No 'Risk' No Fun

On how small changes in a list and the way you play it possibly turn out to be a lot of fun and victory! But being hard to apply. Part I

Trying to play a little bit more risky with my marines last night, turned out to be fun and brought me the 8th win in the 10 games I played in our campaign. Usually I basically run a Librarian with nullzone and some other power, a dread, 2 Preds, a Vindi, 3 Landspeeders, 2 tactical squads and a stern guard and I try to vary depending on the enemy, sometimes drop the stern guard and add an additional tactical squad. I did pretty well so far. But as strange as it may sound, I wanted to change something to this working lists I had not tried before. I tried the Captain with Command Squad (4 plasma guns and an Apothecary) against the necrons and it worked out pretty good. So I wandered what to take and after reading a nice article on the 'Yes the Truth hurts'-blog I decided to run a 'Master of the Forge' (henceforth MoF).

the agony of choice
With the current SM codex one definitely has a lot of choices and some of them really sound great, considering the rules or the fluff, and there are many fantastic models BUT, if you do spent some time on studying the individual choices you will see, that in the end a player tends to reduce this plethora of units to a core, which typically is the same had used before. In my case this have always been, dreads, tacticals, scouts, landspeeders, predators , vindicators and stern guard. Additionally some units always drop out because they are really useless or because of personal taste. In my case this have always been things like, bikes, scout bikes, Land-speeder Storm, Assault Marines, ...

Wait, but this exactly melts down to the same list(s) I already mentioned above, and there is the dilemma, you cannot just change your army list completely, you can do changes judging on experiences with units, personal taste, enemies,.. But all these changes are (normally) very 'small' and the core of the army will stay the same. (Ok, at this point I should say that I specialise myself now to the case of a SM army.)
So, changes like dropping Melta bombs when playing against 'Nids or including them when facing IG are usually what happens.

Now what I tried was to at least change the HQ choice and take a look on how this effects my army. Taking the MoF I had to choose whether to give him the conversion beamer and or use him more close combat related. I chose the conversion beamer.
Ok, now since he probably should not move very much in that match, I had to support him with an unit to ensure his survivability. Now the MoF is able to bolster ruins by increasing its cover save by +1. Thus I chose scouts to support him carrying camo cloaks (giving them a 2+ cover save in that ruin), sniper rifles and a rocket launcher.But bolstering ruins is not the only and real advantage of the MoF, he also changes your army list composition by allowing you to take dreads as heavy support. Sounded great, lets play a dread base army I thought, until, until I realised the problem related to

Confinedness of the personal collection
I noticed that in no way I could field more than 2 Dreads, simply because I don't own more then two (well, in fact 3 but one is not usable). And this was not the only unit where I noticed that changing an army is not just limited by the personal taste and the usability of certain units but also the banal fact that one has to own enough models! To cut a long story short, I quickly saw me facing the same choices as always. Sure I could have used a whirlwind proxy but I did decide for the predator again.

Now the final list I used looked like this:

MoF with conversion beamer
10 Tactical SM, with Rocket Launcher, Flamer, Rhino
10 Tactical SM, with Rocket Launcher, Flamer, Rhino
10 Tactical SM, with Heavy Bolter, Melta gun, Rhino
7 Scouts, with Camo Cloaks, Sniper Rifles, Rocket Launcher
Dread with Plasma Cannon, Heavy Flamer
Dread with 2 x twin-linked Autocannons
Landspeeder Typhoon
2 x Predator with Autocannon, Heavy Bolter
Vindicator

As one easily notices, no big changes made even though I tried really hard. But at this point I was really sure, that the change of the HQ choice would enable me to change my style of playing against the 'nids. If it worked out and how will be told in the next part of this article, following the next days...

Short Battle Report: Iron Knights vs. Chaos Daemons

So tonight I fought against a good friend of mine who was fielding his chaos daemons for the first time. this army was basically his whfb army but he used it for a test match now in 40k against me.

he was basically fielding:
- Herold on Juggernaut w/ 2 or 3  Bloodcrushers
- 3 Flamers
- 10 Horrors with standard bearer/icon and the Changeling (if that was his name)
- 10 Plague Bearers  with standard bearer/icon
- 10 Daemonettes w/ standard bearer/icon
- 10 Bloodletters with standard bearer/icon
- 5 or 6 Seekers
- 3 Screamers
- 2 Soul Grinder

I was fielding:
- Scriptor
- Sternguard, 5 veterans, 3 combimelta, serg. w/ pf. in Razorback w/ heavy bolter
- Dreadnought with multimelta, heavyflamer in drop pod w/ beacon
- Trike w/ multimelta
- Landspeeder w/ heavy flamer, multimelta
- Vindicator
- 2 Predator with autocannon and heavy bolters
- Tactical Squad, 10 Space Marines, Flamer, Rocket Launcher, Rhino
- Tactical Squad, 10 Space Marines, Melta, Multimelta, serg. w/ pf, Rhino
- 5 Scouts, 4 snipers and heavy bolter and cloaks
- 5 scouts, 4 snipers and rocket launcher and cloaks

This short report is some kind of test for upcoming reports and unfortunately without pictures but some scatches.

