Tyranids: First Contact

Hi all,

I haven't gotten much further with painting the hive tyrant but instead this week I managed to borrow some models off a friend and play a 1875pt game so thought I'd do a short one about my experiences so far.

I was using a flying hive tyrant with lash whip, bonesword and heavy venom cannon, 2 units of 30 termagants, a unit of 30 hormagaunts, 2 tervigons, 2 exocrines, a unit of 3 zoanthropes with neurothrope, a venomthrope, a unit of 4 warriors with 2 boneswords and lash whips, 3 deathspitters and a barbed strangler using a Combined Arms detachment.  I was playing against raven guard using a talon strike force with a pinion demi company, which mostly deep struck or outflanked, a librarius conclave of 3 and a shadowstrike kill team.

The battle went well, playing a maelstorm mission, my tervigons were disappointing as they did little before getting killed, while the gaunts of both kinds did very well holding up space marine units and even wiping some out after a few turns. I really liked the exocrines, their Ap2 high strength weapon really helped against the marines where other units just had to rely on weight of shot to do damage.

Another unit I like were the zoanthropes as they more than earnt their points back and worked well to anchor the back line of the army against the deep striking stuff and take on the librarians.

I didn't get much out of my tyrant till the last turn but I think I needed to play it more aggressively rather than holding it back in future games.

I definitely want to get an exocrine and loads of gaunts for this project as for me they're what worked well during the game so I'll probably look into the endless swarm formation, which allows gaunt units to go into ongoing reserves when destroyed on a 4+.

Hopefully I should have a guide for how I'm painting my Tyranids plus a fully painted Tyrant to show with it next weekend.

New Year, New Army: Tyranids

Hi guys

With 2016 being a month old now, I thought it was a perfect time to share on of my new projects for the year.  I was inspired by the "getting started" boxes that Games Workshop have release to start a new 40k army different from the many shades of power armour I normally do, so I'm starting to collect Tyranids.

For those who don't know Tyranids, they are a race of bio-weapons controlled by a central hive mind who's only aim is to consume biomass and increase their numbers.  They area a bug like swarm consisting of a multitude of differing creatures each suited to a particular role whether that be overwhelming with numbers, attacking from below, scouring the skies or killing people with mind bullets there's a Tyranid for every job, even their ammunition and ordinance are smaller Tyranids.  This race of bio-weapons also has no vehicles in their army list, rather they have a vast array of differing monstrous creatures which will be very different from any army I've collected before as I like my tanks.

As I mentioned above I've got the getting started box which contains a hive tyrant,3 warriors and 10 gargoyles to start my army with the plan being to expand from this to create about a 2000 pt army, maybe even taking it to tournaments and to use in a narrative campaign I have ideas for later in the year potentially.

The first model I've worked on is the Hive Tyrant which I've built on foot with bonesword, lashwhip and heavy venom cannon and for the colour scheme I picked black glossy carapace with orange accents, green fleshy parts and the weapons will be a dark red. The picture below shows the progress so far, the green is almost finished requiring a wash in the recesses to finish off and the black has been gone over.



There will be more progress on the painting side next weekend and I'm also hoping to write some reviews and tactica for units and formations.  Let me know in the comments if there's any particular unit or formation you'd like me to review.

Thanks for reading, you can find more posts about designing a game on the blog and more posts like this will be coming in the future.

A Belated New Year Post

Hi all

I haven't posted in a while as things have been busy with phd work and moving house but now being moved in I have some time again to do this blog so I thought I'd update you on what I have planned for the beginning of this year.

I have a new 40k and horus heresy project  for my games workshop stuff, plus have started playing infinity recently so will be sharing my experiences and models from that.
I hope also to continue my dropzone stuff  and write more about game design with potential for sharing some background for a game that I've been designing.

Keep an eye out for this future content.

Game Design: Part 6; Balance

Balance is very important to a game as without it, the game collapses as it is one-sided.  There are two important types of balance to consider when making a game, the first is game wide balance and the second is internal army balance.
Both of these are very important in making a good game without players having to field one particular list to be competitive or have dead ground within the game for example a unit that's good but there's another available that does just as good a job or better for the same cost of resources or less in game.

There are several different types of balance that can be applied to these but I am going to focus on perfect balance and perfect imbalance and what they mean in the context of whole game balance and internal army balance.
Perfect balance refers to a situation where all pieces of the game are of an identical power level where the restrictions placed on the more powerful abilities bring them to be equal to the least powerful.  This kind of balance generally leads to a symmetric game like chess as part of the perfect balance system means that the armies are pre-chosen and often randomness is removed from the game.  This creates a game in which no player can break the game through choosing certain pieces repeatedly and where skill is the overriding factor to who wins but this can have downsides, taking chess as an example both players have an identical set of pieces that move in controlled ways.  This is a game that can't be broken but as players improve they stop just being able to play the game and have to start memorising loads of different plays, move combinations etc and it becomes more of a memory game than the abstract wargame that it is, with players not getting to develop new plays untill they reach the top tiers of the game.

Perfect imbalance is very different to perfect balance, this method balances the game by having pieces of varying power levels and ability sets providing players with choices of what to take to solve problems they may come up against.  This method is the most common in tabletop wargames as it allows designers to do more with their game.  Perfect imbalance works by giving players multiple choices for problem solving within the game mechanics and piece selection rather than having problem X only being solvable by solution Y.  The balancing for this is done by assigning each piece a score based on its power and utility for players to create a force with equal totals of this score, this is the points system common to many wargames.

Game wide balance means that all the army lists you can pick from are if equal power with options to deal with any type of threat in game. This allows players to pick the army they like best for any reason, such as play style or ascetic, and always be able to be competitive with it.
Internal army balance means that all choices in an army list should be equally viable, which normally means that each has its own niche in the army so there's no instance of unit A is good at tank hunting but unit B is even better for the same points.
To get these two into the game is hard as it will come through play testing which will give a small number of data points to balance with whereas when it's release there could be 1000s of players trying to break the balance.

My thoughts would be to get as much information as possible even if it's after release of the game as then when/if it comes to updating to a new version then your players will have found a lot of the imbalances in the system.

All Hail Mars! Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarii Rangers and Vanguard Kit

On the 5/4/15 I got my first wave of skitarii for my army, which was three boxes of the infantry.  These models are great and really easy to put together coming in 7 pieces, legs, torso front, torso back, two arms, head and backpack.  There are 5 different poses of leg, torso, arms that could be put together in combination to give lots of different overall poses.  There are two different sets of heads to make either hooded rangers or helmeted vanguard plus the two sets of guns for them and one of each special weapon.  The squad leader has all the options for pistols and melee weapon plus some special heads.  The only thing I think the box is missing is more of the special weapons as a squad of 10 can take three, which can be three of the same.

Painting-wise they are very nice models with loads of nice details all over.  The standard martian paint scheme of red and silver really looks good on these models and the martian ironearth paint makes for an excellent base.  My first squad of rangers are below to show how they look painted.

I also recently had a chance to play a small 750 point maelstrom game with them as well and these new units are good, I was only using the rules from the white dwarf as it was before the codex release so I wasn't able to use the doctrine imperatives.  The rangers work really well as back field units with their extra range over most standard units and their ability to pick you special weapons and characters being very useful, while the vanguard proved their worth as a support unit for dragoons, allowing them to take down a chaos lord easier by lowering toughness.  The additional rules available for the codex allows you to improve either BS or WS (sometimes to the detriment of the other) and if using the special formations and battle-forged force organisation chart gives them crusader and scout (without outflank).

This is just a little look at them, I'll do a more in-depth tactica and review when I've played more games with larger forces.  I will also do posts on the other types of units when I have made them and had a chance to play a game with them.