So what did I learn from the Apoc Game?

So I finished the Apoc Game and it was a lot of fun, but there were several problems that came up during the game. Not being any sort of a negative nanny or anything here, but I do feel the issues I encountered are worth noting, and like wise I feel these issues should be shared along with my thoughts on them so that others may benefit from my efforts both positive and negative.

A points disparity between the teams. This was a huge issue as 36 hours before the game one team was estimated to having 56,000 points and the other team having 58,000 points. With the 12500 points worth of units I was bringing everything looked like it was a set to have a really great 120,000 point battle. And then we had some people drop out bringing one team to a near crippling 32,000 points compared to the other teams 58,000 points. I handed the lower team everything I had but one person really can't be expected to make up nearly 20,000 points worth of models in an army.

So for next year I think I will put a max-points cap on each team, say 30,000 points. And then break down on a per-player basis. So let's say each team has 10 players. That means each person would be individually responsible for bringing 3,000 points to the battle. If the respective warmasters for the team wants to change this break down so that something unique can be brought to the table, they would be able to do so, one person only brings 1,500 points while another brings 4,500 for instance so that second person can bring 3 Thunderhawks or something of that nature.

Another big problem I ran into was with the tables. I had the tables set up in a sort of 'U' shape, that way people could use the length of the table as the battle field. Well, nice idea... in theory. In practice it lead to horrible bottle necking. On one table there was this huge cathedral terrain piece that basically blocked half the width of the board forcing the invaders army to progress down one side of the 4' wide board. On the other section, the invaders army stalled against the defenders as the units in the front simply didn't move beyond the engagement.

I'm not totally sold on this plan just yet, but it has sufficient merit to it that it's worth serious consideration. I'm thinking of setting the tables up as 3 rows, each row being 24' long by 4' wide, placing rulers/meassuring tapes of some form along the edges of the board, and just assuming that there is no gap between the boards. Like this:

And then for the actual game it would be played long ways. There's also been a suggestion to put the defenders in the middle of the middle board and give them a 4' x 12' deployment area and have the invaders deployed around that area with a 12" no-mans land between them. Like I said, not totally sold on the idea just yet, but am considering it.

Another problem I had was the sewers. Yeah, they were a great idea and the finished product looked really good, but those were honestly the high points of the sewers. That they looked good and were an interesting idea. Here I think my original idea of having multiple levels and dozens of pipes through out the board would have saved the map. As it were, the sewers just created a bottle neck in the 2 cross overs and that bottle was plugged by 30 terminators. For next year I'm looking at options and idea for multiple levels to the sewers and having larger utility rooms and spill ways and the like.

Continue

post Apoc game report

Well... that was a helluva game! Lots of prep work, lots of great fun. Was great to get to see a god damned Ork GREAT GARGANT on the table! What? Don't beleive me? You want pics? Here they are!


One of the things I love about Apocalypse games is the diversity of them. A lot of times I see people talking about trying this different mission or using these special scenario and the usual response is something to the tune of "But then my [insert unit name] won't be effective" or something, so I don't get to see a lot in the way of non-special scenarios around here. With an Apoc game, since there's so much on the table, people are more willing to roll with basically anything at anytime.

In this game I threw a couple extras into it. The first thing I did was I included a War Wall, yes a WAR WALL! Not like the little tiny 4" tall castle wall either, no with the help of a friend I put a massive 12" tall war wall on the table! Yes, 12 inches tall! You want to get over this thing you're going to be flying! Period. You're going to be deep striking units, or running them in Storm Ravens or you're going to have jump pack troops starting their 12" move at the very base of the wall!

The War wall spanned 24 feet of table.

Second thing I did was a multi-board layout. In this particular case the second board was actually a sub-board and was meant to represent the sewers running under the edge of the city wall which the main board represented. These tight confined spaces were limiting to what units could operate down there. Can't fit a leman russ in the pipe? Can't use it down there. Had a scene were a single heavy flamer took out 5 Ork Nobs in a single blast.

The Sewers

I added a more themed objective in the form of a Bulk lander that was evacuating civilians. The Short version is the defenders would be able to earn 2x the turn number worth of victory points when they launch the lander. So if they launch the lander on Turn 4 they would get 8 victory points. But there are 2 'ifs' attached to this objective. Firstly the ship has to be able to fuel up, so they need to hold the Fuel depot. Secondly, a bulk lander isn't meant for combat. Compared to... well to any sort of combat vehicle is is extremely frail and easily destroyed. If the Invaders were able to destroy the lander they would get 3x the current turn worth of victory points, so if they destroy the lander on turn 3, the invaders would get 9 victory points. If the invaders destroyed the fuel depot then the defenders could only ever 2x the turn the fuel depot was destroyed in. So if the invaders destroyed the fuel depot in turn 2, and the defenders launched the lander in turn 3, the defenders would get 4 victory points. Not 6. Lastly I built the Orbital Defense Laser complex.

I wasn't really happy with the end result of the orbital lander.

Over all the game went very well and there are several things I learned from my prior apoc game I hosted last year. One of the big things I did that really helped me avoid some problems was being exceedingly clear about times and schedules. I told everyone, repeatedly that the game would begin at 11:00 am. I actually said "That means you have your models ready to be put on the table in your deployment zone. Not 'I'm turning onto the road leading to the shop at 11:05am and can then figure out my list when I get there.' start at 11:00am." I went a step further and established that if people were late, their forces would be put in reserves and the earliest they could bring their forces in would be turn 2, which was scheduled to begin at 2:00 pm. This helped get people there and prepared to start the game at the listed time.

The other thing I did that helped move the game along was setting a time limit of 60 minutes per turn. Period. If you didn't get to the assault phase by the end of 60 minutes, sorry. This really helped to force the teams to actually carry out their actions and not waste time.

There were lots of great scenes through out the game.

Ghazgul goes to meet the Emporers Champion in combat!

The Wall of Stompa march forward.

Warmaster of the Invaders Seth expresses his dislike of heavy flamers.

One of the best occurances of the game came in the 2nd turn, when an Ork Stompa using it's Lifta Droppa picked up a Land Raider Crusader, one filled to the brim with Black Templar mind you, and then dropped it on top of a Baneblade effectively knocking both out of the game for a turn.

I took over 200 pictures from the game and I can't possibly post all of them, so I will simply post this link to the photo bucket album.

Continue

Preperations continue

Wow, less then 1 month until the Apoc game! And my preparations continue for it! Still have a lot of work to do for it. Right now I'm focusing on the Orbital Defense Laser. I've posted images of that previously, but now I'm working on the rest of the building itself. I know I haven't posted much to explain what the intended end result will be, so let me do that:

This is a digital render of the building design. Obviously the hemisphere on the top of the building is meant to represent the Laser cannon I had been building. So I took a half ball from the design, and turned out this:

Well actually that, and this:

So now that I have the cannon itself built, I need to build the rest of the complex. So, where am I going with that?

Well I have part of it built:
Still have a lot of work to do on it, but it is taking shape.

Continue

cannon nearing completion

So got the Orbital defense laser cannon mostly built. Not finished with the over all project, I still need to build the rest of the building that's going to mount the cannon, but the cannon itself is mostly built:

The Defense laser cannon

I have managed to build the platform for the cannon mounting. The platform itself is comprised of 6 lengths of sheet styrene cross mounted so that 3 lengths went one direction while the other three are laid over top in a perpendicular direction.The tiles are then laid ontop of that platform. I've braced the bottom with 1/4" square styrene and that helps the platform maintain it's strength and support the cannon. I'm going to edge the platform in the Games Workshop city of Death fence parts which you can see the corner of already on there.

And then there's the cowling for the cannon mount itself. The cowling is made from one half of a hamster ball with various pieces attached to it to suggest that it's more then... well... half a hamster ball.

Continue

Preparing for apocalypse

So the clock is ticking as I continue to get ready for that Apocalypse game I'm hosting next month. Still have a lot of work to do but right now I'm focusing on building the Orbital Defense Laser for the game. I got the majority of the Cannon itself built today:

Continue

Death Watch detachment

And construction of the Kill Team Detachment has been completed (You know baring the possibility that I want to build a Death Watch Dreadnought just because I can, or I have that Land Speeder I could build. And a Storm. A little speedy transport wouldn't be unwelcome for a Death Watch team).

Anyway. 20 Death Watch marines with a watch captain:

 Placed in command of the detachment is a Death Watch Captain:

 Each Squad is lead by a Sergent. In this case, both Sergents are from the Ultramarines Chapter.

 Covering the heavy fire part of the detachment is a Quartet of heavy bolter armed marines:

4 Heavy Bolter armed marines provide the heavy support the rest of the detachment needs.

As with all Death Watch Kill teams, the detachment is comprised of Marines from various chapters. Here we see the 4 Fists (2 Imperial Fists, 2 Crimson fists).

