My list:
Librarian with jump pack.
Honour guard with jump packs, 2 Lightning Claws, 1 Thunder Hammer, 1 Storm Shield and 4 meltaguns.
2 Sanguinary Priests with jump packs.
Sanguinary Guard with 2 plasma pistols, 2 infernus pistols and a powerfist.
2 x 10-man squads of Assault Marines, each squad with 2 meltaguns and powerfist. (hereinafter referred to as Squads Wallace and Gromit, to make them easier to tell apart)
5-man squad of Scouts with sniper rifles, camo cloaks and 1 missile launcher.
5-man Vanguard Veterans with 2 power weapons, 1 Storm Shield, 1 powerfist and a Glaive Encarmine for the sarge.
5-man Devastator squad with 4 missile launchers.
YH's IG (as far as I remember):
CCS with Straken and Officer of the Fleet
PCS with 4 flamers
20-man blob with a commisar. Commisar and Sgts have power weapons. Special weapons unknown.
30-man blob with a commisar. Commisar and Sgts have power weapons. 3 grenade launchers
Veteran Squad with 3 meltas in a Chimera with hull mounted heavy flamer and heavy stubber.
Veteran Squad with 3 meltas in a Chimera with hull mounted heavy flamer and heavy stubber.
Leman Russ with plasma sponsons and lascannon.
Leman Russ Demolisher with plasma sponsons and lascannon.
Leman Russ Executioner with plasma sponsons and lascannon.
ALL vehicles in this army have Extra Armour.
Mission: Seize Ground, 4 Objectives.
Deployment: Pitched battle. YH won the roll-off and deployed first.
The Battlefield:
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| 1750 pts of Blood Angels, on a little cardboard tray not even the size of a sheet of A4. Oh, boy... |
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| IG deployment. Man, that's a lotta guns... |
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| Blood Angel deployment. Had to be a bit cheeky with the placing of the Devastator squad, since cover was pretty sparse on my side of the table... |
Turn 1
Blood Angels sieze initiative! Not that it makes much difference, given the near-total lack of guns on the field. Still, can't complain, eh? Also, before the turn started, the Vanguard Vets were taken by the Red Thirst, which would later prove convenient...
BA: The Devastators took a potshot at the Chimera on my right flank, knocking off the multilaser. The Scouts sniped away at the exposed 20-man blob, taking down 3 gormless Guardsmen.
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| Opening shots... |
The big horrible tanks then proceeded to blast away at my Devastators, killing the Sarge (of course) and 1 marine.
Turn 2
BA: No thanks to the Officer of the Fleet, only Squad Wallace and the Vanguard Veterans arrive. Not quite as much as I'd hoped...
The right flank was too cramped for a safe drop, even for a Blood Angel, so I went with the left. The plan was to crack open the Chimera with Squad Wallace, then shred the contents with the Vanguard Vets. The Vets would (hopefully) shred their target within a turn then consolidate to spread out and give Squad Wallace a cover save, so that perhaps something would survive to bolster the forces arriving next turn. The reality was a bit different, however.
Squad Wallace arrived on target. The Vets, however, scattered too far away from the Chimera to have a hope of assaulting whatever popped out. Change of plan, then...
During shooting, Squad Wallace wrecked the Chimera, spilling the contents out the back. Wonderful. Now I had an angry mob of Vets with meltaguns to add to my troubles... Dakka from the Scouts and Devastators didn't achieve much, so on to assault.
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| Squad Wallace's very brief moment in the sun. Shortly after this pic was taken, the Veterans and the Demolisher moved aside to let a Leman Russ on the other side of the field blast them apart in the most perfectly placed battlecannon shot I'd ever seen... |
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| The Vanguard Vets get stuck in with Heroic Intervention. |
IG:
The IG units shuffled around, letting the tanks bring their guns to bear. The Leman Russ targeted Squad Wallace, the Executioner was on the Devastators and the Demolisher... well, see for yourself...
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| "It was an honour to serve by your side, brother..." After taking a pummeling from innumerable lasguns, bayonets and some power weapons, the Demolisher brings it's very, very large guns to bear... |
So it was that at the end of turn 2, all my forces that arrived from reserve were wiped off the map. Not looking good....
