So, batrep 2, this time against Dark Angels.

My list:

Towering Transports, 2990 POINTS
Death Guard (NetEA V0.3.1)
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DEATH GUARD RETINUE [700]
Plague Tower (transport), 3 Chaos Spawn, Nurgle Sorcerer, 4 Plague Marines, 3 Havocs

DEATH GUARD RETINUE [650]
7 Plague Marines, Plague Tower (transport), Nurgle Sorcerer, 2 Chaos Spawn

DEATH GUARD RETINUE [415]
4 Plague Marines, 3 Havocs, Lord of Pestilence (Supreme Commander), 4 Death Guard Rhino

PLAGUE ZOMBIE INFESTATION [175]
3+2D6 Plague Zombies

ARMOURED ASSAULT COMPANY [325]
6 Death Guard Vindicators, Plague Hulk

WALKER HORDE [275]
4 Death Guard Desecrator

PLAGUE REAPERS [200]
Plaguereaper

BLIGHT DRONE SWARM [250]
5 Blight Drones





Richard's list using the club Dark Angels:

Incompertus, 3000 POINTS
Dark Angels (Epic-UK 070414)
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TACTICAL [400]
6 Tactical units plus Transport, Supreme Commander

RAVENWING [325]
4 Land Speeders, 4 Bikes

RAVENWING [325]
4 Land Speeders, 4 Bikes

DEVASTATOR [350]
4 Devastator Units plus Transport, 2 Dreadnought LAS

DEVASTATOR [350]
4 Devastator Units plus Transport, 2 Dreadnought LAS

LAND RAIDER [350]
4 Land Raiders

DEATHWING [350]
4 Deathwing Terminator units

DEATHWING [350]
4 Deathwing Terminator units

NEPHILIM [200]
2 Nephilim Fighters




DEPLOYMENT

Unusually for me, I only had one garrisoning formation, the Walker formation of four Desecrators. They came slightly forwards off the Blitz to provide some central AA fire.

Richard dropped the transports on both Devastators so they could garrison with the Dreadnoughts in Overwatch.

Knowing that there were no barrages but lots of Deathwing to come, I went for a clumped central deployment while Richard took advantage of his much faster formations to spread out along both flanks.










EDIT - now with DG objectives ringed in green and Dark Angel objectives ringed in red:









TURN ONE

No teleporters arrive.

Marines win initiative.

Marines: I didn't take as detailed notes as last time, I think the first activation was a Ravenwin formation Doubling down one flank.

GD: BTS Tower Advances towards the Devastators in the forest, taking no damage, killing one Dev stand for three BMs. Given the amount of Plasma Cannon fire from the overwatch, this was a great start for me.

Marines: Land Raiders Double into the BTS Tower for two damage and no crits, putting it on 4BMs now.

DG: Vindicators Double and break the woodland Devs, who retreat back past the shanty town.




Marines: Nephelim arrive and kill a Vindicator, managing to keep out of the AA bubble.

DG: Small Tower Doubles on my left flank and kills a Land Raider.

Marines: Tacticals double, kill the Vindicator's Plague Hulk and break them. They go and hide behind their bigger friend the Plague Tower.




DG: Plaguereaper Blitz guard goes on Overwatch, ready for turn two Deathwing.

Marines: ? I think the other Ravenwing formation came down my left flank.

DG: Blight Drones advance on the Land Raiders killing two and breaking them.

Marines: Second Devs double onto the Blight Drones, killing one. Marines are now out of activations.

DG: Walkers double after the small Tower on my right so that it's not so isolated.

DG: Warlord's Retinue go on Overwatch between the Plaguereaper and Walkers, in case of turn two Deathwing.

End Phase

All broken units rally.

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TURN TWO

Teleporters - due to not being able to find the right FAQ entry, we decide that if both players have teleporting formations, the player with the lower Strategy Rating has to put a formation down first, so that the other player can react to their placement.

Zombies come on defensively to protect my Blitz and BTS.



Terminators come on to attack the small Tower.

Initiative won by the Marines.

Marines: One Terminator formation Sustains into the back of the Tower with crossfire from the other Terminators. I can't remember if any damage was caused.




Marines (retain): Other Terminators retain and Engage. The Death Guard pile out of the Tower and win even though they were two-down due to snake-eyes from Richard. However the Tower is down to one DC.

DG: That Tower Marshals and positions to support an Engage on the Terminators.

