A Better Picture of My Shining Spears

I think I'm finally figuring out how to properly photograph miniatures. Compare this photo to the ones here. On the old one, half of them are out of focus.

All it took was a trip down memory lane to my high school and college photography classes. I'll make a post later showing my setup and what I do to photograph.

Now that I look at it, I really need to redo their bases. That project is going on the back burner until Eldar get updated...

Shining Spears Are Awesome

I hear a lot of negativity about the Spears, and while I too have not had a ton of success with them last night everything changed. I took a squad of 5 plus an Autarch for a friendly game and they dominated. To start, I held them in reserve and got a good roll for them to come in the second turn (Autarch helps with that). My opponent had a Dreadnought and scout squad in my deployment zone (we were playing capture and control). The spears flew in and since they are a big unit (big base sizes) I managed to charge both the Dreadnought and scouts together.

while I didn't destroy the dreadnought I did manage to destroy two weapons. Meanwhile, I wiped out the scouts. I survived the return attacks and while I couldn't hurt it in his assault phase since my haywire grenade failed, I simply used Withdraw and got them all out of there.

Next they assaulted a combat squad in his deployment zone and wiped them out. They got assaulted once and actually lost a guy in that but managed to withdraw and charge back. They took some shooting casualties and lost a guy charging into difficult terrain but the Autarch and Exarch survived to the end of turn 7. Their final body count was 5 scouts and 20 tactical marines.

A jetbike Autarch is a beast. He can get 6 S6 power weapon attacks on the charge. He can carry a fusion gun or a reaper launcher (either one results in dead marines). Supported by a squad of spears there is not much that can resist.

However, I don't think my experience is typical. Most of the time you will charge into a squad, devastate them and then get shot to pieces. This didn't happen too badly to me because I exploited some deployment mistakes. He wasn't able to bring all his heavy weapons to bear because I put a lot of terrain between us.

Anyway, Shining Spears are a scalpel among scalpels and really aren't for every battle. They're a hard-hitting "fun" choice. They're fast and deadly but can be very vulnerable in the shooting phase. I'm going to use them a bit more and see if I can still get some good mileage out of them.

Next game I think I am going to take Swooping Hawks, even though they suck. I used to love them back in the crazy days of 2nd edition and I want to love them again. I'll have to build a list around them.

Shining Spears Completed

Here's my latest project. Coming back from vacation I finally put the finishing touches on these guys.

I went with a different color scheme than the standard GW one. The codex says that aspect warrior colors and stylings vary among different craftworlds. I thought the GW one was too similar to the Dire Avengers. I went with a dark purple since no other aspect uses it.

My craftworld's main color scheme is black and green, black being the predominant color. To unify the aspect warriors with the rest of my army, I decided that every aspect will have black on their armor. For the individual models, they have black gauntlets, greaves, and helmet while the breastplate, pauldrons. and cuisses are the aspect color scheme. The exarchs have inverted color, with a black center and aspect colors on the feet, arms, and head. Furthermore, I inverted the jetbike's colors.

I'm not sure what to work on now. I need to finish up my windrider host, maybe I'll finally get around to that.