Chaos Day Battle Reports - Part Deux

Greeting my fellow archon's, and other species equivalents! I'm on my lunch break at work yet again, striving to bring you a full update of what occurred at Chaos Day.

The anteroom for Hooters - surprisingly Gothic

So, the next morning, I was canny and elected to take the bye. With 11 players, every round we unfortunately had to have some one sit out. This is unfortunate, but alas, such is the nature of Chaos Day.

The mission I missed, luckily, was my own mission - Marked for dead. The main objective was to eliminate you opponent's key unit. The mission, taken from the rules pack I made and no one read until the day...

Marked for dead

Your advances have faltered, hitting a point of resistance you’re unable to break. Your troops are disciplined; your battle strategies are sound. But yet, the enemy does not yield. Time after time, the waves of your attacks crash on their defences, unable to break the deadlock.

Yet a group of enemy warriors spurs on their comrades to greater acts of valiance. Their actions alone have cost you men and resources you can ill afford to lose. You’re confident the enemy, upon seeing these warriors fall, will suffer a blow to morale greater than any military strike. Their courage would falter, their lines will break and their defence will crumble.

You’ve brought them to battle, now you must bring them to their knees. Destroy the enemy’s champions, and then crush those who are left. But be careful, they may be aiming to blunt your spearhead by cutting down your own great warriors too…

Setup

Mission is as normal for an Annihilation mission with the setup pitched battle. Kill points however are not in use, instead victory points are.

After deployment, each player nominates one of their enemy’s units that is on the table, announcing before the start of the first turn. This may be any non-vehicle elite, walker (the only exception to the non vehicle rule), fast attack or monstrous creature, with a minimum cost of 125pt. Players are encouraged to pick targets they would be happy to brag about killing, rather than puny squads of grots. Mark this squad with a skull, a photo of Adam Torap or another suitably grim marker.

If the opposing player is one of those cowardly sorts who puts everything in reserve (or one of those brave, dashing players who plays Daemons!), you may still choose your target before your enemy’s first turn. This target, if given the choice, must make all attempts to enter on the first turn (be in the first wave of daemons etc). Otherwise, for any reason, they don’t arrive in the first turn, they get +2 to their reserve rolls (they are spoiling to get to grips with you!).

This unit is worth double victory points if destroyed. However, any unit the chosen unit destroys is worth 50% more VPs.

If one chosen unit destroys the other chosen unit, they are worth triple victory points.

The Vindi-may-care, in his famous "wolf tamer" poise

The winner is decided by standard victory points at the end of the game. Remember, big juicy targets will earn you the most victory points, and any squad you kill with your marked squad will earn you big points too!"

This led to Paul having a huge breakdown when Adam's Assassin (Paul's target) sniped his last plunderwolf (Adam's target unit) with a shieldbreaker. This single shot won Adam the game due to the monstrous 600 victory points for target on target kill! Paul hated the mission...I actually think it worked. It made you think tactically with your monster unit - do you run them forward and kill as much as you can, or hide them tactically? Do you shoot your opponent's monster unit, and risk ignoring the rest of his army?

My only full game of the day came against one of my regular opponents, Max and his technicolour blood angels. Max was a last minute participant and had to borrow a few units to pull his list up to 1750. One of which, was that bastard Mephiston. The second, was that bastard furiouso dreadnought with bloodtalons of infinite bloody blooding.

The game was dawn of war with 5 objectives. He got first turn and stuck his razorbacks and mephiston in a position that confined where I could place my blob squad . I put the blob, sliscus, and an empty raider in a corner as far from mephiston as possible. Due to mephiston's fleet AND magical flight, I didn't want any first turn charges. Keeping him as far away as possible meant he couldn't do much and kept him out of the game whilst I dealt with the tanks.


The blob squad in action. Don't be afraid to use your nails, boys.



So, his first turn, a bloody dreadnought lands right behind my blob (one that was provided to Max by Dan, which is very similar to the one pictured below, which is also Dan's...he has about 6 of the buggers), and a land raider trundles on the opposite side.. No matter, I'll just blow the audacious so and so up with my heat lance and blaster jetbikes. They come on behind it and needing 3s I roll...two 2s.

The rest of my lances and blasters roll a whole heap of nothing as well, save one, who blew up a razorback despite it popping first turn smoke. This is going to go down hill, really fast. I jump my jetbikes in my assualt turn to make a nice line to block the dreadnought charging my blob's rear. I also keep my bloodbrides nearby in case so I can charge the dread and stall it later. The land raider isn't touched despite my lances special rule "anti land raider".

Could you get him to step forward? And turn around?
Yes, yes, that's him, the one on the left.

The dread I manage to stall for a few turns with my bloodbrides, eventually destroying it from a haywire grenade up the wazoo. The terminators in the land raider end up eating my blob. Alas, even Max's poor rolling couldn't save me, as he needed 2s to wound sliscus on four d6 and rolled a 1,1,1,2. I laughed heartily, rolling for my 2++ shadowfield save and got a single 1 myself!

Fortunately, after his terminators chased the blobsquad down and killed them (sound familiar?) my second squad of troops plodded onto my board edge and shot them up, forcing a couple to run back into their land raider. I cheekily contested my own objective, whilst flat outting my remaining raider and disintigrator ravagers over two other objectives. In the end, he comfortably claimed 2 objectives to my paltry 1, although I still argued over one of them just to see the look on his face to realise I might have drawn!

This game made me realise that reserving my force in dawn of war is an utter pointless exercise. I should have brought my entire army on straight away rather than letting it come on piecemeal. Hmmph.

My final game was cut short unfortunately, with my old opponent Adam Torap. His grey-knights-with-no-grey-knights was composed of inquisitors and henchmen, and the now infamous arch-bitch-valkaryie or whatever her name was.

Real men wear pink

This was a special mission. One objective, slap bang in the middle of the board. Anyone could claim it. We unfortunately only got to turn 3, where adam was leading on victory points by about 50! "highlights" include my haemonculus failing to instagib valkamary with his "Rusk-blade" (it proving this weekend to be about as much use as a child's biscuit) before valkamary opened her crazy corridor to the eternal labarynth of elsewhere, sending my haemoncularse to play with  Garlic Jr in the null zone.

I hate gimmicks.

Anyway, with that final battle, I secured myself the bottom place! I had an absolute blast over the weekend, and learnt alot of useful tidbits about the Dark Eldar. And it's much better to lose horribly amongst friends on a fun weekend, than at a snobbish full on tournament against people bringing their A-Game!

The Dishonour Squad and Plyskyn, living up to their name this weekend.

Adam's Corteaz conversion - I love his conversions!

pew pew!

I've bunged in as many pictures as I humanly can. I'll probably slack off from updating on here over the next few weeks, as I'm undertaking the challenge of learning how to play fantasy and build a 1500 point army in a month! I'll still be popping in with some of my armies pictures, and I'll definitely be proactive once the new dark eldar models are out in a few weeks time! 

Keep an eye on here, I'll be back soon,

Si.