First Game With New Chaos

I had a game (finally) with the new Chaos codex last night, against the new chaos codex! 1500 points. Guess what, Chaos won... Blood was certainly spilt for the Blood God, fortunately more of it was my opponents. In fact, I wiped him off the table! I didn't even think my list was that good to be honest, as I just grabbed a load of random bits of things I wanted to use and put them in the army. I wanted to give you a brief rundown on my feelings on my first game with the new codex. Fist of all, lists:

HQ
- Chaos Lord - Pair of Lightning Claws, Terminator Armour, MoK
- Sorceror

Troops
- Chaos Space Marines x15 - CCWs, Champion w/ Power Fist, MoK, IoW
- Chaos Space Marines x10 - Plasma Gun, Autocannon, Champion w/ Power Maul
- Chaos Cultists x25 - 11x Autoguns, Champion w/ Shotgun

Fast Attack
- Raptors x10 - 2x Meltagun, Champion w/ Pair of Lightning Claws
- Chaos Bikers x5 - Plasma Gun, Champion w/ Power Sword and Meltabomb
- Heldrake - Baleflamer

Heavy Support
- Forgefiend - Hades Autocannons

My opponent had a noise marine based list. Don't ask me what the acronyms stand for, I'm just copying from his email...:

HQ
- Chaos Lord - 5+i, PP, PW, VotLW, MoS

Elites
- Helbrute - Plasma Cannon

Troops
- Noise Marines x9 - CCW, Votlw, Rhino, IoS, PW+DS
- Noise Marines x10 - 8 SB, VotLW, Blastmaster, PW+BP
- Noise Marines x10 - 8 SB, VotLW, Blastmaster, PW+BP
- CSM x10 - VotLW, CCW, 2x Plasma Gun, Rhino, PS+BP

Heavy Support
- Havocs x5 - 3x Autocannon, 1x Lascannon
- Havocs x5 - 3x Autocannon, 1x Lascannon


The mission was The Scouring and we played the diagonal deployment. I will add that I rolled Infiltrate for my warlord trait, but forgot to actually deploy any infiltrators... although I did seize the Initiative! I won't go through the game itself, just how each unit did.

The Heldrake was awesome. Well worth the 170pts. I suppose it depends on if you have dedicated AA units (Tom only had 2 units of autocannon havocs which missed a lot). The S6 AP3 Torrent flamer is amazing at clearing out squads of marines, and laid waste to most of 2 squads of noise marines and a havoc squad during the game! He did day that he was going to add at least a defence line to his list after the decimation the Heldrake caused.

Cultists with the Endurance psychic power = win at holding objectives. They were shot down to about 10 by the end of the game, taking most of the brunt in the first couple of turns. Feel no Pain definitely helps against those sonic blaster ignore cover weapons! My loudout may not be the most efficient (was basing it off what models I had), but it was still fairly cheap and looked pretty chaotic.

Big blobs of CSM without Rhinos work if you're fairly lucky (and your opponent deploys fairly close to his deployment line). He had 3 turns of shooting at the MoK squad and whittled them down to about 7 (under half) due to his blast master AP3 blasts. But they had Mark of Khorne and Banner of Wrath so charged 10" into a full squad of marines and munched them down like Donkey Kong on a banana. I think this unit will be hit and miss though, depending on how much shooting it attracts during those first few turns.

Forgefiends are OK, not sure if they're worth their points though. It did wreck a Helbrute first turn due to hitting with 6 of its shots and using daemonforge to re-roll armour pen! But then it proceeding to not do much the rest of the game, except for glance a rhino to death over a few turns. I suppose its another random chaos unit! BS3 does hurt its damage output, I will have to have a few more game with it to see if its worth taking in future.

Raptors are great, very cheap for a Jump unit. Although they really need to get the charge off (or take MoK - but that will increase the points). The meltas didn't come into play so I can't comment on their loudout. Although I will say the boon Icy Aura did end up killing more marines than the champions lightning claws...

Bikes were killed turn 2 so didn't really do much, but they were a cheap distraction unit and did they're job, taking the AP3 shots away from the Raptors.

That's about it, overall I think the amount of stuff on the board at 1500 overwhelmed my opponent a little bit! He focussed on killing the Heldrake, Bikes and Cultists too much and let my assault units run across the board to hack him up and take objectives. I was worried about all those AP3 ignores cover guns at the beginning of the game, but thankfully blind luck prevailed!

Final score 7-0 VPs.

Darth Meer