7th Edition and the evolution of 40K

Warhammer 40000 has changed a lot in the last two editions, and some people are very pissed about it. I'm not so sure. I want to discuss a few things: allies, game balance (Ward codexes and TauDar etc) and the new detachments/formations rules.

Raven Guard MSU spam

In my last article on MSU spam I noted that it was a little weak at 1500 point Maelstrom because of the Khan tax. You need scout (and outflank) on all the Rhinos for this army to work. That becomes difficult if you've already paid 200+ for a chapter master and 60+ for a librarian in order to make your Maelstrom list capable of scoring the easy cards. With Khan, your HQ allotment is now 450 odd points, which doesn't leave you much to work with. One solution is to use Raven Guard instead, as their Rhinos come with Scout for free! Now obviously this isn't the most powerful Chapter tactic, but that's great if your scene uses comp score. A sample list:

Space Marine list building for Maelstrom

A quick one today, just compiling some thoughts on list building for Space Marines. I've been reflecting for a while on the fact that the guy who won our tournament scored a 3.0 for comp, which is basically as high as you can get without making an army that is deliberately bad. Yet his list is pretty well optimised for Maelstrom. Let me first explain how to build a Maelstrom army for Space Marines, and then you'll see what I mean.

Note: I'm glad he won the tournament with that particular list. Nobody could be upset at having to face down that army and he played it extremely well. But the guy who came second (with Eldar) was fielding a genuinely shit army featuring a bunker just so his opponent had a building to destroy. His score was 2.75 from memory, basically just because it was from the Eldar codex. He had no wave serpents, no Wraithknights and only one squad of warp spiders. He was using Shining Speers and doom weavers! If the comp scores were reversed the placings would have been reversed, and I think that was the true result, but nobody cares we just play to have fun and the winner was very gracious.

Space marines in 7th edition part 3: MSU spam with Rhinos

Last part in this series. So far we've covered drop pods and bike lists. Today we're looking at armies with lots of tactical squads in combat squads in Rhinos. A version of this list placed 5th at the Bay Area Open, the first tournament to use 7th edition rules.

Something like this...

How to win at Maelstrom

At my club we play a lot of Maelstrom of war missions. It's about a 50/50 split with eternal war and the annual club tournament uses book Maelstrom missions. I've read a lot of commentary complaining about Maelstrom, saying that it comes down to luck of the draw too often. That hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, I don't think I've had a single Maelstrom game come down to luck of the draw. However, you need to build armies that are suitable to Maelstrom. If you bring something that is fundamentally an eternal war army, like Deathwing, Death-stars or a firebase, you are going to lose. Pretty much anything that is designed to kill stuff rather than score is going to have a hard time unless you can reliably table your opponent by turn 5. In this article I've assembled some of the insights I've gained playing around 30 book Maelstrom games. Feel free to disagree with me.

My first display board

I wanted to make a display board for the club tournament because it was my first one with this club. I thought it would ingratiate me with some of the old hands and I also wanted to make some commitment to encourage myself to keep going. I also figured a display board was my best bet for actually walking away with some prize (which turned out to be true). This post is about the making of said board, with pictures!

Tournament write up

So we had the big tournament on two weekends ago. I had a great time but I didn't do very well, scoring 1-1-3. I did, however, win best theme! This was due largely to my display board and some other aspects of my painting/modelling, which I will showcase in a separate post. This article is going to be more about battle reports.

The Emperor's Ghosts in full regalia!