I went down to Games Workshop for a game of 40K before I went to pick Amy up from the station. With the Necron release only a day away, it was suspiciously fitting that Mark, my opponent, should be a Necron player, giving the old rules one last battle before the new ones came out...
Things didn't get off to a good start for me. We got Shane at the shop to roll up the scenario and deployment, and we ended up with Annhialation (I'm far better off holding objectives!) and Spearhead deployment. Spearhead is my least favourite because it means that I've got the furthest to travel across the board before I enconter an enemy, which when I'm up against a gun line almost invariably means I'll be shot to pieces before I get there. I decided therefore to make use of the craters strewn around the battlefield for defence, and aim right for the centre. Initiative was going to be vital, so I chose to set up first and take the first turn rather than react to Mark's deployment. I kept my Chaos Lord and a squad of Raptors in reserve to take advantage of Deep Strike, and began...
Mark set up with a crowd of Necron Warriors on the front line and with his Destroyers on the flanks. I knew there was a Monolith in reserve as well. As I had the first turn, I threw my Posessed Chaos Space Marines at the army; they'd rolled up Scout for their special ability. Very few would pick this as their first choice, I suspect a large part of the reason you don't see Posessed in many Chaos armies is that they are quite unpredicatble. However, the role they play in my games rarely goes beyond using them as a meat shield to draw the enemy fire, and it is a tactic that works fairly well. I also managed to take out a couple of Necrons with my Havocs, but they later succeeded their We'll Be Back roll.
Mark took his turn and wasted no time in immobilizing my Rhino with his Heavy Destroyers. He also took a few pot shots at my Chaos Space Marines, one of them had an early night but other than that to no avail.
And now for my first mistake of the evening: I brought on my Chaos Lord on with my Raptors via Deep Strike. My Chaos Lord has wings and is well within his rights to do this, and sending him out without support is suicide and I know it. My mistake was that I brought them down far too close to the main Necron line. As you can't move after you Deep Strike, yes I was close enough to shoot them with their pistol weapons for all the good that did me, but was also in a prime position for them to rattle me with rapid fire weapons next turn before I could even think about getting in to combat. And that's not to mention the Monolith that had appeared, as these things so often do, out of nowhere, who's Flux Arc was doing me some serious mischief. As expected, most of my so-called 'Command Squad' got shot to pieces by all that Mark could put in to it, amazingly about 3 of them survived.
I tried to make up for it by going in to combat. I went straight for the Necron Lord, and to hell with the War Scythe; if I was going to have a hope of winning I had to stop him from using his Ressurection Orb. The only way I was going to manage that was to win combat, get him to fail his leadership check and catch them on the initiative roll-off where I had the upper hand. I managed to win combat, but not by enough to give them anything like a hard run at their leadership check. Mark used his Monolith to teleport the Necrons out of combat, and my lord went down to gunfire in the following turn.
My only kill point of the game came from gunning down the Heavy Destroyers with my Havocs, and to be fair I should have done that a long time before they immobilized my Rhino and took out two of the Havocs. The rest of it... the Chaos Space Marine squads couldn't do much with the Monolith so close, any attempt to destory it was failing horribly and the small amount of damage they were doing to the Necrons was quickly rectified by the We'll Be Back roll.
The battle was over quite quickly with only a very small number of my Chaos Space Marines surviving. Mark had once again one it quite comfortably. My army is not geared to dealing with very hard-to-hurt targets like that and the more I game with it (to be fair this was the first time in nearly a year,) the more I feel as though they need a complete overhaul in order to get even close to being effective.
On the other hand, it might be time to get my Sorceror back in on the action. He did OK last time...
War of the Ring blog coming up soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment