Victory Pointless

I’m playing in the Warhammer 40,000 Crusade organised by the London Wargaming Guild. For the uninitiated, ‘Crusade’ is essentially the campaign mode of 40k – you build an army which persists between games, with units gaining experience, perks and horrible injuries between games.

This was not only my first Crusade game, not only my first game of 10th edition but my first ‘proper’ game of 40k at all for 24 years.  I did the maths on that figure and now I feel ancient.  It is therefore fitting that my army for this campaign is the Necrons, a bunch of incredibly old and decrepit robot skeletons who have slept for aeons and have now reawoken in a futile attempt to reclaim past glories.

That being so, I prepped as thoroughly as I could for this battle, cramming as much of the core, army and crusade rules into my brain as I could and agonising for ages over what my army list should be.  I got back into *painting* warhammer about three years ago; a global pandemic and the arrival of a baby meaning that my re-entry into actually playing the game was delayed until now.  This meant that I had roughly 2000 points worth of models built, painted and ready to go, so I had to choose which half of those would form the start of my 1000 point crusade force.  After much strategic deliberation it ultimately ended up being mainly the ones I had painted most recently and were therefore most excited to use.

We rolled up for which mission we would play and it ended up being Spawning Grounds, with myself as the defender looking to hold three objectives long enough to spawn some gribbly monsters (or, in this case, awaken some slumbering Necron horrors).

What went badly:

• The core of my army was a big 20-man blob of warriors lead by a Royal Warden and Chronomancer.  The plan was for this to be a rapidly-regenerating tarpit that would be next-to-impossible to kill.  In the end, though, it got Oath-Of-Momented out of existence in a single turn, no chance to reanimate.  I was overconfident in their durability and left them too much out in the open.
• Poor positioning of my Catacomb Command Barge meant that his reanimation orb barely came into play.
• I forgot a few abilities and weapons that may have come in handy.
• I underestimated vanilla Intercessors – with two shots a piece plus grenade launchers they can put out a scary amount of firepower.

What went well:

• I was lucky in the mission: sitting still and holding objectives is what my army is best at.
• The Deathmarks did good work, sitting high up in the middle of the field and picking off characters and units at will.
• Similarly, the Doomsday Ark took out a lot of marines.  My opponent didn’t have much anti-tank so it could pretty much sit there and blast away turn after turn.
• While the warriors got wiped, the Royal Warden leading them managed to survive two more turns on his own, reanimation protocols and the Protocol of the Eternal Guardian strategem keeping him clinging to life and single-handedly slowing down the enemy advance on the central point.
• The scariest thing by far on my opponent’s side was a squad of Deathwing Terminators.  I knew that I didn’t have an answer to them in melee – if they got in amongst the main body of my force I think it would probably have cost me the game, and I was wary of falling into the trap putting too much shooting into them that they might just absorb.  So instead, I dealt with them by not dealing with them.  I managed to get my Skorpekh Destroyers around the other side of them.  The Terminators charged in and easily wiped them out, but that meant they ended up miles away from where the key fight was happening with a long slog to get back to the action looking down the barrel of a Doomsday cannon.  I effectively neutralised them as a melee threat purely by baiting them into a bad position. It was almost tactics!

On the whole, though, more went right than went wrong and the result was a victory to me.  The Necrons managed to defend the key points long enough to awaken some more of their number, forcing the dark angels to retreat.

In the post-game, disaster struck: I rolled a one on my out-of-action tests for both my Chronomancer and my Skorpekhs.  I agonised for a while over whether to pay the cost to cure them, but eventually decided the RP was more valuable than a couple of level 0 nobodies and their injuries would make them a liability, so into the necrodermis recycling plant they go.