2 Imperial fists along side 2 Crimson Fist marins

 2 Blood Angel marines:

2 Blood Angels serving in the Death Watch

 The members of the Death Watch detachment who come from the Aurora chapter

Aurora Marines serving in the Death Watch

The Ultramarines have 3 Brothers serving this detachment:

a trio of Ultramarines serving in the Death Watch

 While the Dark Angels have likewise provided capable team members

Dark Angel Death Watch members

The children of the death world Fenris, always eager for a fight, have provided members to the detachment:

2 Space Wolves in the Death Watch team

Honor bound to destroy those that would endanger the Imperium of Man, the Black Templars have a presence in the Death Watch.

With the cold methodical logic that makes them so dangerous, the Iron Hands provide fire support for their Death Watch Brothers:

I use very simple conversions through out the entire detachment to keep it as uniform as a Death Watch can reasonably be. Mainly part swaps. the Iron Hand marines are good examples of this as I use the torsos and one set of bionic legs from the Iron Hands upgrade kit for the pair of them.

There were only a hand full of 'free form' conversions through out the entire detachment, and by free form I mean I didn't simply decide to use a different part to accomplish the effect.


This Sergent is the first example. I use a pin in the left Wrist to angle the sword outward to signify him declaring a charge.

I angled the wrist to tilt the chainsword forward, as he signals a charge.

Another example is basically every one of the Heavy Bolter armed marines.

The right shoulder of the Heavy Bolter set up has the ammo belt coming right across the edge of the shoulder pad meaning the shoulder pad is actually one piece with the ammo feed and a couple cables. So I couldn't pop on the shoulder pad of the respective chapter. I had to literally cut away the old shoulder (minus the shoulder for the Black Shield mind you. He can just be a flat shoulder pad). I then had to use should segments from other arms (I used the shoulders from the tactical marines for reason I will explain in a bit) to replace the upper arm and then added the shoulder pad to that effectively rebuilding the bit with the chapter iconography.

Through out the entire detachment I wanted to keep the various little accoutrements and symbols that so characterize space marines. These include:

The Servo Skull on this Heavy Bolter Marine

 The bolter strap on this Iron Hands Marines
 

The tooth on the grip of the bolter of the marine on the right

The Templar on the left as been awarded a Marksmanship honor

The Marksmanship honor hanging from the barrel of the bolter on the left.

So, I mentioned I used the shoulders from the Tactical marines arms for replacing the shoulders of the heavy bolters and I alluded that there was a reason for this choice. Here's why:

In the new tactical kit, the hands are built into the bolters while the arms are separate pieces. You attach the hand and arm at the wrist. Nice option for conversions, but in this particular case it created a little bit of a head ache as it means I had to cut out the hands from the bolters, and then attach them to the Death Watch Bolters. 15 times... It gets a bit boring after a while. Anyway, This now means I have 15 arms, that I don't have hands to go with. So I further canalized 4 of the arms to rebuild the shoulders of the Heavy Bolters.

And there we have a 21 man Death Watch Detachment complete and ready for paint.


... you know, I do have all those extra Dreadnought pieces. I might just do a Death Watch Dread.

Continue

work and projects

Okay, so I'm still alive. I survived retail hell and I'm working on various projects again. Also got a really big project I'm working on, an Apocalypse game! I hosted an apoc game last year. It had its ups and it had its downs. The folks who played in it had a lot of fun and they've asked me if I was going to do another one. So I am! But I'm gonna push it out several months for several reasons. First reason being is giving people a chance to get ready for the game, mainly by getting all those models they want but can't really using in their armies. But also to give people a chance to get coordinated and synced up with one another in the game. Also I need time to get ready for it. I've got some plans that require the construction of specialized terrain. So  I need time to build that terrain. I've set up a website to provide a single location for interested parties to get information on the game.

In the last Apoc game I put together 3 4'x8' tables to create a 12'x8' table and saw about 35,000 points on the table. For this upcoming game I'm hoping to get 50,000+ points on the table. But I'm also going to be setting up a far larder board. So large that I've talked to the owner of Game Vault and have reserved the front gaming room for the battle. Which also gives me some 136 square feet of table top space to work with.

But the Apoc game isn't the only thing I'm working on. Well sort of anyway. I'm also working on some other 'cool' stuff that is being motivated for use in the Apoc battle. The first of these is a Death Watch detachment which will consist of 2 ten man Sternguard squads with a Captain. I ordered 2 tactical squads, Pedro Kantor model, 3 different chapter shoulder pads, a Death Watch conversion kit, and an Iron Hands conversion kit.Well the order came in and I've gotten to work on my plan for the detachment.

