Jetbag Assembled

A few months of scattered attention, a couple tubes of krazy glue, and more than one xacto wound later, the jetbag has assembled itself. I still need to get two more vypers and put the headbands on the shining spears, but I'm primed to start priming the main warhost here in the next couple weeks. I can't glue much together yet, since I still want to be able to get under all the nosepieces and cockpit canopies. Given my penchant for starting sloppy I need a little room to work and clean up the details later. I'm also planning on swapping out all the big bases for medium sized ones on all the jetbikes.

Saim Hann Redux #527.2

After their first 2000 point game last week against c2’s chaos, I want to playtest a new arrangement with my Saim Hann army that changes the warlocks to shining spears and the farseer to an autarch. In order to use the warlocks’ destructor ability, they really had to get in close, which meant getting assaulted by any decently fast unit, which in turn meant they went squish after maybe two turns. Even wounding on 2’s, they just couldn’t get the job done with only 1 girlyman attack each. The spears’ higher initiative and high strength power weapons might work out a little bit better, plus they’re even a little cheaper. Sure, the power weapon effect lasts only for the initial assault, but hell at least they can hit and run! I figure I have enough anti-tank and a decent amount of anti-horde, so I wanted to throw a different kind of threat in the mix. I think assaulting is more fitting to the wild rider theme than a farseer and warlocks anyway. The autarch can ride with the spears, buffing their leadership, adding attacks, and getting the hit and run ability in return. Or, if necessary, he can break off and melta something to slag.

I’m going to use my warlock models for shining spears, rip one of the arms off and replace it with the jetbike autarch’s right arm to make the exarch’s star lance. Then I’m going to take the farseer off his bike, mount a fusion gun under the canopy, and put the metal autarch on there with another dire avenger spear arm to represent his laser lance. Other than his singing spear, I wasn’t really digging my farseer model anyway; the flow from Eldrad’s body to the jetbiker arms and legs was sort of weenie looking. I’ll keep him around for later. I know the vypers are fragile and expensive, but I figure by adding stones, fields, and cannons to them, stunned and weapon destroyed results no longer have a drastic effect, so instead of 50% chance of them being destroyed or neutered for each glance, there’s only a 25% chance. Maybe later if I get a hold of two more of them, I’ll drop all the upgrades and go for higher numbers of main weapons instead. So, without further ado:

edit: I added in two more vypers, dropped all their holofields as well as the shuriken cannons from the ones with bright lances, changed the shining spears' exarch to have a normal laser lance and a shuriken cannon, and changed the wave serpent's scatter lasers to shuriken cannons.

Autarch – jetbike, mandiblasters, laser lance, fusion gun

5 x 3 Guardian Jetbikes – 1 shuriken cannon each

10 Dire Avengers – Exarch with twin avenger catapults and bladestorm
Wave Serpent – twin-linked shuriken cannon, shuriken cannon

3 Vypers – star cannons, shuriken cannons, spirit stones

3 Vypers – bright lances, spirit stones

4 Singing Spears – Exarch with shuriken cannon, skilled rider, and withdraw

3 Fire Prisms – holofields, spirit stones

Cut and Paste

For some reason I glitched out and didn't realize there was a Saturday tourney at BFG this weekend; I hear there was a 3-monolith army there and no big bugs at all. Interesting shift in the meta, wish I'd been there.

Instead I was impatiently mucking about with jetbikes today, concentrating mainly on converting shuriken cannons to mount up to 6 jetbikes and 2 vypers. With the bikes, I first made a couple of cuts to the original weapon, sawed off the cone portions of the shuriken catapult mounts, and put the catapult barrel on one side and the ammo canister on the other. There were actually 2 different versions of the cannon but they both looked pretty cool underslung in this manner. For the Vypers, I put the cannon barrel in the place of the center stabilizer that normally barely pokes out from underneath the front canopy.

I also toyed around with an old cut up Eldrad model I had in the bitz box, sawing it up even further and attaching it to guardian rider legs to mount him on a bike. His sword arm was cut off and replaced with a guardian arm, and his staff top was replaced by the blade and handle-guard from the metal jetbike autarch model to make a singing spear. On the lower half of the staff I put the little power generator from the base of the bike autarch's laser lance. I cut in deep lines in his bike's wings to set his ride apart a little bit from the rest of the troops. I think he's going to look pretty cool, although I still have to dig out the dreaded greenstuff to clean up his robes.

