On the defeat of Circle, Molik Karn and the power of a couple of inches.

So this has been an eventful few days, where to begin?

I have been busy with both gaming and hobby work this year (which sounds so much more impressive when you put it like that) and kicked off the hobby side with building and painting my Cyclops Brute. It was a simple model to build and the first plastic PP model I've put together and painted. I decided to paint it in a few bits just to catch the places I otherwise would have struggled with. The decision was made then that I was that I was going to rebase as well as repaint all of my Skorne onto resin bases. John had a few of the ones I was looking at using (Tiny worlds Swamp bases) so I didn't have to worry about the first few things not having a base. I figured that I would paint them up like rolling sand dunes with a bit of tuft here and there.

The colour scheme hasn't changed since my early days with Skorne but the technique and paints used has. Instead of working up the red in six layers, which I found wasn't nearly as effective or necessary on the small areas, I have changed to working sensibly with three. My colours are a lot more solid as I'm trying to avoid dry brushing everything (which was the case in the early stuff as I was too lazy to pick out all the detail in the metal). I've also started to add small bits of cold blue grey/white to act as a contrast to the very warm bronze and red of the colour scheme.

I think the base looks good with the tuft and the various elements picked out. The silver highlights to the bronze don't show through that well in the picture but you can see them on the "horns" of the helmet.

  I do have to find a better way of taking photos for this blog.

Onto gaming. I've been playing a lot of games with Makeda2 and I've found that I have enjoyed her style of play immensely. Although I have been playing her for a while now, only recently have I got to try out the famous 'Molik Missile' I've heard so much about. Wow, that is a powerful play. Leaving out the assassination power of the combo, Molik is capable of taking out large amounts of infantry and then sod off back to the line of the army. Yo-yo'ing him like this doesn't take a huge amount of effort and with his high speed for a heavy, Makedas speed buff, rush and side step he can go an impressive distance.

John and I decided that we needed to experience playing against other armies to truly understand the game and master it. With that in mind when somebody asked for people to come to the FLGS and have a few games we jumped at the chance. The gentleman who came down had a large Circle force with him and played Morvahna1 with an infantry heavy force consisting of a unit of Reeves, a unit of Wolves with UA and a Pureblood Warpwolf. I have played against circle before but the list I went up against last time had more beasts and multi-wound infantry. I played Makeda2 with Molik, an ancestral swordsmen bubble ( an Ancestral guardian, a unit of Swordsmen and a Extoller Soulward.) the Cyclops brute I had finished painting and a unit of Beasthandlers.

His Reeves shot a lot of my Swordsmen, however this just powered up my Ancestral Guardian and Extoller Soulward with souls. Unsurprisingly, the game was won however with Molik. I waited till there was a few infantry spaced out in front of Morvahna and had Molik charge the one in the front, after hitting and turning it into a cloud of blood he then took his sidestep move and hit the next, he then took his last sidestep move and ended up in front of the worried Circle warlock and only needed to buy a few attacks before it was game over.

Now, a lot of this would not have been possible without reach, giving Molik that extra couple inches off his base that he can hit at is supremely useful.

Reach is wonderful I thought.

Thank goodness for reach I thought.

Well, reach would come back to bite me in the ass.

When we got home I felt like I was confident with Makeda and wanted to move on to another caster so as not to get crutched on her. I decided to try out a 25 point version of my Hexeris2 list. This was a primarily shooty list working with hexy2s Black spot to drop lots of ranged hurt on units. However, coming from one caster to another and expecting immediate success is always going to end up hurting you. My first few games with him ended in crushing defeats because I was being stupid with my positioning and not focusing.

This is where reach comes in. Twice in the games I've played with hexy2 I have ended up losing an assassination attempt that I thought was a sure fire thing because of Reach. Carver has reach and due to the idea of engagement I kept on giving Carver a +4 defence bonus. Carver with a +4 defence bonus is very VERY hard to hit leading to failed assassination attempts and annoyance.

So, in the next games I'm gonna focus on getting good placement and making sure that I have a reason to have everybody in the place they are for a reason. I will try and get at least one win in with Hexy2 and try to get as comfortable as I can with him.



Thanks for reading my rambles and hopefully they get a bit better (and more flowing) as I get used to writing all this down.