Your painting area, does it reflect your gaming habit......

As I rushed around trying to get ready for work the other day and got a barrage of abuse that my painting table was a bomb site!

I am inclined to agree but the crazy thing is I know where everything is on the table! unless I'm looking for a paint that seems to evade my eyes and its sitting right in front of me!

Example being if you look at the above to the untrained eye aka Nadine its a shithole however let me walk you through is...

It started life as a computer desk... but when I was bought a big stonking monitor to play warcraft on (For the Horde!) it was to be my new painting table...

Area 1:

Where the "magic" happens no its not the bedroom but the only clear space that I have to paint! With brushes shoved at the back general shit on the right and right underneath the trays of paints that slide out, where the keyboard would normally go...

Area 2:
The world famous bathroom tile that has seen every type of army painted (and survived longer than all my ex's!) and more than likely still has the paint on it! As a good friend of mine said if you chopped it in half you'd be able to count the layers like a rings on a tree! and just to the left of that is another shit dumping area normally where brushes go to die, I think the one that hit me the most was my trusty windsor and newton brush that had a run in with some superglue, not a pretty sight!

Area 3:
Part of the "Mexican" production line, i.e. I stack em and rack em on this bit then rinse and repeat on the next bit, help keep them out of the way....

Area 4:
Basing stuff, cork and the like,

Area 5:
when not taking pictures to put on the Blog I use a book with a piece of paper to protect it and shove the semi-painted stuff on there I think it of the "whats next to be painted" area. On the back wall I also have my colour theory circle as well as the gameswork shop thicko guide to highlighting and shading using there paints, the only reason I keep that up there is I tend to experiment when starting a new project, that's how the noise marines came about!

Area 6:
Stuff I really wanna get painted but can't either be arsed or have been distracted by something else, but read on with regards to this...

Area 7:
Glue, Dice, stat cards and general odds and sods

Area 8:
The really big dump zone!! or models that are yet to make it onto the whats next to be painted bit....

Now I'll agree there is a lot of wasted space but hell its works for me, but does the "chaos" of my painting table reflect my gaming habit i.e. collecting stuff and painting?

I'd have to say yes to be honest, I'm constantly chopping and changing what I want to play with and paint, I'm always looking at new systems and new armies for the the ones that I play on a regular basis, Take my Skorne for example I painted a 35 point army in about 5 weeksish and I've not played a proper game with them much to the protest of some of the guys that I know, and jumped feet first into a retribution force!

But with the year rapidly drawing to a close I've decided to use whats left of it to finish off started projects so in no particular order this is what I'll be attempting to do....

The ever growing Chaos.. I'm not going to bother with the khorne berzerkers as originally planned as there crap on the table unless you put them in a land raider! but for the rest:
Lucius & three noise marines
10 Chosen
10 Possessed
2 forge world nurgle dreadnoughts
1 forge world slannesh dreadnought
1 nurgle rhino
1 defiler

Warhammer Orc's & Goblins...
Doomdiver
a couple of individuls shammy & warboss
a unit of really old school night goblins with bows
base the whole army with magnets and the like

Deamons....
Finish of the deamonettes including the mask
Herald of khorne on jugger
Forgeworld Herald of khorne on foot
soul grinder

so that's the plan assuming that I can stay away form the dark eldar when they get released next month, I'm really trying to wait for the Legion Codex to come out but go knows when that's going to be as I kinda expected to get some "mutter from the gutter" but GW aren't letting anything out....

At the moment I'm also starting to make some space as I'm going to need it for Barbie's dream house so as I get rid of my stuff that I don't use the bits that I like I'll post up..

Today its Dream pod's 9 Heavy gear blitz!

Myself & Spencer started collecting this stuff a while back and the actual models are really cool with the battlesuit/mech warrior/ anime feel to then the only negative thing was the price, I'll be honest there not cheap and when I asked various questions on the forums with regards to the rules the "community" was a bit snotty and rude to be honest,

The Naga has to be one of my favourites as it reminds me of ED209 but with really big guns!

anyway if your intrested the link for the auction is .. Heavy gear

And one last thing is that I've been accepted onto the blog roll for table top gaming news so check out some of the other blogs on the website, loads of cool looking stuff for all sorts of systems!

tabletop gaming news blogs

as always cheers for your time and drop any comments below,

Retribution Chimera & Malifaux Crew

So I managed to get a third game of warmachine in last week using the Retribution against Kurt, now Kurt is one of these guys who keeps on smiling no matter how much smack down you give him, but it was to be Kurts night with his trollblood gunline doing some very sneaky shooting (but quite clever) and my caster once more rolling over and playing dead!

The game was a good laugh and I discovered that dawnguard Invictors are pretty tasty and once there stuck together I'll be putting them on the painting table to sit there for a couple of weeks and hopefully the paint fairy will sprinkle some magic dust on them! I.e. if I have the time and can be arsed!! (I've picked up both call of duty & deadrising 2 so xbox time has gone through the roof!)

 But onto the Chimera.....
 
The colour scheme was a bit of a cross between the "challenge Ant" that Spencer gave me as well as the while that I painted on the caster, in layman terms its a right ball ache however it does look sweet on the table and once the whole lot is done it's gonna look mint!

 

Its a fairly plain scheme which gives the models the animi look, they kinda remind me of the suit things out of appleseed,

So how does it fair on the tabletop?

Well points cost its the most expensive out of the three light warjacks that Retribution can field at the moment, however it is one of only two jacks that carry an arc node, now as a cryx player arc nodes are my bread and butter but with the Retribution, I'm still to find a happy medium with the arc node and offensive spells, but that'll come with time.

The thing that I like about the Retribution jacks as a whole is that you get forcefield's with each jack and the Chimera rolls in with 6, the other cool things that come with the jack is Apparition, the important bit on the description is that the model is placed, so according to the rule lawyers down the shop it's exempt from free strikes, but you do have to be completely within the 2" so basically you get to jump outta the way and carry on rocking!

the other little trick is the Phantasmal Field, basically +1 Def for each point of focus against ranged & magic attacks, but that would give you a defence of 15 if you stacked it to the max, but the focus could be spent else where so not too sure how much of a benefit you'd get out of this skill,

The actual hitting power of the jack is pretty naff, ok so you can combo attack for a P+S 20 attack which isn't to be sniffed at or make full use of the two open fists and long bomb your opponent around the board.

So over all "ok" is the way to describe the Chimera I've still alot of games to get under my belt so I can suss out how the model fits in with my plan and if it actually deserves a place in the army!!

Now on to the Malifaux crew, I've had these since April when I went to Salute but havn't really done much with them, I tried a game with Chris but that didn't really go too well as neither of us really knew the rules so was a bit slow to say the least, but recently I've been told by one of the other guys that the chaps over at wargames inc are playing it quite a lot so I did plan to go over there and get some dice time in, but other things came up so didn't make it, hopefully next week I'll get there and see what I can pick up,

But I did manage to get the crew painted, all in one day which I was happy with, over all the models are fairly easy to paint but are a little delicate but as I'm used to warmachine & 40K stuff these are actually in scale! I wanted to keep the actual scheme fairly simple but also quite dark as they are "bad guys"

Overall I'm quite happy with these as tabletop standard and it nice for something differant to paint I might get some more bits and bobs depending on how I get on with the rules system, but as I'm having a clearout I don't need anymore stuff to be honest!

Retribution Mage hunter strike force... are they really that dirty??

Well... the painting has taken a bit of a back burner to say the least!

On a positive note I've managed to get a unit of mage hunter strike force finished

The big question is are they really as good as people make them out to be??

So far I've played 2 games with the retribution and when the guys I normally play against find out that I'm trying out the new project its meet with moans and groans of the usual cheese which makes me smile ;)

The first game against Spencer I'll be honest I had no idea how to use them and it was tight to say the least, I sent the mage hunter group after Spencer's warcaster and only just failed to take him out.

Now the second game was against Stef's troll's, with the new Trollblood army book out I wasn't looking forward to this game as it was going to be a tough one! Stef didn't disappoint me and promptly stomped all over me! (I did make a schoolboy error at one point but the less said about that the better!!) however I sent the mage hunters after his warlock and once more they failed to do the job that was expected of them.



Breaking down the unit into the basic areas...

Movement:

So they have stealth, pathfinder and advanced deployment with the upgrade which makes them nice and fast and the threat range is very impressive.

Shooting:

fairly good range, if you use a certain caster and get snipe on them then they border on the insane! Arcane assassin is nice and with that skill it appears that they are warcaster/warlock killers but then they also have jack hunter giving you 3D6 against warjacks, include the unit upgrade and you ignore LOS, so far all very impressive, but then you look at the actual power of the ranged weapon and its only 10... now against anything above armour 18ish then your going to need some above average rolls to score more than 3 to 4 damage points sometimes easier said than done!

Melee:

For what ever reason the unit comes with combined melee attack? again the arcane assassin & jack hunter skills can be used in combat but with a power + strength of 9 I don't quite "get it" either stand 12 inches away and shoot like a nutter or run up and get a +7 to hit and damage with one attack (minimum size unit and commander) assuming you can get all 7 into melee range of the target.  

so final thoughts??

Against warmachine armies they do have there uses, aka jack hunter however as I found out to my cost against hordes they are "ok" maybe I expect too much of the unit? and should use them more as a "sausage" unit? I've had the usual suspects trying to tell me what to use but I like to find my own way as we all have a differant playing style.

now the question is turned over to you.... would you agree with what I said or am I missing something?

Any how I'm working on one of the retribution light jacks to see if the technique that I tried on my caster works on the bigger models, so far its looking quite good but I'll try and get this finished sooner rather than later, and once its done I'll break down the model from a gaming point of view as I enjoyed disecting the mage hunters gave me some food for thought!