this nice battle report from our roving reporter darryn soaking up the sun in that tropical nordic climate :)
So
I had my usual list plus the goodies I recently got. I dropped
skulltaker in lieu of some more bodies on field. 20 plaguebearers, 6
flamers and 6 screamers and some change after shuffling around stuff. I
lost seekers and flesh hounds though. I got my finecast riddled
bloodthirster out and about for action (going to replace the darn thing
on thursday! curses) and a nasty tzeentch daemon prince. My opponent,
one Aartu, fielded 25 terminators in 5 man squads, led by belial, with 2
ven dreads and a land raider to back it all up. We got the mission with
one objective in either deployment zone with the diagonal version. We
couldn't work out the proper names for these, and i'm too lazy to get my
book out. I won the dice roll and chose the side with the most amount
of impassable terrain, clearing my intended DZ.
Turn 1:
I chose my
deployment (gribbly fliers first to ping tanks) and the chaos gods
disagreed with my choice, sending in my much weaker (to shooting)
assault troops and soul grinder. I had hoped to knock out a few tanks
before coming in, but oh well. Most of my stuff ended up hiding this
turn, except the suicide bomber flamers, who were supposed to gimp
termie squads marching up field. They instead decided to surround a land
raider and melt it into all sorts of psychodelic colours. After 3
templates, it looked much more like the beatles tour bus than a fearsome
war engine of the machine cult. 3 hull points in 1 turn, boom!
For my sins, I had all the terminator squads turn on
the flamers, which was not so bad in retrospect. The 69 point squads
died horribly (and managed to pull down 2 more terminators from
overwatch) while my soulgrinder laughed at the pitiful attempts to
scratch his paint.
Turn 2:
Well half my
gribbly stuff arrived despite me needing it. Some plaguebearers oozed
onto the far objective and the thirster gloriously arrived from
deepstrike. Note that if you chose to glide in, you ignore all terrain,
meaning you can pretty much deep strike whereever you like. My screamers
and daemon prince were still busy playing backgammon in the warp, and
were delayed. The soul grinder and horrors opened up some whoop ass on
the terminators, but coloured lights and daemonic phlegm do nothing to
tactical dreadnaught armour. The thirster ran (how does one run whilst
flying?) and set himself up for some vector strike goodness next turn.
The plaguebearers obviously insulted Belials fashion
sense since most of the terminators turned around and opened fire on
the poor dudes. They didn't last long but between them and the
bloodthirster buzzing around, all the fire for this turn was pretty much
ineffective. One squad of terminators tried to charge the soul grinder
and failed, leaving them helplessly in the open for next turn.
Turn 3:
So now my gribbly
stuff is all in. Great. The prince arrived near the landraider whilst
the screamers deployed in the biggest open space I could find. The rest
of my dudes howevering around the far end of the field now began their
long slog to get to the other side. The shooting phase was topsy turvy.
Vomitting and shooting his harvester gun at the terminators in front of
him did nothing for the soul grinder, whilst the fresh prince (see what I
did there) melted the fun bus and made the 2 termies inside walk. The
thirster flew over a dreadnaught and hacked off one of its arms. The
assault did not go well. Soul grinder charged in with 5 attacks which
all bounced off the termies storm shield, and got immobilised for his
efforts, ouch. I must say, screamers turbo boosting 24 inches on the
turn they deep strike is the absolute bee's knees, long live 6th ed!!!!
The terminators milled around some more. Assault
cannons tried in vain to bring down either the thirster or prince, but
it was simply not enough fire power to do anything to them. The soul
grinder died in his turn, and the consolidating terminators set
themselves up in the midst of tons of daemonettes and bloodletters. Some
terminators learnt the hard way that if you punch a glob of tentacles,
its hard to get a vital organ, go tarpit horrors go!
Turn 4:
Now it gets juicy.
The thirster and prince descended from on high to tag team belials
squad whilst the screamers wheeled around to go rip some dreadnaughts a
new exhaust vent. The daemonic horde that was my left flank descended on
the hapless terminators (12 in total) and began the process of
dismantling them over the next turns. The prince popped a few termies
before jumping at Belials squad but between him and a raging god of war,
they did zero wounds! Also took zero in return. biggest flop epic fight
in history. Suprisingly 40 something rending and 45 str 5 attacks
failed to take down 5 terminators, wtf. Screamers with the new update
(str 5 armourbane ap2) made absolute mincemeat of the one venerable
dreads.
Starting looking very bad for the marines at this
point as everything was stuck in assault, my field of expertise. I
finally pulled down the one terminator squad and got started on the
next, whilst the thirster decided he was going to get skulls for the
skull throne and started to lay into belials squad. A neat trick was
when the prince got charged in the rear by a ven dread, he used smash,
not much you can do against str 10 hits coming your way. 2 penetrating
hits but it still lived on.
Turn 5:
Mopping up.
Belial's head was added to the throne of skulls along with the rest of
his cronies. The prince died but took the dread with him, and the swarm
of daemons finally clipped off the skulls of the last few terminators on
the left flank. All but 2 of 25 terminators were remaining.
End result: Objective + killed walord, 4 points versus first blood 1 point. Win to me!
It
was agood game but I really felt the pain of not having the right
weapons to go through terminator armour. Man they are tough.
Stormshields are even tougher! I like how things work in the new
edition, if you are not using funny wound allocation stuff, the combats
go much more swiftly, and there are many new rules to use. Its nice when
they are named (smash etc) as it helps you remember you can do it. 6th
edition is looking to be very friendly to daemons so far, so really
loving the change!
awesome battle report
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