Deathwatch Captain

So I've converted Kantor into the Death Watch Captain. The biggest point of conversion on this model was the storm bolder arm. I speciffically wanted to have a Death Watch shoulder pad on the left shoulder. Originally I had hoped I would be able to shave down the existing shoulder so I could mount the shoulder pad on it but the way the arm is designed made this not viable. The ammo feed connects at the back of the shoulder in such a way that I would had to disconnect the ammo feed while the original shoulder pad came low enough on the arm that I would have to replace the upper arm anyway to keep details that were previously covered.

So I had to replace the entire upper arm. I used one of the straighter arms from the tactical marines sprue for the replacement.

For the rest of the detachment I'm going to build 20 marines, decked out to be representative of Stern Guard, with a varied assortment of chapter markings. I have the bits and pieces so that I'll be able to build 3 Ultramarines, 2 Iron Hands, 2 Crimson Fists, 2 Imperial Fists, 2 Black Templar, 2 Dark Angels, 2 Blood Angels, 2 Space Wolves, 2 Aurora Chapter Marines and 1 black shield to round out the two squads.

Another project I'm working on is Egyptian Chaos Marines:

Egypt styled Mauler and Forge Fiend

These will be a ForgeFiend and Mauler Fiend respectively. I'm going to mount the cannons on the sides of the Howdath of the WarSphynx.

Continue

Wow... back log much?

Okay, so it's been close to a month. Getting ready for that Apoc game really took it out of me, combined with several issues at work it wasn't an easy time leading up to the game itself and I didn't get a chance to rest or recover from it right away either.

Enter the Apocalypse!

But I've been able catch up at work, rest and recover. And now that I've got the time to do I'm back to talk about the apoc game. So it was a fairly straight forward setup with 2 teams of three players each, wielding approximately 17,000 points each.

Team Imperium

==VERSUS==

Team Xenos

Team Imperium came out to a solid 17,000 points while Team Xenos came in a bit lighter at about 12,000. To help shore up the difference I gave Team Xenos a selection of an a combination of any of the Apoc stratagems or any of the 5 super-heavy/Gargantuan creatures I brought which included a pair of Scratch Built war hound titans, a Shadow sword Super-heavy tank, a Greater Deamon of Khorne, and a Maurader bomber. They selected 1 War Hound, the ShadowSword, the Maurader and 2 additional Strategic Assets. So with teams more or less evened up, we began. There was simple too much happening  to go through the entire length of the game so I'll be posting  pictures of the high lights.

I had several surprises in store for the players. The first of which to be revealed revolved around a glowing rock in the middle of the field. Imperial Gaurdsman Marbo was the first to come into contact with it, though he was killed by Tau cannon fire in the process, his life energy was still used to awaken the entity that resided with in it:

A vengeful C'Tan construct emerges to wreak havoc on the battle field!

The C'Tan was fast to unleash its wrath on the closest targets, a trio of Dark Eldar Raiders. Though one of them were able to avoid the worst of the blast, the first two were wrecked and the embarked sadists were sent to their feet amidst the wreckage. The Dark Eldar quickly unleashed all their poisonous fury on the C'Tan and killed it though it's exploding body sent out an energy pulse that ravaged the near by Orks.

Across the battlefield a group of Ratling Snippers were quickly pinned down as they inadvertently activated an ancient store house of Combat automatons that burst free, their targeting optics searching the battlefield for any movement, not caring who the movement was from. Realizing that staying still was their own hope for survival the Ratlings froze where they were and preyed that the ancient constructs would find another target to engage.

Slowly, and with a ponderous certainty they began to track on the fast moving Dark Eldar and began to move away from the Ratlings. But the match was ill-suited to the lumbering machines as the quick footed warriors of Commorough simply danced around them until they were able to destroy the offending machines.

Hoping for force the Imperial forces away from their point of honor, Team Xenos then deployed their Maurader Bomber and dropped a monstrous payload of 6 bombs on the imperial forces holding the Cathedral, the bombing run inflicting serious casualties in its effort.

With both Dark Eldar forces and Tyranid forces behind their lines, Marneus Calgar himself stepped up to meet the threat and supported by squads of Terminators and Devatators engaged a monstrous Trygon in combat while high overhead Dark Eldar flyers and Space Marine Storm Talons engaged in combat.

