14th Grand Company

Perhaps the title is a bit misleading, are any of our little plastic armies ever really finished? Perhaps not, but I completed the 2,000 point army I brought to the Seattle GT  including a display board for it.

Two models that were last to be finished also completed (though very late) ToEMP #10: officer of the fleet and the company command’s chimera.

The officer of the fleet is a real help against reserved based armies such as drop pod marines. During the tournament he wasn’t a game changer as none of my opponents relied on reserves, but then again maybe they just changed their tactics in response to him?

The Chimera was used to protect my command squad with the invaluable Commander Creed. This tank was destroyed in nearly every game in the tournament but Creed was lost in only 2 of them, so I think all in all it was well worth its cost.

As for my results? I achieved my goal for my first ever GT: win 2 games. In fact I even tied a third while grabbing the secondary objective. The two I lost were both hard losses. The first was against Nidzilla and only a sole sentinel remained at turn 6. The second was the last game against a fully mechanized guard army which would have been a great deal closer if luck had been better with me.  In the end I placed 47th out of 80 some great 40k players (and cheating one who won but was later disqualified!). After spending the last few weeks getting over the hard losses and the less than I hoped painting score, I’ve started to reorganize my army composition and think hard about how I want to play this army. I may move to a more mechanized army with squads of veterans rather than the platoons, but I still want to stick to the theme I’ve started so may look at replacing the tanks altogether and build a completely foot based army. We shall see what the future holds…

I have just finished another tank to my growing horde of traitor guard. This one is the dreaded Leman Russ Demolisher with sponsoon plasma cannons. Indeed it is a pricy tank, but when it lets loose, it is sure worth it. Thanks to the Lumbering Behemoth rule it can move 6″ and still fire off the demolisher and a plasma cannon, ensuring the destruction of any squad unlucky enough to get in its way.

The demolisher cannon is a kit bash using the Banehammer cannon that I didn’t use for my Baneblade. I had 4 Leman Russ kits, a built Leman Russ and an old built Leman Russ demolisher so I decided to build my own demolisher cannons to create two full squads of tanks, one of the traditional LR and another of demolishers (the other 4 tanks are built and painting has started so watch for them!)

Every weapon on the tank is AP2, ensuring that anything that the tank hits will not get a armor save.

I tried something different with the back by adding two extra barrels and placing a smoke stack on either side.

I also wanted to pull in a theme I’ve used on my troops by adding gas cans and ready-to-light torches to the storage bin.

This also complete the 8th challenge of The Tale of Even More Painters:

• Vehicle: 10 points
• Symbol: 1 point
• Meeting deadline: 2 points
• Total for Challenge 8: 13 points

And here is a sneak peak of whats coming next:

This is a combinational post. First of it is to display my second entry for ToEMPs but also for FTW’s request for our “Must Have Unit.” I’ve only played a few games for my traitor guard, but in all the games my Bane Wolves have made a huge difference by either killing 15 marines in one turn or taking a lot of shots while my lowly platoons take the objectives. These tanks aren’t real tough but they are fast and they are very deadly, which causes many people to fear them to the point of ignoring anything else.

Even though there are the disadvantages of running these tanks in a squadron, it does give them more survivability – I really just need one shot from the chem cannon to make that marine player cry Also my fast attack slots are all filled with my scout and armored sentinels (which are other favorite units!).

Bane Wolf 1:

And its pack mate, Bane Wolf 2:

For the ToEMP this unit gives me an additional:

• Vehicles x2: 20 pnts
• Vehicle details x2: 10 pnts
• Challenge 7b total: 30 pnts
• Challenge 7 total: 37

Whats next? Well in part it depends on what the next challenge is for ToEMP but I have 4 Leman Russes in the mail to add to the one I have finished and the Demolisher I need to strip and repaint, this will give me a full squad of Leman Russes and a full squad of Demolishes! I would like to get these all done for Tanks-giving but we’ll see how that goes!

Although I was hoping to have had a head start on the second challenge for 73rd’s A Tale of Even More Painters with my sentinels, I came back from my work trip to find the challenge was to paint an elites choice, and if none were available then a heavy support could be painted instead. I had neither choice planned for the short term for my traitor guard and didn’t even have any models I could put together for it, but luckily I had one of my brothers old Leman Russ tanks in the back of my closet. With his permission I have relinquished the tank from those who worship the corpse and added it to my growing horde.

I continued the Red/Orange/Yellow theme onto this tank to keep the army color scheme together. This is actually my first tank with “painted” armor, all my other tanks are silver for my Iron Warriors. This gave me the opportunity to apply paint scratches and wear.

The skull motif and XIV are unified across all of my tanks, linking them to the 14th Grand Company. The icon is from the dark elf warrior box, but works great for my tanks.

The process of pulling this tank together in just a few short days was helped by the fact my brother had this mostly built already. I simply had to add the tracks, remove those darn Aquilas and add some chaos flavor. Modifications were kept simple overall, some spikes were added to each sponsoon and around the top hatch.  Chaos star icons were also added to the back of each sponsoon (those plates fit perfectly into that spot!).

I also felt the cargo hold on the back needed some filling up. I debated on adding actual cargo, a blood sacrifice pool or some gnarly chaos goo. I decided to go with a gnarly chaos sacrifice goo with a victim pleading for help.  I continued this goo theme out the front viewing hatch of the tank (as well as on one of the sentinels).

I have yet to name this tank, I think I’ll leave that honor to my brother who was great enough to hand this tank off to me! (thanks Sean!)

For the ToEMP challenge this earns me:

• Vehicle: 10 points
• Icon/Symbols: 1 point
• Eyes: 1 point (This is the only guy I’ve done the eyes on and he is dieing!)
• Vehicle Details: 5 points
• Meeting deadline: 2 points
• beating deadline by 24 hours:  2 points
• Game points: 185 (just shy of earning another assault card!)

Total for this tank: 21

Total so far: 32