Escalation 500 game 1

I should mention that my opponent at this game was very new. As in: literally his first game ever.

My list:
Warboss "Kon Kushin "
-Bike
-Power klaw
-Finkin' Kap

Gretchin
No upgrades

Boyz
-Nob
--Power klaw
--Boss pole

Deffkopta
-Rokkit

Bikes
- +3 bikers
-Nob
--big choppa
--boss pole

Looted Wagon
-Kill kannon
-X3 Rokkit launchas
-Ram

His list:
Wolf Lord
-Wolf claw
-Combi melta

Grey hunters
-Power fist

Grey hunters
-no upgrades (Wolf Lord goes here)

Thunderwolf cavalry
-no upgrades

The game was tactical escalation.
I forgot to use da Finkin Kap completely
He deployed both units of hunters in some tall ruins in the right corner of his zone and his cavalry in the on the left.
I deployed my boyz in the wagon on the left of my map (facing the thundercav) then the rest of my stuff at the maximum distance forward on my right (facing grey hunters).

He goes first, moves the cavalry up and ends the turn.

I move up my kopta to an objective to score for the turn, shimmy my bikes up 12 inches, and start a congo line of grots between two objectives. I completely forgot to move my wagon and in the shooting phase was reminded of that when some git inside pushed the big red button and caused the wagon to lurch forward over terrain for 6 inches. The ram helped not get stuck, definitely worth the 5 points. For the rest of my shooting phase, I turbo my bikes up, and ran the grots, keeping the kopta next to the objective and in cover.
I score the objective my kopta was sitting on.

His turn 2, he shuffled the hunter squad with the Lord around the corner of his ruin and took a couple of bolter shots at my bikes with both units, killing one bike. The thundercav moved forward, sticking to some trees for cover, but couldn't quite get close enough to charge. He ends the turn without scoring.

My turn 2, i pull two objective cards, one is currently controlled by grots, the other is within reach of the wagon. I mistakenly disembark my boys from the wagon, thinking i had enough range to charge this turn, and then move my bikes closer to the grey hunter squad that's on the ground. I forgo shooting with my bikes so i can make my charge distance easier (only one grey hunter was visible, the others were wrapped around the corner of the ruin). i took a shot with my killkannon at the thundercav, expecting to completely miss and scatter horribly but instead got 3 hits! Scored 2 wounds and nuked one if the cav right off the table. In the assault, i charged.with my bikes, taking no loses in overwatch, and killing a hunter with my hammers of wrath. Now, something i had forgotten, was that his Wolf Lord with a wolf claw was in the unit... The Lord rolled like a god, hitting and killing 4 of my bikers and putting a wound on my nob, the grey hunters put another 2 wounds on Kushin because i didn't want to lose more attacks... Swinging back, i wiff with my boy bikers and nob, and Kushin knocks the hunters unit down to the wolf lord and one hunter thanks to his klaw. Passing leadership, we stay stuck in. End of turn, i capture both my objectives.

His turn 3, he moves his cav up towards my boys to charge them, and moves his other unit of grey hunters off the ruin to get closer to our close combat. He skips his shooting and goes right for the assault phase.
Now, at this point, i realize how stupid of me it was to charge the grey hunter unit with the lord in there. I was kicking myself because i knew i should've just kited them and shot them every turn. But i didn't, so now i have to deal with the real possibility of his lord tickling Kushin to death with his wolf claw, and then taking out the rest of my boys with what's left and his fresh grey hunter unit thats just about to charge.
Back to the game: he fails the charge distance for his other unit of hunters! (Sigh of relief) and makes the distance to get in with my boys with his thundercav. Overwatch gives me nothing, and the cav with all their attacks wipe my unit down to a single boy and the nob at full health. The nob strikes with his klaw and takes a eound off of each rider. End of combat, i pass morale! Thanks mob rule! (Probably never going to say that again.)
Now, at the important combat, the wolf Lord completely misses with every single attack, even after master crafted (unsure of how he got this, but it didn't help!) and the grey hunter did the same! Kushin cracked his knuckles and slaughtered the hunter and the Lord while laughing his ass off, winning the assault, and consolidating back away from the other hunter squad (they have a power fist in there, afterall.) he ends the turn without scoring anything again.

My turn 3: i pull 3 objectives for markers i can grab (one is held by my grots, the other my wagon again, and the third can be grabbed by my kopter). I move and turbo boost the kopter to the objective, and move my bikes around the grey hunters to get a good angle on them to snipe the sargent out, which i do, taking another hunter with him. In the assault phase, i just charge them since there's nothing to worry about anymore and sweep them off the table. As for my nob with the thundercav, i guess the cav felt the Lord dying and just felt such grief that they only succeeded in killing the boy and taking a wound off the nob (whew, that's close! Another time i fully expected to die outright.) and the nob swept through the cav, WINNING assault, and giving me a win for the game by tabling Gauntlets.

Pretty crazy game, and a great one to start learning Orks with! I definitely made mistakes, but Lady Luck forgave them.

