Saturday, May 28, 2011

For Vengeance! for Sanguinius!


Hey all, Moros here...

I think I might have wargaming ADD, yes I have started up another army and guess what it is! Blood Angels!

This will be my third army and I am very excited for them! I decided that I've had enough chaos and I wanted to run a loyalist force. I also wanted to have something that I had more confidence in gameplay wise. Tzeentch themed CSMs and Khorne themed Daemons are extremely fun and have their place, but it was time to stop beating my head against a wall and wake up. They just don't have the options needed in the current 40k environment to be strong.

I am by no means done with my other armies, I still play them all the time down at the club and for pick-up games at my house. Don't hesitate to call them out if you're interested in running your lists against them. They both provide different challenges to armies and are a very good way to test to see if your force can handle various enemy threats. I am also willing to loan them out at Lancashire Wargaming's 40k day if you don't have an army to play and want to learn!

So now, onto the space vampires! The Noble Blood Angels! I looked into pretty much all the armies out there before I decided on Blood Angels. I think the only thing I didn't consider was eldar and crons... because... well... they just don't fit my style.

My style is fast, in your face, combat... I learned this when playing as my Khorne daemons. And this fits the Blood Angels extremely well. They are a very mobile and close range centered army. But they retain tons of options when it comes to deployment, transports, units, and combat strategy. Taking this into consideration I delved into blogs and articles all over the net learning the different types of Blood Angels armies and it pretty much came down to 3 types for me; Full Mech (All infantry riding in vehicles with the vehicles doing pretty much most of the work), Decent of Angels (All jump pack infantry arriving via deepstrike and utilizing the decent of angels rule to deliever melta and melee!), and finally Hybrid (Its both mech and jump... duh!)

I tested lots of lists and did much planning and talking with my fellow generals about the best way to deliver a strong army without doing a copy paste of an internet list. I settled on the Blood Angels Hybrid style. The main reason was because of the options that I can have and the adaptability to any situation that it offers.


Here is my 2k Blood Angels Hybrid List -

HQ - 100

Librarian - 100
+Shield
+SanguinSword
+Bolt Pistol

Elites - 180

2x Sanguinary Priests - 180
+2x Jumppacks
+2x Power weapons
+2x Bolt Pistols

Sanguinary Guard - 260
+Chapter Banner
+ 3x Infernus Pistol

Troops - 1020

RAS - 180
+Meltagun
+Infernus Pistol
+Las/Plas

RAS - 180
+Meltagun
+Infernus Pistol
+Las/Plas

RAS - 180
+Meltagun
+Infernus Pistol
+Las/Plas

Assault Squad - 240
+5x Marines
+2x Meltaguns
+Thunderhammer

Assault Squad - 240
+5x Marines
+2x Meltaguns
+Thunderhammer

Fast - 440

Baal Predator - 145
+TL Assault Cannon
+Heavy Bolter Sponsons

Baal Predator - 145
+TL Assault Cannon
+Heavy Bolter Sponsons

Baal Predator - 145
+TL Assault Cannon
+Heavy Bolter Sponsons

Total - 2000


There are still some things I might tweak, like dropping some infernus pistols here and there and picking up this and that, but that is the basic idea and what I will be using to start my Blood Angels 2nd Company army!

I have aquired all the modesl for this venture and have started assembling! Be on the look out for WIP shots and battle reports coming soon!

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Berks Spring Assault II - Dark Angels Battle Reports


Berks spring assault 2 reflections…

My thoughts about berks spring assault 2 as a tournament… first I will start off with a few battle overviews of my four rounds and then I’ll address the tournament overall. I of course brought my dark angels. My list looked something like..
Belial
deathwing squad + chainfist + apothecary
2x 5 man tacts with melta in rhinos with an extra stormbolter
2x speeders with multi-melta + typhoon
2x pred with heavy bolter sponsons
Honestly I did a bunch of play testing with this list and it is very strong indeed. Its a lot of fire power with mobility and a nice CC punch with that termie squad. I was ready.



Round 1. Vs Sister of Battle.
I got to play ‘Hugo’ from the berks club running his sisters. This was not a very fair fight right from the start. Hugo was having difficulty getting a list printed out and models ready for play. I kinda felt bad that he had to play me the first round. It was dawn of war deployment. He deployed 2x squads of sisters on the field as well as the cannoness + retinue. He had 2x sister squads in reserve as well as a heavy weapons team with heavy bolters and an exorcist. I deployed my terminators right in front of his squads and a tact squad in a rhino. He went first and couldn’t really see anything to hit me when he forces can on. My turn 1 saw my terminators wipe the near squad of sisters and throw some wounds on another from shooting. This game went pretty quick and I won’t bore the audience with the details. My terminators carved a bloody path straight through the sister’s lines. They took out a 10 man squad each turn and I believe on turn 3 the canoness assaulted them and belial took down 3 and the lightning claw term took down the canoness. Speeder was able to take down the exorcist with a side armor shot after making all his cover saves from a turbo boost. And.. the heavy weapon squad eventually ate too much pred fire and went down. Massacre victory for the DA.

Round 2. VS. Dragon Warriors (CSM)
I finally got to play my friend DJ’s brother-in-law ben with his CSMs. This match was going to be fun, I love playing with guys I know. Its why I love supporting the local tournament scene. The mission was here to bone me however. I played on a VERY urban board. I mean.. VERY. I think there was more BLOS terrain than flat ground. Not good for an army like mine that relies heavily on its ranged fire power.. than the bomb hit.. night fight rules would be in effect the entire game… wtf is that? Really? On this map? His list was nothing fancy, prince with wings, mark of slan. 1x defiler. 2x 10 Man CSM squads in rhinos and a 10 man zerker squad in rhino. Great.. a cc list on a night fight GAME. Ouch. I thought maybe I could punk his defiler and prince and then swing back across my lines and defend against the zerkers and CSMs. I castled up in the corner and rushed my termies out to meet the defiler and prince, it worked great.. save the prince kept making his invulns and the damn defiler took 8 penetrating shots from shooting and terminator hammers and was still standing… that was the game. Failing to take down that defiler meant the zerkers got the charge off on me and wiped my terminators. Just too many wounds even with the apothecary. I was able to take down the prince with melta guns and the defiler luckily got immobilized facing a wall. (lol, I gotta say that was pretty funny) so his battle cannon was meh which made me happy. I took down each squad to less than half but he got me to almost nothing.
Now.. I gotta say… ben was a great guy, really fun to play, we had a blast in round 2. But that night fight for the whole game has absolutely got to go. I don’t know why our local tournaments are so in love with this idea, it completely bones a non-assault based force. Here, I have an idea.. whynot make the entire board dangerous terrain. How would you assault-based armies like those apples? It’s the same thing. So stupid, should not be there. I played a decent round, but the scenario completely screwed my army. Time for lunch and I was 1 and 1.



Round 3 vs. eldar (john from turn 8 podcast)
john had a pretty decent eldar list, a little bit of everything here. An avatar, wraithlord, squad of war walkers, a far seer with a guardian squad, guard squad on bikes, 2x venoms, and a transport with dragons inside. (if I remember correctly). The mission was capture the flag, which I must say, was a really really good mission. Steel Mike made up for his blunder on the night fight game with this one. Basically you and your opponent deploy spearhead and there is a ‘flag’ in each opposite corner. The goal is to invade and capture the flag and bring it back to your deployment zone. Any model is a BS can carry the flag and you cannot put the flag in transports. I thought it was great. This is the kind of uniqueness I was hoping to see at this tournament. I was very afraid of the jet bikers picking up the flag and turboing around the map for the rest of the game. So… I deepstruck my termies on turn 1 (love deathwing assault) and scatterd 12” which honestly ended up being VERY close to the other objective. So on turn 1 I had one objective. And was already running it back to my side and.. there wasn’t really much he could have done about that considering he had to go through my terminator HQ squad to get that flag back. I sped both rhinos up 12” in a T, making sure not to waste my smoke where I didn’t have to. I secured the second objective as well on turn 2 and tried to create a wall of rhinos to escort it back to my side. No such luck. As I was running that flag back, the wraithlord was too much and eventually killed my little 5 man squad off. I had to break off belial from my terminators to join the second tact squad to carry it the rest of the way. The predators were my MVPs in this mission. Heavy bolters took down both venoms, a bunch of jet bikes and the war walkers once they came in. the speeders were decent as well, taking down the transport and a few war walkers. I felt bad about john taking the avatar. I focused fired it on my turn 1 and dropped it before it even got to move. That’s not right. My opponent ended up contesting my one flag with a late game jet bike boost luckily passing his dangerous terrain. And I failed to get his last one into my deployment zone. I forgot it was only 18” not 24” (bah humbug there). And with some secondary objectives I managed to get a pretty good victory. John was a great guy to play and hopefully he learned a lot and got some good stuff for his podcast.
Onto round 4.

Round 4 vs. IG.
Seriously… IG? I think what.. 3 players took IG to this tournament and I get to play one of them. And it was the cheese.. the hot stinky cheese. 3x hydras, 3x vets in chimeras, 1 3plasma, 1 3 flamer, 1 3melta, and a command squad with all melta and an empty vendetta. Ouch. It was going to be tough. I was ready. I hadn’t gotten much play testing versus this type of list but I had a lot of good fire power and my terminators would be a problem for him. Pitched battle deployment but objectives would be rolled for at the beginning of turn 5. Interesting.. it was either table quarters or annihilation.. well.. I was hoping for quarters. Haha. I wanted to go first and get an alpha strike on that gunline. Bring down my terminators.. 10 in scatter, just nicking the very corner of one of his chimeras.. roll on the deep strike mishap.. terrible accident.. destroyed.. great… well this game was over right then and there. No seriously, there really is no reason to even talk about the rest of this match. I lost 40% of my army on turn 1 to a BS scatter and result and now I just spent the rest of the match getting blown off the board. I did managed to take down a few chimeras, the vendetta and 2 vet squads but it was just too much fire power versus a wounded duck of a DA army. Sorry for the sad game. So I would up 2 and 2 for the day. Pretty upset that out of my last 3 tournaments, twice has my command squad been lost of deepstrike mishaps.. and both times was a scatter of 10” +. Ugh. Thems the breaks I guess.


Overall thoughts:
Really really fun tournament. There are many items I would like to address, but I’ll just name a few.
1. Love the fact that many of the young bloods (age 14 and younger) were playing each other the first few rounds. VERY good idea. I was worry about some of our new guys going up against some heavy hitters and really not enjoying themselves. Did not happen. Great great planning on that part guys.
2. Remove the night fight the entire game mission. Its completely stupid. End of story. Remove it.
3. Armies on parade was kind of lame.. I had my guys in the back and hardly anyone even came through the whole way to do it. Eh. The best person won, no doubt there, but I just don’t think it went as well as it could have.
4. Golden grot, I would think about losing this. Just too many events packed into one day. (unless event started earlier, see below)
5. SPACE – dear lord, for a couple of my matches I was little rubbing up against the person behind me and it was really difficult to move armies around and I can’t believe we didn’t have more display boards being turned over. There was plenty of room in the front of the garage if we didn’t have so much ‘extra stuff’ going on. Honestly we didn’t need that much more room, just a wee bit more to give ourselves some breathing room.
6. Free drinks. Love you guys. Thank you thank you thank you. Epic. Nuff said.
7. Raffles. Great. Hope you guys made a bunch of money for the club. This was a great idea and I think it worked very very well. We had guys in our club that knew they wouldn’t be winning a prize but still had the raffles, so they were waiting in anticipation like everyone else.
8. Time. Berks guys put on a great event, lots of things happening from all aspects of the hobby. Give yourselves more time. Start an hour earlier, that would give more cushion to the rest of the day. More time should have been spent explaining the events and what to do and where.
9. Sportsmanship. Yes yes, it is a ‘hobby style’ tournament but I hate sportsmanship. It doesn’t allow any room to maneuver. Say.. your opponent is doing something illegal in the game, and you call him on it and look up the rules and you are right. Bam, you just got NO sportsmanship score. I know that’s not how the system is supposed to work, but it’s the truth. Also, if you table your opponent, his way to ‘get back’ at you is to drop your sportsmanship. I’ve seen it done to me and to other people. Its also a way to gang up on someone who is doing well to try to boost your club mates in front.
10. Appearance scores from your opponent. See sportsmanship above.. why can’t appearance be done by a TO and its just an objective rubric. This way, your opponent doesn’t have the opportunity to get revenge upon you in the soft scores.

