Not Quite a Batrep - plus Hobby Update

First - the quick and easy: hopefully this slideshow thing works; one would hope as Google owns Blogger and Picasa.  Pics are of my WIP Harpy and complete but unpainted Parasite of Mortrex.  Pay no mind to the horrendous base on the Harpy...  that was the base the Fell Beast came with from Ebay; but not a bad result for a $15 Harpy with broken wings and no tail.  Not shown are my newly built two shiny dakkafexes and 6-strong unit of DS, scytal, VC warriors.  

Next up is this 'not quite a batrep' business.  A somewhat long story, but the important parts are that I finally got to play a couple 5e games with my nids, learned quite a bit, and met some really neat folks.

I went down to Games and Stuff last week and met a few Inner Circle folks, where I saw a post about a 40k tournament at synDCon on the same weekend of Adepticon run by the FAIL Gamers group.  My Saturday was unexpectedly clear, so I stayed up all night getting a playable if unpainted force together, then found out the tourney was canceled due to lack of registered entrants, but FAIL would still be running open gaming.  I figured if enough people showed, the tourney would be a go, or at worst, get a pickup game or two in, plus it was a convention - lots to do.  Turned out to be a very RPG heavy con, with almost two dozen tables of various RPGs running all day, but precious little else.  Salvation arrived in the form of FAIL's president, Gorath, bringing two tables worth of terrain and a couple armies to demo with.  Lessons learned after the jump...

We ended up playing two games as demo events for the convention, teaching a few kids the basics and just having a good time showing off the hobby to new people.  Great reminder that kids will always be a core part of the hobby, just like painting and tournament play.  The first battle was a 500 point skirmish with nids vs. Iron Warriors on an urban battlefield - where I learned that there definitely is such a thing as too much terrain.  I took 6 stealers, 4 wars, 1 HG, and a tervigon vs. 3 squads and a hero of some sort.  Other lessons:

• Don't charge even a combat squad in cover with a tervigon and no support unless you're desperate.
• Charging warriors are a fearsome thing.
• Tox vs. regular troops is a waste.  Nice to have the flexibility to be a threat to a high T unit in a balanced list, but I can definitely appreciate the arguments about not needing tox on stealers.

Game 2 was bigger; 2k vs 2k, me and a kid with some ancient metal nids with 1k each vs. Gorath's 2k worth of Iron Warriors.  The kid took a 340 point tyrant with wings, a blob of almost 30 devilgaunts, a biovore, a squad of warriors with mixed weapons, and a paper cutout of an HG.  Not quite tourney legal, but all in good fun.  Since he had a big troop presence, I took a tervigon, 15 stealers, 8 ymgarl, 3 HG, 3 Zoans, and a Mawloc.  Very open terrain.  I managed to wipe out his possessed, a vindicator, two tac squads and two devastator squads, plus his champion/leader whatever.  Iron Warriors were pretty vanilla, with the possessed gaining furious charge for the game, which I promptly allowed him to do against my stealers by leaving a gap in my gant bubble wrap.  Placement lesson learned...  but Gorath was by that time already calling me an "umbrella cover" bastard after I deployed my infiltrated stealers across the entire force frontage.  FNP made all the difference though - the possessed couldn't take the squad down and they got whittle down over two turns, and finished when the terv joined in.  The HGs popped the vindicator, while the zoans almost single-handedly wiped two squads from the map with warp blast.
Lessons learned:

• I definitely liked the zoans, but psychic hoods will negate them.
• FNP makes a big bug broods tough to take out - see note on psychic hoods.
• Really wish I'd used broodlords - they will absolutely make a major difference in combat; and 2 points more than it would cost to just buy 3 more stealers; at least vs. meq.
• Revisited my strategy of using only 2 biovores; it will take a brood of 3 to be decently effective vs meq - definitely about forcing saves.
• Mawloc didn't do horribly - he ate 3 marines and tied up a squad for 2 rounds, killing another 3, and then became a fire magnet keeping fire from my stealers, who promptly ate another squad.  Need to learn how to time Hit and Run.
• Need to work on what the heck to do with a tervigon after it is out of gants - both games my tervs rolled doubles on turn 1.
• Bring phone charger/laptop to take pics and better notes

Quite the wall o'text.  Just glad I finally got some playtime in.  Looking forward to hearing from you.