Rogue

Hello. I don't think this is rules fishing, but ignore me if it is. I'm curious to know what the highest 'sustained hits x' number is. I don't need to know entire weapon profiles or the like, just the sustained hits number. It's for some maths I'm playing around with. Thanks.

And whilst I'm on a roll - here are three aberrants, taking me to 15 in total (not entirely sure why I stalled on a dozen, but there we are).

A trio of aberrants. For some reason, I'd ended up with a dozen painted, so this rounds me out to 15. Coupled with August's biophagi, it opens up the possibility of three rockgrinders full of lethal hits aberrants :)

They look great. That's a very nice blue tone, and the shading on the skin looks so smooth.

Hmm. In my defence, I have managed to paint the complete HeroQuest set, a BloodBowl team, a Ridgerunner and a Goliath Rockgrinder since I last posted.... And most recently, these two 'assistants' to my Biophagus - they're extra Biophagi in game-terms, but there's only space for one mad scientist in the Brotherhood (and I liked the look of the killteam arms).

I've had a few quiet days, and have spent some of the time putting together a pair of trainee Biophagi (see here with their boss). It means I can make more use of the Biosanctic detachment rules. (The arms are from the broodbrother killteam kit; the bodies are standard neophytes.)

Hey Ulfast - thanks for asking. There's been a lot going on recently. On the positive side, I've been painting a lot of not-40k stuff - all of the HeroQuest box, and I'm currently finishing off a Wood Elf BloodBowl team (just a treeman to go (and a pair of back-up catchers, if I can ever track them down on ebay)). On the less positive side, life's been a struggle for a while, and that's really dented my capacity for things like blogs and updates. Even painting and playing has been hard work. The Brotherhood is still ticking over, and continues to fight off the vanguard tendrils of an approaching hive fleet; and hopefully I'll find the energy at some point to pick up some of the extras again.

Hello, Guard players. I'm hoping you can help me out with a bit of list-building. A couple of friends and I are going to play a mini-league between ourselves, with a couple of 1250 point forces each. I have a small GSC Brood Brothers contingent, and figure I can use it as my second force, but I have very little tabletop experience with Guard since maybe 3rd edition. Here's what I have. 3 Leman Russ tanks - all three have magnetised sponsons and hull weapons. Two have magnetised turrets (the standard Russ options, not the demolisher ones); one doesn't - that one is fixed as a battle-cannon. 30 infantry with lasguns 1 officer 2 commissars 1 tech-priest 1 standard bearer 3 grenade launchers 3 mortars I could also potentially borrow some of my GSC models if there's a good match - my magus could be a primaris psyker, for example - as it would fit the general theme of a Cult-infiltrated Guard regiment. My plan 1 tank commander 2 Leman Russ tanks Tech-priest The officer and both commissars would each lead a unit of 10 guardsmen (Krieg-flavour, because mindless self-sacrifice hits those GSC buttons again). 3 chimeras (that I don't yet have, but could proxy short-term), because having mechanised infantry in support of the tanks makes sense in my head. That comes to 1215, leaving 35 points spare for juggling or enhancements. I'm thinking either Hammer of the Emperor (because tanks), or Combined Arms (because tanks and infantry). I'm not aiming for finely-tuned tournament list. Equally, I don't want it to be a complete mess that'll get rolled over in every game. So, what do you think? Any advice/criticism would be appreciated.

In the context of playing against friends (rather than pick-up games against strangers), I've found that fun games have been ones that take the opponent's limitations into consideration. For example, one of my regular opponents is building up a Tyranid force. Until recently, he didn't have much that could deal with my heavier vehicles. Once we'd realised that, I stopped including them in my lists (until just recently, as he's now got some anti-armour bugs). At the same time, he didn't just lean into an anti-infantry build (knowing that that's what I'd have to bring). In that sense, part of the list design process is thinking about your opponent's army at a practical level. Yes, Tyranids (as a faction) can deal with armour, but these Tyranids can't, so going full Outlander Claw isn't going to produce a fun game.

I wonder if the idea of 'tax' units is amplified in armies that have more datasheets (looking at you, marines). I only really play Genestealer Cults at the moment, so that's my reference point. If you ignore characters we only have ten units - three battleline, a transport and six others. So our battleline units do things that our other units either don't do as well, don't do as cheaply, or just don't do at all. And perhaps more to the point, the battleline units do things that you almost always want somewhere in your list - they're valuable as utility units, even when you're skewing the rest of the list into something specific. My guess is that, with something like marines, it's always possible to look at tactical squads and say, "Yeah, but unit X does that better" - you have so many units to choose from that there'll always be something better suited to your needs.

The Determining Visibility section of the rules (under Core Concepts) says that "... an observing model can see through other models in its unit, ..." So can you see (and fire) through models in the same unit, but not through other friendly models in other units. I realise that wasn't the original question, but it's one that's come up in a couple of my games recently.

The movement section of the rules (The Movement Phase: 1. Move units) tells us you can make a Normal move, Advance or Remain Stationary. A Normal move allows you to move up to your movement value, which would include moving 0". I think interpreting a Normal move as Remaining Stationary is playing very fast and loose with the rules, given that Remain Stationary is a specific thing (with capitals), and not just an absence of movement.

I think that idea of "What you're used to" has a big effect here. I mentioned being surprised by how much terrain was on the table at a recent tournament (pleasantly surprised, as it was more than I'd usually use, and so gave me much more cover than I'm used to). A friend of mine (playing Tyranids) kept losing to his regular Imperial Guard opponent, and wasn't sure why - he figured it was just because he was relatively new to the game. Turns out they were just playing with far too little LoS -blocking terrain. Not because of ill intentions on anyone's part, because that's what the opponent was used to and tended to set up for games. At some point, this friend and I played a doubles games into the Guard (with more Guard allied in). I was quite insistent on giving several LoS-blocking pieces around the centre of the table; the Guard player was surprised to find that his super-heavy tank, which was parked in his deployment zone, didn't have targets every turn. He was so used to playing with minimal terrain that he just expected that he could sit and shoot all game long. No wonder the Tyranids wee struggling to win. Again, I'm not suggesting shenanigans here - just if you mostly play garage-hamner in a small group, what's normal to you might be very different to what the designers intended or what most people play.

Felt about right. My doubles partner and I were pretty had three ridgerunners and three doomstalkers between us. We were able to hide them (the runners especially), and couldn't always line up targets, but that's what you want, generally speaking - if we want to shoot things, we need to consider position and anticipate enemy movement; it shouldn't be a shooting gallery. We faced Chaos armigers, a lancer grav-tank, dreadnoughts, a Necron ark, and a big knight across the event, and none of them had significant issues.

I always thought I had a lot of terrain on my table - four of the old Imperial Sector buildings, the killteam cathedral, lots of Mechanicus bits, half a dozen containers - until I played in a small doubles tournament at my FLGS last month. They had two big three-sided ruins in the middle, huge pieces in each deployment zone, and small bits elsewhere. Suddenly, I could deploy all my infiltrators in cover - like, ten genestealers and a patriarch completely hidden unless my opponent was practically in my deployment zone. And there were whole areas of the board that were hard to target without significant repositioning. It felt like a different game. And that's coming from someone who thought there was a lot of terrain on my own table. Apparently not.