Looking Back: Vehicles

I wouldn't claim to be the best Space Wolves player by any means. In fact, I was pretty mediocre as far as strategy was concerned. But I always preferred mobility for my wolves over any sort of static gunline. My troops were usually mounted, and my tanks usually did all of my long-range fighting. In my full collection, I have five tanks, two being Predators, two being Rhinos and one being a Razorback or third Rhino. When I played and collected Space Wolves, I wasn't exactly flush with cash. And really, when you play this game, not many people are. So I had to be flexible:

On the Prowl

Anything 1500 points or below only ever saw one Predator in the field. And the reason for this was that I loved my troops too much to sink points into something that I knew would get one-shotted.

My Predators, one of which has lascannon sponsons and the other with heavy bolter sponsons, generally played the role of bullet magnet. I wanted my opponents to shoot at this tank so that my Rhinos would last the extra turn. Lascannons scared most kiddies that I played against, so I'd field the TL LC with the HB sponsons or the AC with the LC sponsons. That way, there was always that “threat” of a lascannon running around on the field, drawing attention.

On the Warpath

My Rhinos were critical machines, even with transports being certain death to occupants in 3rd and to some degree 4th edition. But with the 5th edition has come a vast improvement to transports, so these babies are even more critical than ever before.

The Razorback collar and gun see little, if any, action. I keep the top hatch of the Rhinos separate so that if I want to field a 3rd Rhino I just swap out the top bits. But I like the model.

The Lone Wolf

I only have one of these, and it pretty much serves a singular, suicidal purchase. I basically just choose one tank at the beginning of the game and have my Landspeeder tank-hunt it. After that, I don't care what happens to it. It's a 65 point homing missile, and more often than not gets maybe one shot off before it goes down. I actually bought an Attack Bike but never assembled it to replace my Landspeeder but never got around to it.

This last shot reveals a slightly interesting truth — I was and probably will continue to be a sprue painter. For as long as I can remember, I painted most of my plastics while they were in the sprue, and then assembled them afterwards. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall I prefer it over pretending that I can reach into the dark recesses of various models and paint them perfectly.