Escalation League: 500 point level introduction

Whew! Crazy weekend, finally getting the chance to write it all down.
Before I get into the meat of the stuff, i want to shout out to Papabear for hosting the event and for opening house to everyone.
About ten minutes before leaving, General Baites suggested I alter my list a touch. I took his advice and dropped a deffkopta and the boyz' trukk in exchange for a Looted wagon with a kill kannon.
I got the chance to play two games on Saturday, one against a new member of the group (and new to wargmaing as a whole) who I shall dub Gauntlet. Gauntlet was starting out completely new and was starting out with Space Wolves.
The other game I played was aginst Papabear himself bringing his Tau.
Im going to post each game separately as a battle report, so I'm not going to give anything away here.
Enjoy the reports!

Paint update!

Due to the "no paint, no play" rule instigated by Papabear for the escalation league. I've had to finish Kon Kushin.
Can't wait to crush some gitz on the table on Saturday!

DeffKoptas

Just finished these guys up tonight. I had a lot of fun painting them (I know, ME of all people painting, right?) and genuinely enjoy the freedom Orks bring to the table when it comes to conversions and painting.
As you can see, these guys are not stanfard issue by any means. I followed the same basic construction for both:
The starting point was finding the base for the thing to glue everything else to. Deadbolt threw an old pewter killa kan into the deal when I bought the bulk of my Orks from him, and I had little intention of using them, so I figured why not?
The pilot is the driver model from a Trukk that weren't in use yet, and the tail fins are also from Trukks: they're one of the cross beams from the bed of the trukk cut in half and put at the back end. Then I put a vehicle gun mount at the end and so it works. Even has some rivets in the piece i painted as yellow lights. The rotor engine is one of the killa kan's legs tured upside down with some pieces of sprue glued in for the rotor blades
I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I had making the things, can't wait to use em and i hope i gave you an idea or two how to spruce up your own stuff.

Great Unclean One:

This is my Great Unclean One (or Winged Daemon Prince). Built him the day after Christmas out of a Tree Man from Sigmar's Wood Elves. The wings are from a Flamespyre Phoenix. The scythe head is made from plastic mould stuff that my wonderful sister gave me for Christmas as well. Currently thinking for paint that he'll just be rotting wood and the wings will be white on the top and tips and fade into greens, browns and some dark greys as the wonderful gifts of Nurgle seep and coat it.

In my fluff, he represents the GUO that is the patriarch of the particular strain of spores responsible for the marines of the Iron Host to become wgat they are now.

Cypher

This guy is straight up one of my favorite characters in the setting.
Not only do zero people actually know who he is, he is constantly giving the Dark Angels the middle finger, and he's on some mysterious quest involving a sword that no body recognizes.
His statline is pretty sweet too, and even matches his fluff!
For those of you who don't know, Cypher has his own dataslate which gives all his stats and wargear, as well as the means to field him: either as a slotless HQ for any human faction (Chaos or Loyalist, Guard or Marine). Except the Dark Angels, or as part of his own formation where he grabs up to three units of Chaos Chosen to represent some of The Fallen he has gathered.
He has an extended range bolt pistol, and a plasma pistol which lacks the 'gets hot!' rule and even comes with BS10 and a nifty rule that lets him shoot each gun twice in The same shooting round.
He has infiltrate, eternal warrior, ATSKNF, hit and run, and his sword (which is not a melee weapon) gives him shrouded.
Instead of the sword strapped to his back, Cypher instead prefers to use his pistols in close combat: half of his three attacks (four because of two pistols) are at the same profile of a bolt pistol, and the remainder as a plasma pistol... At I8, WS7 with another fun rule that lets him overwatch at full ballistic skill, which again, is 10 for the effect full on twin-linked at BS5 goodness. One does not simply mess with the Lord of The Fallen when he has a decent chance to drop 3 terminators before they can even blink
Now then, I've used Cypher in a number of games, each time he acts like a massive thorn in my opponent's side all game long.
In my last game, against Space Wolves (he had 2 units of thunderwolf cavalry), Cypher and his lone unit of 6 Chosen (who all had a melta gun), infiltrated and gunned down half a unit of thunder cav (3 of them) in the first wave of shooting, taking down another when charged on the next turn, but in return losing all but Cypher and one Chosen. Hit and Run helped me here, and on my next turn, all the stormshield saves were made. It wasn't until my opponent's turn 3 where he charged Cypher again with his now lonely thunder cav rider, and lost it in overwatch, which freed me to shoot up his terminators that dropped down next to Cypher just that turn. 3 termie deaths later, and in turn 4, I make the bone headed mistake of charging into the terminators with Cypher, thinking ill be able to hit better than I did, and ended up losing him.
Anyway, moral of the story: Cypher can be a massive pain in the butt for anyone hoping to get a unit of heavy infantry into the frey. Cypher simply won't allow it, and is rather cost effective for everything he does and allows, he's a great distraction unit that packs a very big punch.
On another note, when building my Cypher model, I chose to go the route of him being lost in The Warp for a bit, so upon exiting he grew a pair of feathered wings.
The wings on the model are from the Blood Angels Sanguinor kit, the sword and backpack are off the Lord from the Dark Vengeance set. Bolt pistol is from the Chaos Raptors kit, and the body, head, plasma pistol and pauldrons are all from the Dark Angels Veteran kit. Very fun project that has been worth every penny.
So gawk and enjoy my friends.