Deployment and movement here:

I started and could not do much but move. His Flamers scattered off the table and got lost. His Soul Grinder 1 also scattered off the table and I was allowed to redeploy him and put in some ruin, where he failed his test for dangerous terrain and got immobilized! My Drop Pod scattered just 2 inches and I moved all my transporters towards the objectives and the landspeeder went full speed behind some cover. In the shooting phase his Horrors took out the Sergeant of my Scouts squat S1 (with heavy bolter) and his Soul Grinder was able to kill one Scout from S2 (with RL). I will not mark all shootings and movements on the following maps. But in my second turn my Predator to the left killed some Screamers (Sc) the Tactical Squad (melta) left the Rhino (R2) as well as the Sternguard the Razorback (RB). Ok the Trike moved full speed to the right. The Tactical Squad from R2 fired at the remaining Screamers as well as the Razorback did and killed them. My Dreadnought (D) used his Heavy Flamer to kill 1  Plague Bearer (PB) that had walked up to the Scouts S1. But missed with his multimelta. The Vindicator also shot at the PB scattered but managed to kill  2. The second Predator did also very well and killed 1 PB. The Scouts S1were forced to do a leadership test for shooting at the Plague Bearers due to the Changeling but passed and killed 1 Plague Bearer, thanks to the Hellfire-Amo. The Landspeeder showed up and killed 3 or 4 Horrors with his Heavy Flamer. After this the Dreadnought charged the PB and killed 2 and survived without any hit against him, thus 2 additional PB died because they were fearless.

it looked like this at the begining of his second turn.

So I am gettin tired of producing this pictures but here is what happened in his second turn. His Daemonetts and the Seekers as well as the second Soul Grinder showed up. The Horrors scored a glanzing hit at the Landspeeder but fortunately his crew was only shaken. The Grinder destoryed the left Predator which exploded and killed on Veteran from the Stern Guard. His Seekers ran forward and the Soul Grinder 1 again killed one Scout but they passed the leadership test. The last Pleague Bearer was taken out by the Dreadnaught in closecombat. In my 3rd turn, my sternguard entered the RB and drove up to where the left Predator has been and killed some Horrors with the heavy bolter. the Vindicator drove back and killed all the Daemonetts while the Predator killed 1 Seeker, the Dreadnought also killed one with the heavy Flamer and the Scouts SG1 also with the heavy Bolter. Tactical Squad 1 entered the objective in the north and Tactical Squad 2 moved further into the ruins. ah, and the landspeeder moved behind the big ruins in the north to recover...

daemons turn 3 his Herold and Bloodcrushers appeared directly above the last Predator. His Bloodletters scatterd off the table and where also destroyed. At this point all daemon hope was lost but we continued. His Soul Grinder 2 destroyed the Multimelta of the Dreadnaught and the Horrors moved towards the left objective and tryed to kill the RB but could not penetrate the armour. the seekers attacked the scouts but just killed 1 of them but also lost one, thus a draw. the soul grinder tried to charge the Dreadnought but failed.

To bad for him, in my 4th turn the Landspeeder showed up and fired his multimelta in his back and blew the guy up. the Sternguard in the RB drove forward. The Dreadnaught charged the seekers to support the Scouts, while the Scout Squad 2 had already reached the ground floor of the ruin to move forward the right objective. The Predator killed 1 Juggernaut while the Sternguard had left the RB and also killed 2 Juggernauts. The Seekers where killed by the Dreadnaught and Scouts...

Well I font remember the last part of the battle exactly, an maybe it was turn 5 not 4, but this was basically all the action that took place. So at the end of turn 4 or 5 with the exception of the immobilized Soul Grinder and some Horrors the Iron Knights killed every Daemon and captured all 4 objectives. And lost 1 Predator, 4 or 5 Scouts and one Stern Guard Veteran. I have to say, the Daemon player was unluky with two scattering dices and the Bloodthirsters have just been thrown into this dangerous region to get the chance to see them fight, because the game was already lost at that point. Unfortunetaly they dissapeared in the warp... I personally had much luck with the scattering dices, I scattered nearly all the time but always just 2 or 4 inches before subtracting the WS. It was a nice game even though I really dont like Daemons at all...