GW lives in a parallel universe

Really. GW always appears awkward and clumsy to me when they are trying to explain to their readers how they turn their army into a winning army. Their tactics may work in their local metagame, but when I read their advice I always get the thought “there are ways that let you hit still way harder”.

I just ran across their blog post on on how to kill a Blood Angel. It shows the general GW symptoms of overly hyping the latest releases (Storm Raven and Furioso Dreadnought in this case) and then offering meager advice on how to counter the threat:

Blood Angels can be a bit trickier to take down as they have Death Company and Assault Squads as troop units too, but the principle is the same.

Umm, you noticed in the Codex that Death Company can’t hold objectives, right? Just outrun them.

Take a look in your Codex to find the weapon with the biggest blast, highest strength and lowest AP, it’s guaranteed to cause a few worried faces.

Unless the Blood Angels player is sporting an Honor Guard equipped with Melta Guns, in that case the worried face is probably yours.

However, he comes my favorite part (added bold type face for emphasis):

Walkers are a great way to hold up Blood Angels units that would otherwise be chewing through your weaker squads or holding objectives. As long as the Blood Angels don’t have a power fist or a thunder hammer in the unit, your walker will be practically invincible.

Hello? GW? Reality check? Have you recently been playing games outside your dorm rooms and noticed what every Sergeant is equipped with?

eCaine finished

After I finished the Thunderhead, it took me quite a while to post the pics, so eCaine has already been completed in the meantime and I can treat you with fresh pics.

I am pretty happy with how eCaine turned out. I kinda did a bad job on his coat as I was too aggressive with the Ice Blue in the end. I really like his body armor and his gloves, though; I started with Dark Angels Green that I darkened further with Badab Black (looks awesome! I even thought for the split of a second to start a DA army just to paint all models in DA Green and Badab Black ) and then added layers up to the highlights in Hawk Turquoise. The blue coat clearly links eCaine to the Cygnar colors, but the dark green body armor makes him a rather dark any mysterious character – like the sea where you don’t know what exactly lurks in the deep. eCaine has all primary colors (blue, green, red (his scarf)), yet he is a rather dark model except for his head. I guess his head in bright colors is pointing at that he has basically good intentions.

Thunderhead finished

Nope, this blog isn’t dead. I spent June/July watching the world cup in South Africa, but August and September were invested into painting whenever I had time off the job and family. I have to say I prefer spending time with my family, though, as our daughter is doing progress with every day.

Either way, here comes the Thunderhead, my first finished Warmachine model:

Besides being my first Warmachine model, it’s also my first model I painted using a palette for mixing my paints. Using the layering technique I was able to get a quite nice blue gradient, but unfortunately it can’t be seen that well in the photos. I’m sure I won’t win any painting competition with my blue gradient, but for a first timer I am really happy with the result.

A few additional words on the base decoration: I want my Warmachine models to walk over a terrain of rocks and ashes. As the kingdom of Cygnar is on the retreat, I figure they launch counterstrikes through torched no man’s land which suits especially the role of eCaine, my Warcaster. For that purpose I mixed aquarium sand with hobby rocks and glue, covered everything in black ink and drybrushed it with Dheneb Stone. Et voilà.

I got some shelf space

I finally got some shelf space in our local gaming club and took the opportunity to take a picture of all my painted models. I painted them between Summer 2008 and Fall 2009 when our daughter was born. Now I paint at a slower pace and I still have at least as many Blood Angels still to paint, but I am already very satisfied of what I managed to paint so far – they are about 6’800 points worth of models.

(Below my Blood Angels you can spot nu55kill’s magnificent Tau)

Painting progress

I am currently painting two projects after I have finally created my own man cave (i.e. hobby corner) in the cellar. It even has a fridge there so I might fill in some beers later.

Either way, my Thunderhead has now all it’s base colors:

On the other hand, I am currently painting mission objectives markers for my Blood Angels to have nicer ones besides my neongreen markers from GW:

I am sick of all those dead Space Marines being used as mission objectives, so I decided to create markers more along the idea of supply points. Therefore, we have here a mobile radio station, an ammo depot, and a depot with energy cells and a Servo Skull.

In the meantime, all my brand new Blood Angels sit in their boxes unoppened. It sure would be satisfying to build and paint these, but I have made good experiences with sticking to something and finishing it before I move on. Hence my Cygnar Army will be done first. Of course this makes me lag quite a bit on my Blood Angels stuff, but I will start to work on them when all the instant fan boys already have moved on to the next cool Codex, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Furthermore, this gives me time to observe the forums, look at other people’s lists and conversions, and then benefit from their experience.