Invasion Kenosha, pt 1

Hi all! This past weekend I got back into the 40k groove by checking out Invasion Kenosha, a tourney put on near my home town that was put on by fellow Warhammer blogger Equinox.

When I put together the list that I was taking I had a couple of thoughts in mind:

One, it was a 1500 pts tourney and so I couldn't bring the normal set of tools that I consider to be indispensable. So no ridiculous Heavy Support choices and certainly not the plurality of units that I'm used to in my Mech Guard lists.

Two, at least when I started originally putting my list together ForgeWorld units were set to be allowed. Because of this my list needed to be able to deal with some of the nastier Forge World options that were out there, such as Lucius Drop Pods, Land Raider Achilles and Hades Breaching Drills.

Three, I of course still wanted to go mostly mech. I likes my tanks and I have a lot of them, so being able to get my Vets out there was a given. However I wanted to try something that was more of a mixed mech army, so including some foot element in the army to help screen my tanks and overwhelm other infantry would be key.

So here's the list I put together. I'm using a lot of acronyms here, so if you're confused check out my IG vocabulary reference page.

CCS with 3 meltaguns in a Chimera, ML/HF
2 Veteran squads, 3 meltaguns in a Chimera, ML/HF
Veteran squad, 3 plasmaguns in a Chimera, ML/HF
PCS, 4 flamers in a Chimera, ML/HF
3 Infantry squads with power weapon sgts., one with a Commissar with power weapon
2 Vendettas
Hellhound with hull heavy flamer
Leman Russ Demolisher with hull heavy flamer

A couple of key points here:

- I don't like doing triple Vendettas in lists anymore. Vendettas continue to be awesome and incredibly efficient, but they are such high value targets that they are shot down almost instantly or are forced to turboboost the entire game due to shaking. I also really like the other Fast Attack choices and choosing one to throw in in their place sounded like a good plan. Plus, it's much easier to transport 2 Vs than 3.

-The infantry squads were included to help deal with what I consider to be the bane of Mech IG, drop armies. They can easily provide a 6 inch area of safe space between them and my tanks to help reduce the chance that a deep striking unit will blow something up. They also provide a nice buffer against assaulting armies, tying up big death star units until I can devote enough resources to blow them up. I wish I could have found the points for some special weapons for these squads, but at least at the time I thought that power weapons were more important.

-The Demolisher was chosen for two reasons: strength 10 and mobility. Strength 10 Ordnance gives me an out against a Land Raider Achilles (stupid immunity to melta) and can help blow up TWolf Cavalry and give nearly every unit in the game a hard time. I chose it over other Str 10 choices like the Manticore and Medusa because it's very mobile and well armored. Putting it at the forefront of my spearhead provides some protection for the rest of my AV 12 tanks or on the side to protect their AV 10.

-The Hellhound was a last minute choice. I was debating either it or a Devil Dog, and I'm still not sure if I made the right choice. On the one hand my Chimeras are all equipped with heavy flamers making it somewhat redundant. But, on the other hand, I often want to set guys that are over there on fire, and the Hellhound with its speed and long range super flamer excels at this task. Again, if I could have had more points a hull multimelta would have been a nice addition, but we do what we can do.

-Over all I was a bit worried at my lack of long range firepower. I have the Vendettas... and that's about it. Granted I feel that I made my army pretty effective in mid field, but not having more ability to reach out and touch people at 48" or more was a little worrying for me. Replacing the Hellhound with either a Devil Dog or some Heavy Weapon teams/Hydras (along with creative points reallocation) might have been enough to fix this problem, but even then I'd be a bit worried.

I played a pair of test games with the list against some people from my FLGS. First was against a double Raider/jumper Blood Angels list and the second was against Nids. Both ended in pretty strong wins for my list, but then again both played pretty well to my strengths (dealing with small groupings of well armored units, using speed bumps effectively and burning gribblies and MCs), but neither had the sheer weight of light mech that I knew would be popular at the tourney. Still, it showed that my list could function well against some pretty good players.

We'll get into the games next post, plus some pretty pics. As always thanks for reading, and it's good to be back!