Theory machine musings

Ok I am admittedly a noob when it comes to playing the game of Warmachine. I have played a couple dozen games against almost that many opponents. Tomorrow will be my first tournament of any kind. We will be playing 50 points steamroller 2013 beta pack rules. I have been really tempted to try out new things but a tournament is probably not the place to be figuring out new warcasters. I will probably take Stryker 1 and Nemo 2 because I have the most experience with them. I take Nemo tier so that I can take 5 pow 12 stormsmith stormcallers. They seem to work quite well with a stormwall against infantry heavy armies. I will be using a stormguard unit as my tar pit to stay within the tier.
If I think I am going up against high at our I will take Stryker. In the Stryker list I will use stormwall and a defender in the battle group. A unit of ATGM with UA and a hunter attached. A couple solos like Gorman and Eiryss. I thought about adding Victor Pendrake because my local meta is skewed towards hoards but changed my mind.
I will post the lists that I ended up taking and my record after the event. Wish me luck.

Later

Off the battlefield: non wargaming game night

I played games with my family tonight. My older brother and his family were in town and we played the Big Bang theory and poo. The Big Bang theory is similar to trivial pursuit but all of the questions are about the Big Bang theory television show. It was fun but since I am not a super fan I didn't do so well. My 12 year old nephew however knew almost every question that was asked. It was funny when his dad said that the question was too obscure or too hard and he just blurted out the answer as if it were just common knowledge. I really liked playing rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock, whenever someone disagreed with the answer on one of the cards.  Overall it was a fun game.

I brought Poo! it is a very fun game. Each player is a monkey and it involves 'throwing' poo cards at the other players and trying not to get too much poo on yourself in the process. It has different cards that are worth different amounts of poo that you play on the other players and they have cards that will either block the poo entirely or deflect the poo to other players instead or you can play a card that will clean some of the poo off of you.  If you get 15 poo on you you are out of the game.  The last clean monkey wins. we all had fun and my younger brother won that game. This game is fun for a family night game I know that my kids like playing it as well.

Here are some pictures of the two games that we played.  Hope you have fun playing some non tabletop miniature games sometimes as well.

Later

Orange Minuteman

Ok I finished the rest of my Cygnar light jacks over the Christmas holiday. I will be posting the pics over the next couple of days. The first one Is the minuteman. I have really liked this model. The sculpt is really nice and I have seen some awesome conversions to make it look like it is flying. I really think it turned out well.
Later

Epic Nemo

All right I was able to get to my favorite caster lately over this weekend. Nemo has been very fun to play at tier one because I can take extra storm callers. I am going to finish the stormwall so I can really get some lightning action going on in a 50 point list. So the next step to playing a fully painted army was painting my caster. I know that I still have some things to do but here he is base coated and washed.

Cygnar charger

I finished the Charger for my orange army last night. I really like painting chargers but I don't need any more for my army. My plan right now is to finish up my light jacks and the. Paint a couple of casters that I use most frequently and then move on to the heavy jacks.

Orange Lancer

I finished the lancer first. I like the changes that I made to the general paint scheme. I haven't sealed it in case I decide to change anything else right now I still consider this scheme to be subject to change. After I have had a few weeks to decide if this is right color for my army I will get them l sealed its a good mat sealant. Any way I will be posting the finished pictures over the next. Couple of days as I get to them.

Work in progress report orange Cygnar army

Ok so December is usually taken up by all of the things going on. I probably won't get to my local game store at all this month and painting time is almost as hard to find. However I do manage to get to painting last night at around 10:30 and got about an hour and a half in before I had to turn in. I got quite a bit done though. All I have left to do on these warjacks is the tan areas, some highlighting and touch ups, and the fine details like the rivits and things.

Cygnar Orange Crush Army

Ok so maybe I am crazy. Or maybe I just didn't like having my Cygnar army painted like Everyone else's army. I was looking for alt paint schemes and came across a couple of orange schemes that I liked. I am starting with my light warjacks and repainting the smooth surfaces. I am going to try to get a earthy burnt orange color. I am starting with the old solar orange foundation from citadel. I am going to do a devlin mud wash and work my way up for the highlights. The metals will be done with the ancient metals from reaper, ancient bronze and ancient copper mostly. The padding and accents will be tan washed with devlin mud as well. Here is a picture after my first coat of orange. I will be putting another coat of orange before I move on to the other steps that I just outlined.

