Surviving assassination

My IG gaming buddy recently picked up the assassins dataslate, as he's long been a fan of the Vindicare, and is now assassin crazy. I have to say I find the idea of them pretty fun as well.

We decided it would be fun to play a game with the "assassination force" formation of one of each kind of assassin vs whatever I thought could beat it.

Since with an unbound list I could negate half the cards in the deck of objectives, making it no fun at all, we're going to try to play to table.

570 points to play with. I have what I think is a viable Dark Angels list, but I'd like to try with Deldar as well. I'm having a lot of trouble, but leaning toward a ton of splinter shots (venom riding cannonborn?) vs everyone except the Vindi, and possibly some lucky reavers to keep him occupied.

What are your thoughts, Archons? By way of thanks I promise a report on the game. It's so small I really have no excuse not to.

Reavers with cluster caltrops is the perfect answer.

you get provided if you bring either 6 or 9 man squads

6 biker squad.: 4 D3 str4 hits and 2 D6 S6 hits. lets mathhammer this. on average your bladevanes do 5 hits. then his assassins are T4 i believe so roughly 3 wounds. The caltrops however average 7 hits. roughly 6 wounds so 9 cover saves great he has a 3+ cover. right there that's 3 unsaved wounds normally FNP mitigates one on average so grand total of 2 wounds! enough to kill the assassin provided if he doesn't GTG and if he does great that means ineffective shooting. Your reavers either way did their job.

9 biker Squad: 6 D3 Str 4 hits and 3 D6 S6 hits roughly about 22 hits, then 16 wounds 10 from S6, 6 from S4 on average. Thats a dead assassin, unless he's lucky. even with a 2+ cover.

If not reavers then just shoot him with Splinterborn. Don't bother AP2 unless you have disintegrators. drown that bastard in wounds and youll surely make his day bad!

hope that helped

There are a few options here. My choices would be:

List 1:
5 Ravagers w/Disintegrators(45 points left for upgrades)

List 2:
6x 3-man wrack squads in dual cannon venoms.

With either list above, you're getting a lot of shots. The difference is mostly semantics, I think. Although you DO have more overall hullpoints with list 1, you would have fewer targets.

Anyhow, the math:

List 1: Generates 45 S5 AP2 shots. Hitting on 3+, Wounding on 3+, will generate 19.5 wounds per turn. Your targets will likely have a 4+ save being their best save(except for vindicare, who will probably have a 3+ cover save due to stealth). With those numbers, these shots could potentially kill 3 of the 4 assassins in 1 round.

List 2: Generates 72 poison shots. Hitting on 3+, Wounding on 4+, will generate 23.75 wounds per turn. Since your targets don't have armor saves, this option is probably better just due to the fact that it's more wounds and more target saturation. Statistically, in order to kill one of his 4+ assassins, it would need 6 wounds applied to it, while taking 9 wounds to kill the vindicare in cover. So you're about 4 wounds short of having a decent chance of taking them all out in a single round. That being said, I'd be confident enough with this list that you'd definitely finish them off by round 2 or 3(Only round 3 if he spends a round hiding from your vehicles, so you have to turbo-boost to get to him.).

EDIT: On second thought, ditch the 6x 3-man wrack squads and buy 3 more venoms. Only 1 of the 3 can afford 2 splinter cannons, but the other two come with cannons, and are more ablative hull points with flickerfields. Sorry for the edit. Hard for me to start thinking unbound. Anyhow, this adds another 24 splinter shots, and probably makes list 2 table him in a single round.

5 ravagers with DL's one shot goes through and they're dead right?

Or if you actually want to have fun, try bringing a small army and have each assassin do their job like they're supposed to. Get 3 haemonculi in put them into a squad of warriors, a squad of wracks and a squad of grotesques. the shooty shoots, the choppy chops. maybe bring some elder allies so he can shut down your psychic powers too. Either way it might end up feeling like you're playing stratego trying to keep certain squads away from specific assassins.

P.S. I just want him to snipe your haemonculi in the grotesque squad and for them to rampage

Reavers hands down are the best option, as they don't care about being reduced to BS1, and inflict enough hits to kill a T4 three wound model with a 4+ with ease. As long as you have one squad of nine reavers in your army you have nothing to worry about when it comes to assassins.

Mushkilla wrote:

Reavers hands down are the best option, as they don't care about being reduced to BS1, and inflict enough hits to kill a T4 three wound model with a 4+ with ease. As long as you have one squad of nine reavers in your army you have nothing to worry about when it comes to assassins.

Even with 6 Reavers, and 2 CC. Bare minimum. Although like Mushkilla says, I always bring 9 man squads with heat lances and CC's and arena champ with a venom blade for protection.

Although I have a question Mushkilla, people were sharking me about how you have to hit with blade vanes and caltrops when it says hits implementing that I already did hits. Is this true, if false ima choke him > . This was in a tournament.

You should choke yourself and not in a good way
You got psyched out over your OWN army's rules and you want to blame anyone other than yourself? Shame on you. You should understand the fundemental rules of your units, especially when going into a tournament.

Timatron wrote:

You should choke yourself and not in a good way
You got psyched out over your OWN army's rules and you want to blame anyone other than yourself? Shame on you. You should understand the fundemental rules of your units, especially when going into a tournament.

Not necessarily. Its a hyperbole :0. Im just saying that its kinda my fault too. Just want a clarification on a rule, simple. Hits to me is Hits not attacks. And currently nothing helps me find the answer not even the FAQ's. Im a kind of person that over emphasizes anything jokingly and so what if i lost. I played for fun. There just needs to be clarification.

There is no need for clarification, hits are hits, as you say. The obviousness of that is the reason for my use of the term 'psyched out'. Someone has convinced you that something you know to be true is otherwise, and I suspect they knew full well what the actual case was. There are many occurrences in the rules of attacks being said to do 'hits', when no roll to hit is made, Templates and Blasts being the most obvious examples, but there are many others, hence my use of the word fundamental.

Barrywise wrote:

Or if you actually want to have fun, try bringing a small army and have each assassin do their job like they're supposed to.

I think this is the key here. It's really not hard to list tailor an army against 4 models and win with easy (Reavers or the list that BetraytheWorld suggest). However, it would be far more interesting and enjoyable for both players if you make a general list and go for it!

Hey yeah, I forgot to post the actual list I wrote! I think we'll play it this weekend, but it might not be til next week.

You know, just in case anyone was really mega excited to read this report ^^

I went with:
Haemo with LG and VB
3 grots (1 aberration, 1 LG)
They ride in a raider with sails. I'm planning to use them against the culexus primarily, using the templates to get round that pesky "you can't hit me" thing.

5 trueborn with 2 splinter cannons
They have a venom with another cannon. These are for shooting the eversor before he wreaks too much havoc.

6 Reavers, two with caltrops. These are for flushing the vindicare, then seeing what else needs doing. Hopefully then everyone can converge on the callidus. She can't shred 'em all! But that depends where she appears from, infiltrators scare me.

Comes out as 3 points less than his formation, and has some elements from nearly all your suggestions. Not only am I not a big spamfan, I don't have enough of any one model to go with any one piece of advice