The Tau attempt to follow up the destruction wrought by the Marauder by inserting a strike team.

Through out the game I had feed information to select players about "Army objectives". These were objectives that ONLY certain armies could claim. One example of these army Objectives were given to the Dark Angels. I supplied a model to Team Xenos and explained to the Dark Angels player that he is a Fallen and if you capture him you gain 6 victory points, but ONLY the Dark Angels player could claim that objective. If he was killed by anyone else there were no victory points from it. Annoyingly fate seemed determined to thwart the Sons of Caliban effort to capture the fallen as it wasn't until very late in the game that he was even able to get forces to the side of the board where the Fallen was hiding.

Look under the rock!

With a timely intervention from an Orbiting Chaos battleship, the Reaver titan was destroyed as a lance strike came crashing down through the skies to obliterate the machine god.

At the end of the day the Imperial forces held and the Xenos threat had either been eliminated or driven off!



Thoughts from the game:

It was a lot of fun to run, a royal pain to organize and overall a trying experience, kind of like climbing a mountain. You spend months training for it, which you hate. You get to the mountain and look up and think "Holy crap! What made me think this was a good idea?" and then you start climbing. A few hours in your huffing and panting as your muscles ache but you keep pushing on. It's not until you get to the top of the mountain and are able to look out that you can really appreciate the achievement.

Pretty similar situation here. "Hey it'll be cool to run an Apoc game!" turned into "Oh wow, I've got a lot of work to do for this." which became "oh god, why are Apoc games so much effort to put together?" which then became "Good lord, what made me think this was a good idea?!" but once the game actually got going and I got to see titans stomping across the battle field, and heroes making legends for themselves as they battled across the board I remembered why I had wanted to run an apoc game.

In short: I got bored with the battle missions in the rule book. I'm not necessarily interested in a fair fight, I want a fun one. And thats what Apoc gave me the chance to provide. While this was by no means the largest Apoc game I've ever seen seen (I know this years Apocalypticon clocked in like 600k points) it was a huge difference to a normal game of 40k with lots of thematic elements popping up, heroic charges, vain glorious defeats, and outrageous occurrences you won't see in a normal game.

I did manage to do two things that I feel made a big difference to the game and it's expediency though.

Firstly there were the Kill tokens. These were just 25mm bases with "1" painted on them. I made about 200 of them.

I then provided a cut to each player. So whenever that player earned a victory point, I tossed a counter in their cup. This made it easier to keep count of kills as the game went on, and turned out to be another benefit when the teams realized that they could use their victory points to bring back units (The Tyranid player brought back his hive tyrant like 4 times or something). So they just removed the number of counters they needed to bring back the units they wanted, handed them to me and I dropped them back in the box. No counters? Sorry, can't bring the unit. End of story.

The other thing that helped make the game work better, and I admit I wish I had done more with this idea, was the use of burning wreckage markers.

These helped the game for a couple reasons. Firstly they looked really cool, but they were also very useful to help keep track of what the effects were on various vehicles, which ones were wrecked, and which ones were destroyed outright.

I had mentioned I wish I had gone further with this idea. I mean there are lots more effects that I could have created for the game that I see in hind sight. One example would be during the 2nd turn when the Xenos team captain used the smoke barrage stratagem. It's basically a wall of smoke that lasts for one turn providing a cover save to everything on one side of it that is shot at from the opposite side. It would have been simply to make a dozen 6" segments of smoke that could have been laid across the line where the effect would be in effect. Another option would have been for vehicles with Smoke launchers. It's these sorts of extra efforts that can really help a game come alive and really make a difference.

One thing I did learn from running this game is never assume the players will know what needs to be done in prep for the game. I don't know how many times I said "I want to start the game at noon so I'm asking people to show up between 11 and noon ready to play" figuring that people would understand that I meant for them show up with a understanding of how many points worth of models they had. But apparently that didn't translate to "showing up with points totals" for the players. As they had to sit and figure out lists and total up points till after 12:30. So if you want to start at 12, you need to list out what the players need to have done to be ready to start at 12.

Another thing I learned is that if you can avoid it, don't put all the young people on one team while having all the not-young people on the opposing team. When I did the game I separated teams based on armies being played. Imperial Guard, and Space Marines on one team. Xenos and Chaos on the other. Which would up with 3 teenagers on one side, and 3 adults on the other putting team xenos at a noticeable disadvantage. If I were to do this again with the same teams, I think I would swap The non-Ultramarines Space Marine player with the Chaos Player to help balance out the teams a bit more.

Continue