This should be my final one for a while. 4 games in 2 weeks, and now my wife is starting to give me the look.....
This time I am taking on Alex_H and his NIds. It has been a while since we had played and this is our first 7th game.
We played 1500 points. I am a big fan of this value.
1. It allows plenty of chat throughout the game and still be finished at a sensible time. This game took 5 hours!
2. Choices have to be made. At 1750 you can generally get everything you want in your list, and 2000 you can take an extra something a bit special that you have not used to see how it plays without affecting your army too much. 1500 something has to give. You can’t have all your fancy units and toys to play with. Some have to stay in the box
3. There is so many rules to remember in 7thand trying to keep track of what is going on you need to keep it as simple as possible.
I had chosen 3 lists initially so I could choose which to take at the time. The first was based on my unbound terminator list from a few games back. This time I used the Dark Angels codex with Belial, a librarian, 5 DW Knights, 2*5 DW and 1*10 DW. It looked good and if I was playing the emperors will missions then I think would have had a chance, but playing Maelstrom I did not have enough units or manoeuvrability to cover the board. Also I had no flyer protection (in hindsight I may have worried about that too much).
The next 2 lists were basically the same. The main change was terminators for stern guard. Here is the list I settled on:
Chapter Tactics: Imperial Fists
- Librarian level 1 Telepathy
- 9 Sternguard in a pod with PF and 4 combi-grav guns
- 10 tacts in rhino flamer missile
- 10 tacts in rhino flamer missile and veteran
- 10 scouts with Camo Cloaks and sniper rifles and missile
- Whirlwind
- Landspeeder typhoon
- Stormtalon with skyhammer missiles
- Thunderfire
- 10 devastators with 3 missile and 1 lascannon
Winged Hive Tyrant
Winged Hive TyrantVenomthrope
Exotrine
Harpy
Mawloc
4 Zonethropes with a Nuerothrope (sp?)
4 Zonethropes
2 Spores
As you can see the basic minimal troop choices, and they don’t even have objective secured! I was not really expecting such a small force. When I think of nids I normally think loads of gribbly stuff supported by some fancy big stuff.
As Alex and I had played a few game recently we decided on a mission neither of us had played, Maelstrom 4. This had an interesting twist where both you and your opponent can claim tactical objective “secure objective X” when they are in your hand! The newer codexes will be at a slight advantage here as they only have 12 of those and 24 other ones where using the one from the books there rae 18 “Secure Object X” cards. As we both have an older codex it levelled out.
Again I am not going to give a turn by turn report, but here are some of the main highlights.
· I set up with the heavy stuff at the back. The idea was for the scouts to infiltrate up field and the 2 tactical squads (the assault half) would get forward for objectives on the other side.
· I was interested to see how the whirlwind would perform as I had not used one. It would have been ok against a horde list but against this high armour/inv save list it was pretty poor. Will I still get the model.....probably
· Initially forgetting about the sternguard! But when they came on they were OK. Helped kill a squad of zonethropes for first blood. There second round of shooting against the Exotrine with only 2 wounds left....5 grav gun wound and he made all 5 of his 5+ cover saves!
· The librarian was poor but a cheap HQ choice. I am not sure what other option a marine player has. The others are more points, and a captain needs even more points to make him useful. The librarian did get shrouding off once but failed a perils test, and eventually died. He is a bit of a soft VP for slay the warlord and also some of the tactical objectives require you to kill the warlord and offer D3. In the turn he died he gave up 3VPs.
· I worried too much about the spores. They couldn’t get objectives and worst of all they didn’t give up any VP’s killing it first did not get me first blood.
· Again the lack of solid mobile units, objective secured or not, was my opponent’s downfall. He bunched in one corner and all I had to do was bombard him. He could not go and get the other 4-5 objectives. I had enough stuff to cover lots of area and on turn 4 I controlled every objective on the board. I was picking up objectives on both of our turns. It could be said I had reasonable luck in getting the objectives, but I generally covered 4-5 of them in most turns.
· The legendary deathstar units are a thing of the past at 1500pts. I can’t see how you can justify 450pts, for something like a land raider and a squad of assault terminators (about a 1/3rd of your army) and still have enough stuff to get everywhere. Edit: my sternguard and librarian were 372pts!
· The internet whinge about a lot of things! I was out gunned 8-1 in psychic phase. Did anything horrible happen in the psychic phase, no it didn’t? Power went off, powers failed, powers were nullified. Even rolling 3 dice for a warp charge one was failing. Additionally he got half of the charges from the zonethopes who used up a lot of points that could have been spent on other things.
· The final score was 17-4 at the end of turn 4 where Alex conceded. His flyers were bombing around causing problems but nothing else was on the board. The flyers would have had to land to get the objectives when my fire power should have been enough to sort them out
· Net lists are they any good. Alex played a strong net list that is doing the rounds. I think it would have been ok in the emperors will games. KP wise at the end I was 5-5. If we had carried on playing I had a lot of easy KPs that his flyers could have dealt with, but his venomthrope was about to go splay and his mawloc had one wound left.
The aim of the game should not be to build a list that will be rock to your opponent’s scissors. I think the missions have produced a good levelling effect for this. Will we see the deathstar unit again? Yes, but not at 1500 and maybe not even 1750.
Pictures:
Setup-
Turn 2:
The End:
