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Maximum Khornage!

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I’ve gotten several more games in with my Daemons over the past few weeks and have, for the most part, done quite well with them.

In fact, until last Tuesday, I hadn’t seen anything worse than a well-fought, skin-of-the-teeth draw. Tuesday saw two completely one-sided games: one in which overly-aggressive deep strikes and incredibly unfavorable scatter rolls helped John beat the living tar out of me and one in which everything in the army clicked together like clockwork and I steamrolled over Sean.

I’ve done some thinking about what’s gone into my army, and have toyed around a little bit with it as I’ve gone along. Now’s as good a time as any to document it.
HQ
The Bloodthirsters are great. Even when they’re swinging for 6’s on a Eldar skimmer, I never feel like they’re being wasted. In my game against John, I wished I’d shelled out for Unholy Might, since it would have let me squish Pedro Kantor like the mortal bug he is instead of getting sucked into a three-round tickle fight… but 20 points is an awful lot to spend and it pushes the ‘Thirster up to nearly 300 points!
I’ve yet to really use any of the Heralds (Skulltaker or one of the generic Khornate heralds). They look like they’re pretty killy for the points (especially Skulltaker on a chariot), but come at the cost of my most effective anti-tank unit: a Bloodthirster.
Elites
I’ve yet to run Bloodcrushers, but I’ve got a stack of them to assemble. At first, I dismissed them as not giving me anything Bloodletters didn’t already give me, but that’s because I didn’t truly appreciate how nice that 3+ regular save is. I’m looking forward to running a few of them.
Troops
Bloodletters are where I do the most waffling. I think I have a clear feel for what works well with pretty much all of the other Khornate choices… just not Bloodletters.
In small groups, they die too easily. In large groups, they’re overkill. Without Fury of Khorne, they don’t stand the slightest chance against a walker. With Fury of Khorne… they stand the slightest chance against a walker. When I give them Icons, I don’t need them. When I don’t, I do.
The only thing I do know is that I don’t expect to ever need to give them Instrument of Chaos.
I’m also playing around with how many I deploy. When I first started working with the army, I’d drop 40 of them on the table (five squads of eight each). That seems to be overkill, but it has been working better than the three squads of eight that I’ve been running.
Next, I’m going to try a large squad (of sixteen) and a small squad (eight), each with an Icon. We’ll have to see.
Fast Attack
These guys get poo-pooed by other folks I know who run all-Khorne daemon armies. “They cost nearly as much as Bloodletters,” I’m told, “but they’re not Troops and they don’t have power weapons or WS 5.” This is true… but I’ve yet to have Bloodletters be anywhere nearly as useful as Flesh Hounds.
The speed is the key. Fleet, plus the 12″ charge range gets them engaged and very, very quickly. They fight like Chaos Marines / Assault Marines, and that’s nothing to complain about. At the very least, they do well locking up units while nastier things (like Bloodletters) close in.
I’ve recently started giving them Fury of Khorne, and I’m very happy with it. It closes the gap a little bit between the Bloodletters and the Hounds. I’ve also been happy with Karanak, though I think that if I ever need to shave points, I’ll drop Fury of Khorne in the unit that gets Karanak (since he comes with it as well).
Heavy Support
I’ve yet to really use Daemon Princes. I put one in the list I used on Tuesday as a points sink, but it didn’t really get the opportunity to succeed or fail. It’s slow, though, and it costs too much to buy Flight, so it seems like it’s a poor choice… unless I’m running three of them.
And why would I, when I love Soul Grinders as much as I do? The model is awesome, and it’s never really disappointed me. Fleeting into combat is a treat, and does a great job of locking up squads that can’t hurt it. The close-range shooting is utterly devastating to 4+ save armies. I’ve also had a great deal of good luck with Phlegm, against 3+ armies. AP 3 Large Blast makes me feel a little guilty.

For the most part, I’m pretty settled on the things that I think work, save for how many Bloodletters I should invest in, and what I do with the points I have if I spend less on them.
In terms of getting the army together, I’ve got to assemble those Bloodcrushers and settle on a paint scheme. I’ve got some thoughts, including a non-traditional scheme that should look awesome if (and only if) it actually works. I’ve written of August to work and vacation, though, so at the rate I’m going I’ll start painting them in December.
The list I’m currently planning on using is:
Bloodthirster
Bloodthirster
Bloodcrushers x4 – Fury of Khorne, Chaos Icon, Instrument of Chaos
Bloodletters x16 – Chaos Icon
Bloodletters x8 – Chaos Icon
Flesh Hounds x7 – Karanak, Fury of Khorne
Flesh Hounds x8 – Fury of Khorne
Soul Grinder – Phlegm
Soul Grinder – Phlegm

Apocalypse First Turn Deployment Thoughts

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I got to play Apocalypse for the first time in ages over the weekend. I might get into what I brought (3,855 points of painted Dark Angels, 145 of unpainted Dark Angels) and how it went (tied); we’ll have to see. Mostly, the undertaking was an exercise in making clear how essential planning is with an Apocalypse game.
One of the problems we ran into was with what I’m going to call First Turn Deployment. What I’m talking about is how half of the Drop Pods in a Space Marine army and half of the Deep Striking Terminators in a Dark Angels army don’t actually get deployed at the start the game on the table, but instead get to enter the game at the beginning of the first turn. Chaos Daemons are the ultimate example of this, in that they don’t even get to choose to start models on the table and, instead, must Deep Strike half of their army during their turn.
One of the players was relatively new to the game and was playing Chaos Daemons. Their team bid 10 minutes to deploy…. which ultimately became nearly an hour and a half as the Daemon player took over an hour to Deep Strike their initial wave of troops into the battle.
Mind you, this was unintentional. The Daemon player wasn’t trying to take all morning putting their troops down, and she wasn’t trying to abuse the bid/deployment rules. It just ended up that way.
It is a problem, however, because Apocalypse needs to move… and frankly it’s unreasonable for a Daemon army to be able to bid zero minutes (ensuring that they go first) and then spend 45 minutes actually deploying their troops. So, I’ve come up with two solutions (and have been presented with a related Apocalypse house rule that also addresses this):
Option 1:

If you have units that are placed on the table after initial deployment or at the start of your first turn, you may not spend more time on these deployments than you bid for your initial deployment.

I’ve expanded the initial wording a little bit to account for Infiltration.
If your team bids 10 minutes to deploy, they get 10 minutes to do their initial setup and then 10 minutes to do any first turn deployment. This is still a good deal, as it effectively doubles your deployment time, but it does cap how long you can spend.
Option 2:

If you have units that are placed on the table after initial deployment or at the start of your first turn, the amount of time you bid to deploy is shared between your initial deployment and and subsquent “first turn” deployments.

This one is significantly more restrictive but even more fair, I think, to players without first turn deployments. If you bid, for example, 25 minutes to deploy and take 20 minutes doing your initial deployment… then you only have 5 minutes to do any first turn deployments.

Jay suggested the third option, which is what’s in use at Games Workshop stores during their megabattles. It doesn’t explicitly address this issue, but it does cover it.
Option 3:

Players have a set amount of time per turn. Bringing in units past the initial deployment counts against that time.

In other words, if you take too long doing your first turn deployment you won’t have time to shoot, run or assault.

This is certainly the easiest to implement but seems a mite punitive towards armies like Daemons who really don’t have a choice about the first turn deployment thing.
That said, there is something very attractive about turn time limits. If we’d gone with 30 minute turns, we’d have gotten 6 rounds in instead of 3… but sometimes it simply isn’t feasible. (If we’d gone for 30 minute turns, this weekend’s game would have been a complete disaster.)
What do people think? Alternative approaches to this problem?

Returning to 40K

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For the past six months or so (really all of 2009 so far) have been spent not playing 40K.
I started out the year playing Fantasy, which wasn’t so bad but would have been better if I hadn’t been playing it with the oldest armybook currently in use. Fundamentally, it’s not a bad game, but there are some serious army balance issues that I’m looking forward to seeing resolved (later this year, if rumors are true). Also, all this gaming took place within the context of an escalation league that was fun… but ran a couple of weeks too long.
I then followed up Fantasy with War of the Ring. It’s new, looks neat, and I had a fun idea for an army. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is also a game that’s fundamentally pretty fun but starts to have issues the closer you look at it. Although I’m less optimistic about the game getting cleaned up (since that would really require a new edition, and the game’s not been out six months), I do think a little distance will help. Plus, as with Fantasy, all this gaming has been within the context of an escalation league and it’s running a bit long, too (despite making this league shorter than the previous Fantasy league).
This past week, I decided I needed a short break from War of the Ring before the league wraps, so I played some 40K (against Bill, Sean and Tyler) and had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. All three of those games were nail-bitingly close. Two of them were games I shouldn’t have stood a chance in (I went in knowing that mechanized Eldar should be nearly impossible for my Khornate Daemons to handle) but managed to eke out a win and a draw in. It’s nice to come back.
This week’s the last week of the War of the Ring league. I’m back to Harad for the week, and I think we’ll be doing something to celebrate the end of the league (we were going to have our traditional Top 8 tournament, but given that WotR seems tournament-unready and we don’t have eight players, it’ll have to be something else). I hope to get some momentum up later for painting my Skaven in anticipation of the new book. Saving that, though, I’m very much back to Warhammer 40,000.

Khornate Daemons

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I’ve been thinking about playing a Daemon army in 40K for quite some time, entirely because I want an army that’s all about the assault. I’ve got two armies that are primarily about shooting, and was ready to start up a Tyranid army… until 5th came out and made that army much more about shooting as well. I’ve settled on doing an all-Khorne Daemon army because there’s no way it’s not going to be about running at the other guy and stabbing him repeatedly.

I played a game against a friend’s Daemonhunters army on Tuesday, using a lot of proxies (Tactical Marines became Bloodletters, Dreadnoughts became Bloodcrushers, etc.). It went very poorly for him, but I think that’s more because of his list hasn’t really been updated since 4th edition than my tactical superiority.

The list I ran was (going from memory, I’ll correct it when I have the printed list handy):

  • Bloodthirster
  • Herald of Khorne – Iron Hide, Fury of Khorne
  • Herald of Khorne – Iron Hide
  • Bloodcrushers x4
  • Bloodletters x7 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x7 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8
  • Bloodletters x8
  • Fleshhounds x8
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue

It became immediately clear that I need to play this army very, very differently than the way I’m used to playing. I tend to be a somewhat defensive player, and I simply cannot do that with this list. I need to drop in as close as I can and run towards them as fast as I can. Anything less is asking to failure.

I also got a bit of a feel for some weaknesses in the list. By focusing on Khorne alone, I’m positioned to do very well against Marines… but I expect I might have some trouble with Ork hordes, and I’m very, very weak on the anti-tank that’s the new Imperial Guard codex is going to make more essential than ever.

Also, I’m not terribly mobile. Sure, everything comes in via Deep Strike, but that’s it. Mechanized anything, especially Tau and Eldar are going to give me fits.

With that in mind, I’ve shifted things a bit.

The Bloodthirster is a big deal, not because he’ll chew through infantry, but because his high strength and Monstrous Creature anti-armor abilities are one of my few anti-armor options and his wings make him much more mobile than the rest of my army. I’d like to include a second, but I expect that would elicit groans… plus, I can get a Winged Daemon Prince for considerably less.

Flesh Hounds are fast, and that’s something I’d been overlooking. They’re not as good as Bloodletters, but they’ll get across the board much more quickly.

The Soul Grinders are essential. They’re very hard to kill, extremely effective in combat, and represent some more anti-armor that I need.

I’m likely to try to play this army proxied for a few more games to see if I’m on the right track with it. I’m not in a huge hurry to buy up the minis just yet: I’ll be slogging through painting miniatures for War of the Ring for several more months, but I’m pretty confident that this’ll be on the buying (then assembling and painting) queue immediately after that.

The list I’ll try next time:

Initial Wave

  • Bloodthirster
  • Bloodcrushers x4
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Flesh Hounds x8
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue

Reserves Wave

  • Daemon Prince – Flight, Iron Hide, Unholy Might
  • Bloodletters x8 – Icon
  • Bloodletters x8
  • Flesh Hounds x8
  • Soul Grinder – Tongue

War of the Ring Escalation League Rules

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I’ve done some thinking about the upcoming War of the Ring escalation league.

I’m a really, really big fan of them because leagues encourage regular play without imposing too much of a competitive atmosphere on things while, at the same time, making it easier to slowly work your way into a new army.

We’ve been talking about doing a Skirmish of the Rings league for a while now. Now, with War of the Ring out, we’ve been talking about doing one of those as well.

Something I’ve really wanted to see is a way to tie the skirmish game in with the larger scale game. That we have a fully fleshed out skirmish game that segues into a larger game is simply too good of an opportunity to pass on. This morning, on the way into work, I think I came up with how.

I’ve also tweaked the rules to prevent some of the abuses we’ve seen in the past, as well as to better reward the sort of thing we want to see more of, but have done an imperfect job of encouraging.

So, without further ado:

Draft Rules for the 2009 IFL War of the Ring Summer Escalation League.

First LotR and AI Games

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Played my first two games of Lord of the Rings (the skirmish game)* and my first game of Aeronautica Imperialis last night.

I won’t get into how they went (2 for 3) of what I used because they weren’t so much games as demos. I certainly had no idea of what I was doing in either system: it’s been months since I last read the Lord of the Rings rules and I’ve never read AI’s.

All were fun enough; all are going to take a great deal of getting used to. The simultaneous turn thing (present in both games) is going to be an adjustment, that’s for sure. It’s also nice that both games take up very little space, so it should be easy to just toss them in the car with whatever else I’m carting out to Game Parlor.

* You know, I think we need alternate names for Lord of the Rings and War of the Ring. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been speaking to someone about one or the other and everyone involved has gotten confused about which we’re actually talking about. Maybe “Skirmish of the Ring” and “War of the Ring.”

War of the Ring

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Now that I’ve finally gotten the chance to read through War of the Ring, on top of actually playing around with the minis (’cause it’s all about the toys), I’ve done some more thinking about what I’m going to try to do for War of the Ring.

I’m not sure how much I’m going to want to buy into the game, so the fewer sets and metal models the better. Although I love Far Harad (Mahud and Half-trolls = awesome!), $45-$60 a company is just too damn much.

I get 3 company’s worth of Haradrim in each box (1.5 companies with spears and 1.5 companies with bows). This is kind of annoying, because it means I’ve got to keep the number of my stabby Haradrim about equal to my shooty Haradrim. I’d rather not end up with a box of unpainted archers.

A friend of mine found a really good deal on some Serpent Riders on eBay: $1 for a box of six and something like twelve hours left on the auction. Still waiting to see if that comes through, but for now I’ll assume it did (otherwise, I’ll replace the Serpent Riders with Haradrim Raiders).

Also, I’m kind of excited about turning a Troll into a Troll from Harad. It seems reasonable to try to have a monster but I don’t really want to rock a Mumak. Plus I kind of like the idea of localizing any of the allied units I might want to run.

So, that gets me:

Suladan, the Serpent Lord
Abrakhan Guard – Hornblower
Haradrim Warband x3 – Hasharin, Taskmaster, Banner, Hornblower
Haradrim Warband x3 – Bows
Haradrim Warband x3 – Bows
Serpent Rider Warband x3 – Chieftan, Banner, Hornblower
Mordor Troll

I’m sure there’s a lot of room for improvement, but it’s a relatively inexpensive start for me.

Battle Company

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My primary army is Dark Angels.

While learning both 5th and the Dark Angels codex, I started out with a Battle Company list (that is, a list emphasizing power armored marines instead of Deathwing or Ravenwing) but when the new Space Marine codex came out I decided to play to my codex’s strengths (scoring terminators! scouting bikes!).

I’ve had a pretty good list, I think, that’s primarily Terminators with bike support… but I’m getting a little tired of it; time to shake things up a bit. Plus, I have a tendency to roll awfully, and a failed 2+ terminator save hurts a lot more than a failed 3+ marine save.

So, just for the hell of it, I’ve thrown together a regular marine army. I think the dual Land Raiders is probably goofier than I normally like to run; I figure I’ll play a game or two with them and then replace one with my usual Devestator spam.

Azrael
Company Veterans x9 – Lightning Claws x2, Powerfist, Meltagun
Tactical Squad x10 – Powerfist, Plasmagun, Missile Launcher
– Rhino – Pintle-mounted Stormbolter
Tactical Squad x10 – Powerfist, Plasmagun, Plasmacannon
– Razorback – Heavybolters, Pintle-mounted Stormbolter
Tactical Squad x5 – Flamer
Land Raider
Land Raider Crusader – Extra Armor
Whirlwind

Azrael rides with the Company Veterans in the Crusader. They’ll hit very hard and be very hard to kill with a 4+ Invulnerable. Tactical Marines are good at pretty much everything. The other Land Raider sticks around in the back and provides some anti-tank support while the Whirlwind helps out with anti-infantry. (I’m not used to running without more frag missiles.)