DE 2000 Pt 3 round Tournament

I played a 3 round 2000 point tournament with my shooty kabal DE list. This post has all three games in it. The list I used is as follows:

Archon with Blaster (goes with blasterborn), AKA Lord Serus "Where'd I put my shadow field.....?" Severius
(2x) 10 Warriors with Splinter Cannon and Blaster in a Raider with Dark Lance, Night Shields, Splinter Racks
(4x) 5 Warriors with Blaster in a Venom with 2 Splinter Cannons
(2x) 3 True Born with 2 Dark Lances in a Raider with Dark Lance, Night Shields (these deploy out of the vehicles)
3 True Born with 3 Blasters in a Raider with Dark Lance, Night Shields
(2x) 3 Reavers with Blaster
(2x) Ravager with Dark Lances, Night Shields
Void Raven with 2 Shatterfield Missiles, flickerfield

I went completely shooty, with no close combat capability to speak of at all. The tournament itself had about 40 people at it with a wide range of armies. There were two necron flyer spam lists. Probably the most common armies were Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and Dark Eldar/Eldar mixes of allies. The scenarios were worth 15 points for a win, 10 for a tie, 5 for a loss. Each one also had up to 5 bonus points available, making the max battle points for a game 20.

Game 1 vs Blood Angels with Grey Knights allies

Blood Angels List:
Librarian
Cortez
10 Knights with storm bolters and halberds
10 Tactical Marines
10 Tactical Marines w/Plasma Cannon
Landraider
2 Baal Predators
1 Triple Lascannon Predator
2 Vindicators
Aegis defense line with Icarus cannon

I thought this would be a good match up for me because he had a bunch of vehicles and I had a bunch of lances.

The game was Dawn of War with 5 objectives (the battle chronicler icons). You could earn an extra point for each enemy unit destroyed to a max of 5. I got first turn with no night fighting. I rolled the warlord trait that grants stealth in ruins, which helped quite a bit as I could go to ground on one of the objectives with a 2+ cover save. Cortez and the knights deployed in the landraider. One tac squad sat on an objective with the librarian behind the defense line, and another took up in a building on a second objective. Set up looked like this:



Turn one for both armies went like this:





With the first turn I managed to destroy 2 tac marines and take a hull point off the landraider. Not really what I was hoping for. My reavers all got taken out in return. During this game I just shuffled around to get jink saves and stay away from the bolter marines. The pictures are to give a basic idea, but they aren't accurate as far as exactly where my ships were as I didn't write them down and I had 12 vehicles.

My second turn saw the landraider and a predator go down. The squad hiding behind the aegis got shredded bit by bit over the game, losing a few models each turn until it disappeared. Looked like this:



The grey knights bailed out of the landraider wreckage and made for cover. Blood Angel vehicles continued to roll forward. My Archon boat gets destroyed and squad gets hit with a vindicator. The Archon is vaporized.



On my third turn I am starting to run through most of the vehicles. I think only one was able to shoot after this. I dropped off squads near the objective markers. If you notice, my void raven hasn't shown up. It actually did on this turn, and was blown to bits by the Icarus, so I didn't bother putting it on the map.



My foot squads take some punishment and the grey knights attempt to assault the objective in the middle woods on my side of the board, but fail their charge. Oops.



This was the last turn. I dropped off more squads on the objectives just to be sure. I shot down the rest of the knights + cortez and the librarian + tacticals. Both vindicators went. As time was getting short on this game my opponenet conceeded with one tactical squad held up in a building on his right side. Result was max 20 point win for DE.






Game 2 vs Space Wolves

Wolf List:
Wolf Priest on a bike
5 Thunderwolf cavalry
(2x) 8 Grey Hunters with melta gun and mounted in drop pod (one is joined by Arjac and one by wolfguard)
10 Grey Hunters with 2 melta guns on foot (joined by wolfguard)
9 Grey Hunters with melta gun mounted in Rhino (joined by wolfguard)
(3x) 6 Longfangs with 5 missile launchers (one is joined by wolfguard)
4 Wolfguard + Arjac, various equipment

This game was purge the alien (kill points) with hammer and anvil deployment against a well painted space wolves army. I got first turn with night fight on. Bonus points were for having a unit in your opponent's deployment zone, to a max of 5. I deployed everything in a shooting line. The pods and two squads were mandatory reserve, so out of seven that were left, 3 long fang squads started on the board. Two of them were placed in a ruin on the upper center of the table and one of those squads had a cyclone terminator with it. The third was placed behind a hill in the middle. Two grey hunters (foot and rhino) plus the thunderwolves were reserve.

This was a horrible match up for the space wolves and great for me, as he was using a slow moving army that did not have very much long ranged firepower outside of the small long fang squads.

Picture of the firing line. Void raven is in reserve.



Set up.


I open fire on the longfangs. The squad in the center was killed to a man. One longfang group in the ruins was reduced to two models, the other went to ground but still lost three. Everything drifts forward to get jink saves as there is pretty much nothing that can shoot back.