Turn 3
BA: Squad Gromit and the Sanguinary Guard arrive. I agonized a great deal over placing these two. About 550pts of my forces had just gotten annihilated, with nothing to show for it but about 20 dead Guardsmen, their disappointed (and similarly dead) Commisar and a wrecked Chimera. The terrain was too dangerous on the left flank, far too open to retaliatory fire for my liking. If I placed there, I was doomed. So I plonked them both down behind the other 2 Leman Russes on the right flank. A bad scatter and the game would be very short indeed...
The Sanguinary Guard touched down, scattering only 1". Squad Gromit made a flawless landing. Hurrah! Time for some payback...
The shooting phase saw the Sanguinary Guard wreck one Leman Russ. Meanwhile, Squad Gromit managed to shake the Executioner with their meltaguns.
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| A daring and absurdly lucky drop turns the tide of battle... |
IG: The Executioner scooted South to clear the way for the 30-man blob to fire ALL its gunishment on Squad Gromit. The Demolisher attempted to trundle Southeast to get to a better firing position, but managed to immobilize itself on difficult terrain. This put me out of sight or range of most of its guns, which was quite a lucky break for me!
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| Is this a heavy flamer I see before me? |
Turn 4
BA: The Honour Guard arrive, hurrah, hurrah! 4 meltaguns to bring the PAIN! Or so I'd hoped...
The Sanguinary Guard leap forward to fnish the Leman Russ Executioner, blasting it to slag with their Infernus Pistols. Return fire from the Demolisher dealt no casualties, due to the golden angels being a fraction of an inch out of Demolisher Cannon range. A plasma cannon caused a hit, but they made the cover save. :-)
The Honour Guard let rip with 4 meltaguns onto the Chimera full of Veteran Guardsmen, but only managed to knock off the Heavy Flamer and shake it.
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| Inside that blob are perhaps 4 power weapons, slowly whittling away at the brave Squad Gromit... |
Turn 5
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| The might of the Honour Guard is brought to bear on the last remnants of a horde of 30+ Guardsmen. |
The Sanguinary Guard now turn their attention to the Chimera...
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| The Sanguinary Guard gets medieval on this Chimera after a salvo from their guns fails miserably. Getting medieval failed miserably, too... :-( |
Turn 6 & 7
Not much else happens, really. YH's last surviving Chimera made a last ditch attempt to wipe out Squad Gromit, but thanks to cover and wound allocation shenanigans, only the Sanguinary Priest gets obliterated by meltaguns. The offending Veteran Squad was quickly cut into crispy bite-size chunks by the Honour Guard's Lightning Claws and the Sanguinary Guard's Glaives Encarmine.
YH's surviving Veterans and Straken's Company Command Squad advance steadily towards the nearest objective, under relentless fire from the few remaining Scouts and Devastators, but it's not enough and he takes the objective. So that's one objective each...
But at the last moment, YH's last mobile vehicle, that wretched Chimera, comes and contests Squad Gromit's objective! The Guard are victorious!
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| The End of the game. That fricking Chimera... |
Post mortem:
That was vicious. Well, I suppose any game involving a DoA list is a bloody affair. This game taught me a little more about fielding a DoA list, I think. Thanks to the DoA rule, a Blood Angel player can really afford to be much bolder with his Deep Strikes, and playing against an army with as much anti-MEQ lethality as YH's, I don't think I could have played this one differently.
There was a heart-stopping moment at the beginning of Turn 3, when I really had no choice but to make 2 absurdly risky Deep Strikes that had a few spectators agog with the sheer ballsiness of them. But the way I saw it, I had to put a deep cut into YH's tanks that turn or there was no way I could have continued the fight in any meaningful way.The fact that both Deep Strikes landed beautifully on target was extremely good luck for me, and meant I wouldn't be wiped off the table by Turn 4...
The luck kind of balanced out, though. The dice just didn't love me anytime I tried to take out that last Chimera. Given the amount of firepower I'd levelled at it (4 missile launcher shots, 2 plasma pistol shots, 6 meltagun shots, some krak grenades and some powerfist love, by my reckoning) that Chimera should have been a smoking crater by turn 4, but it just kept going and came back to troll me in the end. Ah, well, them's the breaks, eh?
The next couple of weeks are gonna be pretty hectic for me at work, so the next batrep will happen when it happens, yah? Happy gaming, y'all...
when was this battle played?
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