Onwards and upwards

Soooooo. Tail of gamers is pretty much over, so to quote Guns 'n Roses, where do we go now. Well 1500pts is a good start to a fantasy army but by no means all I want. I've already got loads to paint for it and the nicer looking ones will show up on this blog. After painting all those sword masters and sea guard I fancy painting something a bit different, a centre piece for the army. And what a centre piece. Last month my girlfriend, who is the most amazing and beautiful girl in the whole world (and dose subscribe to this blog), brought me a high elf lord on dragon!!! I've already build it up and done a bit of magnetization work so it can be a prince or a mage and so the wings come off for transport. I'm planning to paint it in nautical colours and do some water effects on the base and call it a sea dragon. This fits the subtle coastal theme of my army and lets me play it as either a sun, moon or star dragon for coolness and customizability.

Other than that I'm planning to expand my salamanders army and put up some tactic and painting blogs with them. I've already started this expansion with a razorback (see photos bellow) and 5 assault terminators and I'm planning to add a whirlwind, terminator chaplain, devastator squad and maybe some more dreadnoughts. These will all be playing on the nice new realm of battle gaming board I'm getting in the new year (not much to blog about there, I'm just rather looking forward to it) and some will be coming to the 40k doubles tournament in feb with me and Adam (plenty to blog about there).

Finally, after the doubles tournament I'm planning to go green. No, I’m not talking about carbon neutral blogging, or recycling my models. Nope, I'm starting my own WAAAAGH! Probably doing an Evil Sunz Kult of speed, but more on that another time, for now I'll leave you with my razorback.

The elven hoast grows

I'm back.

Sorry it's been a while. This past month I've managed to to get loads of great looking models painted up for my high elves :) but then only had time for one game :(

I had planned to build 1250pts, play with it, blog about it and then go onto 1500pts. Alas, time and work had other idea's and the 1250pts game and blog got put aside. However, the painting did get done, more sea guard and a noble with a reaver bow as well as putting the shadow warriors back into the list. The obvious highlight of this step was the noble. He turned out really great, especially the gold. I base coated the gold in shinning gold and the gave it a wash of ogryn flesh. Then I painted all but the lowest recesses in another coat of shinning gold before building up a highlight of burnished gold and finally methril silver. Turned out really shiny and makes him stand out in the big unit of seaguard that he hangs out with in most games.

The next step was to go to 1500pts. Once again, more seaguard, giving my a huge unit of 32 with every model able to attack when they get charged. To this I added a unit of 5 dragon princes to give my army some manoeuvrability and punch. I used the old models cos I brought and assembled them about 2 weeks before GW announced they were doing new plastic one, Grrrrrr! I'd never painted horses before but I think basing them in white, washing in a watered down mix of astronomican and codex grey and the highlighting in white worked out ok for the majestic elven steeds.

For these guys and the noble I had a crack at using citadel water effects on the base. For the noble I've got him standing on a rock in the sea which looked ok but kind of tailed off at the edges. For the princes I did my standard elf bases but with a few rivers and puddles with turned out much better because they were enclosed which gave a better effect.In the past months I had played a few practice games with the high elves at various point levels and the dragon princes had done ok but no so in my game with this army at 1500pts. I made the sort of mistake that I reckon most fantacy players make once and will never, ever, ever! Do again. My opponent was a Chaos player and fielded a hell cannon and I thought, ahar, a war machine with nothing protecting it his flank. I took the opportunity to charge it with 200pts worth of dragon princes thinking I would kill the crew quickly and then charge back into the rear of his main army later in the game. Unfortunately the hell cannon counts as a monster with handlers not a war machine, making it much harder to kill. I still thought I had a chance and did win the combat by 1 and hopped it would break. Alas my opponent pointed out it was unbreakable, leaving my the princes locked in combat to get eaten next turn. The rest of the game was a closer affair than it could have been but too many chaos units hit my battle line at the same time and I just couldn't cope and I lost badly. In hind-sight I should have used my dragon princes to charge the flank of his marauders (next unit along the line from the hell cannon and slightly in-front) and then disrupt the rest of his battle line. But hey, you live and lean.

That's tail of gamers pretty much over as 1500 was where we were aiming for, but it's far from the end for my high elves or this blog.

To be continued............