be a little different mini write up and it’s going to focus more on my thoughts of where I went wrong in the two games I lost. The venue itself had pretty poor terrain which would have made a little bit a difference game 2 but I still should have won that one without the terrain J

Interesting Discussion on Bugs Part-1

Based on this Article over on Best Overall: http://bestoverall.blogspot.com/2011/03/tyranids-sinsynns-riposte-reposted.html#idc-container

This got me thinking (oh noes!). I've actually in the last 2 tournaments knocked out Mech IG twice, Mech BA's once, SW's once, DE once, and Necrons (which don't count). Not perfectly optimized (though some were close) but a none to shabby record against the "dominant" 40k codexes. I say that because these games and my playing of most of the above codexes has led me to the thoughts that'll make up this series.

Semi-Local RTT w/Mini-Batreps

So on Saturday I attended a tournament on Saturday in Eau Claire, WI. It was a 3-game 1,500pt tournament w/1.75 hour rounds. Buy in was $25 but for the first time since I got out here prize support was actually decent so I didn’t mind. Name of the location was Fountain of Youth Gaming. Best thing about this tournament? The Terrain! Actual, honest to god, LOS blocking terrain that was close to that 25% mark. I can’t begin to tell you how awesome that was. Worst thing about this tournament? Some of the gamers had the stereotypical aversion to deodorant. Anyway, onto the mini-batreps.

*Update*

So just got back from a 3-game 1,500pt tournament. I'm writing up the mini-batreps and I'll be getting them up in the next day or so. I naturally took Tyranids and had a pretty good time. Keep an eye out for the batreps!

Raveners vs. Trygons

So I’ve recently been thinking a bit about my Nids. I’ve been trying to make an 1,850pt list work for a while now since I’d like to run Bugs this year for the big events. I really, really wanna show what Bugs can do so that means I gotta find a way to run them. So that has brought me back again and again to how to get the killing power, speed, and suppressive fire I want into 1,850pt.

Evolution of my Hive Fleet Pt.1

A comment from Ben from this post: http://hulksmash-homeplace.blogspot.com/2011/02/semi-local-rtt-rundown.html got me thinking about the evolution of my Nid list and where it’s going. So I think I’m going to share every step in the process. It gives me something easy to write about J

So I’ve been playing with ideas for Nids for a while. I took a Parasite based list similar to the above list to a 1850 tourney back last October or so in California and finished strong with it but it felt like it was missing something. This was a 2k tournament and originally I had decided to try a slightly upgraded version of my 1,850 list. That didn’t work out as planned since some of the models I wanted to use were a bit farther away than I’d had the urge to travel to so I settled for the list in the earlier post. That being said at 2k I was considering something more like what you see below.

Semi-Local RTT Rundown (Mini-Batreps)

So yesterday I drove 2.5 hours to play in a tournament in Madison since tournaments aren’t quite as prolific around here as they were in Southern California. It was being held in a pretty cool shop downtown in La Crosse, WI called River City Hobbies. The event was run by a fellow known as Timmah on the internet and it went pretty smoothly. My only complaint was the lack of terrain. It was pretty sparse which turned quite a few games into a shooting gallery. I’ve decided to run Nids for Adepticon so practice was needed.

Thoughts on GK Rumors

Now I know it’s a little silly to start talking about a codex based on the rumors that are out there but I simply can’t help myself. I’ve loved GK’s since the first codex came out and played them pretty hard in 3^rd and even a bit at the beginning of 5^th and I enjoyed it. They are a dynamic force and might fit my all foot urge pretty well. This is only going to be about the GK portions of the rumors as the Inquisitor stuff is very much going to depend on wording.