End rants.
This was a fantastic event. All of my club mates and I had a GREAT time. It was the first tournament for a lot of them and they had a blast. Everyone on the berks staff was very friendly and quick to get you whatever you needed. I loved being able to meet some of the berks guys I have only known through the forum. DJ and Ben and Hugo. And It was great getting to see the members I’ve already met. Aki, apoth, Archer, Charlie, etc. (sorry if I missed you). I will be going back next year, hopefully Lancashire can sponsor some tables.

-Brother C.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

A year ago...

guys and gals,

It was just around this time last year when we decided to start having our monthly 40k events. June of last year was our first, pretty exciting how far the few of us have come in just a very short time. I just wanted to post some images of where we have come to give you a little perspective today.








from our humble beginnings, playing with paper circles to develop our armies and learn the rules. Using whatever we had laying around for terrain and blank plywood for our boards. At our last event, we had 2x 2k point tables and 8x 1k tables ready to play on. full with terrain. we have come a long way folks, and we are not looking back.

6 of us are heading up to the berks tourney this weekend. wish us luck. we hope this will inspire more of you to venture out and enter the realm of competitive play.

thanks to everyone who has participated in our club events this past year, we really do appreciate your support. we could not have done this without you. if you have any suggestions as we progress into our second year of existence please don't hesitate to post them. this is your club and we will try to accommodate what you want to see at the club.

thanks again to everyone.

-Brother C

Monday, May 9, 2011

New New Blood Angels List

Alright, I've gained access to a computer and redid my list, making some changes. I expect to tweak it maybe two more times according to your comments and future games. So here it is, my shooty list that is based off of Brother C's army.

HQ: Epistolary-150
+Terminator Armor & Combi-Melta-35
Psyc Powers: Unleash Rage & The Sanguine Sword


Elites: Terminator Assault Squad-200 w/ Epistolary
+Land Raider Redeemer-240
+Hunter-Killer Missile-10

2x Sanguinary Priest-100 1 w/ each Tac Squad
+2x Combi-Melta-20

Brother Corbulo-105 w/ Thunder Hammer Term Squad

Terminator Assault Squad-200
+5x Thunder Hammers & Storm Shields-25


Troops: 2x Ten Man Tactical Squad-260
+2x Missile Launcher-free
+2x Meltaguns-10
+2x Razorbacks-110
+2x Lascannon & TL Plasma-70
+2x Hunter-Killer Missiles-20


Heavy Support: 3x Predators-210
+3x Lascannon Sponsons-195

That's pretty much it. I'm alwaysopen to constructive critisism. Also, i stil have 40 spare points that I don't know where to put. Suggestions would be helpful. Thanks guys.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Hey everyone, Calistarius here with my new list(finally!). It's nothing too fancy but I think it will do me good.

HQ: Epistolary-150
+Term Armor &Storm Shield-45
Elites: 3x Term Assault Squads-600
Troops: 10 Man Tac Squad-180
+Missile Launcher-free
+Land Raider Redeemer-240
Ten Man Tac Squad-180
+Plasma Gun-10
+Missile Launcher-free
10 Man Assault Squad-190
Heavy Support:3x Predators-210
+3x Lascannon Sponsons-195

Total-2000
Sorry for the bad format I had to do this on my Blackberry. Let me know what you think. Thanks guys!

Monday, May 2, 2011

Dream Wizards Team Tournament Round 3:


Dream Wizards Team Tournament Round 3:

Opponent: IG and Space Marines.
Us : Dark Angels and Chaos Daemons (Khorne themed)
Primary – Objectives (1 – objective placed in center of each opposite corner from spearhead deployment)
Secondary – killpoints
Spearhead Deployment
We knew we would be fighting a gunline in the last round. There were too many of them at the tourney and we had done too well to not have to face them. This was I think the worst list we could draw against, it wasn’t a full parking lot like what was going on at the championship table, but it was worse. Our opponents had a lot of anti-infantry firepower.
Space Marines:
3x rifle dreads
3x thunderfire cannons (these really hurt during the course of the game)
libby with nullzone
3x scouts with shotguns in land speeder storms (there may have only been 2x scouts here and the speeder storm was empty that was running around fuxing up all our deepstrikes)
1x scouts with sniper rifles
IG:
1x manticore
2x hydras
1x command platoon in chimera
1x vet squad with 3x meltas in chimera
1x vet squad with 3x plasma in chimera
1x vendetta with 3x plasma vet squad
2x 10 man troop squad with heavy weapons, plasmas, commissar, you name it.

Spearhead… great.. they castled up in the corner as we knew they would. We knew this was either going to be a massacre of them, or of us. Could we weather the storm and break their lines, or get gunned down trying?






They won roll off and we got to go first, not good. They would have as much as they could to shoot at on their turn as well as be able to make a final push on the objectives with those speeders on the bottom of turn 6. Moros rolled secondary wave. Really not good. Terminators came down near the center of the field and marched into their territory, I managed to immobilized on of the speeders. Scatters went very bad for us. Everything scattered away from their castle and into open shooting lanes.
Their turn 1 saw daemons dropping left and right, they knew where the threats would be and they took them down hard. One crusher squad scattered into range of a storm and misshaped – misplaced and ended up being in the far corner, which put them out of the entire game. Terminators got shot to hell but kept on the advance.
Turn 2 rinse and repeat
Turn 3 rinse and repeat
Turn 4 we finally break their lines and get into the assault on the large 10 man IG squad with a winged prince and Belial (Adso) and one lone terminator. We drop 7 of them but with the silly stubborn rule, hold. I manage to blow up their command platoon chimera and kill 2 guys inside, who just shoot back at my 2 remaining terminators going for my objective and finish off both with combined fire from the dakka dreads, scouts, speeders, hydras, and the kitchen sink.





Turn 5 has me scrambling my remaining terminator squad to our objective, bearing the ENTIRE opponent force’s weapons onto it. This squad bore 2 entire rounds of shooting from a 2500 points gunline (cheese? Maybe ) and still managed to get over there.
Speeders came zooming in to contest and last termy finally goes down to an assault from the scouts, Ezekiel takes a perils trying to cast hellfire on the clumped speeders (hey, he hurt himself more than the 2083402830483204328 IG heavy weapons did) and he remained on the board on turn 6. Massacre win for our opponents.




Analysis:
Again, we knew we didn’t really have a chance against this list as soon as we saw who we were facing. But everything just went to hell in a handbasket right from the start. Having to go first, getting secondary wave, scattering every single deepstrike on turn 1 8+ inches AWAY from their lines. Moros couldn’t make any saves to save his life, it was just overall poor poor dice rolling. EXCEPT the dark angels. Dear lord, the Deathwing took some punishment in this match. It really was the only reason the round was as fun as it was. My wrist hurt from making so many armor saves. I was making my invulns as well, even with nullzone (by both mine and my opponent’s hoods were completely useless during the game, we both could only roll 1’s to stop our opponent’s powers) and I made ALL my FNP rolls. It was unbelievable. We did everything I think we could have in this match, we didn’t want to just camp on the objectives and force them to come at us, and honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered much anyways. They just had too much of a min/max gunline for us using older codexes could fight against. Our opponents were great and the space marine models were GORGEOUS. Here is a link to his blog where you can see these beauts. They really are just as beautiful in real life too. We were just happy we were able to get to table 2 with inferior armies, without vehicle spam, and without cheese. I think we showed Lancashire Proud this day, we definitely turned some heads and showed how good of competitors we (and our club) is.

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