So, yeah, I was thinking I'd put off the Wild Riders until I was done painting Tyranids, but it looks like that's going to be pretty difficult.

Here's the latest 1500 list I'm working with, updated after several helpful comments from visitors. It's got 11 scoring units, some good anti-vehicle and anti-horde, great on movement, and the big guns are generally resilient. At the very least it should be a lot of fun!

HQ

Farseer - jetbike, singing spear, guide, doom, runes of warding, spirit stones

TROOPS

3 Guardian Jetbikes - 1 shuriken cannon
Warlock - jetbike, destructor, singing spear

3 Guardian Jetbikes - 1 shuriken cannon

3 Guardian Jetbikes - 1 shuriken cannon

3 Guardian Jetbikes - 1 shuriken cannon

3 Guardian Jetbikes - 1 shuriken cannon

3 Guardian Jetbikes - 1 shuriken cannon

FAST ATTACK

2 Vypers - 2 starcannons, 2 spirit stones

2 Vypers - 2 bright lances, 2 spirit stones

HEAVY SUPPORT

Fire Prism - holofields, spirit stones

Fire Prism - holofields, spirit stones

Fire Prism - holofields, spirit stones

To Cheese or Not To Cheese

Holo-fields are pretty expensive, and I worry that putting them on Vypers is like putting lipstick on a pig. Fritz at Way of Saim Hann uses them on his 3 squadrons to what sounds like good effect, and quickly put them back on for good after he played a few games without them. Still, if I take them off, I can just about afford to fit a third Fire Prism in my 1500 list! What's not to like about that?

Well, there's the one thing: cries of cheese. The main 3-falcon player in town is constantly under attack for using 3 gravtanks, and though I've experienced the frustration of losing to that list myself, I don't really begrudge him for what is technically a legal (and probably fun) list. My question is this: does the fact that they're Fire Prisms and not Falcons make the list less cheesy, ie, will people keep their pouty little mouths shut? Somehow I doubt it. I love Fire Prisms and I've never seen anyone using three before, and only rarely have I seen two in the same list (around the Austin community anyways). I'm drooling just thinking about bank-shooting three Prism cannons together to get that S7 AP2 large blast! Also I want to see if the triple focus(sed) beam creates an actual black hole on the table. I mean, it's AP0! What does that even mean?

Kingsley emailed me with a few ideas, including dropping those holo-fields, but probably the most interesting notion was changing the 3 squads of 6 jetbikes to 6 squads of 3. I'll probably give this a whirl starting out. Not only will this give me more scoring units (very important for alpha missions), but it will make them easier to hide and thus make their little pop-up attacks easier to manage.

Eldar Jetbag

Today I finally got my first Apocalypse formation together: the Eldar Jetbag. GW is still putting the final touches on the formal datasheet, but from what I understand, deploying a full Jetbag lets you scatter all the pieces out across the entire board, and any model it touches is immediately dipped in brake fluid and scrubbed to its original pre-painted state. How cruel the arcane magicks of the Eldar are!

Obviously I kid. This is what 2 Windrider Hosts look like cut out of the sprues. Reassembled (over the next several months) they will constitute the larger part of my next project: Saim Hann. Below is my initial 1500 list that I will use to cut my teeth. I anticipate the learning curve will be fairly steep with such a small and delicate army, but I've always wanted to field a bike force and finally decided to go with an Eldar version. The 2000 list will most likely add Wave Serpent-ed Dire Avengers along with either Warp Spiders or possibly a small but expensive Warlock bike squad with enhance, multiple destructors, and singing spears. As an aside, I have a great T-shirt idea that I really need to put together on Cafepress. More on that later. Also let me point your attention to an interesting Saim Hann blog that I recently found and added to my links section in the sidebar. Nice guy, cool army, and great pictures from the Baltimore GT.

HQ

Farseer - jetbike, singing spear, spirit stones, runes of warding and witnessing, guide, mind war

TROOPS

6 Guardian Jetbikes - 2 shuriken cannons
1 Warlock - jetbike, singing spear, destructor

6 Guardian Jetbikes - 2 shuriken cannons

6 Guardian Jetbikes - 2 shuriken cannons

FAST ATTACK

2 Vypers - 2 scatter lasers, 2 shuriken cannons, holofields, spirit stones

2 Vypers - 2 bright lances, 2 shuriken cannons, holofields, spirit stones

HEAVY SUPPORT

Fire Prism - holofields, spirit stones

Fire Prism - holofields, spirit stones