Marines: Ravenwing Advance on the Tower but get no hits.

Marines (retain?): Last Land Raider Doubles onto the Tower for no damage.

DG: Walkers engage the Terminators for two rounds of combat, leaving one Terminator and two Walkers left, all broken.

DG (retain): Blight Drones retain to shoot Devs, fail to activate and use the SC re-roll. Three hits kills three Devs.

Marines: Tacticals Sustain on the Drones but get no kills.

DG: Vindicators double onto the left Ravenwing for no hits.




Marines: Nephelim cause no damage to the small Tower. (Photo shows Ravenwing attack as well, the Nephelim were represented using some old SF helicopters.)




Marines (retain): Front Devs retain, Marshall and move back.

DG: Warlord's Retinue Advances and shoots the right Ravenwing (next to the small Tower) for no damage.

Marines: Back Devs Marshall and remove all BMs.

DG: Zombies try to Double and fail, shuffling fowards a little to protect the middle Tower.

Marines: Left Ravenwing engage the Vindicators, fail to activate and use the SC re-roll, and wipe them for no casualties. Losing the Plague Hulk to the Tactical's firing was bad, he should have been placed more centrally in the formation.

DG: My BTS Tower formation Doubles towards the two Marine-side mid-field objectives and takes one damage from the woodland, realises the Devs are out of fire arc for the barrage and breaks the last Land Raider.




Marines are out of activations.

DG: Plaguereaper advances and kills one of the Land Speeders that had wiped the Vindicators.

End Phase

The broken formation of two Terminators fails to rally but the single-stand formation ralllies.

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TURN THREE

Death Guard win Initiative on a tie.

DG: small Tower on the right flank fails to Engage on a 2+ and uses the SC re-roll. The Marines are one-up but roll snake-eyes (again ), losing the assault and a stand. The remaining Chaos Spawn, 5-6 Plague Marine units + Sorcerer character decide to consolidate back into the Tower. Oops...




Marines: Tacticals Engage the Zombies and break them.

Marines (retain?): Front Devs advance to crossfire the BTS Tower and cause a point of damage, taking it down to DC2.

DG: The BTS Tower Retinue goes to ramming speed, engaging and wiping the front Dev formation without taking damage.




Marines: Nephelim shoot the Blight Drones for no damage.

DG: Blight Drones Marshall and take off all BMs, putting one on the Tacticals.

Marines: Left flank Ravenwing Engage the broken Zombies and kill quite a few.

DG: Plaguereaper Sustains on those Ravenwing and kills two.

Mariens the rear Dev formation Advance on the BTS Tower for no damage.

DG: Walkers Marshall and put a BM on one of the Ravenwing formations.

Marines: Lone Temrinator fails to hit the small Tower that's on 1DC.

DG: Warlord's Retinue Advance on the left Ravenwing for one casualty, one off being broken.


End Phase

Zombies fail to rally, right flank Ravenwing succeed.

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The Wargaming Trader
NetEA Death Guard Army Champion

TURN FOUR

Marines win initiative.

Marines: More by luck than judgement, the right flank Ravenwing Double onto the right Tower and manage to take off the last DC with Multimeltas (using the Firefight values of the Bikes to let the Land Speeders avoid suppression), everyone inside takes a MW hit and dies. Oops.






Marines: Tacticals retain and Engage the Blight Drones and break them, they fly off near the Marine Blitz.

DG: Warlord's Retinue Sustains on the left flank Ravenwing and breaks them.

DG (retain): The remaining BTS Tower retains, fails to activate and uses the SC re-roll to Double into the middle of all three Marine objectives, killing one Dev stand but not breaking the remaining two Dreadnoughts. Another DC is lost to terrain on the way, leaving it on 1DC.

Marines: ?

DG: Plaguereaper Advances on the Tacticals (currently holding a DG side objective) but doesn't cause enough BMs or damage to break them.

Marines: Nephelim attack the Tower for no damage.

DG: Walkers Advance on Tacticals but don't break them.

Marines: Terminators triple to contest the most central Marine side objective.

Marines: Land Raider doubles onto the Marine Blitz to contest.



FINAL RESULT

Due to the Land Raider, 2 Terminator stands and two Dreadnoughts managing to contest all three Marine objectives and two DG objectives being held by the Tacticals and the right flank Ravenwing, it was 1-0 to the Marines and we were out of time.


