Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Battle Report: 1500 vs Chaos

For the first time in a long time we had an MEQ player at the club on Tuesday. Sam, he of a thousand armies, decided to go with a Khorne/Nurgle list to mix up the pool and drew into playing me. We rolled up annihilation and table quarters for deployment.

Side note: does anyone else seem to keep on rolling Annihilation? Am I unconsciously rolling high because most of the time in this game that's a good thing? I swear, I play at least two games of KP to objective based missions, and often times we need to roll for mission 4 times before we get anything but KP.

Further side note: I would have had pics, but apparently the kids in my lab got a hold of my camera and deleted my pics. Or I accidentally did that. Anyway... grr.

Sam deployed with his Defiler and Obliterators towards the rear and the rest of his army up front. I only deployed my chimeras and Leman russes, the former hiding behind the latter. Turn 1 exemplified how the game would go, as Sam turboboosted his bikes and flew his daemon prince up to strike on turn two. Fortunately for me BID plasma fire from my command squad took care of the DP (yay 9 plasma shots!) while my tanks eliminated all of the bikers, the HB Russ managing to eliminate 4 of the 5 by itself.

Turn 2 saw a squad of summoned Khorne demons teleport in next to the Nurgle rhino and the plague marines disembarking. Lascannon fire from the Oblits eliminated my lascannon Russ and the PMs plus a battle cannon shot from the Defiler managed to reduce my command squad to just the commander. For my turn reserves consisted of Harker's squad and Al'Rahem's platoon. Unfortunately my astropath had been shot down, so I had to accept the results. Al'Rahem, the melta SWS and my merged squads came in on the flank with the Defiler, while the flamers came in on the other. Here was the second of the key turning points: When asking his squad to bring the defiler down, Al'Rahem rolled double 6s, meaning that his order failed so completely that his squad couldn't do anything that round. This is the second game in a row that this has happened... I'm beginning to wonder if Al'Rahem has been drinking on the job... The melta SWS squad missed completely, allowing the defiler to defile both squads on the next turn. I also failed to kill the plague marines when they were out in the open, opening the doors for plenty of punishment in close quarters combat. My last Russ was destroyed by power fists and more daemons teleported in to join the fray.

The rest of the game was downhill for me, but it still felt fairly close. My stormtroopers deep struck in next to the Defiler and managed to kill it, allowing my wave of infantry to start closing in on the obliterators, hoping to make some easy kill points. Harker's squad managed to wipe out a squad of demons, but were then eliminated by teleporting terminators...

...which were in turn eliminated by Marbo, Lord of Awesome. Unfortunately by the end of turn 5 most of my army had been eliminated and I called the game.

Even though I lost it was still a fun game, as both of us got to make pretty fantastic plays that dramatically swung the balance one way or the other. I will never get tired of annihilating MCs in one turn with my plasma command squad, and Marbo is just too much fun. I just need to work on deployment and develop a strategy to counter dangerous CC MEQs.

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