Road to North Star Warhammer Tournament

The tournament uses 2200 point armies. Oh, my, that's a lot of guys. If I was a competitive player, I'd start preparing for the tournament with a thorough review of the rules. However, I'm not going to be competitive. In fact, I'm going to get crushed. Probably five times (there's five rounds). Warhammer Fantasy tournament players by and large are zealots. They know their armies, they know the rules, they know every single little item out of Games Workshop's FAQs, and they know how to play. I'm not that caliper of player yet - I'm going to the North Star Tournament have fun, make friends, and maybe learn a bit more about the game as I do it. So, a thorough review of the details of the tournament rules isn't going to be that helpful. I just need to make sure my Army is legal with a point value of 2200.

My goal is to create a unique army that I can play in future team tournaments with Brian. He plays Lizardmen (frogs, actually, but that's another story). So, I'm going to create an infantry heavy force with lots of artillery to compliment what he does with his frogs. I sought some help in fleshing out the ideas, and Brian and Boldo from Boldo's Armory in Rochester tweaked my list. This is what we came up with (we used Army Builder, of course - any Warhammer player can't live without that wonderful tool):

• Arch Lector of Sigmar @ 190 pts (General; Prayers of Sigmar; Hand Weapon; Sword of Battle; Armor of Meteoric Iron; Dragonbane Gem; Potion of Strength)
  
• Captain of the Empire (Battle Standard Bearer) @ 128 pts (Hand Weapon; Full Plate Armor; Battle Standard Bearer; Holy Relic)
  
• Battle Wizard @ 150 pts (Level 2 Upgrade; Hand Weapon; Lifebloom; Feedback Scroll)
  
• Master Engineer @ 85 pts (Hand Weapon; Hochland Long Rifle)
  
• Steam Tank @ 300 pts ((Hull) Main Cannon; (Turret) Steam Gun; Causes Terror; Large Target; Unbreakable; Engineer Commander (Repeater Pistol))
  
• 15 Greatswords @ 190 pts (Always Strikes Last; Musician; Standard Bearer Std; Hand Weapon; Great Weapon; Full Plate Armor; Stubborn) and Count's Champion (Always Strikes Last; Hand Weapon; Great Weapon; Full Plate Armor)
  
• 2 Mortar @ 75 pts with 3 Crew (Hand Weapon)
  
• Great Cannon @ 100 pts (Cannon) with 3 Crew (Hand Weapon)
  
• 4 Pistoliers @ 114 pts (Musician; Hand Weapon; Brace of Pistols; Light Armour; Fast Cavalry) and Outrider (Hand Weapon; Pistol; Repeater Pistol; Light Armour)
  
• 9 Knightly Orders @ 270 pts (Musician; Standard Bearer Std; Barding; Hand Weapon; Lance & Shield x9; Full Plate Armor) and Preceptor (Hand Weapon; Lance; Full Plate Armor; Shield)
  
• 30 Spearmen @ 192 pts (Musician; Standard Bearer Std; Hand Weapon; Spear; Light Armour; Shield)
  
• 29 Swordsmen @ 205 pts (Musician; Standard Bearer Std; Hand Weapon; Light Armour; Shield) and Duellist (Hand Weapon; Light Armour; Shield)
  
• 11 Handgunners @ 126 pts (Musician; Hand Weapon; Handgun) and Marksman (Hand Weapon; Hochland Long Rifle)
  

In any case, there was a 5 point bonus in the tournament if Armies were submitted by 30 September. I succeed, so maybe, for once, I won't rank last! It's going to take a lot of work to pull this together! All together, I've got to assemble and paint 121 models in just five weeks! Fortunately, I have a plan...

I've finally pulled everything I need together to make the Army. Almost everything is assembled and ready to prime. The characters came together great, and I mounted lots of Lizardmen bits to them. I'll prime everything tonight.

I did an express job on the Steam Tank. The Empire kit is great with lots of wonderful extra bits, but these all add time to the project. So, they went into the bits box. I left the wheels off the frame for now to make it easier to prime and paint.

Probably the most time consuming models were either the knights or the handgunners. I'm always surprised at just how long horses take to assemble and paint. It's incredible. Games Workshop provides a few extra bits that really help you customize the handgunners. I took full advantage of this and have a guy drinking from a bottle and another guy working as a loader.

I'm missing is a cannon - Games Workshop US is backordered on this and I just hope I can get one over the next couple of weeks. I've also got some Lizardmen shields on order on Ebay to round off my theme of this being a unit serving Lizardmen warlords.

It didn't take too long to prime the Army. I read a Games Workshop article sometime two or three years ago about using a stick to prime your models with. You take a 24-36" long stick - it needs to have at least two sides that are about an 1", and it would be better if it was about 1" square-and wrap it in tape. I think the article used double sided tape, but I've found masking tape wrapped around the stick so it was sticky side out works fine. Leave room at the bottom to use as a handle. And then just stick your models to it. I don't recommend this for metal models because they're likely to fall off. Take it out side and spray the models with primer. This provides a few advantages. It allows a much greater range of motion and control which means you can see and paint your models better. It seems that you get better use of overspray - particularly if you use all four sides. And I tend to make less mess because I'm holding the paint target out in the air in front of me.

Once I had everything primed and was letting it dry, it was time to retool my work station. Like most of you, I only have so much space. When working on a large army like this, I need my space set up differently to assemble models than when painting them. Now that I'm ready to paint, had to switch it back. You can see my setup in the picture for this post. First up: the Steam Tank!

Starting to work up the paint on the Steam Tank. This is a major portion of the points in my army -- nearly 15% -- and that's a bit scary in Warhammer tournament play. I hope it's worth it. I'm not going to do anything special on the paint job. Just the basic wood, polished iron, copper, and gold. I guess I could leave it a bit tarnished to reflect its time in the jungle, but I just don't see it's master engineer letting that happen. In any case, it's got to be one of the more complicated units through all the Warhammer armies. Steam points, grinding, impact hits, causes Terror... And using the steam points seems like a matter of either finesse or absolute brute bashing. No in between.

In the meantime, I continue to read the Warhammer rules. One thing that's great about the new rule book is how they call out the main part of the rule in bold font. This makes scanning the rules section much better and is really helping my retention. One thing I've got to remember, though, is reading the FAQs and Errata before the event. So much to do; only so little time!

The Steam Tank has come out really well! I spent maybe a couple more hours on it than intended. And even then, I didn't do all that I could have with it. There are banners, buckets, and more that come in this kit and I left them aside in the interest of speed. I'll need to add those later, I guess. However, it did come out nice! Next I 'm going to do the unit of 30 spearmen. I hope to complete those in 3 days -- by Sunday night. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I like to immerse myself in my projects. Inspiration and fantasizing keeps me going. One thing that helps is reading related fiction, and in Warhammer, that means reading Black Library books. They have three specifically focused on the Empire. In fact, they call it "The Empire Series". There are three books: "Iron Warrior", "Reiksguard", and "Call to Arms". These are not literary masterpieces. How much SciFi is? But, they are fun reads and give me nice imagery to think about as I paint my dozens of models. You should try that, too.

Keep on cranking along on my spears. I hoped to finish tonight, but I don't think that's going to happen. Soooo, I'll do the feathers, the banner, and the drums. And maybe hair. Then I'll call these done till I get the same level of completeness done on the other units. I only have three more weekends to go and have nearly 90 more models to go. Including 18 horses, and I hate horses. They are REALLY time consuming.

I did go by Total Escape Games and pick up some stuff for my unit stands. I can't decide on the widths I want available. I've got two 30 man regiments -- the Spearmen and the Swordsmen (probably up next). If I go ten wide, I'll get The Horde bonus and an extra rank can fight. On the other hand, the spears already get this as long as it isn't a turn they charge. I'm wishing I had gone with 40 spears so I could get four ranks. That would make for a pretty tough infantry unit. On the other hand, ten wide is hard to maneuver, particularly if you have terrain on the board. So, I'm thinking I need stands six, eight, and ten wide for both units to give me flexibility.

The stuff I got included some rare-earth magnets, GaleForce 9 magnetic bases, and Games Workshops customizable stands. This isn't my preferred setup -- I wanted to use sheet metal. But, that will take even more time and I need to get stuff done.

Can you tell I'm feeling the pressure?

It's late and definitely past bed time. However, I think I've got the spearmen done well enough to play. I want the whole Empire Army to come out inspired by lizard like colors and I think the mix of greens here does that. I still need to put some flock and gravel down on the base. I also paint the sides with Games Workshop's Bubonic Brown. Then there's the whole thing of getting them magnetized to stick to the base. And let's not forget their shields. I'm going to try to use Lizardmen skink shields -- bought a bunch of them on Ebay, but they haven't arrived yet.

I still haven't decided what size of bases to make for these guys. I'm still thinking 6, 8, and 10 to have most flexibility. Plus, at 6 or 8 I think four ranks would get to fight (because they're spears). More on that in a future post.

Next up on to do list are the swordsmen. The spearmen are traditionally the most lowly of the State Troops in an Empire Army, so I wanted to use flatter colors. The spearmen will have a bit more flash. I think I'll do their outfits in light blue. Well painted brightly colored armies tend to get judged a bit more favorably than darker colors.

My race to North Star continues. The swordsmen are about half done; I have a chance of finishing the painting today. In the meantime, I've started working on movement trays for my regiments. The bases for the individual armies are standardized for infantry, cavalry, horrific monsters, and almost everything else in Warhammer (only exception I can think of is artillery). However, your entire unit moves as a group in formation. So, it's useful to put the entire unit on a movement tray for convenience and making game play faster. When doing this, you need to consider the playability, your strategy, and the actual mechanics of basing.

Many players are trying to mass units at least 10 wide now -- this allows them to benefit from the Hordes rule which in the new Warhammer rules gives them an extra fighting rank. However, big units are expensive, and you loose flexibility. You need to move in formation and it gets really hard to move a big unit like this around a busy table. And, a large unit like this can limit the number of units you have and leave you unable to cover all the threats you'll face on the battlefield. So, there are significant trade-offs. For North Star, I'm sticking with 6x5. This is traditional, but very tried and tested.

Mechanics are a bit easier to understand. The movement tray needs to be of the correct size; it needs to be rigid; it must be easy to pick-up; and the units must stay on it. The trick to keeping the models on the tray is to magnetize the bases of the models and to use something that magnets will stick to on the movement tray. I chose to use washers, rare-earth magnets, Gale Force 9 rubber steel sheets, and Citadel's modular movement trays. The movement tray has two rigid plastic sheets that are already marked for the proper base sizes so it's easy to measure the movement trays to the desired size. The rubber steel sheets are flexible and have self adhesive making it easy to attach the sheets. I cut the plastic sheets with the rotary cutter on my Dremel. Then I traced and cut a steel sheet out of the right size, adhered it to the plastic sheet, and then trimmed it to match. I used #8 washers and 1/16th inch thick disk magnets because combined, they are close to the exact depth of the Games Workshop bases. The closer to the steel sheet, the better the magnets will stick, so this is important. All I did was super glue the washer in place, and then the magnet.

The result is a movement tray that can even turn over and the models will stay on. This really helps game play!

Wow! This is hard. So I've painted 50 men and 1 steam tank. Not much of a Warhammer Army yet. I've got cavalry, handgunners, greatswords, artillery, and leadership to paint yet. My order of Skink shields for the State Troops have not come in yet. I don't have my display board done yet. Things are looking pretty rough!!!! Oh, and I've got to buy or make whatever I'm going to use to transport the army! And study rules! What have I got myself into??!!

No matter. Its fun and I like the way the troops are coming out. It's going to be a great Empire Army. My great cannon is supposed to be coming in tomorrow, and I'll simplify the painting a step on the remaining troops. If I have time, I'll spruce them up once I get all the basics done. And, if not, Boldo will back me up with loaner troops. Problem with that is I won't get any points for paint. Such is life.

Got the 10 Knights done this weekend, except for finishing the bases and their shields. I'm really happy with he way they came out. I really want these guys to be inspired by Lizardmen. My key for doing this is to use Saurus shields, if I can make them fit. I've got temple guard and regular shields to choose from. The green is supposed to be keyed to the notion of emulating the scales of lizards and the deep forests of Lustria. I've put several Lizardmen talismans on the the models, and I have a banner I plan on swapping in if I get enough time. I got the horses magnetized. This was complicated. I had to carve out space for two magnets (Dremel with a rounded cutting tool came to the rescue here -- but it was messy). And I wanted to be able to unhorse the Knights, so I only used plastic glue to mount them. We'll see how that goes.

I started the Great Swords this morning. I hope to have them done by tomorrow evening, but we'll see. This is what's left to do after that:

• Artillery -- my great cannon finally came in to Total Escape Games Friday
  
• Handgunners -- including a powder monkey
  
• Pistoleers -- I hate doing horses
  
• Characters -- Priest, Captain and BSB, Master Engineer, and Life Wizard
  
• Shields -- for Spearmen, Swordsmen, and Knights
  
• Bases -- flock, gravel, and paint the border
  
• Magnetization -- this is mostly done, but still have a bit to go
  
• Display stand -- still thinking about this
  
• Carrying case -- still thinking about this, too
  
• Study rules
  
• Pack and go...
  

That's an aweful lot to do when I've only got 11 days left (and one of those is a travel day). And just so you all know, I do have a full time job (I'm an engineer), a family (went and got pumpkins this weekend), own rental properties (had to go seal up the swamp coolers this weekend), and have five other blogs! I like being busy.

I'm phsyched to go, though. Really looking forward to getting up to Minneapolis and getting beat and pummeled for two days at North Star.

The North Star Warhammer Tournament masters have posted a picture of this year's trophy. Now, THAT's a Hammer. Way cool. Probably not suitable for air travel.

I've got one week to prepare left. Finished the Greatswords this morning as well as they're going to get done. They look pretty good. I'll post a picture of them tomorrow. I've got a HUGE amount of work to get done yet. Tonight I start working on the Handgunners. Hope to finish them tomorrow. Think I'll be OK, but posted that I'll take Tuesday off next week just to be sure.

Meanwhile, Games Workshop announced the release of the Tower or Sorcery today. This is a great looking Warhammer Fantasy Battles scenery kit that looks fantastic. They have other buildings, too. Check them out.

I'm into the final big rush now. Less than a week and I've got five days of work to do in three days, basically. I am ecstatic about how well my Warhammer Army is coming out! When I started the project, I had a fast painting scheme in mind and wasn't sure it would work. It has. I do need, after the tournament, to go back and do some touch ups. I haven't done good enough highlighting on many things. The faces can be taken up a notch higher. I'd like to bring up the Lizardmen inspired theme further. And this includes freehanding the banners with iconography from the Lizardmen Army Book.

Still, got a bunch to do. Back to the painting bench!

CHECK IT OUT! I am so very happy and relieved and.... tired. Haven't posted in a few days as I blitzed through finishing the Empire Army for the North Star Tournament. I painted around 60 models in the past two weeks. Of course, Great Cannon and the Two Mortars were pretty easy, but the characters took effort. And, I got a good display together -- took Tuesday off for that. And I've got the bases flocked and the edges painted. I look superb.

I wish I had two more weeks. I could have kept up better on my posts here; and I could have got some little details done that I had no time for. Plus just a slightly better level of finish on the paint. But, it's done and I'm ready to go up there and do battle for the weekend! Now I've got to pack. Did I mention I have job? Oh, yeah, I've been working all this time and even have to work most of tomorrow before I take off for Minneapolis.

All the travel plans worked perfect. My improvised Army transports worked awesome (still need to write a post about that) and the display board made it through checked baggage just fine.

The gaming hall that the organization committee put together is awesome. The boards have excellent terrain and each has its own named theme. Each table has a sign that states exactly what all the terrain is supposed to be, so there is no ambiguity among players in this regard. And we have plenty of space. For those of you who have played other tournaments, you'll know that many times you can barely move through the hall, much less move your armies around.

Anyhow, I've played the first two rounds. First round was against Dennis Gunia running Chaos Warriors (the Warhammer army in the picture). It was a good, fun game; my mortars did incredible damage to him, as did the Steam Tank. However, I got crushed! He played very well. Next game was against Tim Knoblauch playing Chaos Dwarves. Tim and I had a blast -- literally. His rocket launchers and my artillery dueled across the board. Alas, I only killed one of his two while he got my engineer and two of my artillery units fled. The result was a resounding win for the Chaos Dwarves. Got to go to get ready for round three!

So... Two days, five matches, and two months of hobbying comes to a close. I fought against Dark Elves in the third and fourth matches. Seth Richter and I duked it out yesterday, but the Mercenaries of Itza just weren't able to prevail. Seth's army had a large unit of Cold Ones and a level 4 mage that just ate me up. Normally, this wouldn't have been that bad as my artillery would just bash them down. However, terrain and scenario setup didn't lend itself to that approach and I ended up facing the Cold Ones at nearly full strength. My knights didn't eat their Wheaties and got creamed. That was pretty much the end. It didn't help loosing half a unit per turn to the mage. And then I tried against Eric Brooks. Eric had a very different approach than Seth. He had a large unit of Black Guard that just had to be dealt with. This ended up a close match -- other than my Knights fleeing off the table as my Pistolliers routed through them. I lost by about 100 points -- and the knights, who never even were in combat were worth 270 points. Incidentally, the Pistolliers rallied and finished the game on the table.

The final match pretty much summed up my tourney results. Paul Gonsowski fielded his Bretonnian's confidently. Now, I think a fielded line up of Bretonnian Knights looks awesome -- and a bit intimidating, even though they usually don't stand well after their first charges. My Steam Tank was destroyed in a charge by Knight Errants by a hero with killing blow (for those more experienced players out there, this will sound funny but check out their Army book -- this is valid). They overran and engaged my Knights, and crushes me during my following close combat phase. Meanwhile, I've been peppering him with my artillery, but with only marginal effect. One or two knights each time -- Paul was rolling an incredible series of armor and ward saves. A couple of turns later, most of my army has been slain. You can see above my last stand as I fight off his swarms of Knights.

And so, the Mercenaries of Itza just didn't fare so well at the North Star Tournament. However, I did. I painted a 2200 point Warhammer Army in about two months to a respectable level of finish. I got to spend a few days with my friend Brian. I met several great guys. And, I got a great tutorial from several players on how to play Warhammer Fantasy Battles. So, my Road to North Star may have ended on a bloody path, but the adventure was awesome and I look forward to doing it again next year.