Fine Cast, yes or no?

Ok, I would like to get some peoples opinions on this one. Do you like fine cast models?
They have some real nice details put into them, and they are light weight, those are the only pros I can come up for them.

They are always always expensive. usually more than a box of the most common unit in that army. If I could find models I liked that were plastic or even metal I would buy them. I hate hate hate resin models

Maybe I am too much of hobby lightweight to get the full bang for the buck out of these models, but I would like them to get rid of the resin all together. I would like to hear from the people on this one.

Cons:
One: They dont paint well, even with good base coats paint doesnt like to stick to the model. In most cases I apply a second base coat over first and sometimes have had to go back and apply a third base coat in some areas by hand, i use the spray  on the first two. Colors never seem to come out right on the resin and I have even had paint come off the model, paint flaked then fell off.
Two: They are a nightmare to put together and keep together. Same problem as paint, glue doesnt seem to want to stick. I have tried crazy glue, super glue, both of GWs light and thick glue, which to be frank i wasn't surprised when they didnt work because they never do. Then when you finally put it together it breaks before any other model. I have even had pieces fall of during the night. left the model standing up after painting, in the morning wake up to paint but find first I have to re-glue an arm on. I even hold the son of a gun there for a good five minutes, and still the glue just doesnt seem to want to hold. I have even tried elmers and rubber cement, nothing seems to work.
Third: Holy cow cleaning the pieces off of the sprue, I spend a good ten minutes picking pieces off and shaving away wherever the press came together and leaves the edging going around. Yes the models look amazing when done but you have to spend too much time to get them to that point. Another thing I have never had to deal with in my 12 odd years of the hobby, my Chaos daemonic mount still had a piece of the foam die they cast the model in practically inbeded in the model, pic to follow, took me ten minutes to pick that crapper out of there. And I always miss some piece of shit sprue bit leftover until i am painting details on the model, my job requires me to spend hours looking at drawings trying to find mistakes of 1/16th of an inch or less, and yet somehow one bastard always slips through

Bit of yellow is the foam, notice the frills on the mail lower in the picture and a little extra yellow in the folds of the mails lower edge



 Lastly: the cost. They are always more expensive than a whole box of plastics if I could find models I liked in either plastic or metal i would buy those instead; maybe I am just too much of a hobby lightweight to get the full bang for my buck from these guys, I would not mind at all if they got rid of the Fine cast line or resin I have had that bad of experiences with them. Would really like to hear back from other people on this one. If you use fine cast resin models let me know what you think. I promise to listen to your side, at least as much as any one on the internet listens to someones else's argument they dont agree with

Dark Angels vs Tyranids

 Howdy folks!

Bob here with a brief discussion of my first game using the new Dark Angels Codex in battle a few weeks ago. We had an odd number of players in the shop so I ended up fielding 3000 points of Dark Angels versus two 1500 point Tyranid players. I was not expecting to have to play at this point level (but god knows I have the models to field 3k or even higher) so I did not have a list read. Here is what I ended up throwing together: Also I can't remember if this is all of it.

Belial with a Deathwing Command Squad with a company banner, champion, apothecary, and an assault cannon (320) mounted in a Land Raider Crusader with a multimelta and Deathwing upgrade (290).

Tactical Squad 1: plasma cannon, plasma gun, veteran sargent with a plasma pistol (195)

Tactical Squad 2: plasma cannon, plasma gun, veteran sargent with a plasma pistol (195)

Tactical Squad 3: plasma cannon, veteran sargent. (165)

Deathwing 1: 2 lightning claws, assault cannon, chain fist (250)

Deathwing 2: plasma cannon, chain fist (250)

Deathwing 3: chain fist, cyclone missile launcher (255)

Deathwing Knights: (235)

Dark Talon: (160)

Ravenwing Black Knights: grenade launcher (126)

Ravenwing Attack Squadron: 6 bikes, plasma gun, veteran sargent with a power sword and melta bombs (206)

Landspeeder Vengeance: assault cannon (160)

And arrayed against me were two "Nidzilla" lists. I have never fought Tyranids before but I know the basic tactics to use against them (i.e kill the big ones and the little ones). I don't remember my opponents exact lists but they had at least one Trygon, one Mawloc, a Tervigon, Tyrants and Hive Guard and Tyrant Guard, Gaunts, a Carnifex or two, some Zoanthropes, and lastly a Doom of Malan'tai (more on this abomination later).

