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 sisters1.

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!

1) You might have noticed that I don't remember unit names for sisters very well by now..