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All posts for the month August, 2011

So I decided to play in the ‘Ard Boyz Tournament, my first tournament ever. It was free entry, and local, so why not.

I made a few lists, and did not really test any of them, but decided on 2500 points of Eldar on foot.

Avatar, Eldrad Seer Council of like 7 Warlocks, 50 Guardians, 10 of them Stormies, 10 Wraithguard, 10 Harlequins, 10 Scorpions, 5 Swooping Hawks, 6 War Walkers, and a Wraithlord.

8 players attended, and we got matched up. My first opponent was playing some sort of Space Marines with a lot of flamers and melta. Go Avatar! I deployed first, and he had a cigarette while I was setting up my massive amount of infantry. When he got back, he looked at it all, and said he needed to go, family emergency, packed up and left.

Damnit, I was looking forward to kicking his ass. I was given a win though, minor victory points. If we had played, I could have gotten much better. Oh well

Next game vs a veteran Dark Eldar player that I always wanted to play, but our schedules conflicted. So 5 objectives, spearhead, I went first again, and on that round, a stray Missile from a Guardian squad makes its way through some trees, across the board, and wrecks one of his Raider gunships. in the course, I managed to destroy all 3 of them (secondary objective) but we tied on objectives. I made a mistake on my turn 4, not looking at the clock, and not moving to cover a second objective. Draw + some.

3rd game vs Tyranids, victory points, Kill the captain, and kill all the fast attack. Dawn of War. I don’t deploy anything. man was that guy slow, so after what felt like a very long game, I managed to kill his “captain” and a LOT of those little buggers he kept making. Didn’t get his fast attack, he didnt get mine either, and Eldrad was of course still alive and well. Calculating up all the points, I got another minor victory(100 points shy of Major), plus the extras for killing the captain.

End Result

Sisters of Battle placed 1st, I placed 2nd, Dark Eldar placed 3rd

As a reward, I got $40 of stuff, so I got 2 boxes of Daemonettes. They look badass.

Sept 17th, we head to Tualatin Oregon to play in the Semis.

So that list I posted a while back here on the War Dolls, for the vassal tournament, well I finally got to test it today whilst out and about with my friend Jenn.  She and I went out to Post Falls to Gamers Haven to play some 40k, and I used a lot of her nids to supplement the models I didn’t myself own.  She played her Chaos Space Marines, and I played my list below, and I have to say the bloody thing was effective at killing her off.  My only gripe is that it is not good for kill-point games, mainly because I am pooping out free points via my tervigons.  With how much of her army I killed though I was able to still win by two killpoints, but I would have had her even more handedly if I did not use the tervigon on that list.  Regardless all those termagants really tied up many of her units and allowed me free reign with my big guys to mess her world up and destroy all her vehicles.

Would I still use my tervigons in my list even in games I know will be kill points, you bet your sweet hiney.  Why would I do that you ask?  Simple, while they were busy killing off hoards of my little guys for one kill point per unit, which in some cases took two turns to do, those Marines weren’t shooting at my monstrous creatures with their meltas and their plasma guns.  This allowed my monstrous creatures to pretty much just go wherever they wanted and kill plenty of guys, it was rather effective.  I may have won by two and not by more, but to be honest a two kill point win is still fairly impressive, especially considering three of those kill points were from killing models that did not cost me any points.

-thumbs up-

Overall it was tons of fun and I learned a whole lot about playing 40k that I was still unsure about and needed some help with, and Jenn while a tough teacher was an effective one.  She was fair though and pointed things out that I was forgetting, reminding me little things here and there, and while I still need to work on my charts for what I need to wound and hit, I did fairly well.  Was a fun day overall, and especially since the prior two days were so stressful for me, I really needed to get out of the house and have some fun.

So thank you Jenn, and everyone else who has helped me along the way to learn 40k.  I give my greatest thanks to Cami and Jenn, you two have had the greatest influence on my learning, and I cannot thank you enough.  I had lots of fun and you guys all rock.





Hello, my freaky darlings. I’ve been up to my hips in too much to do for the last week or so and haven’t had a ton of time to devote to gaming. I did have to buy a laptop since I’ll be largely out of my house for three – six weeks, so here’s a review of said laptop and what I’ve done on it so far.



