So it's a couple of days after my game against Chris and it was a really fun and enjoyable game. Chris surprised my by using his Chaos Warrior army which is basically a horde of Marauders. Whilst initially worried due to the amount of units and models, I thought it would be good practise against such armies. Chris's army was basically three massive blocks of Marauders, a unit of Chaos Warriors, two units of Chaos Knights and four units of Warhounds. Everything had marks of Khorne or Slaanesh and he had chosen to be very character light, by only taking a Level three sorcerer using the lore of death and a Battle Standard with the lore of fire thanks to the book of secrets. He also had a Warshrine and a couple of chariots.
We played the standard battleline scenario and I put my army pretty much centrally, as this meant I would be facing down his marauder blocks and could hopefully charge through them. I then placed my Beasts of Nurgle and Flamers on my right flank to try and act as speedbumps for the knights. I won the roll of for first turn and I was very unsure what to do. I could go first and move everything up but I could force Chris to go first and then I could see what he was going to do on the flanks. In the end I rolled a dice as I was unsure what to do and gave Chris the first turn.
The battle pretty much went as follows....
# Chris charges a lone chariot into one of my bloodletter blocks in the hope of killing the herald. He succeeds and that chariot then somehow doesn't run away and keeps on killing off bloodletters. In the end it's killed but it has smashed up the bloodletter block, which then gets ground out by a combo charge by some Marauders and the Warshrine.
# I smash the rest of his marauder blocks up by charging up the centre
# We both roll quite low for magic during the game, but Chris still blows his BSB up (even with the help of puppet to change the roll!)
# My other Bloodletters and the Lord of Charge charge Chris's generals block and kill it. The Bloodletters run it down whilst I leave my Lord of Change in place as I thought he was safe and would help provide some leadership to the other unit of bloodletters.
# Chris reforms his Marauders fighting my mauled bloodletters, which gives his Warriors a path to rear charge my Lord of Change! Chris rolls highly and they get in and I fully expect to loose my general. Then it proceeds to kill all of the unit bar one model, but by then it's been flanked and is killed. Chris then mops up.
So Chris won in the end but it was very close as if I had have pursued with the Lord of Change, I would have probably won the game! It was good fun and I was actually impressed with my list as I wasn't expecting it to do that well. However we both agreed the Beasts of Nurgle are very over pointed for what they can do (look at Crypt Horrors which have almost the same stats but are less than half the points!). The unit has potential but it is just so expensive and has to compete against Flamers and Fiends which are more useful.
I really enjoyed our game and it's got me thinking about redoing my Daemon army now!