Stormwall up.... Kind of

Well I have mostly finished putting together the stormwall. Unfortunately I did not notice the major manufacturing defect in the right arm socket. There is a huge bump that stoops the arm from seating properly.

I am going to use my dremmel tool to grind it out. The dremmel can obliterate fine detail that I don't want to get rid of quite easily. I am sure it will be able to get rid of something like this without much problem. The main thing that is holding me back from doing it tonight is the fact that it is resin. And I do not have proper ventilation or a dust mask so I need to stop at the Home Depot on the way home tomorrow and get one.
Other than that set back I like how it turned out for the most part. I had envisioned it smashing a Cryx he'll jack wreck marker but it doesn't have long enough arms to make it look convincing. I guess I will try to work it into the base or many the base of my storm strider that will be finished soon as well.
Anyway here are some of the pictures of the assembly process.
Enjoy

Starting the stormwall

Well I am still working on my minuteman as i get time, but we have a local 50 pt steamroller tournament coming up this weekend and I really want to use stormwall in my tier 2 eNemo list. 5 storm callers 2 fireflies and stormwall will be so much fun as the core of the army.
So I cleaned up all of the pieces and I started to put it together last night at about midnight. I will finish assembling it tonight after the kids go to bed. Here are a couple of pics of the legs. I thought that I took some of the upper body and storm pods but I guess I was wrong. I will post the pics of the assembled model tonight.

More minuteman

Well I have made some progress on the minuteman since my last entry. I have primed and then painted the dark blue base color. I usually do the Metallica first because I like to dry brush them and t makes a mess. I may end up reprinting the blue if I make a big mess of it, but that is ok because the blue is all on easy to access surfaces that do not have tons of details. I am enjoying this model and I think that it will be fun to finish up.

Online trading

Several months ago I competed a trade with a total stranger that I met on twitter. He had announced that he wanted to get rid of some Warmachine stuff that he didn't want any more and was looking for dystopian wars stuff. It was a really smooth transaction.
I have recently been told about bartertown.com. Which, in case you don't know is a website for trading table top miniatures with others. I have found that my mileage has varied with each trade. I had some warhammer 40k stuff that I was getting rid of and I received a good offer after about a day. I sent my stuff first because i didn't have any feedback and the other guy had several hundred positive feedback. However I am still waiting for the Warmachine models that he was going to send to me last week. The only other person I have traded with on the site completed the trade quickly. Some other people offered me money for some dystopian wars models and they sent it to my Paypal account before I sent the models to them.

I have found that models that have been glued do not travel well even when they are packed in a lot of packing peanuts. This rhulic warjack was packaged well, lots of styrofoam peanuts but as you can see there will be some reassembly needed. There were also 5 gun bunnies in the box and 3 of them need repair. Oh we'll at least I have been putting models together long enough now that pinning and gluing then will not be a big deal. So far I am fairly pleased with this new Orion that I have to get rid of the games that I will not play and get games that I will play. I hope that I can get rid of the rest of my dystopian wars things but I guess we will see.

Minuteman

So I have gotten myself a minuteman.  This little guy will work well in many of my lists and I think he will be fun to play.  So I took some pictures of the steps of putting him together.

This is all the parts

 This is putting on the jump pack.

 Close up of the jump pack.

 The assembled model ready to be creatively placed on its base and then painted.

Journeyman League

So my FLGS is doing a journeyman league. I have only been two of the three weeks so far.  I missed the first week because it was the first day of school for my kids and I didn't want to miss out on our first day of school traditions.
I am playing Cygnar but I have some concerns about the battle box content.

Charger: I like the model a lot but it is so focus hungry. It can really do some damage when it is loaded up with 3 focus but it need 3 every time I am going to attack with it and when pStryker only has 6 to begin with it doesn't leave much to upkeep spells or boost other jacks.

Lancer: I am split on this one.  I like the arc node.  It has been nice for channeling some of pStrykers spells. But I haven't been able to really do anything with it offensively other than that.

