1750 - Dark Eldar vs Space Marines

Who wants another battle report?! *ignores distinct lack of raised hands*

My list is almost identical to the last 1750 game I played against Daemons, with a slight switch in wargear:
Archon, PGL, Huskblade, Venom Blade, Shadowfield
Baron
4 Incubi, venom, 2x splinter cannon (archon goes here)
5 warriors, venom, 2x splinter cannon (sit on objective and score, venom does damage)
3 trueborn, 3 blasters, venom, 2x splinter cannon
10 wyches, hekatrix, venom blade, haywire grenades, raider (dark lance)
10 warriors, splinter cannon, raider with splinter racks (dark lance)
10 hellions
5 scourges, 2 haywire blasters
Razorwing, flickerfield
Razorwing, flickerfield
Ravager (3 lances)
Difference from previous iteration is tagging out the klaivex and grisly trophies from the wych raider to get points for haywire grenades as I felt I was too light on anti-armour.

I'm up against Iron Hands, with the following:
Chapter Master with standard netlist (2+ armour, eternal warrior storm shield, burning sword of death)
10 terminators with 2 cyclone missile launchers
Venerable Dreadnought (assault cannon/storm bolter)
Ironclad Dreadnought, 2 heavy flamers, drop pod
10 tactical marines, plasma gun, combi-plasma, rhino
10 tactical marines, plasma gun, combi-plasma, rhino
5 scouts
Techmarine with 'thunderfire cannon'
4 hyperios missile platforms (forge world nonsense - twin-linked BS3, 2 wound 3+ save artillery that fire missile launchers, also have skyfire and interceptor)
Predator (autocannon, can't remember the sponsons)
Vindicator
(anyone spot the biggest flaw in the list?)

Mission was Kill Points (yay), Vanguard Strike. Night fighting WAS on the first turn, and the Iron Hands won the roll for table sides, and the roll for first turn (I've lost every roll I've made with the baron!). Can't remember the SM warlord trait, mine was re-roll reserves.


Space Marine deployment. Ignore the rhinos and scouts - he's kept all his troops in reserve. Terms and tanks are across the front line, hyperios battery is in the ruins (we're playing all the buildings as ruins), the closest thing on the top is the 'thunderfire cannon', a conversion because he doesn't like the original and happens to be about half the size of the actual thunderfire. Oh, and that ruin's fortified.


My deployment. I've bunkered outside of 36" for night fighting, and tried to spread out to avoid the heavy flamers doing much. From top to bottom it's ravager, warrior raider, incubi venom, wych raider, trueborn venom, warrior raider at the back. Scourges are deep-striking, and hellions are walking on. I've deliberately deployed the ravager so that the dread can't get at it's rear armour; worst case scenario it'll take a pair of glancing hits. I roll to seize and fail.

Turn 1 - SM:
Pod lands right in my face near the ruin, and the dread disembarks into it. Terms and tanks move forwards. The dreadnought then heavy flamers both my venom and the wych raider (cheatyface moment number 1 - flamers have to cover as much of the target vehicle as possible, so he should have picked one and only one; there's no way that he'd have got both if he was covering as much of his intended target). Then they get searchlighted - firstly, my bad; I hadn't considered that an option. Secondly, I'm pretty sure this is cheatyface moment number 2; I don't think he can searchlight both tanks, just one (whichever one is the official 'target'). This lets some of his shots get through onto both, and the thunderfire dumps the S6 blast around getting both the venom and raider. The upshot is an immobilised wych raider, and a stunned venom as I get very jammy with my flickerfield saves, making 3 against penetrating hits (cue much complaining from the Iron Hands).

Turn 1 - DE:
Wyches disembark into the ruins (the legality of which is queried by my opponent even though his dread's just done the exact same thing). I shift my tanks around that can move. I make a potential error and play too defensively with my venoms, bringing them back out of range - I can't get to the artillery, and I know I can't scratch the terminators; I should have bipped them up and hidden behind terrain with turbo-boosts. All 3 snap-firing blasters miss his dreadnought, wyches miss a thrown haywire. Immobilised raider takes a shot and misses his vindicator, and then an argument ensues as my opponent is adamant that it just has a 45 degree fire arc as it's hull mounted (despite me demonstrating its 90 degree fire arc) - meh. My other lances combine to put a single glance on the vindicator. Wyches charge the dread, losing 3 to overwatch (average - 2 flamers are most likely to put out 3 hits) and slap it with haywire grenades. I get enough glances to kill it but one penetrating hit...which causes an explosion. I manage to wound ALL SEVEN wyches, and don't make a single save, losing them all (and unsportsmanlike crowing from the other side of the table).