On wolves turn 1, a drop pod comes in next to a ruin behind my gunship line. The grey hunters shoot, but don't do much besides maybe taking a hull point off a raider. Two longfangs like their chances in close combat against the reaver bikes instead of shooting and charge and lose one to overwatch. The second longfang squad quits cowering and stands back up.



The guns unload on the one longfang squad and the grey hunters. The longfangs all go down and the hunters are reduced to two models. The Reavers finish off the lone marine in combat and jump into the ruins. Voidraven makes an appearance.



The next two pictures are a summary of the rest of the turns because the game went lopsided. The second pod came down behind my gunship line, and the remaining two grey hunters from the first group managed to assault and kill one of my true born lance squads. Both pod teams and their pods were then wiped out. The thunderwolves came in from reserve, and since they can't charge from reserve anymore, they could not hide. They ran part way across the field and were shot down. The foot and rhino grey hunters came down in my opponents bottom corner and were shot apart. The wolves were left with 3 or 4 marines hiding in the rhino crater at the end of the game. Kill points were something like 12 to 3. Result was max points win for DE.





Game 3 vs Chaos Daemons

Daemons army:
Fateweaver (the evil two headed chicken)
Bloodthirster
(3x) Daemon prince with wings, 4++ save, bolt of tzeench (sp?)
(3x) 5 pink horrors with bolt
(1x) 5 pink horrors with bolt, joined by the changeling
(2x) 3 flamers

This game was the corner to corner deployement with big guns never tire (objectives). We had three objectives. Extra points were for the warlord (+2) and up to three for destroying troop units. I thought this was also a good matchup because of the five monsters, low model count, and my poison weapons. I went second and there was no night fight. I did not put this one into pictures because it is easy to explain....

The daemon player had to use his second line (failed his roll) and brought in 2 pink horror units and 2 daemon princes. The jetbikes bladevaned one of the princes almost to death and he was easily finished off. The horror units cause a little damage and were shot down.

The daemon player had horrible luck with the dice. Example; fateweaver comes in on turn 2. I shoot him and do 5 wounds. He fails his rerollable 3++ three times and dies. Ick. It gets worse from there and he can't blow up my boats for anything. Daemons tabled at the end of turn 4 I believe. The 10 man warrior squads in boats with splinter racks absolutely did a number on the daemons. Really helped bring down the flying monsters. Result is a 20 point victory to DE.

Results

Combined with painting, my little devil pixies came out as best overall. I think I had good matchups and the shooting list just had too much firepower. As for the rest of the field.... Since I've seen a lot of posts on flyer spam; both necron spam lists lost a game each and had a hard time picking up all the bonus battle points. One had 5 flyers and the other had 7 (it was allied with orcs and had a dakka jet). The 7 flyer was beaten by an eldar list centered around pathfinders and wraithguard, due to insane rerollable cover/armor saves. The 5 flyer lost to nids. All the other lists were generally one or two vehicle flyers.

Sorry for the length, but thanks if you read this far. Comments about the list or anything else are appreciated.

thumbs up, though i was a little scared when i saw this list. Your play stile isnt a favorite of mine...but hey, you won, and you made the dark kin proud

Not a fan of the spam lists? Normally I'd have a few squads of witches and probably a squad of incubi in there with an archon, although I think they were all taken down a bit. This was my test to see how the all shooty worked for 6th and it did pretty well considering I got matched with opponents of similar points totals as the event went on. I'll have to play it more and see how it does against some different match ups. The flyer spam lists will probably give me trouble as my highest shot volume comes from poison, but we'll see....

It'll give me some time to build a million jetbikes to try out Mushkilla's reaver list. That one looks like fun.

Great battle reports, I like that you tried an extreme list. It reminds me of something my Shaolin teacher taught me when I was in China.

"You learn form, before learning formlessness. A movement in training is always over-exaggerated to emphasise it's purpose and to understand the full range of it's use. In practice it may not be as apparent but will be just as effective"

Well what he actually said was:

"Form before formless. Exaggerate training, to learn purpose. When learn, later not so much. Understand?" (in a thick Chinese accent)

The same can be applied to 40k and playing extreme lists to learn one aspect of the army in great depth. In my reaver list I learn't things about the movement phase, deployment, positioning, reserve and 1st vs 2nd turn that I never learn't playing my regular more balanced list.

Nice to see someone else using battle chronicler. I'm a more of a visual person so it really helps make things clearer. How did you get the tank/models to be so big?

Sig121 wrote:

It'll give me some time to build a million jetbikes to try out Mushkilla's reaver list. That one looks like fun.

It is a lot of fun. The one problem was randomizing, but that's "fixed" now that the daemon update gives an example of how to resolve turbo boost attacks.

"use the final position of the screamers for wound allocation"

When you create the unit you can pick a custom option for the base size. I put the raiders as a rectangle custom at 50 wide and 120 long... or something like that. All the marine vehicles were done similarly. The bomber is an elipse custom shape. I tried to do the elipse shape with the bikes and they turned out looking like hersheys kisses, so I'll probably stick with normal round ones for those next time.