Army Showcase- Graham's Slaves to Darkness

Welcome to the first in what will hopefully be a new series on the blog, the Army Showcase. 

St Andrews Wargaming gives me the opportunity to show off my own hobby work to the blogging community, and there are many other great blogs out there to showcase their own hobby work and amazing armies. However, there are plenty of fantastic armies out there from hobbyists and players that do not have their own blogs, and I hope to help bring you some of these in the coming year. 

So before we get started with the first army showcase, I am putting the call out to all the readers out there. Do you have an army that you wish to showcase on the blog? It doesn't have to be a Golden Daemon winner, just a painted force that you are proud of and want to show to my regular readers. If you want a chance to showcase your own army, please get in touch (corrm83@gmail.com). All you need are some decent quality photos of your force (cameraphone is fine) and to answer a few short questions based on the army to get a flavour of why you chose the force. 

Today's inaugural army is Graham's Slaves to Darkness Chaos force. Graham's models have appeared on the blog before. I first met him at the Newcastle Warlords gaming club and was amazed by his Age of Sigmar armies that he uses. He does some amazing work, frequently wins painting competitions and has even had the opportunity to use his armies in live stream games on the Warhammer Community channel. You can find more of Graham's excellent work on his twitter page (@PaintedbyG) and his facebook page. 

Second Thoughts on Age of Sigmar- Vampire Counts vs Chaos Warriors

Last week, I managed to get my second game of Age of Sigmar to try out the new system. My first game did not go so well and I highlighted many of the problems that I had with the game. Hopefully my second match would go better and I would start to see the appeal of GW's newest game.

 

This week I took on Yans' Warriors of Chaos. Before the game started, we did have a little chat about what kind of game we wanted to play. I wanted a balanced game with a reasonably sized army. I was planning to take mostly infantry with a unit of cavalry and I also wanted to try out a monster this game. I suggested capping the model count at 100, but Yans pointed out that this would not work with Warriors of Chaos as he was mostly fielding dragon ogres, who have 5 wounds a piece. So model count was out. We then settled on roughly equal numbers of warscrolls and just what "felt right" on the battlefield and see how the game turned out. Once again, I really missed points values at this point. Games are so much easier to arrange when you can say to your opponent "2000 pts, I'm taking Vampires". So, we had a go at balancing our armies, but the only way to tell would be after the game had ended.

 

For this battle, I took:

Vampire Lord (V)

Two Necromancers (N1 and N2)

Terrorgheist (T)

30 Skeletons- Spears and Crypt Shields (S1)

30 Skeletons- Ancient Blades and Crypt Shields (S2)

40 Zombies (Z)

3 Crypt Horrors (CH)

Corpse Cart (CC0

9 Black Knights (BK)

 

A decent sized force for the vampire counts. I wanted to take bigger units of skeletons and zombies this time in order to access their special rules (skeletons get additional attacks in bigger units, while zombies get bonuses to their hit and wound rolls). I also wanted to try the Terrorgheist as monsters are absolute beasts in Age of Sigmar. I also took a few magic users in order to bolster my undead forces.

 

Yans force consisted of:

Chaos Lord of Nurgle (CL)

Nurgle Sorceror (S1)

24 Chosen of Nurgle (C)

Giant (G)

6 Dragon Ogres (DO1)

3 Dragon Ogres (DO2)

Shaggoth (S2)

Gorebeast Chariot (GC)

Hellcannon (H)