Epic: Space Marine Character Pack

As the first part of my Epic project I ordered the space marine character pack to add to my 20 year old battle company. Being out of Epic for 20 years I had no idea what came in the pack so I asked GW what was actually in the pack and they did not have a real answer. I was wondering since they wanted 20 dollars for it and only showed like 13 models. I got a proper and correct answer from the nice folks on warseer in the Epic section. Since my internet searches did not yield many good images of what is in it I am posting its contents here now that it has arrived.


So to start you get 4 bases, 4 bikes, and 19 infantry models. So 23 Models total.

Here we have Techmarine, Apothecary, Chapter Master, Servitor, Epistolary, and Chapter Banner Marine.

Captain with Cape, Metal version of old plastic captain (I use these as sergeants currently), Jump Pack Captain, Terminator Captain, and Company Banner Marine.

Power Armor Chaplain, Power Armor Chaplain, Terminator Chaplain, Jump Pack Chaplain

Jump Pack Librarian, 2 Power Armor Librarians, and Terminator Librarian.

Banner Bike Marine, Captain on Bike, Librarian on Bike, Chaplain on Bike.

So that is what you get. Check back later to see if I do anything with them.

Fun with GWs Free Shipping

On Monday, I talked about how GW with its low free shipping threshold combined with high product costs leads to even most single items shipping for free. So I was ordering a couple things for epic and they listed as having different lead times so I ordered them separately. They were all actually in stock and shipped out the same day from the same location. So look what showed up today. Three separate boxes each with 1 blister. My wife was very interested in why I was getting so many boxes. I am sure the mail person was not amused either but there you go. Afraid an item is back stocked. Order everything separately.

Forge World Epic Stuff

I am trying to get my old epic force into shape and I noticed that Warhound Scout Titans are pretty common in Space Marine lists so I was interested in getting some. Now the current GW ones are ugly. The versions from 20 years ago were better looking. Not sure what happened but it was certainly a step back. Forgeworld had some nice ones but they seemed to have disappeared from the online store epic area. I had heard rumors that if you call them they had like 50 in stock that they would sell. Ofcourse they do not respond to emails in a timely fashion and calling the UK for a 30 dollar order starts to add to the cost pretty quickly.

What to do? Well I searched their site for Warhound and found this link.

Warhound Titans 1

Interesting Description. The product code notes it as a Specialist games epic product and the price is exactly what the epic warhounds are so I ordered it even though they had no picture. It has shipped so we will see what I get when it shows up. They also had a Titans 2 which was listed at 88,888 pounds so a little out of my budget. This looks like a place holder in the system for an old product not currently available but interesting that it is included in the new site database.

As a test I searched for SG-EPC to see what other items were waiting for people to find that are priced at orderable values:

Gargantuan Squiggoth
Basilisk
Chimera
Chimera Heavy Bolter
Epic 40,000 Tau Broadside Battlesuits
Fire Caste Warriors
Hammerhead Railgun

People with an old catalog might be able to indentify all these pieces.

Weekend's Work

So this is what I was up to this weekend. I was building something but it had nothing to do with 28 mm miniatures. This project is supposed to take 2 people about 12 hours to do. I do not think I am going to make it in under that time limit. With spring cleaning on Saturday and this on Sunday, I was beat when I woke up this morning for work.

My Father-in-law, and my mom's friend came over on Sunday to help with the build. My mom was tasked with sorting the hardware components with my mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and loving wife were tasked with making lunch and dinner while keeping the 3 year old away from the power tools.

Here I am after about 7 hours of work on Sunday. I add more of the fencing on the deck this evening but will need help to get the roof on and the swing beam up later in the week.

GWs Free Shipping

So GW has been doing Free Shipping on orders over 15 dollars for a while. Given the cost of GW stuff pretty much every single item meets this threshild. I almost never buy anything from them directly except specialist games stuff since I can get a much better deal and support my local store by buying or order from them but they had a problem getting specialist game stuff for me. There are some online stores that still over a modest discount on specialist game stuff but you have to spend a reasonable amount to get the discount.


Currently I am working on getting my 20 year old epic space marines into a usable modern force so I am buying a couple of things over time. Here is where GWs 15 dollar or more order free shipping comes in. Each of the overpriced Epic Blisters is more than this so I ordered them each individually. They have different lead times ranging from 1 day to 3 weeks so I hope this will speed up arrival of at least 1 blister. I am sure GW will still make a nice profit on them even with individual shipping.

Hobby Time Displaced

This is a picture of my father in law and I unloading a outdoor playset for my daughter from a rented truck. 5 Boxes loaded with wooden parts to be assembled. Once I opened the boxes to check the parts they fill up my cars half of the garage. After 2 weeks of doing nothing on it due to a funeral and Easter, I had to get started so my hobby time is getting really compressed. I am trying to be better about time management to get more stuff done around the house to allow for more hobby time when I do get a chance.

Warhammer 40K Battle Missions

Picked up Battle Missions today for some light reading over Easter weekend. Looks interesting enough where everything is a few tweaks to a standard mission. The thing I noticed was that they give you a nice picture of the deployment including what counts as the players edge for movement on of reserves and fall back. I also noticed that the scale on the pictures is very bad and almost random. What is list as 12 inches on some maps looks the same as 6 inches on others. Now Guys, you have a standard board of 4 by 6 could you not have made all the maps to scale. You went through all the trouble to make them why not do it right so players get a real indication of what the distances are.

I wrote some new missions in the past. You can check them out here.

Blood League Season 3 Game 4

Finally got my next blood bowl league game in. I only have time for about 1 hobby game every 2 weeks and I had that 40K Apoc game that took up a whole Sunday so this was delayed a bit from the schedule. I picked up a 3-0 win but I cannot really say that I know how to play my Chaos team an better. I essentially got lucky when in Turn 2 my Dark Elf opponent failed a 2+ dodge roll on a player with dodge skill. This left him poorly positioned to defend again my pounding which gave me the multiple man advantage through the rest of the game. My armor breaking dice where on fire and tore through his AV8 like nothing. After having almost no luck with casualities this season I got them all in this game. He ended up with 2 permanently injured players which pretty much makes his already battered team not worth much. He has 2 positionals that should be cut and another 2 that are questionable for long term development.

I have now got my team value back to where I started since I lost 150K last game when my minotaur was killed. Ofcourse other teams are now 200-300K more valuable than mine so I will get inducements through the rest of the season probably.

Is it us?

Why are people so bad with the rules for 40K? It seems like a day does not go by where some blog publishes a post with an incorrect rule in it. Sometimes these mistakes are just little parts of battle report recaps or tactica but sometimes they are the whole basis for the post. Anytime I see this I try to leave a comment so that these things do not keep propagating through the player base. Sometimes people come back and tell me that I am wrong. Often when they do this they are correct or the rule is one of the great gray areas that haunt the system where they are just vague or make no sense.

Do you still encounter players who claim that if you charge into an ongoing combat the opponents models cannot attack the new chargers? I remember that happening to me during a small tournament not long after 5th edition so I discussed it with my opponent about it even though I was the one doing the charging. I swear that this is something that people saw in rumors and propagated since the actually rule is not crystal clear. Of course if you applied the logic that gets to that point to the rule properly you would end up with charging unit not being able to attack in close combat since they were also not engaged at the beginning of the assault.

You look at the Adepticon FAQ which is longer than the basic rulebook. It does include all the codices but still GW should being doing a better job of writing clear rules. You look at a site like warseer and see 15,000 topics and 220,000 thousand posts in the rules area. Sure many of these repeat every few months but come can we not read the rules or are they just overly complicated and not clear.

Can you look at the rules for the hive guard Impaler cannon and say for certain whether those rules are limiting covers saves the target can get or just trying to say how to treat cover for direct fire weapons that do not require LOS.

I look at the competition Blood Bowl rulebook which is like 40 pages with a 1 page FAQ. It is pretty clear because people have put in over 2 years of unpaid fulltime work into getting it into a clear, concise, and compact. The biggest problem with that rule set is that both the Block actions and Blitz actions have a Block in them and if their was an addition name for hitting people things could be clearer since many skills do not work for both block parts of blitz or block actions.

Tervigon WIP

As part of my speed building last week for the Apocalypse game I wanted to get a Tervigon in the army. I had three unbuilt fex kits so I got to work. My goal was mainly just to get the basic body assembled and do the greenstuff and arms later.

My conversion is really simple. I essentially just extended the mid section of the fex kit with spure pieces. I then started to fill in the space with random curvy bits just to that there is less greenstuff required.

I used some of the hive node terrain bits from the stealer set to get the places where the termigants will appear.


Once I do the greenstuff I will add another armor plate to the back just facing the other direction to cover the unfinished spine part.