A Time for Batreps Part 1

Good morning fellow wargamers and welcome to today’s post, hopefully for your reading enjoyment!  It was relatively quiet for the hobby lately and then my good friend Wells came down to visit.  Next thing I know I’m playing a game daily with the guy and having to flex some game muscles I haven’t in a while.  It was a great time and I was able to catch up on some games and relax during a rough work week.  So I wanted to share my battle reports with you all on the 4 games we played!  Just like last time I can’t recall all the details because of old man brain but I will share my impressions and some cool moments, and with that let’s begin with part one of a two-part post!

So our first game was the venerable and well known Warhammer 40k and Wells brought his Daemons of the great sorcerer himself, Tzeentch (mono-god build)!  This time he faced the growing legions of the new Death Guard, the mortal vessels of his arch-nemesis Nurgle.  We played 2000 points and after rolling for the mission and deployment we played Contact Lost and deployed in corners (one of my favorite deployments to be honest).  If you’re not familiar with Contact Lost the gist of the mission was that you gained your Tactical Objectives by holding the objectives and could have up to 6 at any time, so the game was like double objective focused.  Objective squared. 

End of my turn 1

Let me tell you about this game.  Daemons of Tzeentch were rough to handle at first.  I forgot a couple key points about them such as not caring about your AP at all and they shoot…A LOT.  A host of 30 Daemons was cheaper than my 7 Plague Marines.  The first turn didn’t have a lot of happenings going on other than some movement towards the objectives and hopefully better positioning for the next turn.  Once Wells explained how his Pink Horrors could fire 90 shots at full strength at S4 with +1 to wound it was pretty clear that I needed to get stuck in and fast.  However, since I play Death Guard fast was not really my strength so casualties were expected even with my unholy resilience.  I split my force to try and cover two sides of the board and capture as many objectives as I can, and Wells equally split his force but had the upper hand in mobility, numbers, and firepower.  It became quickly apparent just how difficult it would be to budge his daemons from any point on the field and suitably for the Death Guard it became a war of attrition.

The (in)famous Death Guard Champion

Long story short (I have 3 more games to cover!) I barely won 12 to 11 and that was due to Wells having some poor luck with his d3 objectives and never being able to score more than 1 point for those.  We had some good moments though.  Wells managed to Treason of Tzeentch my daemon prince and subsequently charged one of my Helbrutes taking it from a healthy untouched to nearly exploding with 2 wounds left.  Wells took out one of my Rhinos near his Lord of Change causing it to explode for a nice 5 mortal wounds.  The Noxious Blightbringer, a model I previously held little care for, was instrumental in my Plague Marines being able to cut through 30 Pink Horrors with relative ease (I gave him the Dolorous Knell for that sweet 2 dice on LD checks and pick the highest, with a nice -2 LD penalty as well).  Wells was able to pick apart my backline units like the Predator and Helbrutes with his Burning Chariots and he was able to secure objectives easily as he needed to, as his blobs kept my line troopers busy by sheer numbers.  My MVP of the game, however, was a Plague Marine champion who single-handedly charged into a blob of 23+ Pink Horrors, and managed to survive the overwatch fire to go on survive 8 rounds of melee combat ALONE before Typhus waddled in to help.  Then he rolled up on an objective to score the last point I needed to win the game, what a trooper! Wells was kind enough to give me a spare model he had so I gave him a little trophy, some battle damage, and will be giving him a name for his honorable service to Nurgle.

Still holding strong for Nurgle!

Survived and took an objective, mah man!

Like I said it was a rough game for me as I took models that eventually did very little than what I expected or their gear wasn’t that great against daemons.  Instead of Blight Launchers, I should have gone with the Plaguespewers for the auto-hit d6’s to spread the wounds on his units, as the higher AP didn’t matter squat to his models.  I also lacked a lot of multi-wound damage dealers so when faced with his bigger stuff (i.e. Burning Chariots, Soul Grinder, and the Lord of Change) my options were limited and scarce.  Late game I had nothing that could threaten his Lord of Change and if Wells had better dice rolls for his psychic powers overall (he still had some solid rolls don’t get me wrong) things might have been very different when those mortal wounds start flowing in.  As a side note, I still do not like using Poxwalkers as a unit and I am still not a fan of their models so I think for future games I will forgo them in favor of Plaguebearers.  I’ve heard on some sites about the Poxwalker infinity circuit or whatever, but truthfully screw that noise and stay on the shelf.  I mean the Plaguebearers are comparatively T4 with ++5 and Disgustingly Resilient with better attacks, and only at a slightly higher cost, it makes it kind of hard to NOT take them over the zambos.  Also I wouldn’t have put forth points into power fists unless I knew that squad was going to try and tackle these bigger targets, but with the prolific number of ++4 saves rolling around it was hard to land some of that much needed damage and so maybe they had a place and I just didn’t use them correctly. 

With a new Tzeentch trophy

Overall it was a good game and we both had a lot of fun but I felt that Wells should have won by all rights.  If he had some better VP dice rolls he would have definitely come out of this victorious.  As for me, I think I’ve learned a lesson about making sure you have the right tools for the job in this edition.  I know I’ve said that before and I truly believe it, but for some reason this game I went potato and didn’t consider it more carefully.  I’d like to think I am usually decent at doing that but perhaps I need more exposure to different armies to be better at that skill.  Ah well!  There is always a next time, and speaking of next times we’ll go over part 2 of the batrep summaries.  Until then happy gaming and hobbying folks!