Power from Paint: Ready to Raid

Welcome once again my fellow Archons. Today is a bonus mid-week post, as I've finished the painting on the last model for my Dark Eldar raiding party for Saturday's Octoberfest.

It's the obligatory finished army picture post (and some tournament ramblings of course)!

Ready to Rumble!

Here are some more detailed shots of the various units. First up the Archon:

HQ: Archon

Next up are the 3 squads of Kabalite Warriors:

Troops: 3x Kabalite Warriors. One lucky mook has a blaster

These all get to scoot about the battle field in Venom Dedicated Transports (which also bring a lot of anti-infantry firepower with their splinter cannons).

Dedicated Transports: Venoms

The trio of ravagers provide a lot of anti-tank and anti-heavy infantry firepower:

Heavy Support: Ravagers

And finally we have the latest addition, fresh from the painting table; the Voidraven Bomber.

Flyer: Voidraven Bomber

The Bomber was a fun kit to assemble, and very enjoyable to paint. I'm glad I managed to put aside a good block of time to work on it, rather than picking at it now and then.  

I'm pretty pleased with the results, and really like the spirit-stones; they make the model "pop". Here's a couple more pictures from different angles:

Voidraven: Top

Voidraven on it's maiden test flight.

The other bit of tournament related news today was the list of tournament forces being published. This is pretty interesting, as it lets us make bit of a guess as to what units we might be up against:

Mmm.... Pie.....

That's a fantastic variety of forces that will be present on the day. I'm not surprised at there being so many Guard present as they are very strong in 8th ed, and can only get stronger with their new Codex. Ditto for Chaos Marines and Space Marines who all get juicy stratagems and relics from the Codexes as well.

There are a lot of factions on the list which I haven't had the chance to play against in the current edition, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity.

I'm fairly happy with my list going into the day; I've got a decent spread of answers to light infantry (splinter fire), heavy infantry (dizzies and scythes), and tanks (dark lances). Let's hope the dice gods are good to me on the day!

-x-

Before I finish the article I'd like to go on a little tangent into a difference between role playing games and war games like 40K (following up a very old conversation with my buddy Tim). 

In war gaming understanding your likely opponents and their tactics, so you can plan on how to defeat them is meta gaming (with the forces/lists being the meta). In a simplistic example if tanks are really strong, you might take lots of anti tank weapons, and also decide to run a tank-light list to reduce the effectiveness of your opponents anti tank weapons if he has come to the same conclusion!  A lot of war gamers enjoy the meta game (game of games) and see it as part and parcel of the hobby.

In role playing games, where players take on the personas of fictional characters, meta gaming is using information that you as a player might know, but your character in the game does not. Understandably this is frowned upon! 

For example if your character is an adventurer travelling the halls of a dungeon for the first time he would not be expected to know the layout and the particulars of the denizens; if the player had traversed the same dungeon level with a different character he may know of the locations of traps or monsters, however he should not use that for Nic Novice's advantage!

Both are different examples of the same phenomenon; using information from outside the current game to potentially influence that game. In some gaming circles it is expected and appropriate; in others it is not.

That's it for this time; thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings and I hope you enjoyed the pics! Next time will be the post raid report and we'll see how well I did!