The game type we rolled for was relic. It was placed in the center of the board in a narrow piece of terrain.I won the battle in the end thanks to secondary objectives and Belial's The Hunt Warlord trait (his command squad killed one of the Hive Tyrant warlords). The game ended at the end of turn 5 and I had somehow managed to deny my opponents the relic. To put this in proper perspective I had only one model left on the board at the end of the game but a brave plasma cannon Tactical Marine had lived long enough so that when the game ended he had just died and the Tyranids did not get to pick up the relic. Check out a few (bad quality) photos of the battle. 

So what do I think of the new army? In short I love it. The Deathwing Knights performed as they should have, i.e. they were tough as nails and killed anything they fought, but they just don't work against large numbers. Use them to kill monsters/vehicles/characters etc. The Land Speeder Vengeance is pretty awesome. If you can keep it alive it can dish out a lot of plasma template death. I never used the large blast as the multiple smaller templates worked better against the Nids. The Dark Talon wasn't all that impressive but I don't think I know how to use it to its full potential yet. Unfortunately the Black Knights didn't live long enough to do anything as they ate death from the Doom very early in the game. And speaking of the Doom of Malan'tai, if you see this thing kill it quickly. The amount of death this thing can deal is stupid. It basically accounted for my middle section of units before I could kill the damn thing.

Thanks for reading folks and as always I welcome your thoughts and comments. My next battle themed article will be Dark Angels v.s. Orks. Cheers and happy gaming everyone!

PRETTY PICTURES!

Yes I have been doing some gaming down in Atlanta, hasnt gone well for me because I am waaaaayyyy behind. But will show you pictures of my current undersized warband.

Warband Champion Lvl N00b

back of sir newb

Took exalted hero model, hacked off old weapons gave him stuff from Chaos Knights box, then shield and sword on back from warrior box. I like the look.

P.B.I. Poor Bloody Infantry

 Yeah marauders good at dying and running away

meh

Chaos Warriors are completely underwhelming when fighting other chaos models

thats 'Mister Drools a Lot' to you

 Good old spawn, handy in small games, easily overpowered in more recent games. My only model with real hitting power right now.

All my guys get the mark of Tzeentch, or spawn of tzeentch, giving them an almost worthless 6+ ward save, or breath weapon for spawn. really need more guys in warband.

and because one time I rolled to get this guy but did not have the model DAEMON PRINCE, now that I have one I will never roll to get him again

lots of reposing went into this model

 and for one battle someday I will get to bring this mamba jamba

I'm not dead, just busy

As the tittle suggests I have not abandoned my blogging, but academia is a cruel mistress. So is professional life for that matter. John should have some material up in the next few days and so should I. John has been playing a Path to Glory Campaign down at Games Workshop: City Walk in Atlanta and I have thankfully been able to get over to my local Hobby Town to get some good games in.  I have two battles to talk about where I have gotten to take the new Dark Angels out for a spin so I will be bringing you my thoughts on how the army performs in combat. Also I have a few new projects I am working on and several drafts for new articles that I will hopefully be getting written in the next few weeks.

Thanks folks and happy gaming!

Army Transport

Hey folks,

Can someone out there recommend a good army transport system? I want something that can hold a lot of infantry plus a land raider and a rhino sized vehicle or two. I would also like something to haul my paints around as well. If you could I would like the exacts size of foam trays that would work best for 40k models. Thanks!

P.S. I haven't forgotten about giving you my thoughts on my first battle with the new Dark Angels. Academia has been a cruel mistress lately so I will be getting to it soon. I will give you a short preview of how it went though. I won with one model left on the board in a 3k game against two 1500 point nidzilla armies.

Gaming in Atlanta!

So yes the rumors are true I did some gaming down in Atlanta yesterday. It was a tournament based on the Path to Glory Campaign, this was however just an introductory thing, and kink worker outer, which was great for me for doing both War band battles and Warriors of Chaos. So in warband/Path to Glory you have favor points to get units and deck out your Champion, you earn favor points  by participating in battles, killing the enemies big guys, winning challenges and other stuff the chaos gods look favorably upon. One nice thing is that you get to pick a god, and every unit in your warband gets that mark if they can. So me and Tzeentch most of my army had a 6+ ward save, and if they have shields 5+, the parry save is upgraded, booyah. So my warband was 4 marauders with shields, 2 normal chaos warriors, 1 chaos warrior with great weapon, 1 chosen with throwing axe, a spawn and my champion with shield and throwing axe. So without going into all the rules warband plays exactly like a normal game just with Favor Points not Victory Points, the major difference is you roll and spend favor points on the models you get, and that is what you are set with, then when you accrue more favor points you can take more rolls and add to your warband. Also there is set gear for your units then additional stuff you get to roll on, biggest difference for me was that Warriors dont have Chaos Armor just heavy armor. So onto the games, it was three games of 2v2 on 3' x 4' table lots of terrain, too much if you ask me. And Joshua if you read this I know I am now at -1 LD for the rest of the tournament. Then for the fourth battle it was a battle royal, with some heavy twists.

Game 1: Played a warband with 10 marauders, 3 forsaken, champion, and dragon ogre. To start out i could do no wrong my spawn crushed half his marauders, my warriors chomped up the other marauders and my chosen wounded the Dragon Ogre with his throwing axe. Then around turn 3 i started dying. Spawn went down my marauders got routed dragon ogre crushed chosen and warriors. I lost, everymodel dead, with about half his dead.

Game 2: Enemy Warband was two Chaos Trolls, champion, chosen and some marauders and warhounds. My spawn was MVP, killed champion chosen and marauders. My marauders killed his hounds and his trolls killed my Champion causing my marauders to flee. Then after his trolls over ran they got stupid and wandered to the edge of the map too far for me to catch in time. Victory for me.

Game 3: enemy warband was 5 warhounds, 3 warriors, 8-9 marauders and champion. This time the dice gods held me down. Crushed his warhounds then chosen was crushed my champion fled, my marauders lost combat by one fled and was caught, warriors lost by one also fled and were caught, spawn rolled a 1 for random attacks and did nothing, was killed in second round and we called it, major victory for him. I failed 3 LD tests which I should have passed causing my army to run and be easy targets.

So i won best Sport, probably bc I had lowest score of the non tournament runners, i did not actually place last thank you very much. So for that i got to take a mutalith or slaughterbrute for d6 games, for free. Well i choose Mutalith and of course only managed a 1 on the roll. But at least i will get to curb stomp somebody one game.

Sorry this is soo long but....

My comments, when playing warband the big guys/monsters are really important and dangerous while your champion and chosen are not as strong as you would think they would be.  Even with ward saves my guys died real fast. Even though i did badly i thought the tourney was fun and am looking forward to the real campaign. This has been great for forcing me to buy units and get them painted in a hurry, as well as trying out models i normally wouldnt take. In the future i will have my champion and chosen in units because alone they are squishy. Also from this tourney i learned warhounds are a bad choice as they always die real fast and have trouble doing damage. And that LD is big big big in these small games as one unit fleeing or dying takes away for me a 3rd or 4th of my army.

Gaming today

Hey folks, Bob here. Today both John and I will be doing some gaming. John is going to be playing down at Games Workshop: City Walk in Hotlanta, Georgia and I will be playing over at Hobby Town USA in good ole Johnson City. City Walk has a cool campaign starting up to get players into a new Warriors of Chaos army called Path to Glory. Warbands of Chaos will be going at each other. Hopefully John will put up some thoughts on the days events and maybe some thoughts on playing Warriors of Chaos. Meanwhile I will be taking my Dark Angels over to Hobby Town for my first time trying out the army since the new book came out. I will do an article on my thoughts on the army and what list(s) I try out. Hope you guys and gals can get some gaming in today too!!