ZekeR

Two armies met for battle in this isolated ruined hamlet. One one side, the Blood Angels. On the other side, Chaos Deceptors. Truly a match-up for the ages.



This is a rough approximation of tournament layout #4. There's a lot of people who consider the chapter-approved tournament layouts boring, but I'm sticking with them: They are regarded as fair, the process is easier than coming up with my own fair layouts, and I can focus on me losing in the actual game, instead of losing during the terrain placement stage. In second edition, I was famous (in my own head) for placing terrain that would completely block tanks from moving around (when my own army list contained tanks).

The objective markers: The Deceptor home objective is in the building on the lower left. Blood Angel home objective is in the building on the upper right. There are 3 No Man's Land objectives: 1 in the center (the main shooting and dying area) and then 1 each in the upper left quadrant and upper right quadrant.

The Primary Mission for the game was Linchpin. Armies are scored 3 points each turn for holding their home objective. BUT No Man's Land objectives are worth 5 points if you control your home objective, and only 3 if you DON'T control your home objective.

THE SETUP

The detachment rule for the Deceptors is simple: Infiltration and lots of it. In a 2,000 point army, I can place up to 3 units of cultists and 3 units of legionnaires using the Infiltrator rules. Which means I can place them outside my deployment zone (the lower left quadrant).

I ended up placing 5 units using Infiltrator rules: 2 small mobs of cultists, 1 large (20) mob of cultists to hang out in the middle, and 2 squads of 5 legionnaires each placed with the smaller cultist mobs. You know, to help 'em out.

In previous games there were always trouble spots where blood angels were overwhelming my forces and I found myself wishing I had more guys there. To counter this I had 2 massive reserve forces: First a 10 man squad of Chosen (chaos marine veterans) led by my Chaos Lord loaded into a Land Raider. Second, a 10 man squad of Terminators led by a Sorcerer.

The Land Raider would roll in using Strategic Reserves rules, coming in on whatever edge of the board most needed its help.

The Terminators would teleport in using the Deep Strike rules, and similarly show up where they were needed most.

I had 2 Lone Operative characters operating as commandos, which I had read about a lot online and sounded smart. The first was a Chaos Lord wearing a Shroud of Obfuscation and using a Jump Pack and the second was an Epic Hero named Cypher. All the good chaos lists run Cypher. Cypher is ESSENTIAL.

Because I read about it on the Internet and never watched them in action, I had no idea what to do with these two commando guys. So I just stuck them down in middle of the board, confident in the knowledge no one could shoot them since their Lone Operative ability keeps them safe as long as they are more than 12" away from enemy models. 

My remaining forces were placed in advantageous positions for shooting.

My basic plan was to hold the objectives early, and shoot any blood angels that approached the objectives, and continue taking shots at blood angels until there were no more blood angels.

On the Blood Angel side, units were all placed in their deployment zone, but they were heavily weighted on the right side of the board. In retrospect, I can easily see the player's plan was to swing that heavy right arm down as if a spoke of a wheel, slowly crushing everything in its path with overwhelming power, until nothing was left of my forces.

TURN ONE

I got the high roll for turn one and got to go first. I drew my secondary missions for the turn and got Locus and Cleanse. Both of these missions require units to take actions instead of fighting, forming a locus and cleaning respectively. So my cult units spent the turn sweeping and polishing the objectives they were standing on. It turns out they are actually really good at this! I'm kind of inspired to find some buckets and mops and outfit future cultist models with such equipment. Those objectives were spotless!

My Predator and Forgefiend both spent the turn firing at the Gladiator Reaper in the top center of the board. My legionnaires each had a single lascannon. One lascannon got fired at the Dreadnought, the other got fired at the Gladiator Reaper.

We got really close to blowing up that single Gladiator Reaper. We got it down to 2 wounds. Plus we got POINTS. All that cleaning scored me 7 points.

On the Blood Angels turn, the wheel started to turn. The marines crossed the distance to my first unit of cultists in the blink of an eye. They opened fire on those cultists and were pretty effective in mowing them down. The cultists did a good job of soaking up bullets, and one even managed to live, causing the marines to charge that single cultist and target it with approx. 50 chainsword attacks. Not to mention power sword attacks from the Vanguards.

Meanwhile, in the center of the board, the heavily injured Gladiator Reaper was using its turret-mounted machine gun thing to really work over my large group of cultists. But this was a LARGE group of cultists, pal, and there were plenty of cultists left to hold that middle No Man's Land objective.

To help clear these cultists, a squad of Blood Angel Terminators started slowly marching towards that middle objective. 

The rest of the Blood Angel army took shots at my Forgefiend, and managed to take it down to 4 wounds (I think).

At the end of the Blood Angel turn, the army received 4 points for their secondary objectives, which also similarly involved occupying territory or performing actions (I think).

TURN TWO

One good term the Internet has invented for us is the term "tilt". It's a great word. For me, it immediately springs to mind visions of Don Quixote charging with his lance towards a menacing windmill.

The Blood Angels had annihilated a single mob of 10 cultists and captured a single objective in No Man's Land. I was feeling the heat. Okay, I thought to myself, time to bring in some Overwhelming Force on this little trouble spot.

But here is where the Blood Angels were super tricky and were fighting me on a second much-less-defended battlefield. The battlefield of my mind.

I went to drive me Land Raider into town from Strategic Reserves, and discovered there were actually very few useful places for it to drive in from. All of this Blood Angel infantry was blocking the Land Raider's entrance (the rules stipulate you need to come in within 6" of a battlefield edge, and at least 9" away from enemy models). It looked totally natural. It's not like the marines were all forming a conga line or anything. But there they were, and no matter where my tape measure went, it couldn't find a big enough spot for the Land Raider to come in.

Instead of driving in from the right side like I wanted, I had to drive in from the bottom side of the board. My Chosen didn't disembark (big mistake) and my Land Raider shot at the advancing terminators threatening the center objective.

Likewise, my giant unit of Terminators (which also needed to be at least 9" away from enemy models) couldn't find a good spot to come down. They WANTED to be on the right side of the board, but they ended up coming down in the center of the board.

During my shooting phase, I managed to blow up the Gladiator Reaper, and whittle the Dreadnaught down to 2 wounds. I was concentrating my fire on a few big models, so there would be less big things to fight later in the battle.

The Blood Angel turn saw the wheel continuing to turn, fully eliminating the forces in the bottom right quadrant. Fully in control they managed to advance to my Land Raider, where they performed a classic maneuver known even back in 2nd edition: They surrounded my Land Raider to prevent my forces from disembarking.

OOOOOOHHHHHAAAAARRRGH! Why didn't I see any of this coming!

To temper my frustrations, i did score more points. At the beginning of the turn, I received 13 points for Linchpin (because I had cultists on 2 extra objectives, plus I still controlled my home objective). The Blood Angels received 8 Linchpin points because they had the one objective in the bottom corner, plus their home objective.

AN UNFORTUNATE HEAD EXPLOSION

I should also note that during my second turn my sorcerer in terminator armor suffered an unfortunate head explosion. It's really not anyone's fault.

What happened is, I was really mad at all the Blood Angels that weren't dying. So I used my Sorcerer's Wychfire psyker power to maybe shoot some more Blood Angels, and here's the important part I used the maximum power setting on his psyker power, not the normal one. I really wanted to do some damage, but unfortunately this also adds the "hazardous" rule to the attack and wouldn't you know I rolled a crummy one. Boom!

In retrospect, maybe I should have used a command re-roll on that one, but it didn't occur to me at the time and I don't remember if I even had any command points to pay for one.

TURN THREE

So at this point things are looking pretty dire for Chaos.

My commander is stuck with his Chosen inside their land raider. And there's Blood Angels outside who are rocking the Land Raider back and forth, yelling rude inflammatory language, and trying to use their chainswords to cut into the Land Raider which is holding up pretty good.

The Blood Angel terminators had finally made it to the center of the board and cleared out the remaining valiant chaos cultists with a few swipes of their thunder hammers.

But what can you do? At this point, you just have to keep fighting and hope things turn around.

On this turn, my full 10 marine squad of Terminators, ended up shooting a full load of combi-weapons at the Blood Angel terminators, before charging the Dreadnaught. We killed some Terminators, but of course not ALL the terminators, and the fact that they had a Chaplain with them made them extra-durable against the normally Devastating Wounds of the combi-weapons. 

The Dreadnaught got beat up by the Terminators, especially since my Reaper Automcannon Terminators were also armed with chainfists. But I couldn't kill it! And then it mashed a couple of my terminators with its heinous power fist and not-very-cool plasma cannon.

The Blood Angels Turn saw their Sanguinary Guard jump pack guys come in from Deep Strike, and they went and dropped right into my home objective. Unlike my opponent, I had NOT made sure there were no spots a large group of jump packing Blood Angels could Deep Strike into my home territory.

For some reason, I had very poorly defended my home objective, especially considering the Linchpin primary mission is all about your home objective.

Anyway, so the Sanguinary Guard are in my house now, they killed all the legionaries and now they're going through the fridge and using my special bathroom, and generally not treating the place with respect.

As far as scoring, it is my shame to report my Linchpin scoring had dropped down to a paltry THREE points, while the Blood Angel player reaped an astonishing 15 points. If any of the cultists were still alive at this point, they probably wouldn't want to be in my cult anymore.

The finally thing which ended up being kind of a good thing was the Blood Angels blew up my Land Raider. I was killing a few Blood Angels here and there with the big guns, but blowing up the Land Raider finally forced my Chosen to jump out, suffering only a single wound in the process.

And in a unlikely twist of fate, I rolled a 6 on the deadly demise roll (which means there was an explosion that affects the units surrounding the tank). So I killed a bunch of Blood Angels, and I even inflicted some damage on Mephiston who had been outside cheering his fellow angels on in their ungentlemanlike behavior.

TURN FOUR

My Chosen were largely intact after having emerged from the smoke and fire like the New World Order on Monday Night Raw.

So they did what my Chosen always do, they had a glorious round of very effective shooting followed by obliterating a single squad (in this case Blood Angel Intercessors) in hand-to-hand combat. And then they got beat up on the rebound because it turns out the Blood Angels are also good and hand-to-hand combat.

Meanwhile in the center of the board, that Dreadnaught just wasn't going down. There was a techmarine next to him, and that guy kept healing him and the frustrating part was he was healing him slightly faster than I was hurting him.

ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE HEAD EXPLOSION

I should probably also mention that during Turn Four Mephiston's head also exploded. It's really easy to forget how bad the hazardous weapon penalty is if you roll a 1. Usually if its a group of guys (like with a plasma gun) you just lose the one guy. Well when its a single-guy unit named Mephiston, you end up losing Mephiston.

But even with Mephiston not being alive anymore, the Blood Angels still had plenty of guys. And my Deceptor forces had almost no guys.

So we decided to call it a draw at the end of Turn Four.

Finally score: 48 points for Steve (Blood Angels) and 35 points for Isaac (Deceptors). If I counted the points right, which I normally don't.