Glimpse into the Golden Age

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 7

Apologies for the long wait (it’s almost been a whole month..), but we’re finally back with the 7th battle of the ongoing campaign: Glimpse into the Golden Age. My opponent, Rob (Grimzilla on the forum), had apparently taken some crap before the battle about the list he was using. His previous list was something along the lines of 2 necron fliers and 3 annihilation barges, but today he was going to try a new list. His new list consisted mainly of a unit of 7 necron lords. The rest of the list was filled up with 2 mandatory warrior units and a C’Tan. The unit of 7 lords was something he was curious to try. A unit like that is so hard that it has the ability to kill virtualy every unit it comes into contact with. The question of course, is whether it will be able to kill enough of those units to earn their points back.

I myself am using the new chaos dex for the first time. I made the list in a hurry and all I could say about it at that poin that I was kind of dissapointed that the daemon prince and defilers got more expensive. I also didn’t like that my cheap and effective daemon weapon option for the lord was gone.

After turn 1: My daemon prince is trying to distract the lord unit while my rhino unit and defiler go for the (comparetively) squishy C’Tan and warriors.

The mission had us deployed in wierd, vertical lines throughout the battlefield and it also prevented Rob’s lord unit from deep striking anywhere else than the deployment zones. This was a great advantage to me since he was kind of relying on his teleportation ability (which worked like deep strike) to get to the important combats.

Turn 3: Rhino unit with lord kills the warrior units and makes contact with the C’Tan. Epic combat between chaos lord with murder sword and C’Tan begins.

The lord unit managed to take out an obliterator and a daemon prince while my rhino unit and defiler took out the 2 warrior units and the C’Tan. The C’Tan combat was unusually epic though. The C’Tan was locked in a challenge with my lord and between his initiative test forcing bolt, my activated murder sword and his wound regenerating ability, the combat lasted at least a full 4 rounds. In the end my lord died to an initiative test right before he was about to knock of the C’Tan’s last wound. The defiler came in afterwards and cleaned up the mess though.

C’Tan kills chaos lord. Defiler is not amused.

Once the C’Tan was dead, all I could do was grab as many objectives as possible and keep his lord unit from doing anything. I had to use some tricky tactics but with his assault rolls sucking balls I managed to accomplish all of this and bring it home for the win.

This fine tactic is called my ‘lets grab this objective but keep just out of range of those necron lords’-maneuvre.

So, since it took so much time to post this report you might have guessed it already: there haven’t been much other battles for the campaign since. I never heard the full story, but some people wanted to quit the campaign while other people then also didn’t want to keep it going anymore and basically: drama.

Oh well, at least nobody can say that we didn’t see it coming.

Hopefully this won’t be the last campaign batrep, but if you’ve been following along, just letting you know it might be. I’ve had a lot of fun and the goal we had in mind in the first place (getting experience with 6th ed) has been accomplished pretty nicely. I’m going to try and keep the blog posts coming though. I’m slowly but steadily finishing my raptors as well as reading the new chaos codex, so I might blog some stuff about that in the near future and until then…

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 6

Battle 6 for the campaign was against Piers (Str10_hurts on the forum). Piers is the one organizing the campaign and I had a feeling his necrons were going to be a tough opponent to deal with. He had a destroyer lord, a bodyguard of some sort, two big units of immortals, 3 tomb spiders, loads of scarabs, a couple of wraiths and a small unit of warriors carrying his relic. The mission objective was for each player to carry his own relic to a ‘doorway’ in the middle/back of the board. Otherwise the mission was just kill points (or whatever they call it nowadays). I went for a big unit of 20 marines accompanied by a lord, a small unit of 10 in a rhino, some lesser daemons, some termies, a defiler and an obliterator.

This was how it looked after the first turn. Big marine unit would be going to try and punch through to the objective (the big tower in the back) to deliver the package.

It soon turned out though, that punching through the scarab wave wouldn’t be going as easy as I would have hoped and my big marine unit got stuck in bad. Also, my 10 man unit was thrown out of their rhino almost immediately by the wraiths and also got stuck in. In turn two I decided to throw in my daemons and termies with the 10 man squad, hopefully killing the wraiths as soon as possible.

Turn 2: Big unit stuck in scarabs, about to get assaulted by necron lord/spiders and 10 man squad + daemons duking it out with the wraiths.

Unfortunately, none of those quick breakthroughs happened and at a couple of points I was wondering if they were ever going to happen at all. Luckilly, the termies charging in with the 10 man squad and the defiler helping out with the big unit was enough to break all of Piers’ units eventually.

Epic challenge between chaos lord and necron lord. Necron lord reanimated himself twice and had to be beaten down repeatedly by awesome daemon weapon rolls.

The battle ended with me having a major lead in killpoints and piers having been able to deliver his package. I made a last ditch effort to reach the objective zone, but was stopped by a distinct lack of a turn 7.

My poor marines, stopped dead in their tracks by sheer lack of turnage.

In the end the battle was a draw and all in all a nice way to sound out the old codex. Piers has a great necron army that’s proven tough to beat by everyone else so far, so fighting him to a standstill counts as a solid result in my book.

As for the new book…

I’ll try and give a proper review next week since I just didn’t have any time to do anything with it except look at the pretty pictures.

At least the back of the book has a cool line on it.

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 5

So, last friday, another battle for the campaign went down. It’s kinda scary because we’re about over half-time with the campaign and it’s still going! I’d have to knock on wood, but it almost seems like this one might actually be able to make it to the end…

The battle I played was against Remco (Confessor Theodoris on the forums) with his sisters of battle. His list is kind of famous at the club for doing well in tournaments and stuff “despite” it being a sisters list. This kinda put me on my guard and also pretty much halfway into writing down a loss.

Totally unnessescary of course as the battle turned out to be just a plain ‘ol draw. Well, not quite plain as it was a really tense battle in the end which could have swung a lot of ways before the final dice was rolled.

Turn 1: The big trench in the middle is supposed to represent a river (something that was required for the mission). We obviously didn’t have a lot of river terrain at the store.

The battle started out bad for me as my defiler got shot down right away and my lord got killed by Saint Celestine (which I believe his unkillable special character was called) a couple turns later. My rhino unit compensated a bit by surviving an outflanking sister unit and killing them off in revenge, claiming a special mission objective afterwards (you needed to get two of those for 1 vp). When my deepstrikers came tried to use a termicide unit (3 guys with combi meltas) and an obliterator to kill off his two nasty S8 AP1 tanks, but I only managed to kill one before I lost both units. I used my daemons to kill off celestine and her unit of flying sisters.

Celestine is apparently best dealt with though superiority in numbers.

At the end of the battle my only shot at a draw was to hold on to my home objective, as I wasn’t going to be able to get him off of his, and score 2 mission objectives, for a single vp, to counter his ‘first blood’ vp. I also had to hope Celestine stayed dead of course…

End of the battle: I only had a single daemon claiming that objective… Thank the gods for fearless units!

So a draw it was!

In other news: I am getting the new Horus Heresy book from forgeworld. I’m not planning on starting a pre-heresy force in any sense of the idea (at least not before I win a fucking lottery or something), but just think of all that juicy fluff, people. Oh that juicy fluff!

I’ll also be getting the new chaos codex of course. But so far I find most of the models ugly. Especially the dragon. It looks really wierd and not at all like anything that would fit into my chaos army as I built it. Wtf is it even? A mechanical dragon? It doesn’t have a crew as far as I can see… Is it some sort of daemon? Why would it wanna help chaos marines? Is this something that one would see regularly among a random chaos marine warband or is it tied to a particular legion? It’s just too much nonsense for me right now.

Left: Awesomeness. Right: Dafuq..

Oh well, I guess I’ll read all about it next week and in the meantime…

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 4

Back again with another recap of yesterday’s battle.

This week’s fighting was done against Dirk (Papa Papaja on the forum) and his nurgle chaos marines / daemon allies. Despite using lots of proxies and unpainted models (what kind of horrible, horrible person would do such a thing is beyond me), Dirk’s army could have actually been pretty fun to play against. It had lots of big nasties, healthy heavy support and enough solid troops. If only it hadn’t looked like a big, confusing pile of crap… *sigh*.

For clarification purposes: the upside-down spider is a wrecked soulgrinder, the unfinished hellbrute is a great unclean one, the dreadnought is a greater (summoned) daemon, the blue/orange rhino is a plague marine rhino and the green terminators are actually obliterators….

