The Eldar Strike Back

So I have been chugging along on my painted army project.  I have experimented with all manner of allies in the pursuit of only using painted models.  With the release of Codex Eldar, and a few games with the new book under my belt I am even more motivated to get some models painted.  My current project is the Wraith Knight.  After an evening of assembly I have quite a bit of the structure of the model put together.

The sword arm is already magnetized.  I found the arm a lot easier to magnetize than I thought.

Painted Army Project

In the area I live and play in painted armies are not the norm.  For every painted army you see there are several more that are mostly gray.  I am guilty of this I frequently suffer from gamer a.d.d. and will switch projects before I finish an army.  However GW has given us a great boon in 6th ed 40k and that is the allies system.

My plan is to only field painted units.  If I want a new unit, I will break out the paints.  Being able to ally means that armies that are mostly unpainted can still be played as an ally for another force.  For example I just purchased a Riptide that I want to play.  I already have painted fire warriors, and I can do a simple quick conversion to make a fireblade.  Now I have an ally force I can throw into my eldar as soon as I paint the Riptide.  I can slowly build up my painted tau without the worry of not being able to play with any tau until I complete the whole army.  Every time I paint a new unit I can work into my eldar army until I have enough units to switch from and Eldar/Tau army to a Tau/Eldar army and eventually to a pure Tau one.

Now my hope is that eventually allies will become an official rule for warhammer fantasy.

Fun with Pink Horrors aka "The Jack in the Box"

So at my job I have plenty of time to think about 40k and the stuff I want to try.  During a conversation with a friend of mine we started to brainstorm on the new Tzeentch daemon rules.  He is a fan of Tzeentch and was hoping to find a way to make them good. 

So we started with a Herald with all the trappings mastery level 3, +1 str to powers.  The herald will take the primaris for Tzeentch and Divination.  You then stick him in a 19 strong pink horror unit with the blasted standard and the Tzeentch primaris power.  We found that the unit was kind of squishy with on T3 and a meager save.  The solution is to stick the unit in a bastion.  With brotherhood of sorcerers rule only one model needs to cast the power.  So even with only one firepoint per side two models can fire out.  So the Herald casts prescience to give the whole squad rerolls, then during  the shooting phase the unit fires 3d6 times and the Herald fires 2d6 times all at str 6.  Finally once per game you can tack on 2d6 str 4 hits from the standard.  

To really make the most of the tactic put the bastion a little ways outside of your deployment zone toward the middle of the table.  Then move into the bastion turn 1.  This really allows you put a lot of fire into anything in the central part of the table.  You can also make sure an objective is right behind the bastion for a last turn objective grab.

The bastion and the unit is susceptible to CC but hopefully all the CC that daemons pack in can hold off any threats.  Another nice benefit is that you get to allocate wounds from glances/pens so you don't have to worry about a luck hit taking out the Herald.  Not a lot of armies can deal with AV 14 at range, especially AV 14  without hull points.  

I still have yet to try this out on the table, so I would love to hear from anyone who gives it a try.