DG DEBRIEF

Having the smaller Tower-transported Retinue consolidate back into a Tower on 1DC was just freaking stupid! The formation only had a couple of BMs and if they'd stayed outside (but in base contact for cover) it's highly unlikely that they would have broken even if the Tower went boom.

The two Tower Retinues were just as tough as you'd expect for a 700pt and 650pt formation of assault troops. Although I was aggressive with going through terrain and lost 2DC to that, that was counteracted by there being no crits across a total of 11DC lost by the two Towers. Given the complete lack of TK weapons in the Dark Angels army, Richard did very well to take off 9DC and the game turned out to be much closer than it had looked at the end of turn 2.

With the BTS Tower I wasn't paying enough attention to facings when moving it, forgetting to have it face the Devastator formation that were the formation I was actually trying to kill.

I also wasn't paying enough attention to last minute rushes to contest, and could have positioned the broken Blight Drones to stop the lone Land Raider contesting the Marine Blitz. The BTS Retinue was also large enough that I might have been able to keep the tripling Terminators out of reach of the central Marine objective.

Anyway, a hard-fought game!

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NetEA Death Guard Army Champion

Loving the photos

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Richard has written up a debrief as well:

Dark Angels Post game review

The lack of barrage in the list used was something I hadn't done before and I missed the templates. These would probably have at least encouraged the Death guard to spread out a bit but whirlwinds aren't the most amazing barrage units out there and their range can require the opponent to come forwards a bit. It would have been nice to have some long range firepower though. On the similar note I also sorely missed good ranged macro weapon attacks (since I usually have used Eldar in the past) although the most spectacular moment of the game did come from landspeeder multi-meltas.

I'm deeply paranoid about the range of workable options for marine lists as my own dice roll spread highlights the brittle nature of the Dark angel list. Taking twice as many blasts to break looks really powerful on paper but when you only have 4-8 stands in a formation it really doesn't take much before casualties mean there aren't enough stands left. This is particularly painful with terminators and land raiders. (Land raiders in particular since it took only 4 saves to reduce them down to 1 model.) The Deathwing had a slight bonus from their unique special rule meaning they got rid of blasts quickly. However my initial gamble with them was in hindsight overly ambitious. The plague towers with passengers were incredibly tough with a high volume of attacks compounding the problem of low volume of attacks.

Even for terminators I'm questioning the inclusion of formations with only 4 stands in them.

The Ravenwing were quite impressive, not least because they also turned out to be the luckiest formations in the list and took down a plague tower. I need to look up the rules for garrisoning again since one of the comments in the epicUK list document talks about them being able to. If so then the potential for them guiding deathwing down for aggressive turn 1 blitzes rises quite considerably. Being one of the Dark angels larger formations and having the invulnerable save (psychologically at least) helped significantly. The mix of bikes and scouting speeders made for a very interesting and unusual formation where I general had quite a tight clump of bikes orbited by the distant speeders. I definitely didn't play them to their full potential but did feel I played them adequately.

The decision to forgo transports so that the devastators and dreadnoughts could garrison is something I'm in two minds about. It was nice to deploy overwatch units quite so far up and their firepower wasn't bad but due to Ian's ability for saves they ended up achieving nothing of note. I'm going to go back to the drawing board with them and see what else I can do. I've a similar review of the nephelim, they felt alright but didn't manage to do anything much all game.

I was glad of the supreme commander but he's expensive and not that amazing so something else to look at.

Overall I quite enjoyed the EpicUK dark angel list, it has some unique flavour but lack of access to imperial support means I might have to look at spacecraft.

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The Wargaming Trader
NetEA Death Guard Army Champion

Looks like a great game and two very interesting lists. The Deathguard one seems like it was interesting to use.

How did the bikes FF value stop the Landspeeders from being suppressed? I thought it was only units that were in range and eligible to shoot that counted for suppression?

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Nope you can use small arms to take suppression, its in the official FAQ

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No worries just found this in the tournament pack.

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Were you using the plague towers with movement 20cm, I have played allot of games against MikeT's LatD list with the towers increased movement and see no reason why they shouldn't have this buff apart from it's not very nurgley. However does it really need the extra movement in the DG list, as I would usually be firing with a plague tower rather than engaging stuff because it has a decent amount of long range firepower.

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Yes, this game was with 20cm move. They're highly unlikely to ever be taken as transports otherwise. Although in previous games where they've been taken as single Towers the speed increase has made a substantial difference when Advancing to get firing lines or Doubling to support assaults.

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