Friday 8 February 2019

2000pts battle report - Imperial Knights & Dark Angels v Iron Hands Space Marines - LCO 5

Last game of the tournament and I've got Robin Neill from Geeks Wargaming you can see the preview of his army list here. I think Otty might have been up against Iron Hands this weekend too [if not Neill himself] as I'd overheard something about their durability - apparently a 6+ Feel No Pain equivalent throughout.


I think I finished deploying first and despite going as far up the board as possible I still had a long way to go to reach the Astartes...


as Robin deployed well back in his zone, surrounding a big invul buffing Dreadnought with the rest of his Dread crew.


We rolled off and I won first turn for a 100% success for the weekend. With so far to go the Lancer had to Flank Speed [another obscene 10 or 11" advance] but had the bikes with him to score the objective. Actually I'm not sure what happened here as this is clearly Robin's end of movement phase. I'm guessing the Lancer did not make its charge as it's too far back but I did manage to kill something [I'm guessing a Dreadnought]. 


The Razorback couldn't get finished off and so it moved up the field to snatch the objective in the top left. I'd moved everything else up as much as possible but failed to take notice of the Bonus conditions for mission - have Characters on the objectives and so squandered a point with my Techmarine  beside the Predator when it could have been in those ruins.


Robin retaliated by focussing on the Dark Talon, taking it out, unfortunately I didn't even get chance to  Stasis Bomb anything this game [and Mortal Wounds would have been handy].


The Lancer got charged but I interrupted and speared his Leviathan, I might have also damaged the other Dread.


The bikes were whittled down to the Sergeant but killed and Iron hand in return. The Lancer took something like 17 wounds so by the end of Robin's turn he'd secured 6VPs [with Titan Killer, Big Guns and Old School] to my 3.


The Lancer fell back but towards Robin's back line, this allowed the Warglaives to move into his position facing the Dreadnoughts. Euronymous moved to intercept the Razorback and as a characters secured that objective. My Chaplain secured the centre objective and my Techmarine moved over to the ruins to guarantee the Bonus point. This meant the Predator had to move up to secure a better view, but I think whiffed on the Land Raider. 


The Lancer multi-charged the Kheres pattern Contemptor, Techmarine, Librarian and Dreadnought. This allowed the Warglaives to get into combat, with one avoiding overwatch. Unfortunately I think Robin interrupted and his dread killed the Warglaive but it might have blown up [there seemed to be a lot of that this weekend]. My surviving Warglaive killed the other Dread.


Euronymous totally wiped out the Razorback and all but one of the Tactical Squad it had sent after the bikes was left.


The Land Raider deployed its squad and moved away from the titanic melee.


Concerted melta fire from the tac squad took down the Warglaive [he may have exploded too], leaving my 'spearhead' crumbling. Robin secured another 6 VPs but I was able to match him with 6 - I Killed 1, held an objective, held more objectives, the bonus and two Big Game Hunter kills.


Turn 3, the Lancer Fell Back and the Bald Headed Quad Rapier was shot to pieces to get me a Marked for Death point. The Deredeo was killed somehow, he might have been part of the multi-charge with the infantry who were also Marked for Death. Euronymous would not suffer the last Tactical Marine to leave and achieved a 10" charge to stomp all over it's metal corpse. It was overkill for sure but it was more about movement and getting into the fight, it left me short of the bonus objective having moved off it.


Most of the Tac squad got smooshed but the remainder either headed for Euronymous or hid in the Land Raider.


Everything shot at the Lancer who promptly exploded, wiping out the Techmarine, wounding the Librarian and putting some damage on the Land Raider. Euronymous was brought to 17 wounds but his Ion Shiled suddenly became unbeatable and I started making save after save against the solid shots from the quad Rapiers, the Melta-gun from the Tactical Squad and the Las Cannons from the Land Raider. I scored another 5 VPs but Robin scored 4.


My turn 4 and I just couldn't kill anything. Everything either missed or was just damage so my turn was pretty quick, aside from Euronymous moving to intercept the Land Raider. I think my Biker Sergeant managed to get into combat with the Librarian.


Unfortunately that just prompted it's passengers to disembark and shoot. He again made save after save but the Librarian had wounded it with Smite and eventually Euronymous was brought low through weight of fire but in typically belligerent mood blew up!


He took the Librarian, two Techmarines and a Tactical Marine with him. So despite not killing a single unit in my turn I'd somehow managed to kill more units in the Battle Round. I claimed another 5 VPs to Robin's 1 Kill VP. I'd finally overtaken him 19-17.


Turn 5 and things were going so quick because there was so little on the board. The Predator could do enough damage on the Land Raider and my Scouts got killed. I scored 2 VPs for hold 1 and hold more, Robin scored 1 VP for an objective.


The last turn I still couldn't kill anything, but Robin could which netted him Kill 1 and Kill more, plus hold 1 taking our scores to 22 to me and 21 to Robin. Which prompted us to make absolutely certain on our scores, so the recount gave us 22-22 and then it became apparent I hadn't added the Big Game Hunter points for all the Dreadnoughts I'd killed. So when all the dust settled I'd got 24 to Robin's 22


This was a really great game, the closest of the weekend, all 6 turns and despite getting first turn the Iron Hands famous resilience meant they easily overtook me at the beginning but I thankfully had enough strength in depth to claw it back. This felt like a tactical game though and granted I had an amazing run of Ion Shield saves on Euronymous he eventually fell but once again the Mortal Wounds from explosions was often my most potent weapon - they really need to FAQ the Noble Sacrifice Stratagem so it includes patterns of Knights beyond Armiger, Questoris and Dominus.


We were both really chuffed to end on such a good game hopefully I'll see Robin around again as Geeks Wargaming were supporting the LCO with their own terrain to help fill out the tables and I've seen them at Aceface's events before. The guys did a review of the tournament you can see my bit here:


Thursday 7 February 2019

2000pts battle report - Imperial Knights & Dark Angels v Deathwatch - LCO 4

Day 2, game 4, scenario 4: What's Your's is Mine. 5 objectives, 1 in the middle, 1 each in your deployment zone and 1 each in your opponents DZ. Bonus points to control both the objectives you placed. I'd be facing Rick Martin and his Deathwatch and thanks to the wonders of the Best Coast Pairings app I knew that the night before. My main concerns were his Corvus Blackstar, Mortis Dreadnought and Razorback. There was a smattering of Imperial Guard too, for bubble wrap and CPs but with the table setup below I deployed aggressively to close that gap as soon as possible. I won the first turn yet again and Rick was unable to steal the initiative.


The Lancer went straight down the line and thanks to the small 'no man's land' in the table quarters setup getting to that front lien was easy. A Warglaive joined it, while the other flanked the ruin to get an angle on the Razorback, as did the Predator. Meanwhile Euronymous went between the ruins to be up front and target the tank. The Dark Talon overflew the guard in the ruins, Stasis Bomb doing some damage.


Supported by Heacy Stubber and Bolter fire from the bikes the squad was wiped out. It might have done some damage on the Blackstar too. The Razorback got destroyed and when the dust settled just one Frag Cannon guy was left. The remaining guardsmen were wiped out in assault and the Dreadnought also took a few wounds.


Rick had taken quite a pounding in that first turn but actually it was a lot of low value troops that had gone, his Deathwatch still had some tricks. The Blackstar overflew my Tactical squad holding his objective in my DZ but wasn't half as effective as my Dartk Talon had been.


Rick's watch captain/Librarian [not sure] had some pretty lethal weaponry/powers. Not sure what damage it did but I knew I didn't want him around next turn. The Dreadnought came out from the ruins and I think I was particularly lucky with my invul saves.


He made the charge into my Warglaive but he was outmatched in combat. The Dreadnought was also Marked for Death as a secondary. 


The Warglaive sliced it to pieces. By the end of turn 1 I'd scored all 5 primary VPs to Rick's 1. It was probably around this point that I recalled Mike Corr's issues with Deathwatch Vs Knights and suddenly realised this might be come a very one-sided battle. To his credit Rick was incredibly calm and philosophical about the situation.


With Warglaive freed I flanked the ruins with the Dark Talon offering air support. The Lancer was going to tackle the squad of Veterans and the character.


Euronymous struggled to negotiate the tight ruins, leaving the Warglaive boxed in and the Ravenwing pushing ahead. The Frag Cannon vet would not survive the shooting phase.


This still gave firing lines to the Blackstar which was gunned down by the Predator and a load of small arms fire.


Lancer engaged the Vets, which allowed the Ravenwing a free charge for extra movement, which they made. The Warglaive appeared round the corner to assault the last of the Guard holding the objective in the ruins.


With most of the Vets dead the lone Terminator fell back leaving the Knight and bikers in the middle of his DZ.


But reinforcements were on the way as two Veteran squads materialised via teleportarium. 


There was a lot of fire thrown at the Lancer, I think there were some meltas in there and special bullets which brought it from 27 down to 9 wounds. I scored another max 5 VPs and Rick scored 1 again.


The Lancer charged the squads, while the Dark Talon strafed them. Euronymous closed up to offer support and hold the objective with the Ravenwing.


Despite inflicting heavy casualties the Vets managed enough wounds of their own to take the Lancer out and also two of my bikers in the process [yet another Knight explosion!].


Rick had a jump pack HW with Thunder Hammer who was able to destroy the Warglaive too. Despite my lead and overwhelming odds the Deathwatch had taken out half of my Knights. Euronymous was still whole though. Another 5VPs to 2 and in my turn I was able to table Rick.