End of turn 1. I'm technically winning 2-1 (one kill point each and first blood)

Turn 2 - SM:
One rhino comes on, and parks behind his ruin bunker. Everything else retreats. (I reckon he's just going to try and thunderfire/hyperios my missiles and win by killing paper planes. How boring). I'm hazy on specifics, but my warrior raider gets exploded (killing 6, I pass morale and pinning), and the trueborn venom gets wrecked (again, pass pinning).

Turn 2 - DE:
Even with the re-roll, my hellions and scourges both come on. Neither razorwing turns up initially, but I have the re-roll and do get them. Baron and hellions hide behind a building, scourges deep-strike in. I can't stay out of range of the hyperioses, and still be in effective range myself, so I just blast up and prepare to take my lumps. The warriors move back to get out of sight, and the trueborn advance on the drop pod. Ravager and both venoms move up. He intercepts one of the razorwings, getting a glance and 3 penetrates; again the flickerfield makes out like a bandit and only one penetrate gets through (again, more whining from the other side about how lucky I am); this rips off a missile. (Also, I will now be investing in a D8 for the future as trying to randomise a weapon destroyed result on a model with 7 weapons using only d6 is tricky). Blasters do nothing to the pod. Lances from the ravager take out the vindicator in an explosion that kills nothing, and one razorwing gets the predator. Scourges and the in-range venom do no damage, and the out of range venom turbos out behind a ruin.


End of turn 2 - still keeping pace with VPs, 3-3

Turn 3 - SM
Other rhino turns up near my ravager; plans to put plasma out the hatch into it. Still no scouts. Marines mostly continue their advancing in another direction tactic. Shooting kills 3 scourges, immobilises the ravager, and the thunderfire tries an ignores-cover barrage on the hellions, but it scatters (thank goodness for indirect fire).

Turn 3 - DE
Hellions have to come out, there's no point hiding. I continue to advance with the venoms and razorwings. The immobile raider and the one ravager lance in the firing arc both shoot the rhino to the tune of one hull point. Blasterborn continue their failure crusade against the pod. The 2 surviving scourges take a wound off the thunderfire, but all my other shooting into it is ineffective. I do kill a few terminators though. The razorwing even puts lances into it but he makes his cover, which it shouldn't get as, even half the size it should be, it's not even close to obscured; cue cheatyface moment 3 - swearing blind that it's area terrain and I'm eventually fed up of arguing so just let him have it.


End of turn 3

Turn 4 - SM
The scouts come in. Rhino moves up and disembarks a generous 6 inches so that the tacticals are in the side of the ravager/rear of the venom. Shooting manages to finish the ravager, get two trueborn, wreck the venom, thunderfire kills all 5 guys that got out, terminators kill all the hellions and I'm left with a krak missile to take on the baron. "Go on, roll a 1" says the SM player, and I duly do. "Good".

Turn 4 - DE
Having just lost 5 kill points in the last turn (baron, hellions, ravager, venom, warriors) the game's now pretty much over unless I can pull something - thinking just hope for failed morale checks on turn 5. One razorwing goes off-table, the other goes for the scouts. I put a ton of shots into the thunderfire, but again he makes every save (at this point, the thunderfire should have been dead almost 3 times over, but instead the SM player is lamenting not making his 6+ FNP on the 3 infantry I've managed to kill/my luck with flickerfields). I kill most of the scouts, the last one legs it. Last blasterborn moves out so that there's absolutely no way the pod can claim a save, and kills it.


End of turn 4

Turn 5 - SM
Marines just move around and shoot - they bring down the venom and kill all my incubi. Archon manages to survive.

Turn 5 - DE
Archon runs for consolation linebreaker. Razorwing comes back on, gets intercepted and shot down. I've had enough of this nonsense and concede.


End of the game (ignore the razorwing in the centre)

Space Marines have killed 11 things for a total of 11 VPs, Dark Eldar have killed 5 units, and have first blood and linebreaker for a total of 7 VPs.

Bleah. I have a really sour taste in my mouth after this game, exacerbated by my open case taking a nosedive afterwards and there's now a lot of broken models. Anyway, I know I made mistakes this game. I was too defensive round about turn 1/2; should have shoved everything possible forwards and forced him to deal with my entire army at once; especially after I'd taken down the predator and rhino. I'd have been in with a real chance if I'd done that. Big tactical error, and I will learn from it. If I'd sent the venoms forwards, I could have dealt with thunderfire and other things early on.

However, there's a few things that went wrong that weren't my fault:
1 - the drop-pod dread. There's no way that that 'alpha strike' should have done that much damage if the rules for flamers and searchlights had been played correctly; I'd have kept the wych raider and that would have helped immeasurably.
2 - the wych explosion fail. Even having kept one or two wyches alive would have a) denied my opponent a KP, and b) would have ensured the drop pod went down on turn 2 (the deathwind did a fair amount of damage). Combine surviving wyches with a mobile raider...
3 - thunderfire cannon. It did a lot of damage, and either average dice or it not getting it's (debatable at best) cover save. If that had gone down when it should, I'd have been a good few kill points better off.
4 -one I didn't realise until this morning: Hyperios launchers. Firstly, I'm not overfond of playing against forge world at the best of times, especially if I don't know in advance if it's being used (some of the stuff is fair, some of it's pretty over the top, some of it's underpowered but makes for a great themed unit). However - from what I can glean from research, these are counted as heavy support choices with the IA12 update, giving him 4 heavy support choices.

Opponent rating: 2/10, would not play again. Nice enough guy off-the table, but on it just too much rules lawyering, nitpicking, etc. Same guy I lost to a few weeks back with all the wave serpents. If you're going to argue the toss over every little thing into your favour, as well as complain constantly about your opponent's perceived 'luck' whilst ignoring your own, I'm not going to play you again.

Apologies for the rant this has turned into; hopefully people can actually learn something from the batrep though! Will be on hiatus for doing reports for a while until I've had a chance to repair my army - as ever C&C welcome!

Solid game, opponent was an ass. This illustrates why I hate forgeworld as it's almost always used to give the forgeworld player an advantage over his opponent. How can you know the rules for his army if they are not in common circulation, as a result you don't know your enemy, and that's bad news if you take Sun Tzu's advice seriously.

The searchlight, flamer template placement, modelling for advantage and the "the top floor of this ruin is area terrain" were all a load of rubbish. Kudos for keeping your cool. Shame about the model case.

Thanks for sharing the pain as usual.

The hyperios isn't in IA12. You talking about the sentry guns. Those are heavy support and have a few weapon options, including the hyperios.

So it's possible when running a vanilla list to take 3 units of 4 hyperios missile batteries as fast attack, then start taking sentry guns as a heavy support, since they are different units.

That said your opponent cheated you twice anyway. It is hard enough playing DE without that nonsense.

Nice pictures, clean table.

I would have given up at turn 3. Congratulations to you, your nerves and your patience.
Playing an unfair / unfriendly game like this is the best way to disgust me from the game for a few months.

A friend of mine is planning to play a FW Mortis Dreadnought as a Dark Angels AA solution.
It seems to be well balanced on the paper... but I am a bit sceptical with FW models and regular games.

Yeah, in retrospect I'm probably a bit over-vitriolic, but I was not best pleased when I realised how badly I'd been done over. Also, after consultation with others in chat (either Shadows or Egorey, I forget who exactly), I got screwed another way. I had planned to bring the Razorwing back in out of range of his hyperioses, and dakka the crap out of his terminator squad. Killing two would have made them -maybe- flee, and if the game had ended that turn I'd have had another 3 KP (chapter master, slay the warlord, and terminators for them fleeing as the game ended), plus he'd have had one less for not killing the razorwing, leaving us at an improbable 10-10 draw. The possibility was exceptionally slim, but I'd have gone for it if he hadn't (falsely) told me that the chapter master was fearless.

Mostly, I'm annoyed that the culture amongst a lot of the long-standing regulars is to turn up without anything other than models. On reflection, it's only extremely rarely that I've seen some of them turn up with templates, rulebooks or codices; has the really irritating side effect of just being forced to accept what your opponent is telling you.

not taking codices is absolute bullshit.

At least you know not to play this guy again!

Eugh, doesn't sound like you had much fun there, bad luck  you have to

I too am not a Forge World fan. I have absolutely no problem if people want to use the models as a stand in for proper 40K units, as they look fantastic, like the Warboss on bike or Khorne Lord Zhufor and so on, but not if they expect to use the mad rules that Forge World frequently come up with. It's very difficult to tell people that they can't use it though, once they've bought it, painted it up and put it in their list, what can you do? Especially if they haven't brought any other stuff for the game, and you have to take something out of your list if they drop it from theirs.

Funny too - my conversions tend to make the model unnecessarily large and showy, rather than smaller. Piddly little Thunderfire cannon, pah! I don't even think Earthshaker cannons are big enough though. No jokes about over compensating please