Banners, Battles and Building... oh my!

This update pretty much is a collection of 4 posts that I have been meaning to do one at a time but ended up running short on time.  So without much further ado, the update!

'Ard Boyz 2250 Preparation Battle for May Tournament.

Aubrey wanted to test out her 2250 Necron list for 'Ard Boyz and being the kind and friendly person that I am, I decided to let her test her mettle against the ceramite armor of the Emporer's favorite Space Marine Chapter - The Black Templars.  After Roy and Shawn suckered me into getting into this money-sink..er I mean hobby and I collected my Ulthwe` Eldar army, I wanted to play Space Marines.  Roy mentioned that Black Templars not only wore black armor but were an assault based chapter.  I was sold!  So...allow me to narrate the battle.

Game 1 - Necrons vs. Black Templars.
Pitched Battle Deployment, Annihilation

 I went first during this battle and with standard Black Templar tactics, went barreling forward with everything I had in order to smash into her line.  She had a curious deployment in which she castled up everything into one corner.  This ultimately proved to be her undoing...

So Turn 1 movement

More of Turn 1, Aubrey's C'tan gets popped by a barrage of Las Cannon fire (teehee) while she assaults my bike squad with her Wraiths.

This is the scene at the top of Turn 2, she's already lost 2 squads of Necron Warriors, 1 squad of Destroyers, her Necron Lord was popped by Lascannon shots and both Monoliths have been Wrecked.
Her turn she managed to take out 3 out of 5 Terminators and 3/4th's of my Assault based Initiate squads with her rapid fire Gauss Rifles.  Things are looking ...grim.




Turn 3 ended up with the Necrons being tabled when the other 2 bike squads slammed into her flank and the rest of my melee squads sliced and dice through her Necron Warriors with their power weapons.

Resolution:
Helbrecht's IX Legion, The Black Company - 13
Aubrey's Necron's - 1 (she killed a Rhino)

MVP's - Marshall Siegfried - 11 body count, Sir Bautch the Emporer's Champion - 8 body count, Chaplain D'Morte of the Emporer's Holy Fist - 9 body count.  Safe to say the leaders of the Sword Brethern did a damn nice job this game.

After looking at our battle, I sat down and tried to figure out why after turn 2 the game became a total route.  I decided that castling up like the way she did against an assault based army instead of setting up a gun line with her monoliths shielding her C'tan was not the best of ideas.  If she had used her Monoliths (or just taken 1) to shield the C'tan and put her Necron Lord in a squad I think she would have had a larger margin of success against my Black Templars.

Now for Sir Bautch's Theme Song - sung at every battle!

Sir Bautch.....SIR BAUTCH!
Sir Bautch.....SIR BAUTCH!
Eyes of the Hawk, Ears of the Wolf!
Sir Bautch.....SIR BAUTCH!
Sir Bautch.....SIR BAUTCH!
Strength of the Bear, SPEED OF THE PUMA!
SIR BAUTCH!

Battle no.2  - The Great Hunt, War Host of Athel Loren vs. DINO-MITE - 1500 points.

I played a second game that evening against Mike's Lizardman army.  Mike is slowly building to 2250 and since we are both relatively new to Fantasy we enjoy the smaller point games til we get the full swing of things.

Mike reaffirming that I am in fact awesome.

This game went a little bit faster than my game with Aubrey.  Mike was plagued with bad Stupidity roles on his key units (his General with his saurus unit and his Cold Ones calvary).  The game ended up being a Massacre (a total victory) for me and I have to say the dice just said no that game to Mike.  There really wasn't anything he could have done that would have changed the outcome.  Sometimes the dice just say NOPE!

I recently decided that I wanted to have some customized Wild Riders for my Wood Elf army.  Primarily because I decided that I hadn't spent enough money on a single unit and I needed to ensure that I had hit the ridiculous level for this army.  I didn't really care for the horses that the Wild Riders come modeled with so I decided that by using Privateer Press's Raptor units I would be able to have Wood Elves on Stags...AWESOME RIGHT??
Anyway here are some pictures of the assembly process as well as some WIP's thus far.

Here I have drilled a hole in the bottom of the Wild Rider torso's and put in a pin to be fitted to their mount.  Wait a sec....John pinned something? No, seriously John pinned something and didn't have the pin vice spear into his hand causing a fountain of blood to cover everything like a Khornite orgy?
I then did a quick measure and figured out how much of a torso I would need to green stuff in order to make the rider fit properly on his mount without having a heinous gap.

As you can see here it worked out fairly well, I'm not the best person at molding green stuff but this was definitely a great way to get better at it.

For those of you who are not the best at pinning yet want to use a very strong bond, I would like to throw out this trick to you.  I like to use a very thing piece of tissue or toilet paper and put glue on each side of it.  I then push the pieces together and the paper adheres to each side of the model forming a solid and complete bond.  Sometimes the bond is so solid you have to pry it apart with a tool, other times it's just a little stronger than your standard super glue bond.  Either way it's worked out very well for me and so I thought I'd share that with you all.  The excess paper is easily trimmed off since it's dry and brittle minutes after you glue and it also fills in the gaps rather nicely!

Wild Riders all primed up along with Morghur (Beastman army Special character).

Wild Rider torso testing out the new Liquitex flo-aid that I purchased a few days prior.  It lays down a pretty smooth coat with the darker paints but the lighter shades it makes the paint a little too thin.
I've been using a 1to 10 ratio on it using distilled water.  I guess the trick is to get used to it and from there I'm sure I'll have better results.

Not to be confused with the feminine product flow-aids....ahem....moving along now....

Stage by stage on the Wild Riders
1. Black Primer
2. Beastial Brown basecoat
3. Elf Flesh on top of the Beastial Brown
4. Ogryn Flesh wash on the Elf Flesh.

I am so glad I remembered to actually start lowest to highest unlike last time.  The picture was taken when the wash was still wet on the right, after it dried it looked a lot better and had really shaded the Elf flesh well.


And lastly, I had wanted to use a Battle Standard Bearer for my Wood Elf army.  Rerolling break tests is kinda big when you have multiple combats going on withing inches of each other.  So I figured why not try to make your own banner?
I will just throw the pics of what I have done so far in a smaller format that you can kinda figure out what I did step by step.   It looks kinda wonky and I may just end up getting the actual Battle Standard Bearer model later but we'll roll with this for now.

Hope you all enjoyed this post, it's insanely long and I apologize for that.  Next go around I'll just do multiple smaller updates!