A rather sad end in some respects, the tabling seemed a nail in the coffin, although I was really pleased Rick managed to take out the Lancer and Warglaive. With Big Game, Titan Hunter and Slay the Warlord from Old School Rick added 5 secondaries to his score of 9 but I maxxed out on 37VPs. Also annoying was I forgot to get a selfie with him as I had to put my army up for the painting comp.


But an absolute pleasure to play against and with Chapter Approved and the Bolter Beta I really think they might be a better prospect. The Honest Wargamer guys believe they are top tier, it just takes a special way to play them. Anyway, three loses and a win, on to game 5.

Wednesday 6 February 2019

2000pts battle report - Imperial Knights & Dark Angels v Nurgle Chaos Daemons - LCO 3

Game 3 and I have Andrew Davies with his mixed Chaos Daemons - Nurgle and Tzeentch.
This was Scenario 2: Cut to the heart. 3 Objectives, one in the middle and one in each deployment zone. Bonus points for holding the centre objective and your own. Unfortunately I didn't take too many pics of the game so my recollection is a bit sketchy

I chose Headhunter, The Reaper and Old School as my secondaries, Andrew picked Recon, Ground Control and Titan Slayer.

I'm facing a big bunch of Plaguebearers, which were going to be much tougher than the Poxwalkers I just faced and then an equally tough huge unit of Pink Horrors, which split into Blue Horrors and then into Brimstone Horrors! There were some Nurglings sneaking around, a couple of Daemon Princes and then two squads of Obliterators that were going to materialise when I least expected...

However, I went first yet again with the Lancer and Warglaives crossing no man's land to get to the Plaguebearers. The Dark Talon overflew their lines with my by now standard strafing and stasis bombing run. I think they took a few casualties as a result,


The Lancer and Warglaives made their charge, but were wholly unimpressive. Thanks to their many numbers there was a -1 to hit and they were buffed by the Daemon Prince [or Princes] so whatever success I did make and that wasn't much Andrew managed to keep most of them alive.


Similarly Euronymous broke on the Horrors, killed a few Pink ones, spawned more blue ones and ended up with a couple of Brimstones. I didn't kill a unit and only secured 1 objective.


The 2 Daemon Princes went after the Dark Talon while the Plaguebearers bogged down my Knights


The Dark Talon was completely outclassed by the Princes and smashed to pieces. My dice started to desert me. Unlike the last game were I'd done everything I could but my opponent had rolled everything they needed I was now bereft of success and Andrew was achieving everything he needed to do.


I mean this just illustrates the sort of rolling I was getting as my Warglaives tried to sweep the Plaguebearers before them. What was particularly annoying was I managed to kill enough of them to finally bring them below the -1 to hit threshold which meant my next turn I could hit normally.


But this is all I managed to kill


Only for morale checks to result in a 1, which meant both the Plaguebearers and Horrors re-spawned their daemons. This happened three times during the game [all though a re-roll helped]. The first time I had killed enough to go below the threshold and then his morale check immediately respawned the same 5 Plague Bearers I'd killed so it was -1 to hit again! It was like fighting water, it would just not break.


Sadly I don't have any more pictures. The final score was 13:7 to Andrew. I only killed one unit of Nurglings with my Ravenwing, there was 3VPs for Titan Slayer to Andrew, I'm not sure if a Knight went down, if it did it probably blew up - it seemed the only effective way to kill anything.


As games go it unfortunately ended up a dice-rolling exercise. By the time I'd engaged there was nothing much either of us could do. I couldn't kill his units as I couldn't hit them, they wouldn't die, spawned duplicates or manifested again. He couldn't damage the Knights as they were just to tough and in all of this we only managed two turns! That said though it was great to game with Andrew and we had a laugh during how bad my rolling was and then had a chat afterwards where I discovered he's quite the regular at Dice and Decks and is fond of some of the other GW games. So, when I get chance in the future, when things settle down, I may arrange something with him. Not sure how I'd counter his daemons again, horrible things :) but maybe we'll play something different like Kill Team.

Anyway, 3 games, 3 loses lets see what day two has to offer

Tuesday 5 February 2019

Google+ commenting


As we were made aware in October last year Google+ will be going away. I raised the question what would happen to our G+ comments integrated into the blog. It would appear we now have the answer - they are just going to be scrapped. Everyone will be reverting to standard blogger comments and everything anyone has ever posted will be deleted. So we can all look forward to our blogs being denuded of any evidence of interaction with followers and friends whatsoever.

With no possibility to migrate the comments I'm really kicking myself that I didn't follow through with my plan to switch in October. When I did it all went wrong anyway - with a vision of what was to come all the G+ comments disappeared, when I reinstated G+ they came back but the dashboard data of how many comments attached to each blog post was reset to zero. This ultimately led me to [mistakenly] stick with G+ comments in the hope Google would offer some workaround/migration protocol. That would appear not to be the case.