Ironclad: Great jack. I upkeep arcane shield on this one all the time.  So it effectively has armor 21 in this league, armor 26 during pStryker's feat turn.  It's quake hammer has done quite a bit of damage to other heavies.  I always seem to forget about the critical knockdown effect though until I get home and review what I could have done better.

pStryker: At first I didn't really like the jack of all trades aspect of him.  But I have really started to like him and his bag of tricks against other warmachine armies.  At first I didn't really like his feat because it doesn't help me do more damage or set up an assassination run.  But now I am learning that with the proper timing it can help me set up the next round after the first big strike, and still have most of my army in tact.  So I am doing OK against warmachine, However hoards eat me for a light snack. pStryker's pow 10 pistol is great when it can disrupt something even if it doesn't do any damage.  But when you plink a warbeast and it does nothing it is frustrating. I probably would benefit from buying a copy of the hoards rules so that I can understand what my opponent is doing, maybe that would help me against them.

So after the battle box I added the Black 13th the week that we were at 15 points.  They were a lot of fun to play with and really helped me control the board to some degree.  Brutal damage is awesome. I was a bone head in the next round when we expanded to 25 points when I dropped the Black 13th in favor of  a full unit of Arcane Tempest Gun Mages with the unit attachment and Jack marshaling a Hunter to the attachment.  I like the hunter but the gun mages were less than stellar with so few squishy targets to shoot at.  I think that they could be good in larger armies that have a lot of infantry  but they do nothing against jacks and beasts.

So next week when we go to 35 points I don't exactly know what I am going to take.  I think that I will bring the Blck 13th again.  But beyond that I am not sure.  Suggestions are appreciated.

Painting Stormies

Well I have been able to paint a little bit lately and I have taken some horrible pictures of my storm army that I have begun painting.  So far it is just the stormsmith stormcallers and some base coating on the first unit of stormblades.  here are the pictures.  I will get better pictures up soon.

So that is what I have been up to.  Hopefully I will be done soon.

Take your warjack to work day is June 29th

Most of us have experienced the pride of taking one of our children or a young relative to our work place.  Showing them off to our co-workers, and hearing people say “Oh how cute!” or “So what do you want to be when you grow up?”  Even if you haven’t done this yourself, you probably have seen others bring their young ones in for a visit.

Well warmongers I believe it is time to bring some of our other pride and joys to the work place.  I propose take your warjack to work day.  Just imagine hundreds of people around the world taking their favorite warjack or warbeast to work and taking pictures of them.  How many different work places can we capture these guys in?  Will they be next to your computer monitor, on top of your tool box, on the dashboard of your work truck? 

So on Friday June 29^th take your favorite, or your best painted, jack or beast to wherever you call work and take a picture of it in YOUR native environment.  Post pictures on twitter with #takeyourwarjacktoworkday

The bits to the collosal

OK so in poking around I found this picture on the privateer press website.
http://privateerpress.com/community/privateer-insider/insider-3-7-2012
There are a lot of pieces to this model.  I like that because it means that we can take more custom approaches to construction if we want to and likely fewer will be posed exactly alike.  It also answered a question I had about the lightning pods.  They will be deployed by the Stormwall to be used by it.
:)

Cygnar Stormwall

OK so I haven't put this one together yet and it won't be available until later this year.  But as a Cygnar player I must say that I am excited for this to come out.  Ever since hearing about the Collosals I decided that the money that I had been saving for the Cygnar Battle Engine was now going to wait for the Stormwall.  From the Privateer press website.

"Perhaps Nemo’s greatest creation, the Stormwall towers over Cygnar’s enemies with all the majesty and menace of a looming cloudburst. From the thunder of its guns to the blinding cracks of arcing electricity from its lightning pods, the Stormwall is the mechanikal embodiment of the tempest. Powered by both steam and surging voltaic energy, it riddles the enemy lines with cannon shells and hails of bullets before smashing survivors with its electrified fists."

I love playing storm army against my opponents mostly because I like the idea of electrical jumps from enemy to enemy and I am glad to see this model following in that tradition.  I really like the fact that this is both electrical and steam powered, my hope is that it will be at home in either a storm army or a more traditional army in the Cygnar lineup.  I am interested to see how the lightning pods work will they have movement or will the be emplaced before the game starts?  It will be interesting to learn strategy for this new type of jack, I think that this will either draw the enemy to it with concentrated attack to take out the biggest cannon on the field.  Or if the enemy is more mobile than the Stormwall they may try to stay out of range and take out the rest of my army.  Just some speculation because I haven't seen the official stats yet.  So basically I have more questions than answers at this point but I am still excited for the prospects of what has the potential to be a great piece in a nice army.

The thing that concerns me with the Collosals is that they will likely cost a lot of points and will only be useable in large battles. If I am going to pay what I am assuming is going to be over $100 for a model I would like to get more use out of it than just occasionally.