Victory Pointless

This was a little Incursion game to take my new Blood Angels for a test drive.

Forces

Space Marines – Gladius Task Force: Terminator Librarian + 5 Terminators, Lieutenant with Combi-Weapon, 5 Intercessors, 5 Jump-pack Assault Intercessors, 3 Bladeguard Veterans, 3 Eradicators, Redemptor Dreadnought, Ballistus Dreadnought

Thousand Sons – Rubricae Phalanx: Terminator Sorcerer + 5 Occult Scarab Terminators, Sorcerer + 10 Rubric Marines, 2 x 5 Rubric Marines, Shaman + 10 Tzaangors, Maulerfiend

Mission

Primary: Take & Hold

Deployment: Tipping Point

Twist: Martial Pride

Battle

Turn 1

The Tzaangors and a squad of Rubric marines moved out and took the central and southern objectives.  My dreadnoughts moved out and took some shots, while the Bladeguard charged the Tzaangors.  Some damage was done but no units were wiped.

Turn 2

The Scarab Occult Terminators teleported in and deleted the Ballistus.  The remaining tzaangors fell back and the Bladeguard were also killed by Thousand Son shooting.  The big squad of rubricae moved up onto the central point with the Maulerfiend just behind ready to Heroic Intervention.

My Terminators Rapid Ingressed into the corner behind the TSon’s home objective, then charged in on my turn, wiped the squad of Rubricae holding it and took the point.

The Eradicators popped out of reserves and took 11 wounds off the Maulerfiend.  My Assault squad charged the Rubricae on the centre point – the Maulerfiend intervened but was tank shocked by my charging Redemptor and died.

Shooting from the Intercessors finished off the Tzaangor.

Turn 3

The surviving centre-point Rubricae fell back, but failed a desperate escape test and the last one died, leaving only a battleshocked sorcerer.

The remaining TSons poured fire onto the Assault squad and the Redemptor, killing the marines but leaving the dreadnought alive.

The Redemptor killed the sorcerer and did some damage to the SOTs, but their overwatch and return fire (via some sort of strat) finished off the mighty war machine.

My Terminators handed off the objective to the Eradicators and started to trek south, shooting up the sole remaining squad of Rubrics as they went.

Turn 4

Now outnumbered and out-objectived, the SOTs tried to use a Temporal Surge to get onto my home objective, but rolled a 1 for the extra D6″ movement and couldn’t quite make it.

Without flipping that objective it seemed very unlikely the TSons would be able to catch up on score and so my opponent conceded.

Post-Mortem

• This was my first (non-boarding actions) game with space marines since 1997.  Do they play just like they used to in 2nd edition?  I honestly can’t remember.  In any case, this was a fairly successful test drive.
• I was running them as vanilla space marines (not ‘Blood Angels’) and therefore got the better Oath of Moment, but the +1 to wound didn’t actually come up that much.  I already had it on anything on the centre objective thanks to my combi-weapon lieutenant, and my power fists were all wounding on 2s anyway.  Possibly I just need to choose my Oath targets more carefully.
• The decisive moves in this game were mostly due to things coming out of reserves (i.e. both sets of Terminators and the Eradicators).  These moves might be harder to pull off in a full 2k game, however.
• The Maulerfiend was the thing I was most scared of, but in the end I managed to kill it without it doing any damage.  The thing I should’ve been scared of were the Scarab Occult Terminators, which were a menace.  My general approach to Terminators is to bait them into an irrelevant area of the table and then just keep away from them, but these guys have quite a serious ranged threat when buffed by sorcery.