Tuesday 14 August 2012

Battle report: 2000 points daemons versus Dark Angels

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!

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