Saturday, April 9, 2011

Working on my new army...

Wolves in spaaaaaaaaaaaace!

Or rather, the oh so mighty Space Wolves. I still have a dozen or so games to play test before I'm comfortable as to where I'm going to head list-wise, but while I get ready for that stage I have been painting up a few units.

Some of the decisions I can see I'm going to need to make are:
- Is 4+ nullifying good enough, or with GK's kicking about has this necessitated Njal and stopping powers on a 3+?
- Will 2 units of longfangs be enough, or will I really have to push for that third and wear the flak that will come from it?
- One of the bigger questions I find myself asking, MSU? Or a more solid assault base with larger units and less shooty transports?
- Do I need a hammer unit? Or do I chance not having one for the first time in years? Hah!

All these and more will start to form a picture as to what is best for my play style in the coming weeks as I get some games in, but in the mean time, here are some pictures of my progress so far.





Oh, and how will my Thunderwolves/Fenrisian wolves look? Like my dogs at home of course!


Note that Pete's ginger howler monkeys have infiltrated even the sanctity of my own home!

9 comments:

  1. Very nice Charlie I like how they are very dark....much better than the normal powder blue you see.

    Are they transfers on the left shoulder?

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  2. Looking good.
    I was wondering what models you are going to use for your thunderwolves? Rumour mill has plastic thunderwolves being released for games day uk.
    This after I converted all of mine from Canis Wolfborn(you saw them at Over The Top).

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  3. Thanks Pete, I decided right off the bat I didn't want to be anything like the baby blue monstrosities in the codex, but rather more like the space wolves on the cover of the prospero burns book.
    This then darkened down further when I brought in some oil paint washes to grime them up a little.

    They are indeed transfers. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of transfers recently by adhering closely to the information they put in the forgeworld painting guide book. You wind up not really being able to tell, outside of the fact that they are too perfect and uniform to be freehand.

    The only really troubling factor I still find with transfers when going to all the extra steps is when it comes to applying it to a curve, like a shoulderpad - but microsol helps a lot here.

    Right now the list im working on only has 1 thunderwolf, ridden by the wolf lord. I'm actually considering making this into a sled, and painting up my fenrisian wolves as sled dogs ;D.

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  4. I'm quite clueless as to what armies are the business in 40k, but I gather from reading on the Net that Space Wolves (along with Orks and Imperial Guard) are disturbingly popular/powerful. So why Space Wolves and not something a bit more obscure and challenging?

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  5. Actually, if you listen to the Internet, it puts orks way down low on the power scale, and SW near the top. This probably is the case when you play with such an embarrassingly low amount of terrain as they do over there.
    The Internet tries to go further, and give evidence of orks doing well at adepticon as evidence that adepticon is not an event full of competitive players.

    Personally I think it's no coincidence that when adepticon increased it's level of terrain (but still not enough) - orks suddenly did better. Either way, it illustrates my point that you should take the Internet with a big fat grain of salt.

    Anywho, after a LOT of games with my orks, I felt that the play style I most wanted to play in the future is a solid shooting base with brutal counter assault, very similar to how pete's old emperors children played. Space Wolves work at their best utilizing this style of play.

    Also, something that played a big part in my decision to run with them is that really just no one plays them in tourneys over here.
    I've played against space wolves 4 times in 2 years. One was a visitor from Norway, one a visitor from Australia, and twice against an aucklander who only plays if a flames of war event isn't on that weekend.

    This made it a no brainer for me. Models I love, an opportunity to paint my IRL dogs, an army that's new and rare locally, and a play style that is hugely at odds with how I have been playing for the last couple of years.

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  6. Having a look through, a much better event to make some Internet assumptions from would be the ukgt, found here: http://www.rankingshq.com/public/tournamentprofile.aspx?TournamentId=1482

    Really though, the biggest trend I notice is not in the armies people are fielding, but the names consistently appearing near the top. Perceptions of what is good and what is not will be thrown off by these people fielding what they will. It puts off the data for those just trying to netlist :)

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  7. Great to see you working on the wolves after you mentioned them at Masters. Colours look great, I agree the darker pre-heresy look is a hell of a lot better than the standard one. Hows the playtesting going?

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  8. Had my first game tonight. It wen't well, but I need a few more games before instant drawing assumptions.

    It was a very weird feeling to be able to kill a landraider with some meltas, that's for sure!
    The longfangs were able to deal to the rhinos early on but really had no late game impact as units were either out of LoS ( funny that, it gets blocked when you play on a proper table!) or were tied up in combat. Still, I can imagine wanting that quantity when I come across mech guard :D

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  9. The reason I satarted Space Wolves was that I wanted to play an army noone else did, looks like we had the same idea. Looking forward to see the rest of your army.

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