Ben Leach, the only time I've played against Chaos Daemons was against
Chris Sharp and his Nurgle Chaos Daemons which I recall as a particularly tortuous affair thanks to Cloud of Flies cover saves and Feel no Pain that I recently had flashbacks about thanks to the similar shenanigans of the Necrons. However, Ben had brought representations from all four chaos gods so I was going to get to experience all sides of the daemon host
Psychic Powers
|
| Winged Tyrant W | Tervigon Plain Tr | Zoanthrope |
|
| Dominion | Dominion | Dominion |
|
| Paroxysm | Paroxysm | Warp Blast |
|
| The Horror |
| Paroxysm |
|
|
The low down:
- Into The Maelstrom - like Maelstrom missions but with Blog Wars mission cards and VPs
- Warlord Trait - Night Fighting Turn 1
- Night fighting first turn, lost deployment, went second and failed to steal the initiative.
Ben pretty much filled his deployment zone, I may be wrong but I think he was also unfamiliar with nids so we were equally naive about our opponents.
Skarbrand, the centaur on the left was leading the army alongside the Plaguebearers and the Bloodletters with a tiny unit of Flamers on that right flank. You can see objectives 3 and 6.
I set up the Stealers in the ruin in his DZ and another, those are Flamers of Tzeentch surrounding the objective there. That is indeed a bottle of Cider, not a proxied drop pod ;)
Tfex and a Carnifex hold up in my ruins, with everything else on the Skyshield,
Except 10 Stealers, Deathleaper and a Carnifex in soem ruins on my right flank. I didn;t want to concede the flank completely so I had to put some firepower there, still probably not enough to face the Bloodletters but anyway...
Battle commences. Now I thought I'd photographed Ben's score sheet so I could see what Ben drew and achieved but apparently not which will make this quite a difficult report to make as I only know my objectives but I'll muddle on.
Maybe you can make out his cards but I think one was a pretty easy objective secure that he already had.
Probably hold objectivve 6 as the bloodletters hung around and had a drink. Then the chaos winds struck and a random character on Ben's side was wounded for clearly offending his capricious gods. We rolled and typically Skarbrand was the victim suffering a wound or two, not a good start.
Everything else got forward but with little shooting I don't think First Strike was achieved. I drew 32, 15 and 22:
- 1VP for destroying a unit in the shooting phase 2VP for 3 or more
- 2VP to secure objective 5
- 1VP if at least one enemy unit with the psyker special rule was killed
First Strike and the shooting objective was doubtful as Ben's units were so big, except for the flamers but they were too far away. However, objective 5 was in front of the Skyshield and there were Psykers in the unit of Flamers behind the ruins next so I sent some gaunts to hold objective 5 and swooped the Flyrant over to the ruins.
The Carnifex and Tfex targeted the Damonettes of Slaanesh, I managed to kill 8 but there were still 13 left. The Flyrant shot at the Flamers and I was able to get enough Precision Shots to focus on one of the Psykers [the Herald of Tzeentch] who couldn't make his save and was out of cover to give me the VP [so I had 2 by the end of turn 1]
Ben's Plaguebeares sat on OB3, I guess it was a card he pulled.
The Daemonettes went for the Tfex who only managed to kill one in overwatch! They'd been Paroxysmed too by -1
But 6 rending hits will end most anything!
The Daemonettes danced on the corpse of the Tfex as I looked on, a bit stunned.
The Seekers of Slaanesh were desparate to add to the slaughter the Daemonettes had wrought on behalf of their god and so assaulted a brood of 5 Genestealers. Somehow they failed kill more than one Genestealer, whereas the premier 40k close combat unit killed 4.
Losing the battle the Daemons then failed their morale and I think daemonic instability caused a further 6 wounds wiping out the unit! So having lost my Tfex fortune suddenly shifted back in my favour. Again the winds of Chaos proved detrimental to the Daemons in some way and these results were just not showing favour to the daemon kind - what had Ben done in past lives to upset the deities so? The Fleshounds got stuck into the Termagants though.
My Rippers turned up, luckily deviating not to far and mishaping
While the Tyrannocyte with Hormagaunts deviated away from Skarbrand but I used it as a buffer between the Carnifex and his Warlord and the Hormies in a position to supprt the Termagants being eaten by the Fleshhounds
I spawned more gaunts and threw the Genestealers at the hounds but only managed a few kills an losing half their number but still Fearless thanks to Synapse.
Skarbrand got to grips with the Carnifex,
the chaos gods smiled on him [for a change]
and then made a very grumpy face as he failed his save
I'm thinking it was the Termagants and Tyrannocyte that may have put him out of his misery, how galling!
Because I think the Flyrant wiped the daemonettes out. I'd scored objective 2 in my previous turn and this was for
- 1VP for destroying a unit in the shooting phase 2VP for 3 or more
With two units dead I just didn't have the firepower to get the third :( In part that was because the Carnifex in the ruins on the right kept failing his Instinctive Behaviour test so no shooting on that tiny unit of flamers.
Genestealers and Rippers tore into the flamers
The Fleshhounds alsogot wiped out but I have no recollection of how that happened, I can only assume they failed their daemonic instability test, although I do recal the winds of Chaos blew hot and foul once again at the detriment of the host with another character suffering wounds at the whim of their own patron!
I m,anaged to destroy a unit through shooting [though not sure which one] and secured a VP for that, and the Genestealers remained locked in combat which go tme Linebreaker at least, but as turn 3 came to an end there was no longer any time left so we had to call it.
I'd managed to score 6 VPs, plus secondaries of Slay the Warlord and Linebreaker, for 8VPs whereas Ben was only able to secure 5 VPs in total. In fairness to Ben his Chaos overlords really didn't want him to win, he suffered far more at their hands than my own I think. However, both of us committed a lot of troops to doingn not very much - the right flank was pretty much a game of musical statues. I was hampered by some poor Instinctive behaviour rolls but again when Maelstrom objectives mean just staying put it will hamper your forward momentum and with only three turns we didn;t have much opportunity to get those figures into play. But once again a really great game only hampered by the time constraints, I think it took us about 40 minutes to actually start the game but that's what you get when it's horde V horde! Anyway, this was Bens list:
And here's my scorecard.
Now I didn't actually think to take stock of where I came in the tournament at the time, I only checked afterwards, you will see I placed 30th, which is perfectly acceptable and I'm actually ambivalent about the result. Ben just beat by two places with PeteB being the best of us in 21st and Liam running way short of retaining his last place wooden spoon with 39th out of 48.
However, Alex has since mentioned that due to the current scoring system those who had say 1 major victory often ended up placing higher than those who had won more but less convincingly. So he will be having a new metric to include the imprtance of winning, in which case I would have leap-frogged all my buddies and got 15th place! Only Matthew Tennant and his Necrons made a bigger jump from 26th to 6th. Pete B would have gone up 4 places to 17th and Ben gained 9 places to 19th. Only Liam would have fallen foul of the new system losing 2 spots to become 41st
It doesn't really change anything but it was nice to see that in another dimension I actually did the best out of all of us. Tyranids are still $hit though :P Now bring on Blog Wars X