Not only have Google failed to do something in the interim they couldn't even be bothered to confirm the situation well in advance - Google's own blogpost on the topic is full of people disappointed/annoyed at this failure and the irony that their own G+ commentary will also disappear has not been lost on them. Obviously I'm really annoyed, and particularly with all the personal support I've received from everyone recently the thought that that interaction will be culled is upsetting, but probably we're powerless to do anything...

So, where does that leave us, well I wasn't going to take down the G+ comments just yet as I was hopeful some migration or at the least 3rd party archival guide would appear but it looks like we've already been moved over to blogger commenting, so BE AWARE.

However, you may want to explore this:

Blogger and other sites may use Google+ for their commenting system. Comments on blogs may also exist as posts or comments on Google+. This feature will be removed from Blogger by Feb 4th and other sites by March 7th. All your Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2, 2019. You can download and save these comments.
So give it a click and download all your comments, you have until April 2nd when all G+ comments will be removed! I think it might specifically be the Google+ Stream, as that has 'comments' in. Whether that is just your comments or comments left on your blog as well I'll have to see, currently my Stream is clocking in at 2GB so it might take a while...

2000pts battle report - Imperial Knights & Dark Angels v Nurgle Chaos Space Marines - LCO 2

APOLOGIES - it would appear the text for the battle report I wrote within a week of the LCO somehow disappeared. I've tried to replace it but weeks later accuracy and details will be sketchier than usual [if that's at all possible!].

Dominik Brundler was my game 2. He had Mortarion, a squad of Blight Haulers, a couple of Drones, a fair few Pox Walkers a couple of Champions on Flies [I think] and a couple of Plagueburst Crawlers. For some reason I felt the Poxwalkers were a real priority - killable and sitting on objectives I didn't need them knockign around - that may well have been a completely stupid assessment


Once again I won the first turn and the Lancer sprinted across the board. I don't even think I felt the need to use Flank Speed as this deployment got him to their lines with ease. The Dark Talon Stasis Bombed the Pox-Walkers and with additional support took one unit out. I felt the Lancer could tie up a Crawler, a Drone and even the Blight Haulers. A Warglaive got in there too but despite some excellent rolling from the Lancer, putting wounds on the Crawler and Drone they both managed their invulnerable saves. The Warglaive also saw its attacks shrugged off by daemonic resilience. I had 3VPs for killing a unit, First Strike and holding an objective.


Mortarion swooped over the Warglaive to land between it and Euronymous with one of the Drones heading towards the ziggurat I had my Scouts on.


I think I was quite lucky in overwatch, hitting Mortarion twice, but I think he shrugged off the Thermal cannon shots. The Drone also made a huge charge to get in behind Euronymous and engage the Scouts.


Morty absolutely eviscerated Euronymous with his scythe Silence. He had been on 21 wounds before the charge and they were all gone. But he did blow up, once again delivering more damage in death than anger [a theme for the weekend!]. The Scouts somehow survived. The Warglaive got smashed by the Daemon Prince and Blight Haulers, it may well have blown up too as we're missing a Blight Hauler.


I think the fly initially whiffed his charge on the Dark Talon but a re-roll got him in. My overwatch was again hot, but so was its invulnerable save.


With the Dark Talon down to 7 wounds it did not take much for the fly's rider to slash the Ravenwing Flyer out of the sky. This secured 4 primary VPs for Dominik with kill 1, hold 1, kill more and hold more. He probably got First Strike and Slay the Warlord too,


The Lancer fell back and charged Morty, with support from the last Warglaive while the Ravenwing tried to bring down the Bloat Drone. I'm not sure what I killed, possibly not the Drone, as it would end up in my back field next turn, but I killed something for a VP and held an objective for another 2 points total.


But the Lancer AND the Warglaive got trashed. It looks like the last of the Poxwalkers were killed, but with heavy armour to hold objectives the success at removing ObSec troops was moot, or even worse with the loss of all my heavy hitters.


Mortarion swooped over to my back field and ultimately wiped out the rest of my army.


The final score was 39-7 to Dominik, he was quite apologetic throughout because his invulnerable saves were so successful, but my attacks were equally good, I can't complain. You take Nurgle for its resilience, there's no reason to apologise when it does its job.


I may well have got my priorities mixed up, perhaps Morty is the number 1 target but he waltzed his way through two Knights and a Warglaive, I'm not sure what else I could have done. You probably need to commit everything to kill him and if he survives hope you are still far enough away to avoid a counter attack and hope you get a second chance. I should probably see if I can find any battle reports that deal with Morty and big invul bubble wrap lists


Regardless of the result it was a great game and Dominik was awesome, what would game 3 bring?