Hopefully having sufficiently illustrated my distaste for unpainted/proxied models, I’ll explain a bit about the battle itself. The mission was “The Relic” and the mission said we could only use forests as terrain. The only time this really mattered was when Dirk’s daemon prince landed in a piece of terrain that made him hit himself for 1 wound (that was pretty funny). The battle went back and forth a lot of the time and although Dirk had some bad luck with his daemon prince and greater daemon. Only the great unclean one seemed to be performing as it should and totally murdered one of my marine units, an obliterator and half of my termies. My terminators were pretty useful in taking out the greater daemon and a plague marine unit.

When the game ended at turn six I was extremely relieved, having only a single troop model left (that was holding the relic) while my termies were desperately holding off the great unclean one and a full plague marine unit.

Sometimes, dumping a unit of 10 terminators on a table is worth it for the psychological bonus alone.

If you’re wondering whether I actually got any painting done after all those promises I made last week…

Erhm…

No.

…

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 3

So, round 3 of the campaign totally went down last night.

I played against Koen this round, who was also sporting his chaos marines. The third mission was Big Guns Never Tire which means heavy support can claim objectives and are worth an extra victory point if you kill them. Koen used two defilers and a squad of 2 obliterators while I used 2 squads with 1 obliterator each. For our other units, Koen used a lash sorcerer, a regular squad with plasma and some khorne bezerkers. I used two regular squads with melta’s in rhino’s, a termicide unit, 5 lesser daemons and a daemon prince.

The battle as a whole was really wierd and had many wtf dice roll moments. A single chaos space marine squad killing off the daemon prince with a single rapid fire bolter volley was one of them and the khorne bezerkers killing off two out of three terminators with boltpistols was another. Luckilly, there were some good rolls for my side as well (the chaos marine unit running away after 2 plasma cannon shots and being able to blow up both defilers in 1 turn), so the battle ended in a draw with both armies almost completely wiped out.

Battlefield overview at turn 2. Interesting to note is the empty area in the center of the table where my daemon prince used to be.

I was pretty happy with the result anyway. My plan was to keep my obliterators on the objective and have my other guys disrupt and distract Koen’s army. So it was nice to have a plan actually work for a change. The downside was that pretty much everything had to die for that to happen. I’ll have to work on that.

Units that can shoot, ie.: obliterators, are apparently the shit in this edition.

Now, with the campaign update out of the way I’m going to try and get an actual painting session in tonight. Among the list of things to do are: glue back some bits that fell off the sorcerer and terminator lord, glue new bases underneath the raptors, assemble abaddon, paint the storm laser for the decimator and get serious about painting the raptors. If I can get all of this done, I’ll be a happy gamer. But first:

Death to the False Emperor!

Quick Campaign Update

A quicky this week. Purely for the purpose of updating my progress on the campaign. Last friday I battled against Imperial Guard.

The fun thing about my opponents army was that it was mostly infantry. He only had a single tank (not counting the chimera) that shot a S10 AP2 template and a forgeworld flyer. The game was mostly about objectives and I actually thought I had a chance in the beginning since most of the objectives were in my deployment zone and his army was clearly not going to be legging it across the table any time soon. I figured if I managed to kill off his troops quickly enough, I would be able to deny his objectives and my marines would be resilient enough to hold on to whatever they found. Most importantly: I wanted to take the decimator out for a test drive.

Start of turn 2. I killed a chimera, he immobilized a rhino. Everything was still looking pretty even.

I can be long and short about it, but in the end, despite the fact that my plan mostly worked, I just didn’t have enough troops left at the end to keep my objectives. Once the decimator and the daemon prince were dead I only had 20 marines who were in no good position to defend themselves (cover saves having really taken a blow in the new edition). Furthermore, since I’m fairly new with the 6th edition ruleset, I was also taken by surprise by some of the additional objectives that the game has now. Having your general killed will give a point to your opponent, which I see now, drastically diminishes the usefulness of certain HQ choices that are designed for combat (…such as Daemon Princes). Also, the decimator is just a big ol’ point sink and despite being awesome to look at, won’t be a repeat guest in my 1000 point lists.

So there you have it. The campaign battle has been reported.

Another thing I’d like to point out is this:

Pretty much everything I was able to say about this when I saw it was:

“…

Why Khorne?”

Death to the False Emperor!