Acer Aspire AS5552-7819 Notebook
. I bought it from NewEgg, my reliable source, for 389.99. AMD Phenom II Dual-Core N660 3.0GHz, 4GB DDR3, 320GB hard drive, ATI Radeon HD 4250 graphics card, DVD Super Multi drive on board. On board wireless of course. 3 USB ports, two on the right one on the left, one VGA and and HDMI port on the left. This is my first laptop and here are my observations thus far.

It’s heavier than I expected, even though I intentionally picked a 15.6″ screen. Carrying in a big over my shoulder though two parking garages and winding through endless hospital corridors made it seem crazy heavy. It has a heat vent on the upper left corner and that can get pretty danged hot. It comes loaded with a ton of just crap and I’m still uninstalling all that.

That’s about all that I can say that isn’t positive about this notebook. It runs EQ2 an RIft both during full raids, though I have to scale the graphics down to basic. That’s not an issue for me since I often have to do that to fight server lag (HALP AB NEED NEW SERVER). It runs Leauge of Legends decently enough; again I find it easier to turn down the graphics and shadows. My other usual programs, AIM, AOL, various Facebook games, ACT, iTunes (the playback part*), Legends of Norrath, all totally playable. Netflix movies totally fine when they actually have the things I want to see! OpenOffice is perking along fine. It comes loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I am a Win XP girl so that’s been something of a learning curve. There are things I like about it and things I do not like but that is completely a user deal not a laptop issue.

I would recommend it pretty highly especially if you don’t raid or just raid casually but want to be able to game and write and surf the web. I’ve gotten around the heat issue by placing a skinny book under the notebook to lift it off whatever surface I’m using. That seems to have really done the trick. For the very reasonable price I’d say go for this notebook. You’ll have to provide your own bag of course.

iTunes — my beloved, why you hurt me? It plays stuff fine and I was able to figure out how to synch my iTunes libraries to the notebook and my main PC. However it won’t connect to the iTunes store, which I believe to be some weird security conflict in Win 7. Still working on that.

Belkin USB Wired Optical Retractable Travel Mouse. Blah I want my 15 bucks back. This thing is small child sized and the cords tangle horribly. Do not want. Find an optical mouse you like and stick it into your laptop bag.

TekNmotion Yapster Universal Gaming Headset. Holy crap this is a good headset and cheap as free. 12.99 for one of the best headsets I’ve had to date. I’m afraid it may not hold up to heavy use but the sound quality is so good I will definitely get more. Some of the reviews complain about it not fitting well but it hasn’t been an issue for me.

So the other day while working I saw that there was a demo available of Warhammer 40k: Kill Team. I instantly had to select download. Granted at first I thought it was the Space Marine game demo, it wasn’t until later that I realized it was a different game altogether. I hadn’t even heard of this one.

The intro had a bit of a fun surprise with the appearance of a Caestus. I thought that was pretty cool. However your character is in power armor, and I think everyone will agree that not putting terminators in a Caestus is a bit of a waste of resource.

There are several different character types you can use; Sternguard, Techmarine, Vanguard, or Librarian. The former being ranged specialists and the latter melee. The Sternguard carries a heavy weapon which I thought would make him slow, so I went with the Librarian for testing. The premise of the game is an assault on an Ork Kroozer and the goal is to kill the Warboss. Since this was a demo, I obviously didn’t get a play through.

The controls are ‘twin stick’ i.e. one stick moves the other shoots, which isn’t too bad, but reminded me of the old video game Robotron, which was so busy it made my eyes spin just watching it as a child. Kill Team is almost as busy, as hordes of Gretchin and mobs of Boyz descend upon you. If you die, your character starts again at certain save points. The Librarian has a power that creates a storm around him and eliminates all the foes in direct contact. It’s powered up by killing enemies. Levelling up will increase your powers/sword damage. I liked that you had choices.

Lets talk interface. The game itself is a top down, 3rd person shooter. Normally I could get into this. I grew up on games like Zelda. What bothered me about Kill Team is that the camera would rotate seemingly at random and I had no apparent control over it. This means that my direction of movement and fire would alter. I’m not the best shot in the world, but when you start rotating the world, that complicates things for me.

For sheer carnage and 40k-ness this is a pretty good game. There were never ending bolter rounds (save for the special power ups like double fire and rapid fire) so the destruction continues unabated. Unfortunately that’s all I seemed to find, and I got a little bored with it. I like puzzles and other challenges in my games normally, and I found this one lacking. The attention to detail, variety of skills and weapons, and customization (different chapter markings) were a bonus, so I still think it’s a fairly positive experience.