September 2005 - Emperor’s Legion

It’s the end of month six, halfway point of the project, and by crikey didn’t that whip by quick. This would be a good point to look back and reflect on what I’ve done to date… that is, if what I’ve done to date wasn’t already covered in the previous articles that you can go back and have a look at… in fact I probably could have used this space to tell you more about what I’ve done this month… the decisions we make hey…

As I said last month, I decided to try my little green men out at the Emperors Legion tournament on the 3 rd and 4 th of this month. It was a beaut weekend. Bails, who runs the tournament, has done so every year for years and also runs a Warhammer Fantasy tournament every year as well. It’s well organised and Bails is an easy going, top bloke to talk to (and he let me, Feldmo and Dave, who came with me, use unpainted miniatures. We weren’t there to win, just to play games and have fun). I played five good hard games over the weekend.

They were:

Pictures from Troy's various games - Click to enlarge

Thanks to Bails, the Emperor’s Legion club and to the Tin Soldier- Penrith store for sponsoring the weekend.

So, what did learn about my army? Glad you asked. I’ll break it down pointwise:

• I generally used my Pathfinders ability to move before the game to get closer to the enemy. Wrong! Close is bad and their makerlights and rail rifles have 36” range. Move further away.
• Even though I had, I’m not gonna lie to ya, 2 Hammerheads with Railguns, I had trouble with enemy armour. I also lost both tanks in 4 out of 5 games. A Broadside and some Fusion Blasters might come in handy.
• I didn’t use my Devilfish mounted Firewarriors very well and they would have been better on the ground adding their fire to the other two squads.
• Concentrating fire on fast enemies first, then slower ones, whoops ass.
• Some Kroot would work nicely with my style of play (fairly conservative) in a disruptive, infiltrating role or a counter attacking, supporting role.
• After 5 rounds of combat and taking 2 wounds, my commander won me my first hand to hand combat with 2 Plaguebearers!

What else did I do this month? Well, after the learning points above I stuck together a Broadside, 3 Crisis suits (with a couple of Fusion Blasters), 20 Kroot with a Shaper, 8 Kroot hounds and 3 Krootox. I’m all about getting the maximum squad size for my collection and then just swapping things in and out for different games. Obviously this is not how it works in most tournaments, but it gives me options to try before deciding on an army for any particular tournament or event. It also keeps me interested in playing this army because each game is different.

Broadside Battlesuit	Crisis Battlesuits

Kroot	Krootox

I also finished painting my Commander. The jet stream effect worked out ok, it’s a bit weird to look at but I think that’s cool because Tau are weird (they’ve got four fingers and helmets with one eye!). I also got another unit of 12 Fire warriors painted and played my first 2000pt game.

Commander	Commander from Side	Unbased Firewarriors

I might leave the details of the game til next month because I’m running out of room this month with all the stuff I’ve done. Kinda makes me wish I hadn’t used the start of this month to ramble on so much. I didn’t even get to tell you about…