What Does Your Army Say About You?

I was walking to my local net cafe today , thinking about the short story of Dark Angels i read in the Imperial Armor 5 book, siege of Vraks. When it struck me that, the army that i play and love (Dark Angels) actualy in a way represents me. So i found some time to make a compilation of what each army may say about its owner, from a fluff point of view!

Battle reports from Montreux, ETC 2011 - DAY 2 - ROUND 6

And we reached the final match. Greece against Belgium. For uknown reasons I was nominated again by my captain and – what a surprise!- I was picked again by the Imperial Guard player. I chose a table with heavy terrain. My opponent was Maarten Vanderkrieken. My first impression for Maarten was that he was extremelly tired, even more than I was. He confessed that six matches in 2 days were too many. This did not affect his performance though, unfortunatelly for me.

Maarten Vanderkrieken. He seems glad with the pairing...

Battle reports from Montreux, ETC 2011 - DAY 2 - ROUND 5

We were facing Northern Ireland. Both teams near the bottom of the rank. My captain had the marvellous idea to nominate me second and without hesitation the Irish pitched me against the Imperial Guard. Another captain for me, Jonny Fisher or Jonny65.

Jonny Fisher, aka Jonny65, the captain of team Northern Iron.

Battle reports from Montreux, ETC 2011 - DAY 2 - ROUND 4

 Here is the second instalment of my battle reports from ETC 2011. I decided to publish the battle reports of the second day separately, in thee separate posts, to make it more convenient for the reader.

  

The first game on Sunday was against Austria. I was placed against Space Wolves! Imperial Guard and Space Wolves with Long Fangs and razor spam are anti-lists for my list. Yet, on the 2nd day I would be facing only these opponents, as it would turn out.

Deployment: Dawn of War. Primary objective: Annihilation. Secondary objective: Seize Ground (3 fixed counters). Positioning the objectives : one objective is in the center of the table. The other 2 objectives are 24" from player's table edge and 6" of lateral table edges.

My opponent was Georg "Firstruleoffightclub" Auenhammer, the Austrian Captain. Another Captain for me. He had two Runepriests, 2 units of wolfscouts, 5 wolfguards with combi-meltas, 3 wolf riders, 4 units of grey hunters, two in rhinos and two in Las-Plas razorbacks, and (surprise!) 3 units of Long fangs – 14 missile launchers in total.

Georg "Firstruleoffightclub" Auenhammer, the Austrian Captain.
He pleasantly surprised me by knowing the meaning of his Greek-deriving first name!

Battle reports from Montreux, ETC 2011 - DAY 1

From upper left to right: Takis Mahos who played the Imperial Guard, Marcin Narewski with Witch Hunter and Imperial Guard Allies,  Odysseus Charalampopoulos ‘Khorne’ with Chaos Daemons, Leonidas Fragkos-Livanios ‘Moskitokiller’ with Dark Eldars. Middle row: Roman Lakomiak with his space wolves. Lower row, from the left: the captain, Stefanos Kapetanakis ‘Blood Guzzler’, playing Tyrranids, Milosz Dziembowski with Orks and Vasilis Apostolopoulos ‘Billap’ with Blood Angels.

I participated at ETC 2011 as a member of the Hellenic National team. Etc 2011 took place at Montreux, Switzerland, 20-21 August. Here are the battle reports from my first day battles.Let me start with my list

Doubles tournament report

Third tournament for this month. Maybe I'm overdoing it? Nah, it's all good. This time would be a bit different though since it was a Doubles format. That means I had to cooperate with someone. I always hated that part...Anyway, Moskitokiller suggested that we should play together and I accepted. Few days later he canceled on me though. Oh, well, what can you do? At that point I guessed I had to miss that one. But few days after he was available again. I've already changed my plans for that Saturday twice. I should be glad I have such a tolerating wife! 

We had to have 750 points each of whatever race we fancied. One HQ and one troops each was mandatory and if we wanted to double up a slot (i.e. two elite units) we had to have at least one unit in each other FOC category (i.e. 1 elites, 1 FA, 1 HS before we could put another HS down). We were supposed to be working around our army lists all week but in typical Greek fashion, Leonidas called me at 9 o'clock in the morning before the tournament to discuss our options. Check out the list and how we fared after the jump. But before you do that make sure you've checked out Invulnerable blog for another report and some very unflattering pictures of me (then again I would need a lot of make up and photoshop manipulation for a decent picture).

Wyches Brew

The other day my mate Leonidas came around my place for some help with painting his wyches. He had to attend a tournament this weekend so he needed my skills with the airbrush for some fast results.

He wanted a dark red colour for the armour so I decided to undercoat the models black for added convenience.
I airbrushed a mixture of black and red paint, keeping it always as at a certain angle to achieve some highlighting.

After we painted all the skin parts with Dwarf Flesh and the hair with Orkhide Shade. I then airbrush Gloss Varnish to aid with washing. I used Thraka Green for the armour and enamel brown wash from MIG for the skin and hair. Leonidas had to leave at that point but I kept a model to further test the colour scheme. More pictures after the jump. Check them out and tell me what you think.

Guest Article : A different analysis on the new Dark Eldar Codex

So, this is the first guest article for this blog. Exciting stuff (at least for me)! My friend Leonidas (aka Moskitokiller) has been into Space Dark Elves for quite a while now. He had some very interesting insights about their new codex. I asked him if he could put down his thoughts in an article that I could post here. The guy is a university professor and he approaches his game the same way he does for his science. Meticulously and with a lot of serious thought. He is also strong willed and opinionated and I always consider his advice even if I don't have to necessarily agree with it. So I hope you enjoy this in-depth article and hope you get many things from it.

I present an analysis on the characteristics of the Dark Eldars according to their latest Codex. Based on those characteristics I attempt to probe the strategy and techniques, suitable for this new army.

Let me first state that this is not the usual analysis one might find on the Net. No unit by unit presentation, no personal favourites, no list of suggestions either. This is left to the player. My intention is to express some of my thoughts and to present a set of principals, a framework if you will,  in order to help the DE player to build his army and to develop his techniques.

Help with a Dark Eldar list!

Gentlemen, I am trying to help my friend Leonidas to built a DE list using the new codex. I think the issue here is that the book is very balanced (like this is a bad thing...) and no unit really stands out to me for competitive play. This is obviously cool because you can use all your models using very different list but it's always good to have a "tournament built" that you can use for more serious competitive play. I checked a few blogs and forums for advice and after talking with my friend Neil I've come up with this list: