TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 4: Building on Creations of Bile

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2025. Last Time Around I ran a test game with the Death Guard Flyblown Host Detachment against the new Astra Militarum book, and I got back on my grind of painting some terrain, finishing most of the set from Volkus. This week we’ll look at another game and more hobby progress.

Revisiting and Revising my Creations of Bile List

While I was at the Ettin January RTT, Ryan convinced me to join the Ettin League they were starting up. It’s a ten-week league with players grouped into pods based on experience and skill and it seemed like a good excuse to play some new people and help meet my game goals for the year. I had to lock in a list for the league’s first phase, which meant updating my Creations of Bile list. I enjoyed playing the army at the RTT, but there were definitely some tweaks I wanted to make. In particular:

What Worked:

• Plague Marines. I was a big fan of these guys in the list, and they worked well with almost every buff.
• Obliterators. Likewise, the Obliterators were solid and being able to bring one back per turn via Stratagem felt very good.
• Nemesis Claw. The Nemesis Claw just felt really good with the army trying to drop multiple units into melee at the same time. I definitely want to keep running one.

What Didn’t:

• The Land Raider. Obviously this was a stop-gap to fill points with something that could serve my purposes, but suffice to say paying 240 points for a transport and four Lascannons was just not what I wanted to be doing.
• The Possessed. If you run these you probably need 20-30 of them. A unit of five just doesn’t do that much, and I can better spend those points elsewhere.
• Not Having Infiltrators. The extra movement isn’t super reliable and it’d be good to have a unit of Nurglings or two in the army to give me some early game speed bumps.
• No Enhancements. Not having points for Enhancements was also really rough, and something I’d like to avoid this time around.

The easy cut here is the Land Raider – I can drop that bad boy to gain 240 points, plus another 120 if I drop the Possessed, for a total of 360 to work with. The Predator Destructor offers most of the damage output of the Land Raider if not more for a hundred points less, and is one of the game’s most efficiently-costed units. It’ll make a fine replacement, and I can spend the saved points on a third Rhino and still have 25 points left over. That’s 145 points.

It’s at this point I also realized that my RTT list for Ettin was only running 1,960 points, for reasons that are completely unknown to me. Possibly because I’m a moron. On the one hand, I’m impressed I went 3-0 down 40 points that could have just been Nurglings. On the other hand, that’s absolutely the kind of dumb-as-shit move I pull from time to time. This means I have 185 to play with, of which 40 will absolutely be Nurglings. Another 35 will go to buying Prime Test Subject for my Chaos Lord, giving him a huge damage boost and the ability to be an anti-vehicle threat. And for my last 115, I can spend those on a Master of Executions to join the Nemesis Claw and give him the Helm of All-Seeing Enhancement. That gives me some great board control play in a pinch if I need to screen out deep strikers or GSC reserves.

After making these adjustments, the list looks like this:

My League List - Click to Expand

I like this list quite a bit more. It’s slightly more mobile – Rhinos and Predators are faster than a Land Raider – and hits just as hard. Losing the Possessed takes it down a bit, but I think I make up for it in the aggregate with more scoring potential out of the Nurglings and Land Raider, and the Master of Executions makes a great add-on to the Nemesis Claw, who otherwise lack the ability to re-roll hits and wounds. The MoE gives them that while benefitting from their +1 to hit/wound abilities at the same time (well, the +1 to wound, anyways), and he gives me a second character to drop an Enhancement on. Otherwise the list plays about the same. The Warp Talons are the other unit I’m not sure about, but they’re already painted, so they’re staying in.

With the list set I needed to get in a practice game, and so I called up my buddy Luke for some Saturday night hams-and-hangouts with the wives. Luke’s running Chaos Knights and has been testing different Iconoclast Fiefdom builds, and that makes him a good opponent to test against.

Test Game: vs. Luke’s Chaos Knights

We’re playing this game on Layout 4 – I’ve done a lot of games on Layout 2 because it’s easy to build but this time around I wanted to switch things up a bit and do something I was less comfortable with. So Layout four with a random mission.

The Mission: Burden of Trust / Prepared Positions / Search & Destroy

Luke has adjusted his bit from the last time around; he’s running a Knight Lancer, 3×10 Cultists, a big Accursed Cultist blob with the Dark Commune, and something like 5 Brigands and a couple of Karnivores. He’s got Pave the Way on the Lancer to give up to three units Scouts 6″. The Lancer is a problem – it’s a big threat, and one that’ll be hard for me to take down with limited shooting threats. I need to keep my tanks safe until they can hit it, and avoid getting charged by it. I deploy back from the line with my tanks and dump the Nurglings where they’ll prevent aggressive scout moves from the Accursed Cultists and also stop movement from the War Dogs along that table edge. My plan is to capture the two side objectives and leave the middle open for now – I don’t want to tussle with the Lancer at the moment.

I’m going first.

I roll +1 Strength and +1 Ballistic Skill, and re-roll both into +1 Strength and +1 Weapon Skill. I’ll take it. +1S is pretty bad against Knights, but I can make some use of it here.

That’s a big advantage on Burden of Trust, and I spend the first turn getting into position and taking a few shots at the Accursed Cultists. I draw Overwhelming Force and Assassination, and ditch the latter for points. On Luke’s turn he draws Recover Assets and Sabotage and makes what I think is a pretty big mistake – he spends 1 CP to chuck Sabotage, ending up with Marked for Death as the replacement. This is not only wasteful but unnecessary – Luke had an easy path to Sabotage with the Lancer or a War Dog around the side of the table, and likewise could have accomplished Recover Assets as easily. He also wasn’t behind on points – I had blanked with my T1 draws. The net effect is that he ends up not finishing Recover Assets – I kill one of the War Dogs attempting it – and Marked is pretty much unscorable based on my unit picks, so he’s blanking that turn.

Turn 2 is where things heat up… or would have, if I hadn’t missed a bunch of my charges. I get off a couple, throw some shots at the Lancer to drop it by about 10 wounds, and start defending two different objectives. Luke spends his shooting phases trying to pick off my Cultists and pushes forward, but then completely biffs his charge roll into the Vindicator, rolling snake eyes for it when he needed an 8. With no ability to re-roll, he’s stuck there, and the Vindicators and Obliterators make short work of the big knight. My Wwarp Talons drop in Luke’s DZ and combine with the Plague Marines to make it really hard for Luke to show up anywhere useful on the table with his Reserves Knights.

I scored Overwhelming Force on my 2nd turn and discarded Sabotage, then I pull Secure No Man’s Land and Marked for Death on turn 3, turning both into 5 point scores. On Luke’s turn 3 he’s able to get Overhwelming Force for 5 and No Prisoners for 4, putting him only 1 back on Secondary scoring. Unfortunately, he’s way behind on Primary and unlikely to catch up. On turn 4 I pull 4 VP for Storm Hostile and 6 for Recover Assets, while Luke can only get 2 for Bring it Down and can’t do much with Behind Enemy Lines.

We talk it out from here, and run through turn 5. I’ll end up pulling Behind Enemy Lines and No Prisoners on turn 5 for another 5 VP, and Luke will nab assassination, scoring both for 7 VP. My primary lead is mostly what carries me.

Result: 86-46, Win

I managed to run away with this one but it’s a lot closer if Luke doesn’t absolutely biff that Lancer charge mid-game. I still likely kill the Lancer with Oblits the following turn but it’s hard to say. The Nemesis Claw didn’t do much this game but the Chaos Lord was solid and the Nurglings did their job admirably. I like where this list is currently, and I’m excited to try it out in my first league game this weekend. As always, I’ll have an update for how it’s going.

Hobby Progress

Adding a Predator to my Night Lords list meant I’d actually have to paint a Predator, and that would be the same for my third Night Lords Rhino. I already have two Night Lords Rhinos painted in my current scheme, plus two more I painted more than a decade ago, but I have a third that’s about a third of the way done that I can finish up. I bought a few predators a while back with the intent of adding them to various armies, and now was a good time to go ahead and start doing that.

I also had one more heresy-era front plate for it so I went ahead and chopped that up and added it on. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I ended up going a bit lighter on the hull spikes because it didn’t make sense to add them where they’d impede the rotational movement of the turret.

I made a little progress on my Rhino, but at this point I’m expecting to finish that one next week. I’ll also want to make a decision on my Obliterators at some point – using Black Legion Oblits doesn’t feel great, so I may buy a half dozen more.

Hobby Bingo 2025

I took Bryce over to the local Warhammer store to pick up some things and while we were there Max “helpfully” told him about 2025 Hobby Bingo. I had been looking for how to take my son through the next step in hobby stuff this year and I’ll admit this was a fine way to do that. Based on what he’s already done, Bryce and I have decided to do the diagonal on this one, going from top left to bottom right.

We still have an unpainted Lieutenant from last year which will cover the Character, and I have more than a couple of Space Marine units around here we can do, including a unit of Scouts that will be good practice for Bryce. Combat Patrol is an easy one for us, which just leaves the Centerpiece mini and the “Your Choice” square. We’ll decide on the choice later – it might be another warhammer adventures book – but my son promptly asked me for a Knight as his Centerpiece Model, ensuring that a regular visit to the local GW would become an expensive one. Still, it’s a better option than most for his army and will help him quickly build out to 2k points. We’ll get started on it in the next couple of weeks, once the single week of winter we get in Texas each year has passed.

Next Time: Night Lords, Creations, and Knight Assembly

That does it for this week’s update but check back next week for another Thursday update. I’ll have another battle report and some more hobby progress – gotta finish this last Rhino – at the very least. On that note, if there’s something you’d like to see in these weekly updates, let me know. I went a bit harder last week, showcasing the tech I used with Flyblown Host to execute a slingshot charge and going in-depth on my ruins painting process, but it’s not clear to me if people really liked that. Sound off in the comments or let me know via Discord if that stuff is good or I should go lighter on the progress/game recaps.

See you next week!

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