Victory Pointless

The Daemonette shimmered and twirled, basking in the adoration of the human cultists who threw themselves prostrate before it, murmurs of ecstasy on their lips.  Atreon strode through them, unheeding.

“Creature.” He said.  “We both seek to conquer this realm for the glory of Chaos. Let us join forces and together we shall cut down the Imperial dogs that infest this place.”

The Daemon’s only response was a laugh, each utterance a blade pressed against reality.  It reached out and caressed his cheek with a jagged claw.  He felt the warp entity bound within his own weapon balk at the touch and his mind filled with sweet fog.

Master Atreon.  Atreon the False.  Kept by and Keeper of the Snake.  Deciever of all, himself most of all.  We find your folly intoxicating.  The compact is made.

This was a classic Chaos Vs Imperium 2v2, with my Alpha Legion forming an alliance with a band of Slaaneshi Daemons to take on a combined force of Deathwatch and Blood Ravens loyalist Astartes.  Again we were playing the special scenario for the LWG slow-grow (see last entry).

The Forces:

Alpha Legion: As before. A Lord + Chosen, Legionaries, Cultists and Obliterators.

Daemons: Three squads of Daemonettes with two Tranceweavers.

Blood Ravens: Terminator squad + Captain, Scouts, Whirlwind.

Deathwatch: Inquisitor, Heavy Intercessors, Aggressors, Eradicators, Inceptors.

Turn 1

The Imperials got the first turn and moved the Aggressors up onto the central objective with the Terminators close behind.  The Whirlwind, hidden at the back, took out half of a Daemonette squad with indirect fire.

Chaos returned fire with what little ranged weaponry we had, but failed to do much damage.  Our units converged on the centre and the cultists, Legionaries and one squad of Daemonettes declared charges on the Aggressors.  The plan was for the cultists to charge in first and soak up the overwatch flamers, but they failed their charge and left the poor Legionaries to be burned to ashes and wiped out.  The Daemonettes, however, made it in, took out two of the Aggressors and claimed the point.

Turn 2

The Terminators moved up and wiped out the cultists who were caught in the open.  The Whirlwind blasted another of the Daemonette mobs and the Inceptors perched on the top floor of a ruin and rained plasma down on the Chosen, taking out one.  In combat the Daemonettes finished off the last Aggressor but were themselves cut down by the Terminators.

On the Chaos turn the Chosen and the two remaining Daemonette mobs weathered a hail of overwatch fire to engage the Terminators in (appropriately for Daemonettes) a pincer movement, between them wiping the squad and taking back the point.

Turn 3

With the majority of the Chaos army now exposed on the central point the Imperials poured fire onto them.  The Eradicators lived up to their name, melting the remaining Chosen and reducing the Lord to one wound.  The Inceptors then finished the job.  The rest of the loyalist forces cut down the last Daemonettes.

At this point the only remaining Chaos unit on the board was the pair of Obliterators, who launched one last salvo to finish off the final Eradicator and then waddled away into the sunset, leaving the Imperials in charge of the field – we conceded the match there.

Final score: 58 to 48 – Imperial Victory!

Post-Mortem

My first loss of 10th Edition!  It was bound to happen sooner or later and probably a good thing too before I got overly complacent in my own magnificent generalship.

I talked last time about how 500 point games of 40k, combined with the simplicity of the scenario we were playing, do not make for great balance.  It seems churlish (and redundant) to reiterate that complaint now I’ve been on the recieving end of it, but my opinion hasn’t changed and force selection was definitely a factor here.  The Chaos forces skewed heavily towards melee (indeed, there was no shooting at all on the Daemon side) and while last time that worked well against mostly shooting-focussed lightly-armoured hoard armies, against a much tougher, more elite shooting army it ran out of steam quite fast.

This was, however, a good fun game with a lot of back and forth, the key objective changing hands several times over.  In the end the marines won out in the war of attrition but on points at least it was neck-and-neck most of the game up to that point.

Key Learnings:

• The main thing I would change about my strategy in hindsight would be to have had one.  My battle plan was essentially to run everybody up into the middle as quickly as possible and kill whatever we found there.  This basically worked, but we lost so much getting there that we couldn’t hold out, much less follow up into the rest of the enemy.  I think my last victory made me overconfident in how effective charge ‘n’ chop would be. But, I’m playing Alpha Legion, not World Eaters!  A more successful tactic might have been to hold off on assaulting the point and instead circle round, use the terrain to block LOS and go for the (slightly) weaker backline stuff first while the Obliterators softened up the Aggressors and Terminators.  This would have given away some VP for holding the point in the early game but may have set us up better in the long run. Even slightly adjusting course to run my troops through the ruins to the right instead of straight up the middle would probably have helped avoid a lot of the punishing overwatch fire.
• Those Aggressors were very well suited to the job they were given – they got on the point early and took a heavy toll on the charging Chaos forces.  A big mistake I made was that I didn’t really twig until it was too late that they had flamers (I thought they were the bolter variant at first) and therefore charging in was not the ideal approach.
• My other major mistake is that I should’ve CP-Re-Rolled the cultist’s failed charge.  In the moment it seemed too much of a waste of CP to use on a unit with such limited damage potential, but they and their soft pink flammable bodies were the counter I needed to the Aggressors – they should have eaten that overwatch rather than the Legionaries.
• The Whirlwind was pretty deadly – I think it accounted for roughly half the Daemonettes just by itself, sitting behind a building in the backfield where nothing could touch it.  I think normally the counter to this would have been Deep Striking Obliterators or Daemonettes, but for this stage of the campaign Deep Strike/Reserves are banned so we didn’t have that option.
• As noted above, force selection was important here and this battle hit home the importance of having a more balanced and adaptable list. Going melee-focussed was a deliberate choice, largely because my Necron army is very shooty and I wanted a different playstyle. But, clearly some more ranged capability would have been useful here – Obliterators are good, but they can’t do everything by themselves.