Escalation list, week 1: 500 points

The Escalation League is supposed to be for friendly, fluffy gameplay, so I'm using it as an opportunity to use Kon Kushin as my warlord as much as possible.

HQ:
Warboss 60
Bike
Power Klaw
Da Finkin' Kap
120p

Troops:
Gretchin 35
No Upgrades
35p

Boyz 60
+1 boy
Nob
-Boss Pole
-Power Klaw
-Shoota
Trukk
136p

Fast Attack:
Deffkopta 30
Twin-Linked Rokkit Launcha
30p

Deffkopta 30
Twin-Linked Rokkit Launcha
30p

Warbikers: 54
+3
Nob
-Boss Pole
-Power Klaw
148

Total: 499

The gist of this army is to have the Grots stay back and hold some objectives, the Koptas split off and grab objectives on the flanks which hopefully causing enough of a distraction for my Bikes and Trukk full of boyz to run up and hit stuff. My Bikes will try to get rear armor on vehicles, or Kushin can break off and use the Ork universal can opener: the Power Klaw, to do the same thing. My Boyz will rush up and try to tie something down for a bit, hopefully whatever my opponent has that's fast moving. With any luck, my Trukk will survive and will tank shock whatever it can while blocking line of sight to what needs to be blocked.
As for my warlord trait that's locked in, starting with this game, I've decided to take the Bellowing Tyrant trait that gives my any friendly model within a foot of Kushin a reroll to failed morale checks, which, as I've learned, is a simply massive boon in this army. Plus, the finkin' kap will definitely give me even more options to play with, so hopefully things go pretty well. Here's hoping!

Escalation League week 1

So, Crispy and I have joined a league. First game is this Saturday starting all the way at 500 points. He's using this as an excuse to play with units he hasn't before, and I'm building up my Orks for this. Deep down though, I feel the both of us have needed someone fresh to play, and boy does this little group have that.
I found a meetup group in my area, the first meeting was last month. Crispy, myself, and one other kid, just starting out in the game, were the only ones that showed up.
We sat and talked and made sure none of us were serial killers. Having established that, we broke into 2v2 teams and broke out the models.
Our leader, Papabear, has been teaching his 9 year old son how to play and openly admitted to being out of practice. He's gonna be running his Tau, so he shouldn't have too much difficulty getting back into the swing of things.
The other kid, who's name escapes me, plays'Crons. But before you rage, he also has made his army out of legos, so he has a coolness factor to tone down the emotions.
I feel this is going to be a grwat experience, having never before been in a league, and having very little experience in games smaller than the 1000 point mark, means the first few rounds will certainly be a challenge for me.
Papabear, upon gawking at my unpainted models, has issued a decree that all models must have at least 3 colors of paint to them to be eligible for play... Naturally, this has been a bit of a hurdle as I've had very little experience in that, I spend my hobby time building my models and thinking about their stories, not their color schemes, so it's been a nice addition to the hobby to be thinking of what color goes where. Luckily, I got some great tips from Deadbolt, who sold me quite a bit of his Orks for a very decent price.
Another feature of our league, though still up for debate, is the warlord traits. The idea is that each player's warlord is the same character throughout the campaign unless they permanently die (upon losing their last wound, roll a d6, on a 5 or 6 they are gone and cannot be used anymore). The benefit of this, is that the players get to pick, not roll, our warlord traits. This, and going with the theme of having a recurring character, means that the trait will stay with that character until death, so armies can be planned accordingly.
I have gone through many drafts of my list, and my warlord trait choices and have decided on where to go. Since I haven't had any gameplay experience as or even against Orks, I have found gauging the power of units to be pretty hard, so here's hoping things go well. I've spent a lot of time on dakkadakka.com hoping for advice and have gotten some decent feedback, and as always, Crispy and now Deadbolt, have offered much as well, which means I now hope that I don't get paired with Crispy in the first round. with him knowing my whole strategy, it would be quite an uphill fight.
Anyway, that's it for this post, I'll be back with more, stay tuned.

Lost in the Warp, Communications: reestablished

Apologies, everyone. Things have been crazy over here and writing here had slipped my mind, but I'm back and ready to roll.
In the time that's passed, I have picked up quite a few Orks from my new friend, Deadbolt, who was introduced to my by Crispy Crusader. I've also experimented a bit in running my Chaos Marines from the Space Wolf codex, more on that later.
Crispy and I have also since joined an escalation league, so be expecting to hear about that in the coming weeks.
Anyway, welcome back and thanks for sticking with me.
-Voidraven