One of these is not like the others...

 o/

Here ya go, some more mechs fresh off of the panting queue:

Don't eat the green one, its not ripe yet.

The green one is a clan Baboon (AKA: Howler) painted in the colors of Clan Jade Falcon's Omega Galaxy. This is my first mini for the Falcons and will soon be joined by four more mechs for another Fast & the Furious, Frankie-styled mech star. 

I just love how all of my minis are invariably adorned in cat hair. It like its just plowed through some sort of colossal spider's web!

This Baboon, as well as another of the same in the coming batch of light clan mechs will be the slowest moving units in this new star, as is befitting of a (light) fire support mech. That said, it still will be moving at up to 14" per turn!

It doesn't look so bad when it zips past you in a blur!

Speaking of fast, next up is my Jenner which is easily the UGLIEST mech in my inventory! This mech did take out a clan omnimech in it's last game. While that sounds impressive, the mech in question was a Dasher which has barely enough armor to withstand a collision with a tree branch when moving at full speed. 

This urbie earned it's paint in that same game.

Here we see it crossing what was once runway 67 A.

This Rifleman on the other hand, ought to have been tossed into the flames of my backyard firepit given its last, stunning battlefield performance!

The Rifleman got lucky in that I was painting red mechs this week, as when it last saw the table top, it shutdown due to overheating. I was fielding it as a C model refit (which is prone to overheating) all while failing to hit most anything with the clan pulse lasers that it was mounting. It was awful.

These three bring the Combine's painted total up to 7 mechs.

Nonetheless, all I have left to paint for my (current) DCMS' Sword of Light demi-company is a recently purchased Catapult K2. Unfortunately, I'm out of the correct shade of primer for the K2 (as are the local FLGS'). 

The 100pt game experiment

 o/

Surprisingly my Javelin would survive this point blank exchange, but only to fall a turn later.

Why not right? We normally play 300 points at the FLGS, with Frankie and I splitting our force into two, 150 point halves which easily are played against one another when playing at home. That said, our 150 point home games, tend to take a bit too long for school nights (or so Mom says). We usually don't start to play until after dinner, so I trimmed the forces down to an even 100 points and starting at 6pm we finished up at about 8:30. Perfect!

Or was it?

The long range fire support units eye one another warily from a distance.

However, Frankie was less than enthused about not having a pure, speed freaks type of lance. Having not played in a good while, and only having a Wolfhound with a 12" movement and a Spider with a 16" movement, he lapsed into his noob, uber defensive mode. His lance was rounded out with a 4N Hunchback and a skill 3 Hatchetman 3F for his commander. 

While his Spider and Wolfhound went to the flanks and the Hunchback up the middle (briefly), he basically hid his Hatchetman in the back field as it was 'so slow that it was useless' (8" movement, just like the Hunchback). I tried to explain that by hanging back he was playing to my strengths, to no avail. I had two WTH-1 Whitworths, a skill 3 Blackjack BJ-1 and a fast moving 10N Javelin, making for a medium fire lance where both Whitworths halved the medium and long range modifiers. 

Urban combat, not the Whitworth's favorite place to be. 

Pointing out that only the Javelin had a greater than 8" movement on my side, and that his Hunchback was the best mech on the table, not to mention the Hatchetman's lance mates were likely screaming over comms to get into the fight did little to motivate him to bring it into range. It maybe fired 2 shots all game, and spent most of its time in hiding. 

Frankie, lamenting his poor dice rolls. 

His dice were not rolling well and effectively outnumbering him 3-4 at the outset, the end results were predictable. Not even his 6 rerolls were of much use. In the end I lost the Javelin, whereas he lost the Wolfhound and Hunchback, and the Spider was rendered weaponless.

Trying to balance out a pure, high speed lance with a more rounded one at such a low points total wouldn't be easy in my opinion. Of course he complained (every turn) that the Spider only moves at 16" a turn. I had to remind him that not every mech moves like a Mercury, not to mention I only have one Mercury in my collection. 

The final pic taken after the weaponless Spider and barely damaged Hatchetman fled the field. Frankie wanted to memorialize all of his bad rolls with a display of ones.

Note: the tanks were just terrain.

As such, I'm calling this one a bust. I'll see if I can come up with a decent 100pt speed daemon list & something to effectively oppose it. Otherwise I guess that I'll just stick with our usual 150pt lists (I don't think he has the attention span to run a full 300pt list on his own). If the games run long, we can just leave them at the end of a turn and finish up the game the next day (one of the benefits of having a gaming area at home). 

Edit: I made him a 100pt speed freak list this morning and while fast, it's damage potential is kinda meh, and its mechs are fragile as hell...

Hell's Horses Iota Galaxy Part 2...3...ish?

 o/

Honestly, I think the paint job on the Clan Demolisher came out the best of all of these. 

I finished painting up this force just in time for a game of Classic with Kushial and his favorite Eridani Light Horse this past weekend. The Clan Demolisher and Stinger C's were repaints, the Demolisher just had a generic urban camo scheme that matched nothing else and the Stingers were previously painted for The Buffet Assault Group itself. 

The light tanks are from Microworld Games and used as counts as Mithras light tanks. The actual Mithras mini looks more like a tracked and turreted farm tractor to me than a proper tank. On the tabletop the Mithras lasts about as long as a farm tractor as both died to a single volley of fire. Granted, in one case said volley was all 40 LRMs (seriously WTF?) fired from an Archer!

These three would not survive the coming battle...

I believe Kushial will be doing a more in depth overview of the game, so I just have a few pics here. This list is set up more for Alpha Strike as one of Frankie's preferred 'fast & the furious' type lists. In Classic, with all 4/5 pilots and crews save the Hellhound which had a 3/5 pilot, the above list came out to 8000 points even.

My army's MVP by a mile!

In Alpha Strike, again with all skill 4 pilots and crews, if I drop both of the Mithras tanks, the list comes out to 142 points. That leaves enough left over to boost 1 mech up to a level 3. While the Demolisher isn't fast, it is furious, having fired a dozen AC-20 rounds and hit with all but two! Only one was a cluster round and we didn't even get to that as the target had already disintegrated.

In the end the Demolisher only had a few nicks and scratches, whereas everything else still standing on the board had had the living shit kicked out of it!