AbusePuppy

I prefer the Autocannon for the ability to crack enemy light vehicles, but the Multilaser isn't a bad gun, either. I'm not a big fan of the Armored Sentinel compared to the Scout one, though. (The Drop Sentinel with a Multimelta is surprisingly scary. You might consider fixing one up to give it a whirl- it'll help a lot against those tanks.)

I am likely going to be bringing some sort of bite-sized dessert.

When firing an emplaced weapon manually, both the gun and the shooting model need to be able to see the target. Honestly, the Storm Bolters are the least important part of the thing- there's tons of other benefits. The big advantages to the Containers are the random table of abilities you roll on and the bonus mini-terrain that comes with it. The table has several potentially powerful results (4++ save, free orbital bombardment, +1Str for rapid fire/assault weapons) that aren't hard to take advantage of, depending on your faction. The Ammo Stores and Fuel Dumps are both very useful as well and can easily be worth the 40pt price on their own.

If they're like the Heresy rules for them, they're the same as regular Terminators except they aren't prohibited from making Sweeping Advances.

This one was just kinda "eh, whatever" until I saw that he had named it George Washington. That really brought it over the top for me.

Once again we down in Corvallis will be hosting the next of our charity tournament series. To give things a little bit of a shake-up, this month we will be running the event under slightly different rules than usual- however, the goal is the same, to have a good time and bring to the fore all aspects of the hobby from playing to painting to writing. Last calendar year we raised over $400 for our charity with the help of sponsors such as Kromlech, Spellcrow, and Gamemats.eu; we're looking to double that or more this year and we hope you all will help us. The entry fee for the tournament is $20, and includes a lunch on the day of the event. We have a number of prizes to raffle off to participants and all players always receive a grab bag with an item unique to the event courtesy of Vreda Forge. Like all of our tournaments in the Razor Valley series, this event will be ITC-sanctioned and use the current ITC FAQs, though it will use a nonstandard set of missions and list creation guidelines. To whit: Armies are built from 1750pts and no more than three detachments. You must have a printed (or written) copy of your list to turn in to the TOs and to show opponents. As this is a "highlander" event, there will be no duplicate units or detachments. The only exception to this is troop units, which you may duplicate if you have already taken one of every troop available to your army. (Note: this does not apply to dedicated transports taken as troops, which are still considered to be unique.) Note that named versions of characters (e.g. Librarian Tigurius) and "near-identical" versions (e.g. Land Raider Crusader/Redeemer) are considered to be the same as their standard counterparts for purposes of uniqueness. This also applies to different versions of the same unit from separate codices (e.g. BA and SM Tactical Marines.) Armies may not include any formations, nor any gargantuan creatures nor superheavy vehicles. An exception will be made for armies consisting entirely of Imperial Knights, though they still are prohibited from bringing formations. We will be allowing all Forge World rules at the event, subject to the above restrictions, and the rules from Death from the Skies will be in full effect. We ask that all participants have models fully-assembled and WYSIWYG if they wish to use them in the tournament; we allow armies that are not painted/based, but such players will not be eligible for awards. Unlike many tournaments we encourage players to write up a backstory or information about their army- in fact, we have a prize for Best Lore that is voted on by the tournament participants, so break out those pencils and write your way into history. Additional details, as well as pre-registration (which is strongly encouraged) and information, pictures, lore submissions, and more from past tournaments are available on our tournament's webpage. Any questions can be submitted to the email address there, posted here to Ordo, submitted to myself via PM, or posted on our Facebook page for the event.

With the exception of the vanilla Russ (which is sadly trash), most everything you have is fairly decent, so you're at a good starting point. What I'd look at now is what kind of army you want- are you looking for an all-mechanized force of tanks, or would you prefer a combined-arms style army with a mix of tanks and infantry? If the former, you obviously need to start getting Chimeras and squads to fill them; some Wyverns would also add to your theme nicely while bringing something unique to the army. Look to fill out your anti-tank for that army, because it's something you will struggle with; Pask is a good start, and Vendettas can help as well, but you'll probably need Meltaguns in squads of dudes. (They're easy to convert from Boltguns, if you don't want to buy them.) If you're looking to more of a mixed army, you're going to need to get mans. Lots of mans. Two Infantry Platoons, each with 30-50 guys in them, is pretty standard; you'll want Power Axes on every sergeant, but heavy/special weapons are optional depending on points. (I myself like Lascannons.) You probably run Commissar Yarrick in that list, with 1-3 Priests lending a hand as well- Pask can be used, but he's not as useful/needed. You have a bit better AT options with this version but will struggle with mobility more when trying to get onto distant objectives. Ravenwing bikes are essentially impossible to shoot to death so long as they're getting their cover save, bar putting absolutely unreasonable numbers of shots into them. So you have a couple options: first, deny them that cover save. You can do this with orders (Bring It Down), with weapons that innately ignore cover (Wyvern mortar, Eradicator Nova Cannon, Hellhound Inferno Cannon, and even regular Flamers), or with more exotic methods (Psychic Shriek, etc), but the key here is you're denying them their reroll even if you aren't denying them their armor save. Another path is to use melee attacks, against which cover is useless- those big blobs of Guardsmen mentioned above will make short work of bikes with their Power Axes, and even just their normal attacks. Although they're a bit unconventional and niche, Rough Riders are also excellent against bikes- they strike first, ignore armor, and wound on 4s if they get the charge.

Augur Arrays are great when they work, but the problem is they essentially require you getting a Taurox into the enemy's face and having it survive a full turn- and if you've already done that successfully, then what do you need the Array for? Just have more dudes inside of Tauroxes that disembark rather than playing games with Deep Strike. I don't think there are any vehicles that are both fast enough and tough enough to make good use of the Arrays, unfortunately.

So not really new, more just reboxings to include several existent items in one kit?

Six targets per turn, to be sure, but if he's doing it "right" and giving each suit a pair of weapons then he's actually tearing anything he shoots to pieces in short order. Eight Burst Cannon shots vs a single guy in cover should very rarely fail to vaporize that guy.

I don't see how you can say a flying AV12 vehicle is just as hard to kill as a ground-based AV11 one. You might not realize because you've never played the army, but it actually struggles a lot with killing airborne AV12 because it's needing 6s followed by 6s in order to do anything- and most other armies out there are in a similar position when trying to shoot down a Valkyrie. (To give you the quick math- the army gets ~2 markerlight hits against a flying target, and used to boost two separate Riptides all with Burst Cannons gets you ~6 total hits, which is one penetration. The Wraithknight adds .75 penetrations and all of the scat bikes combined add 1.2 glances. Assuming the Valkyrie is willing to Jink- which it should- the odds of that killing it are very low, and that's shooting literally my entire army at a single vehicle. To contrast, a single Riptide has pretty good odds of killing a Taurox in one volley.) Nothing either of us say is gonna make Scions competitive, you're right. But not all armies are equally good or equally bad- and the presumptive aim of his post was to make the best he could out of the options available. Within that context, the Valkyrie is a better transport than the Taurox Prime because it is less likely to die and more likely to deliver its contents to be in range without dying. The DS can be useful as an option, but on its own it's not typically enough because of the wide scatter range combined with the Scions' own short-ranged weapons. If you have Servo-Skulls or a Locator Beacon in the area it can be fine, but those have complications of their own.

Acolytes are great, either as naked bodies to fill out a squad (4pts/model) or with Boltguns (5pts/model) or special weapons (14pts/model.) Death Cult Assassins and Crusaders can add some hitting power and survivability to the squad, respectively, and mixing in a solo Psyker to get a chance at a useful power is a real steal. The Inquisitor themself is usually not carrying much gear, if any. I seem to remember in our game those Tauroxes didn't exactly "get what you paid for." In fact, quite a lot of them got wrecked and exploded and killed/pinned your guys in inconvenient locations. Airplanes are MUCH harder to hurt (AV12 vs AV11, able to Jink vs not, hit on 6s vs hit on normal BS) and much more likely to deliver their payload to where you need to put them. Yeah, once in a long while someone will snipe an airplane down- but the amount of firepower needed to do so would have vaporized a Taurox thirty times over, so who cares? All units in the game can be killed, it's a matter of the effort required to do so.

Because you have to pay points for them, basically. It's not actually a bad gun, but you're not taking Scouts because you want the firepower- you're doing it to get bodies on the field for cheap.

Always take two guns, never take a twin-linked gun. Missiles and Burst are your go-to weapons, although having a Flamer as a third to discourage charges isn't a terrible idea. Airbursting Frag Projector is also kinda neat, since it ignores cover innately. Drones for ablative wounds and extra bodies are very helpful.

The Valkyrie is an excellent airplane, albeit one with a limited role- you will always swap out the Hellstrike Missiles for Rocket Pods because the Hellstrikes are just absolutely awful. (The sponson Heavy Bolters are a solid option, I think, and one I would usually go for, but aren't mandatory.) The caveat on it, however, is that it can really only hurt infantry- and that means you need to set up the rest of your army to be able to wreck vehicles. The Airborne Assault formation is pretty decent but does commit you to a plan that leaves a lot of models off the board to start; you would need to add something else to it so you wouldn't auto-lose on turn 1. An Inquisitor and some friends are an idea choice for this, since they are cheap, easy to hide, and relatively fluffy; however, almost anything can potentially do. Tauroxes have reasonable firepower, but they are ridiculously easy to destroy given their cost and you can't really expect any of them to survive past the second turn or so unless you're facing a really, really weak army (or you're playing so safe with them that they basically aren't part of the battle.) Since Scions need to get up close and personal in order to achieve much of anything, I think you're better off with the Valkyries- kit your squads with Plasma or Melta and drop them out of the transports to blast open any nearby tanks, then have the Valks themselves kill all the infantry. Twin-linking all of the Scions' guns the turn they disembark ensures that they'll do their job right, and the pie plates should have a hard time missing completely.

Realistically speaking? They should probably all be Bolters or BP/CCW. (I prefer Bolters, but I know folks who have run them with BP/CCW and had success.)

Well, if we want to get technical then yes, most Imperial bolt pistols are fed from magazines (which typically contain a clip.) But some actually are clip-fed, such as the Herersy-era variants used by CSM. So technically I was correct- the best kind of correct.

Yeah, a Bolt Pistol clip only hold fifteen rounds so he'd have to get rid of the last five manually.

There are very few single models or even formations that are so powerful that you can't tone them down by proper choice of upgrades/options or what you use in the rest of the army. The hard part is figuring out what everyone else thinks is "appropriate" power level and trying to match that, since everyone has a different idea of where the game should be and what constitutes a "tournament list."

To be the devil's advocate here: I have missed three of the four years of OFCC I wanted to attend because I could get a team put together, or the teams we did form fell apart at some point before the event itself because one or more people had real-world commitments. Getting four people to lock into attending a tournament six months in advance is not a trivial matter when they have kids, significant others, jobs, etc, etc, etc that often bring up emergencies that can't be avoided and are hard to slough off with the excuse of "I have some very important toy soldiers to play." I get that people love the team format, and that's great, but it is a huge limiter to bringing new people to the event.

I'm pretty sure Hanaur is the only one here confused by the idea that a Adeptus Sororitas detachment is allowed to take Adeptus Sororitas units. There's lots of things to gripe about in 40K list building, but faction definitions isn't one of them.

And FOUR HP? Um, hello, that's like as tough as two Piranhas?!?! What was GW thinking??

Yeah, a Vestal Task Force can include any models with the appropriate faction- whether they are drawn from Codex: Imperial Agents, Codex: Adeptus Sororitas, a Forge World datasheet, or some other supplement. It's the same reason that you can take models from any of those sources in a Combined Arms detachment, for example.

Oh, okay, I thought I saw him in a Revenge formation, but I may have misread.

Are you sure about this? Because the units in a Reborn Warhost all have two factions- they would be Ynnari as well as Harlequin, which would seem to allow them to qualify for the Death Masque stuff.