With just two weeks remaining before our May mini-tournament, Da Ironbullz hit the table for more practice games.
Over the weekend, I was able to play three games against one of the other players participating in our tournament, who has recently decided to bring his new Tzeentch army.
He was debating whether he wanted to run pure Thousand Sons, pure Tzeentch daemons, or Tzeentch soup for the tournament.
I had been tinkering with my Orks list as well, so we decided this would be the perfect opportunity to playtest the lists and get in some vital practice before the Tournament.
Playing these games was a blast, but unfortunately the outcomes ranged from an insanely close loss to a devistating concession on Turn 2, so my record with Orks in 9th has slipped to 1-5.
I've written a quick recap of each game below:
This was easily one of the most fun games of Warhammer I have ever played. I lost the roll-off for first turn, which I initially thought was a setback, but ended up having a critical upside: my opponent moved one of his big blocks of Horrors and both Exalted flamers into his left flank, which allowed me to catch him off-guard by making a loooong advance + charge with my Warboss & Nobz on turn one. My Warboss wrecked 1.5 Exalted Flamers, while the Nobz finished off the other Exalted and slowly chewed through the Horrors. The lowlight for Da Ironbullz was the Stormboyz getting humiliated after charging into the second Horrors unit holding the middle of the table: the Stormboyz rolled horribly, killing just two Horrors, and the Horrors rolled insanely well to cut down all nine Stormboyz in return! While it was a statistical anomaly, it was shocking nevertheless. I learned a few other lessons, including (1) units of two Deffkoptas aren't much more useful than units of one, and are clearly less useful than two units of one, (2) leaving your only psyker in a transport until turn 3 wastes valuable opportunities to Deny, Smite, and manifest other powers, and (3) Kommandoz don't seem to be worth the points [compared to plain Slugga or Shoota Boyz] on the small board sizes at 1k points. Otherwise the game was close until the very end, and when the dust had settled, it was plain that a single mistake in my movement on turn three cost me five precious primary VPs that would have tipped the outcome in my favor. This was a remarkably close and fun game!
The pre-game setup didn't break my way in this one. First of all, this mission involves three midfield objectives, two of which disappear on turns four and five, and the mission-specific Secondary objective, Secure Landing Sites, rewards incrementally more VPs for holding these three disappearing objectives as the game progresses. My opponent won the roll-off to pick the order of the disappearing objectives, which left a single vital objective in the center of the board surrounded by ruins. We discussed before the game that this setup left me at a distinct disadvantage given that I outnumbered him considerably but he had a core of extremely durable Scarab Termis backed up by strong HQ & psyker support to hold the center objective. To make matters worse, I lost the roll for the first turn (again!). The game that followed was about as close as I could make it, but he was able to completely box me out of the center objective and deplete my scoring units so that I was stretched too thin. I was able to steamroll down the left flank to score Linebreaker a couple times late in the game and take the objective in his deployment zone with my Warboss & Nobz, but it wasn't enough to outscore my opponent, who controlled two of the three central objectives and racked up considerable VPs between primaries and the mission-specific secondary. Although it was a loss, I don't feel I would have played it much differently if I were to do it over again; this was simply a tough mission for Orks to win while (1) losing the roll to pick the order in which objectives vanish and (2) also losing the roll for first turn.
This game was pretty disheartening. My opponent ran his Thousand Sons as the Cult of Magic, which gives +1 wound to any unit that takes mortal wounds due to psychic powers and also provides access to a Smite-like power that does splash damage of mortal wounds to all units within 3". The restricted terrain caused me to foolishly clump up both transports carrying my Warboss, Nobz, and Meganobz along side my Weirdboy, Stormboyz, and one Deffkopta as I moved them towards my right flank on turn one. The very next turn, my opponent unleashed hell during his psychic phase, pulling some classic Tzeentchian schenanigans to unlock a new psychic power and subsequently rolling the 10+ needed to do D6+1 mortal wounds to everything within 3" of my Chinork, which was... pretty much my entire army. Both transports had been weakened by Inferno Bolter fire on turn one (which seem fantastic at ripping through light vehicles!), so this one psychic power killed 5 Stormboyz, my Deffkopta, and both transports, which caused two Nobz and two Meganobz to die while trying to disembark. That same shooting phase, his fully-buffed Horrors unit took 72 (!!) strength 4 shots (with wound rerolls) at my other Deffkopta, Grots, and Shoota Boyz, killing all of them. I conceded at the start of my second turn, at which point I had just 10 Slugga Boyz, my Warboss, a wounded Weirdboy, 3 Nobz, and 2 Meganobz left on the table against his entire army (yes, I didn't kill anything). Tough loss to stomach and I went to bed pretty demoralized after that. Not much I could have done differently besides avoiding clumping up my units when facing the Cult of Magic with their splash mortal damage.
I was also able to make some hobbying progress over the past week leading up to our practice games.
First, the spirit of Gork (or possibly Mork) gripped me on Monday night and I felt compelled to make a new Boss Nob for my Meganobz unit.
The truth is: I already had converted a Boss for the Meganobz... but even though I gave him a massive killsaw from the Killa Kanz kit, he still didn't stand out nearly enough!
I was determined to convert a Boss Nob who would have no trouble standing out. Gork (or Mork) spoke to me and said: wot standz out moar den a big 'uge choppa?? One thing led to another, and I ended up with a Meganobz Boss with two Power Klaws clutching a Darth Maul-esque double-sided Killsaw polearm:
The last unit missing from my list was the Stormboyz. I had been planning to proxy them using slugga boyz for the tournament, but Mork (or possibly Gork) got the better of me and I decided to build them up.
These guys are a conversion I have been planning for as long as I've been an Ork player (nearly two decades!): flying bases with jetpack smoke/thrust.
There's no shortage of cool flying Stormboyz conversions online, so I had plenty of inspiration for how to tackle these.
The technique I'm trying here is to mount the jetpacks at the end of a curved length of thin brass rod, and affix small tufts of clump foliage soaked in PVA glue to the brass rod to simulate jet exhaust.
The effect (hopefully) will make more sense once painted, but here are some early looks at the Stormboyz so far:
