Happy New Year!

     What better way to start off the new year than with blog content? Exactly, there is no better way, so happy new year! I don't really have much to say, but I did receive some cool toys over the holiday break. I'm not that good of a painter so they don't look the best. I'm just proud to say I have 35 points of Cygnar all painted up. Unfortunately no Infinity :(.

The blur means it's working

     For those curious, at 35 the list looks like this;

Kraye

-Centurion

-Thunderhead

-Minuteman

-Hunter

-Squire

Arlan Strangeways

Gorman

Journeyman warcaster

     Now to just get an actual game in with them. Hopefully more battle reports will be coming along in the future, along with a bunch of pics of a huge apocalypse game I played with some friends. On top of that, if I can figure out how to get the pictures, I should be able to put up a report for an Infinity zombie scenario I played a couple of weeks back. 2013 is looking pretty good!

An Intro

  
     Hello, I guess I'm an author for the blog so I figured I would give a short intro about myself. My name is Nick and I live in Minnesota. Short enough?  In all honesty, I am a tabletop gamer through and through. Futuristic battles, skirmishes, and death are exciting. For some reason I never got into video games, but I can live with that. At the end of the day I enjoy the excitement of living out a battle vicariously with little men.

Eh, close enough

          I started out playing Warhammer 40k with some friends back in 2008. I have a decent size Tau army, along with a Grey Knight army built out of the cool 3rd edition models. 40k, however, is not why I'm here. Infinity is the word of the day. Over a year ago I got lost in the war gaming section of the internet and found out about the game Infinity. I thought the idea was cool. Then I saw the models. Initially enthralled by Pan Oceania, I saw the Shang ji with a combi rifle; a part of the Yu Jing faction. A short while later I bought the model online along with a Guilang skirmisher just because they looked cool.

I may be bad at taking pictures. By "taking pictures" I mean painting.

     I thought that was it. I asked a couple of my friends what they thought and nobody wanted to shell out the cash to get started. (Coming from 40k players!) I also picked up some Warmachine stuff for the same rule of cool reasons. Unfortunately the same thing happened to Warmachine, no one wanted to start a new system.
      Going back to 40k for a minute, I was still deeply involved in the game this whole time, and went to a team tournament with a Tyranid player. We did okay, but the main take away was we were invited into the Frozen North Gaming Club. I noticed Scrap Square posted about a game called Dropzone Commander on Frozen North's Facebook page. We got to talking and I almost bought some stuff but it was out of stock. Eventually time went on and I forgot about it. Later on, he posted again about Infinity. I already had some models so we set up a game. I had never fully played before so it was definitely an experience. I had a lot of fun so we set up more games, and now we try to get a match in once a week or so. A couple of other people play, but not as often. So here I am now; two large forces for 40k, a small collection of Cygnar for Warmachine, the start of an Axis Dust Warfare platoon, and a growing Yu Jing Infinity team. That should keep me busy.

Dust Warfare World Championships

So I went to the Dust Warfare World championship a while ago.

I chose to play the Allies, with a gimmicky but awesome list!''

My list was:
Bazooka Joe
Grim reapers
Gunners
Boss squad
BBQ squad
Sniper squad
2x Fireballs with airdrop.

The tournament was held at Fantasy Flight's event center building on 6x4 boards with loads of terrain.
The armies represented were: 3 allied, 2 SSU, and 3 axis. The Allied lists all had at least one super heavy (which I think is almost required for allies to be good). The axis were a mix but they all included at least one Wutan (same here, almost needed to be good). The SSU lists were a little more varied with one helicopter heavy (Burner, and transport with FAYYYYYKEEELLIEEES)! While the other was mega walker heavy using them as shields/transports for close range squads.

The boards ranged from desert, to winter warland to an urban board. The terrain was a mix of area terrain and large LOS blocking terrain. We used the tournament builder straight out of the packet, which I like except for critical positions which kind of makes it a campy game.

My plan was to try to get force collision (I succeeded in this every time) and eliminate the enemy, taking advantage of my lists low unit count and high damage output.

Now onto the games.

Round one I had a bye, so I played Louis or Dakkon on the dust war forums. He had: (lists may be a little off)

Manfred
Markus
2x Flak grens
Kommandotroupe
Wutan
Flammenluther
Battle grens
Snipers

We got, Force collision, eliminate the enemy.
Game went in my favor from turn one as my fireballs shrugged off massive amounts of fire and I managed to kill 3 of his units and tank it out untill the game ended, only losing one unit (BBQ and joe).

Alright, onto my second round.
This was versus an SSU player named dennis his list:
Defense platoon command squad
Chinese volunteers
Transport helo
Faykeli
Battle squad
Burner
grandma and koshka
Howitzer walker

Our game was force collision and critical positions (urgh).
I deployed joe separate so I could get more points for the mission. I also left only one fireball in reserve as it doesnt gain me any points, and needed an offensive threat to push him off his objective.

I didnt need to prepare like that as he had one unit on his objective to my 5 or 6. He used the fly the helo off the board to have it come on way farther away trick, but my fireball killed its occupants then my grims blasted it out of the sky.

As he had lost his offensive unit he sent in the back up one in the form of his burner, and since I had been longtomming him all game, he decided to go after my command squad with the helo taking out most of them (minus the medic and commander!) before it was brought down by machine gun fire.
At this point, he conceded giving me full points for everything.

For my third game (deciding who would be in the finals) it was against Louis from my first round bye with his dual wutan chassis.
His list:

Manfred
Markus
2x Flak grens
Kommandotroupe
Wutan
Flammenluther
Battle grens
Snipers

Our game was FORCE COLLISION CRITICAL POSITIONS! WOOH! Our table was pretty terrain heavy in the corners with just one BIG BIG building in the center.

I stacked the terrain right outside of my deployment for points and kept my fireballs in reserve as I had a feeling he would rush that building in the center. He deployed with LOS blocked to all his army with the building so I couldnt long tom him.

As the game progressed he started moving towards the building in the center and occupied it as his piece of terrain. As he had way more units then me, I was quickly on the losing end here. As he was flanking his heinrich around to snipe my command squad, my fireballs landed with a thud. And the following could only be described as a siege. With my fireballs wiping out whole units with machine guns and flamers and them in turn getting burned by the flammenluther.

As the game kept going, I was slowly getting in the lead as he was losing units, while mine were all snuggled up in the critical position in my corner sniping at the marauding gorillas with rifle and grenade. Eventually I just won on points with me not losing a single model.

His dice were horrible :L.

So after some minor celebration (I got a sprite) it was onto the finals!

The finals game was broadcast, you can find it on Fantasy Flights justin.tv channel. My opponent chris was playing allies! His list:
Bazooka joe
Punisher
Hell boys
BBQx2
Grim reapers
Snipers
Boss
Cobra
Additional resources


Our game was critical positions eliminate the enemy. The board was VERY terrain heavy with almost no LOS from one side to the other.

The game began with me air dropping my two fireballs in a almost pincer move around his corner. I started out by trading the grim reapers (foolishly) for 4/5 of a BBQ squad, they were the closest thing to my fireball that could hurt it. From there I used the reactions from my fireball to kill another BBQ squad and take minor damage from the hellboys.

On the other flank my other fireball crashed through the building taking 4 points of damage from the cobra reacting, deployed the BBQ and had them destroy the cobra. As he was running out of units chris started positioning the punisher to get rear fire on my Grim reaper fireball, sadly this left it open to the other fireball shooting it in the rear and destroying it. While this was happening, bazooka joe was killed from two turns of long toms.

Since he had just a command squad left I slightly over killed them with the BBQ and joe getting something stupid like 28 dice against them finishing them off.

So all in all the tourney was alot of fun with me getting full battle points and something like 900/1200 break points.

Some interesting facts about my games:
Dakkon has the worst wutan ever, and should melt it and get a new one as it only hit like 4 times in our two games.

Helicopters go down REALLY easily from machine guns.

I lost in total 2 units out of all my games.

One of my fireballs had no machine guns and was on fire with a cripple drive train at one point.






Well hoped you liked it, I thought it was pretty fun.

Infinity battle report

http://infinitythegame.com/forum/index.php?%2Ftopic%2F13452-250-yu-jing-vs-qk-haqqislam-with-crappy-pics%2F

SSU faykeli squad painting

I recently started the SSU for dustwarfare (and won the world championships, report to follow). And started my army with a good ol' faykeli squad.

I started off by airbrushing the pants a mix of VMA meiden stone and sand, and going progressively more sand heavy for high lights.

I then started adding shadows by glazing a dark grey into the shaded areas.

I then painted all the rubber parts black and metallics with a mix of VMA gun metal and black.

Finishing up, i painted the ruck sack with GW khemir brown and shaded with dark grey and highlighted with 50/50 khemri brown and bone white then 25/75. (Ruck sack not pictured).

The rubber parts were highlighted with:
VMA light grey then VMA white.

The metal parts were highlighted with VMA chrome, and shaded with VMA black. Then i used black weathering pigments to add some scratches/damage.

The eye lenses were painted VMA light grey 25/75 VMA white, then glazed with VMA light sky blue. Then gloss varnished for effect.

I finished by going back over the hammer and sickle with white.

Infinity battle report (video)

Sorry for the terribad audio, fixing it.

Also If you're into video games, I'm starting a new video game youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/x22Jmac22x?feature=mhee


Mostly PlanetSide2 at the moment, have a lot more footage I'm editing.

Video:

Battle Ready bases review

Hey! Recently I bought a pack of battle ready cobblestone bases for my Haqqislam army for Infinity.
This will be the first time I've done one of these and will go on a scale of 1-10 for the whole product and explain my reasoning.

Here is how they look straight out of the package, minimal amount of flash and other molding issues.
After a quick filing and clipping some of the bigger pieces I rinsed them in soap and water.

The details are very good with no bubbling or warping.

Over all for $8.50 USD for 10 they are easily worth it in my eyes.

I would give them a 8/10.

I decided to do a quick painting tutorial too :D.

After a quick cleaning and washing I started with Vallejo Model Air Grey primer. After laying down a solid coast of that I hit it with VMA sand.

Once that dried, I washed it with watered down Model color black. To shade the cobblestones and add depth.

After that had dried I washed it with some Brown vallejo paint that has the label ripped off. Just use whatever brown or reddish brown you have. Ogryn flesh from GW will work.

This is to add color variation and make it almost like mosaic looking *shrug*.

After THAT had dried I over brushed the stones (its like drybrushing but the paints wet ?_?) with Vallejo sand and some GW kommando khaki. Try to use this to reduce the colors before that didn't make it into the cracks.

While I didn't get a picture of it I washed the rubble/sand parts then over brushed it with VMA U.S.A grey then 50/50 with VMA white to highlight it.

Over all they turned out pretty good in my opinion.

Heres a shot of my Jannissary heavy infantry on one of the bases. I'll take better pictures of the model itself in my light box later.

(Not pictured I painted the rim with VMA black, I know its super important but I couldn't get the lighting right to show how important it is).