Got down and dirty with a marines army once again. It was a fun, nicely balanced and nail biting game with no clear indicators of the outcome until the fourth and fifth turns. Got worried when I saw all the knights and supporting armour as I'd never played them before, but it wasn't so bad.
Death Guard/Daemons List
L'armée Death Guard/Daemon
Battalion 1 (DG)
DP - talons
Lord - Combibolter
Pox x20
Pox x12
PMs x5 - Blight Launchers & Plague Sword
Bloat Drones x2 - Spitters
PBC - Spitters & Heavy Slugger
Defiler - Reaper, Scourge, & Combiflamer
Battalion 2 (Daemons)
Spoilpox Scrivener
Poxbringer
30 Plaguebearers - Instrument of Chaos & Icon
2x3 Nurglings
Vanguard (DG)
Lord- Fist & Combiflamer
Tallyman
Foul Blightspawn
Helbrute - lascannon, missile launcher
Space Marines/Mechanicum/Knights List
L'armée Space Marines/Mechanicum/Knights
Battalion 1 (Space Muhreens)
Librarian
Captain
5x Primaris
5x Primaris
5x Scouts
Primaris Repulsor
3x Primaris Inceptors
Battalion 2 Mechanicum
2x Tech Priest Dominus
5x Skitarii Rangers
5x Skitarii Rangers
Dunecrawler
Super Heavy Auxiliary Imperial Knights
Knight Gallant
2x Warglaive Armiger
We decided to play the new Eternal War Mission, Beachhead, from Chapter Approved 2018.
I had just got a brand new camera 2 days before so I wanted to test it out. We quickly threw a bunch of terrain on the table that would look nice in photos, ensuring a decent path on either side for the Knight. A large piece of LOS blocking terrain was placed dead centre and we played with the ITC rule that the first floor was completely LOS blocking.
I won the roll off so I chose the far side of the table and thus my opponent deployed first. He had his knight controlling his right flank and most of his other stuff took the left.
I was going to try to hide as much as possible but then decided to go for target saturation instead, putting almost everything on my right flank, away from the big knight's guns.
My Nurglings were well positioned on either mid flank, ready to harass whatever came running down either of the corridors.
I put my larger squad of poxwalkers in position to attack the scouts who had set up camp on the middle objective.
The other squad shielded my Lord with a Powerfist who hunkered down in some ruins and waited for his chance to go head on with the Knight.
I had no idea how to fight knights but I thought it wouldn't do to not at least try some desperate gambit. I failed to seize and the game began.
In the first few turns, the battle split into 3 fronts: the Knight Gallant's advance on my left flank, and a nasty snarl of almost everything else on my right. There was also the push for the center objective.
The Knight advanced and managed to knick off one poxwalker whose head was sticking out.
My poxwalkers and Lord advanced in readiness for a turn 2 charge while my Nurglings started to harass the knight and his mechanicum flunkies.
The Knight totally curb stomped the Nurglings and wiped out the ensuing wave of poxwalkers that assaulted him next but my Powerfist Lord managed to put 8 wounds on it! Who would've thunk it? He was stomped as well like an afterthought following his moment of glory.
My Dreadnought, Bucky, was in an excellent position to fire on the Knight several turns but I forgot about him turn 1, and used him to kill 3 Inceptors that dropped in. They put the hurt on my poxwalkers in the centre before being obliterated by my fire frenzy stratagem. Then the Knight squashed him too.
My Defiler, Archibald, tried to settle the score late game, but every attack that it didn't whiff was saved. Then it got stomped too. I lobbed a few Blight Launcher Shells at it but didn't accomplish much.
In summary, his Gallant took my objective. It was very appropriate for a big stonkin' mofo like it to do.
Meanwhile, on my right flank, things got claustrophobic. My Bloat Drones, Prince, PBC, and plague marines were channelled into the narrow corridor as well as most of my Characters.
One of my Bloat Drones got whacked turn one, but his buddy held on tenaciously, surviving a hail of all kinds of bullets in turn 2.
His luck ran out turn 3, although I can't remember what killed him.
My opponent's snipers took a wound off my Daemon Prince Warlord but didn't accomplish much before they were bum rushed in turn 3 by a great horde of plaguebearers. The Plaguebearers came up from behind in a pincer move, forcing his army to be crushed between the forward advance and the PBs.
They attacked the Repulsor and the Dunecrawler to little avail. I had burned most of my Command Points by this time and couldn't buff them much.
It was the combination of my PBC's cannon, the Defiler's very random armament, and the Blight Launchers from the plague marines; that eventually whittled down the Repulsor to its doom at the end of turn five. All this to say, my DG list sucks at killing armour.
I managed to ace one of the Armigers due to the Foul Blightspawn tenderizing him with a 9 wound shot.
Something else was able to finish it off quickly after that. The second one died ignominiously in the following turn from combined efforts of several units though it did ding up my warlord.
The Nurglings got tied up with the Primaris, and eventually my Prince, the Poxbringer, and his Warlord got roped into this very nasty Close Combat.
It dragged on to turn 4, with my prince performing miserably in hand-to-hand. If I remember correctly, his librarian and his warlord finally went down to Smites in the face but his claws didn't do much until turn four when they sliced up the mechanicum character.
His armour only bounced 1 mortal wound back as well which was disappointing.
What surprised me was that my opponent didn't ever opt to leave combat with my Warlord. What usually happens against marines is that I charge them with my prince and then the targets retreat and the rest of the army shoots the crap out of him because he's now the closest model and is therefore targetable. I didn't rush into combat until turn 3 though despite the number of juicy targets. This might have been what kept me alive.
My Warlord survived the game, slicing up the stragglers from the remaining mechanicum squad as a final adieu.
Turn 1, I advanced my poxwalkers forward for a turn 2 charge.
I then burned a lot of CP buffing the hell out of them before they attacked the scouts. I think it was overkill since only 1 survived as his mates stood up as poxwalkers again.
The Knight cleaned them off the objective soon after. The surviving scout and a mechanicum character took back the objective in Turn 3. I sent my PBC and Foul Blightspawn to deal with this problem. They both rolled very well, the PBC melting the Mechanicum guy and my Blightspawn getting something like 4 strength 7 hits, causing 9 wounds on the scout. A wee bit overkill.
I completely flubbed the strategy in the game, not realizing the purpose of the game was to get those objectives every turn. I was just having too much fun gaily blowing everything to hell with my spitters and blight launchers.
I was also supposed to try some new strategies. I had given my prince the warlord trait, arch contaminator, but in the heat of the action I played the prince as having the +1 Disgustingly Resilient trait. That's because I never change my trait, so it'll take a few more games I think for changes like this to sink into my thick skull. This gaff cost me because I had a storm of plague weapons in that breech that would have benefited enormously from Arch Contaminator.
Another head scratcher in this vein is that I took a new psychic power on my Poxbringer to buff my Plaguebearers. I then proceeded to deploy him in a support role for my Daemon Prince and daemon engines, forgetting I had changed his usual power. That wasn't all though. I checked the power on my sheet and saw it was different but then decided I must have made a copy/paste error since I didn't recognize the power. My biggest obstacle in this game is really my own brain. Thankfully Death Guard are relatively easy to play so their resilience wins the game that their commander probably couldn't.
He had only two models on the table when all was said and done, but those models were worth more in points than everything I had left. Predictably they were the Dunecrawler and the Gallant as I lacked the armour busting strength to KO them. I still had my prince, Tallyman, PMs, Foul Blightspawn, plaguebearers (though heavily depleted), and PBC. This was weird since mid game I thought this flank would fail for sure and I'd be tabled.
I still managed, despite myself, to garner 8 points over the course of the game + slay the warlord, linebreaker, and maybe first strike (can't remember).
My opponent had 8 points total so I won in spite of being mostly oblivious to the mission parameters and forgetting all my previous battle plans. He was very sporting about it all, allowing me to try one last time to kill the Repulsor in the final turn, even though it had no bearing on the final results. It was a fun game against a solid opponent that kept things interesting. As I've said before, it helps enormously when two armies are evenly matched as they were today.
Tables des matières
Side Note:
I'll leave you with a few pics of this army that was on the table next to us. I've known the father and son team for years and they make some marvelous scratchbuild stuff. There were hundreds of models (difficult to capture with a macro lens), and they were mostly scratchbuilt. I couldn't tell you which parts exactly, but I know the masks were custom built.
Enjoy!
Tables des matières
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