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Just some quick progress pictures. One of my favourite new kits! Mutilators: Kravek Morne. Great model to work on. Now I'll work on the Defilers so you can be assured their points will go up to 300 ! :)

To me: Defiler = Shoot and assault Venomcrawler = Shoot and assault (lite) I've played two venomcrawlers in my lists probably 30+ times. I've played 2 Defilers and 1 Venomcrawler about 10 times. In a competitive environment, here's why I say Defilers are bang on now (before I thought they should be a few points less). As I said you need 2. That's 500 points of which potentially half of it isn't going to do much, or maybe a little. It's super hard to hide these, and I've had too many games where a 'knee cap' sticking out gets wrecked by an "oath of moment" target, Lancer, or whatever, it just happens so often. The game is so killy and now I see going into 11th "toe-in" is going to be a thing again. So you're going to get 'lanced' to death a lot more, same with the land fortress. But again, please play about half a dozen games, then weigh in. I know my first games changed my mind a bit. In a competitive environment where I don't know what I'm playing until everyone rolls off. there's some really good match ups and bad ones that have me swinging back and forth on points so that's why I feel where it sits now is probably right. Though I still say... EC are incredibly benefited by this more to me than standard CSM. I felt so bad after my last game I just put the EC away for a bit. Now I have people saying ' hey I want to play that EC list as an acid test for my "X" army" ! (Though I should add if your opponents are more of a narrative crowd this unit is definitely going to cause them headaches - I'm used to seeing large redundancy in big target killers. So I'm back to Kravek Morne, but the EC experiment showed me I have to toughen up a bit. I do have some slack units, and probably too many fun elite units. I need to put chosen in to level the field a bit. EDIT: I realize I never said something that I meant to that probably makes all of the Defiler talk moot! I believe 100% it's going up in points. I can't think of anything half decent that hasn't come out that didn't get a nerf or nerf and point boost. So even though I'm defending 250, I think it'll be 275 next points change. That would be my guess. The sad thing is for CSM I think their mandatory so they could make them 300, and everyone will take them. It's be the Forgefiends all over again.

Yes, I honestly think it's one of the most fun, well rounded, and (I think) properly costed units. I thought it was too much at first because of the landraider, and it does border on too high because a Landraider is actually more survivable and brings that high end anti-vehicle punch while delivering an assault unit. But that flexibility is something chaos needed so bad in their line of vehicles that just, as you said, was looking to get it from venom crawlers or these old tanks (which are okay). I think a lot of chaos players were just sick of the old tanks, I know I was since they've been in the codex literally since I started playing in the beginning of 3rd edition. So the Defiler went from a chump to a champ. The biggest difference is the shooting, and movement was horrid for defilers. I just find the movement rules better, and the old defiler never hit anything for me. But anyway I'm blabbing... the most important thing to me is it tightens up even mediocre lists, without putting them over the top. That said I'll repeat that what this does for my 'iron warriors' (which by definition is just Kravek Morne and Termies/Muts) vs. what it does for my Emperor's Children is quite a bit different.

Those metal warp talons really bring back memories. I still think they hold their own!

So I've been doing better with Warpstrike. It's been taking a while to get the nuance, and you really have to flex the enhancements/strats which revolve around coming in from reserves. The big thing has been the Defilers. I know this will be controversial but I feel like 2 are mandatory. I've had a few games trying my (nearly fully painted!) Emperor's Children.... what a difference. The games I've played where I've most convincingly crushed my opponent are with my EC and 2 Defilers. With my experiences, if you take the 2 Defilers out of the basic CSM the become incredibly mediocre. I don't think I could play base CSM anymore without them. The cost is controversial, but I think it's about right. The game is far too destructive to increase this cost, if your opponent is completely unprepared for a 'landraider' type unit that has a 3+ save, that's kind of on them. The reality is the Defiler does not typically get to use all aspects of its points before destruction. They're heavily focused down, and I've lost a Defiler each turn frequently. Those 'casino' canons always seem to go off on my Defilers. I've lost in turn 1 a Defiler to the Warp beast thing (thousand Sons) and the Land Fortress (Votann) with a ilttle assistance. Same with a Dark eldar unit with haywire mortals. I'm really hoping mortal wounds go down a bit in 11th. Anyway, EC just became much more fun for me. I now have a unit I'm 'okay' with sitting on homebase. Still not optimal, but for lack of Cultists this has always been a bone of contention for me. I've always got the option to go kill something with a Defiler, but to add this shooting to my monochromatic EC has been really nice. My last EC game I completely tabled a Votann opponent. That same vontann list vs my Iron Warriors (also 2 defilers) resulted in a close win for me. The IW struggle against stronger shooting, and they often can't swing has hard as true CC armies so you have to play this cagey mid ground game. Cheap pieces are probably the one area I give the IW an edge for trading on objectives. For the record, I've managed to dodge World Eaters with my EC so I haven't had that to deal with yet which is probably one of my hardest match ups locally.

Oh very possibly. Also I think you MUST have generic characters to take advantage of the repeated deployment of units. I only had a Termie Sorc with one of the enhancements. Though I have to be honest my favourite pieces are working in Fellhammer with the vehicles surrounding Vashtorr (preserving lone op). I hate to admit it but in 2+ games Vashtorr has been the star.

So for painting, I did some more models.. bad pictures I have to retake due to poor lighting. Anyway, I moved off of all the heavy oils, etc, and I tried a few with Pigments. That works really well, but too time consuming. Finally I just got a bunch of warpaints dark tone/brown tone and went heavy into it with some darker metal mix. A nice drybrush after with some Vallejo chrome (or anything similar) and it looked great. Glad to have found this shortcut! I've played 3 of my last 4 games using the Fellhammer Siege force, and key to this was Vashtor. He made it work and I used one of the defilers (old version.) I won 2 out of 3 of those games. This week I just played the new Warpstrike, I used Vashtor, and Kravek Morne (and 2 termie squads) and 1 of the new defilers. And I used the new Warpstrike Detachment. I got my butt handed to me. Let's just say my chevrons are pretty red this morning. It was a thorough beating against the Tsons. I have to admit I just despise the mortal wound meta. Some armies that can really leverage this just melt elite armies. Any time I had a plausible save, things felt 'okay'. At some points my Defiler took 12 Mortal wounds from one shot. I know this is a worst case scenario from that Warp Beast thing, but it's all over the table. I'm cowering with expensive units because Mortal wounds don't care how much you paid for a save and toughness.... it's all the same whether the target is 250 defiler, or a 50 point cultist squad. I brought in 2 of my termie squads in his second turn (one for free) including Kravek. I lost all terminators except the respective characters. I didn't realize how incredibly defensive I should have played them. So while I admit a tactical error here, I also had no idea that half my army would melt like this. The flamer Rubrics were brutal... Putting Termies on their invulv 20+ times will get through eventually. Combined with mortals from characters, etc, I didn't stand a chance. I did take down Magnus but honestly he was careless with Magnus as he didn't need him! It's true... I, the Iron Warrior player, was severely outshot. He had Preds, and the warp beast thing, and Psychic shooting and tons of AP2 flamers/bolters. This was a horrid match up. I was okay with this, I'm not expecting great things competitive from this army, but I was a bit disappointed in the detachment. I don't know if I really like it, but it's early. I actually felt like Fellhammer had more utility. Also I came off a game I barely won against Drukhari which was another match up with a TON of mortals. So yea, right now I'm bitter about Mortal wounds! I've always despised any mechanism that doesn't take into account the toughness/wound/save factor you've paid for on your dataslates.. especially the way TSons can manufacture mortal wounds on their own not to mention tank shock/grenades, etc. So I may try Warpstrike one more time, but I'm not a huge fan of the strats basically revolving around the whole just coming out of deepstrike idea, or being set up on the table. I'd also like to try new Mutilators, and a second Defiler. Go hard into the heavy assault mode supported by firepower.

Thanks for the thoughts. The heads do need a bit more work. I'm okay with the rest. I just really am trying to get the 'boring' stuff done so I can work on the new stuff! lol I have always really disliked painting vehicles. I added the face design last minute because there was damage to the hatches that just didn't sit well with me. I never really thought of the orientation being 'up' or 'down'..... If I have the time I'll just repaint the faces masks on the hatches. I think it was only about 20 minutes for each one.... again just to cover damage. And the spaced doors... I wish I had more... are the old forgeworld "extra armour" kits! Remember those? Back in the day when we used to have to pay points for extra armour. Hah- that brings back memories! The Oblits- very good eye. You are the only one to catch that subtle conversion (on line or in person)! That means that either A) no one recognizes the conversion, or B) more likely no one uses Oblits and has a clue how they should look! Nice work on yours... nice and subtle. I may have to steal some of this if I ever go above 2 Oblits. Thanks again for the thoughts.

Oh for sure Possessed are great for your army. I do take issue with Mutilators being the ugliest! I still think Doomrider is THE worst model I've ever owned. Not only for assembly (Half metal/half plastic) but also he looks like a kiss band reject... just horrid sculpt. But yea... Mutilators are up there. :D

Well I'm trying to get through some stuff here in a relatively short time so I'm looking at table top + if I can and then I'll have more time for the "new" stuff! Here we have a couple of new Rhino's good to go: And of course a couple of mandatory Oblits: More to come.... Next up, I think some Termies. Maybe lots of termies!

Now with a few more 11th ed terrain reveals, I still wonder how these models will fit in. Two Defilers will probably fill my zone enough that it makes anything with a larger footprint out of the action. The good thing is we have Venom Crawlers which have a nice small footprint for a vehicle. (I always use 2). So I don't even want to know what I spent in total on this stuff. But I also went in on the Combat Patrol and IW Conversion bits because it appears after the initial wave they really don't seem to restock these. EDIT: Mutilators. I actually love the new models. Believe it or not I had the metal ones, and then I bought the Failcast versions and I still have them! Horrible looking things. I like the new rules for them, and the way I see it is they will replace my Possessed function. Plus they have deepstrike (great for the new detachment) and the mortal wound rule seems to include whomever joins them, so Kravek is a natural fit... really any Termie HQ. I like that they'll have some clout while not taking up too much footprint room which I think is going to be an issue for me.

So good or bad I’d like to hear how your preorder went, and what you plan to do going forward. in Canada I tried a large retailer at midnight, the defiler loader up as sold out. Within minutes everything else including the book was sold out. next morning I knew a local retailer was going live at ~10 am with preorders. The Defiler loaded up as sold out. But I got Kravek, and an IW patrol box next I waited until noon when GW Canada would put up the preorders. I knew it would be bad if my local retailer ran out so fast as very few people play Chaos here. so I got super lucky and snagged a pair of defilers. I think the pre order page was hit so hard with bits I could barely load the cart screen and thought all was lost. I do wish GW would go back to Captchka as it made this much more tolerable and I’ll be telling my store manager again. anyway I said in another thread that I’m relaunching my new IW as a very old revisit to my longest played army. It’s a shame it took so long to get real army treatment! as far as the Defilers, I really don’t know if two is a reasonable number to field but we still play the odd mega battle and it looks like they are simplifying apoc games for 11th which is awesome. I hope you folks got what you wanted! If not, let’s hope wave 2 is around the corner….

Wow I love that. I completely forgot about the original Vindicator kit having those thick slab (real metal!) walls. The additional work is really nice. I wish I could take that kind of enjoyment out of the building process. :)

Thank you both! This is more than the army for me though. In fact I debated doing this at all, and it isn't the new model. It's the history I have with this game. I just recently lost someone close to me, and the last 12 months have been a lot of that for me, but through all of that I've had friends and this game as an incredible distraction. I've always loved painting, and the game itself has been up and down, but it's the friends, the armies, the hobby.... that's what it's all about. For me I've been know as the "Iron Warrior guy" around here for a very long time. I never really got into loyalists until my Ultra's years ago. It just always seemed at the GW store, and all the events there was NEVER enough bad guys. Another thing: A very good friend started his first ever loyalist marine army (we've been playing for about the same amount of time)! And he started Imperial Fists!!! So he's been pushing me too. This is about the journey. A VERY expensive journey, but hopefully it's fun nonetheless. I look forward to sharing it here.

The Iron Background: I need to start with a bit of history. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want history lost on this, and we have tons of new players around the world that may find some of this interesting. So a little about me; for those that don't know my first real army was Iron Warriors. Back before the Eye of Terror days (one of my favorite eras in playing 40k) I had a giant IW army that lead a few gigantic Mega battles. I'm talking gym floor kind of stuff. (Pictures of these battles from the early 2000's exist on the old "Canadian GW" website... before they combined everything.) This could get very long, so I'll try really hard to compress this.... Storm of Iron (the book) and Pete Haines were a big part of my being entrenched in the army (pun intended!) Further to that Perturabo was one of the very few 'chaos' Primarch's I could respect or even mildly understand way back then. Eye of Terror, Pete Haines: I want to mention something in the beginning of this; when EoT came out I started something... wow this is going back... I started something we called back in the day a "Yahoo Group". This was my way of getting REAL iron warrior players in talk group where we could plan our attacks in the campaign as all results were recorded and GW did write results down, and play with fiction/cannon around the event to reflect results! Anyway, the point was spies were everywhere and this was a way to get things controlled. One day, low and behold guess who joins my Yahoo Group? None other than Pete Haines. Pete, I thought, was an amazing guy and hobbiest. He literally brought life to the legion on the table with the once famous "Chapter Approved" articles giving actual siege presence to Iron Warriors and a metal kit would follow. Pete Haines was a little controversial. He had a large say in the state of the core 40K game back then. He was a champion of Chaos, and a fine one at that, but some of his changes to the core game became something that a few people took issue with. Eventually rumour has it he was let go, and his severance was a garage full of Rhinos (since they couldn't sell any due to the "Entanglement" rule. The Agripinaa Sector, and other fallen Forgeworlds: Anyway, there's so much here to talk about, but I MUST keep this brief or I risk losing the crowd here... So one more thing about the EoT and Chaos thing. We DID win Agripinaa (a forgeworld) and we did it with another private group of Deathguard. It was glorious! We had more help too, but we were the two main forces that coordinated this whole thing. And another Iron Warrior dude was quite prominent here as we combined our groups into a powerful, cohesive force. You may know him as "InsanePsychopath" or simply "IP" as I knew him, but he would change his user name to Iron-Daemon Forge. His real name is Jamie Farquhar. He passed away far too young in 2024. He was someone I wanted to see become a Mod here at the BnC and he did in stellar fashion. Rest in peace my fellow Warsmith. Jaimie was a real warrior with these guys and stuck them out through thick and thin. Modern Siegery: Fast forward and I sold approximately 3 Iron Warrior armies fully painted which ranged from 3000 pts to 10000 points of models each! The army got largely ignored, no rules really existed and even the "Warsmith" model lost all identity and everyone ignored Obliterators and their deathmetal "kiss" style hair band look and rules. But we've come full circle. Kravek Morne is here! A named Warsmith that seems to have got his proper hammer fitted during the 13th Black Crusade for excellence at Agripinaa itself! So here we are. Iron Warriors wise a new detachment has been announced, there is an upgrade sprue (sorely lacking in vehicle doors?) and Kravek. It's not a lot, and sure the Defiler, and Mutliators are cool, but certainly not locked into IW, but I will take it! This is the first bone thrown to the IW crowd for... too many years! So with this I launch into a new IW effort. All I have is my test Warpsmith to start me off. My last IW army (probably my 4th or 5th full army of IW) sold in 2023. So this is all I have. And that army was a terrible mess to paint with too many weathering processes that I want to simplify and reduce the materials: IE: oils, solutions, powers, etc. Trust me when I say this was super tough to keep short. But suffice to say we are back. Iron Within. Iron Without.