Some v.quick reports on the 3 games I managed before sick families forced me to drop out....

Game 1 - Dave Thompson (Tau)

I've had the pleasure of playing Dave in a couple of friendly games before and his Tau gave my black legion a complete shoeing last time we faced off, Dave is a very smart player so I was nervous going in to the game, my plan was quite simple. Kill the markerlights and skyrays, I put my barrage down to hit behind the cover on his left flank and the devs in their pod to threaten both bits of cover on his right, I got lucky hitting and breaking one hammerhead formation with the skyray and breaking another hammhead formation with the devs, I then concentrated on destroying the tetras and breaking the other skyrays, the dice were generally in my favour and Dave putting a formation of fire warriors on OW but without LOS to his blitz on t3 meant he couldnt stop me snagging blitz and t&h, my terminators then air assaulted his crisis formation and wiped it out for a 3-0 win, Dave had a smile on his face throughout and was a pleasure to play as usual!

Game 2 - Consul Avenging Angel (steel legion)

This was a game of bad luck at crucial moments for Tom, with stuff failing to activate when he needed it most, neither of us killed a great deal of the other's stuff (we only lost 2 formations each) but I got the better of the sctivation war and managed to out-activate him to nab a 2-0 in turn 3 (t&h, blitz)

Game 3 - dptdexys (Dark angels)

I have pretty much never beaten Dave, so was expecting a kicking, he won the spaceship rolloff and picked T3, I went for T1 and both of us elected to fly our podding devs on in a thawk instead of the pods, things started as you might expect with nephilims going on CAP and both of us stalling for activations, Dave blinked first hitting my tactical BTS with two lots of plasma devs, my terminators then engaged and reduced those to 2 stands of broken devs, dave then tried to engage my BTS with his chaplain terminators but the thawk was critted out of the sky, he then chose to repeat the task with his BTS terminators who wiped out the tacticals but on t2 I won strategy and crossfired them with the devs and terminators, killing two and breaking them, the landing craft then engaged and destroyed the survivors, some cagey play from Dave saw it go to turn 4 but he couldn't stop me taking it 3-1 in turn 4 (blitz, t&h, bts vs bts)

So I managed 3 wins in 3 very entertaining games

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I had a great weekend.

Went W1-D3-L1 (pretty much the usual mid-table mediocroty for me at any tournament), which considerng how much my dice were out to betray me wasn't to bad.

I remember why I stopped taking Iron Warrior Terminators - back to the reserves case for you!

Despite Dave B dragging us down, we still managed a trophy for third placed team.

I'll definately be coming back to this event next year. Well done Dave for organising it.

Thanks to Kieran, Matt, Mark, Mike, and Richard for five fun games.

I'd say the same about Black Legion Terminators. Other than the game against Dave B (and that was Nids) they kept getting jumped on and murdered after failing the strategy roll-off. At least you didn't stick an extra stand and pact on them! They start getting pretty expensive once they get pimped out... I'm still in two minds about them, as because when they do add some nice threat to the list when it does come off.

Fun event though, and the team aspect was interesting. Mark did a sterling job with the Squats, and i think we managed a 1-2 in the singles side of things as well as taking the team trophy

I should never have loaned him those extra thunderfires - next time he can have mole mortars or thunderers and that's it!

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Thanks to Dave for organising and my opponents for some fun and very closely fought games

Very chuffed to get 2nd, and end up on the winning team not just through being in the same side as Richard. I think some of my opponents will confirm the dice were certainly on my side!

Highlights from my games included:

Andy managing to drop pod his Dreadnoughts into a perfect position to assault into close combat with my
prepped Cyclops. They then roll the worst dice ever, but ace the assault roll off to force another round of
combat. 2nd round they kill the Cyclops outright. Probably only time I've ever seen Dreadnoughts achieve something important in a game, let alone take down the BTS!

Matt takes on an entire Squat army with his fully loaded Executioner. 5 units of Squats sorround it before
a Bezerker squad assaults it. Matt picks up the biggest pile of dice ever as half his army gets out of it
whilst counter assaulting, killing all the Bezerkers... Leaving me about 3 saves on the Warlord to get any of
that support fire... Which he makes. I still lose the combat by at least 10 but the support fire damage at least makes taking down the executioner later doable

Same game, my Leviathan Sustains on Incubi and two squads of Gargoyles who having left the Executioner all
fit under one macro barrage template. Three entirely dead units from one shot. Ouch!

Tim showing me its possible to turn one assault without using flyers or teleports. (It involves garrisoned stormboys and me putting his objectives too close to the half way line...) First two activations - two dead thunderfire squads. Luckily for me my dice rolls for the rest of this game were totally obscene...

Intresting to hear people find Chaos Terms a bit of a struggle, as I'd considered the Emperors Children and
Thousand Sons versions to be almost undercosted as 400pts. Guess fearless and that extra bit of quality is
well worth paying for?
Maybe the Iron warriors Terms could do with some help? No demon summoning means they probably need something.

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Yeah, the addition of Fearless does make a bit of a difference In the case of the Thousand Sons terminators there's also the improved firefight, which means you can't just pretty trivially engage and wipe them out if they fail to win the activation roll. They're fine against low initiative armies where you have a reasonable chance of going first, but against anyone with a 3+ to the roll it's pretty dicey.

Daemons were a bit of a subject of contention as well, with Mike and I both taking a broadly similar route with Black Legion, and more specifically taking Tzeentch over the other factions. Frankly the issue is less that flamers are good imo, and more that they are pretty much the only daemons with a firefight value, and as a game being able to firefight effectively is generally just better than CC, unless you have a good insertion method such as the ability to air assault or drop.

Ironically i think the problem is more that Tzeentch has access to both a decent firefight choice as well as a very solid CC choice with the beasts, so most importantly it's got flexibility where the other marks don't. Bloodletters for instance are actually ironically better than flamers if they get into CC, but don't help at all if your opponent just firefights the unit, which given the main weakness of deamons is that they're gone permanently if you lose an assault, is pretty likely.

4 terminators + pact for 300 pts is still chuffing good. Especially (as Richard says) against low strategy rating armies. Personally, I'm always a fan of anything which leaves a bit of uncertainty in your opponent's mind and/or forces them to use units like scouts to protect terminator targets rather than being more active with them. As long as you accept they're not going to do what marine or fearless traitors do then I'd run them. That said, I think there's also an issue of playstyle. I know Dan1314 isn't a fan of 1k sons terminators which I think are brilliant. His 1k sons results are waay better than mine so what do I know?!

Daemons, yeah - it does seem like Black Legion are Tzeentch all the way. I'm sure there's something clever that could be done with factions there but haven't thought it through properly.

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I'd agree daemons aren't quite there as yet, I do think some of the CC based ones need something to make them a bit more attractive though. Really i think the other chaos factions just need something to make them more appealing. Currently even if flamers are made worse, Tzeentch will still keep getting taken because the alternatives are at best 'situationally' good. Whatever happens they suffer from the innate issue of the imbalance between firefight and cc. This i feel is also why you don't see anyone taking the Khorne cult list, because a strong firefight ability is more likely to be relevant throughout games than a strong CC ability.

On another note I do feel perhaps more sorry for Iron Warriors at the moment given they don't have access to them at all! Vindicators are nice and all, but a poor substitute for access to daemons. As was mentioned, some vehicle based ground based AA (something like a stalker) would help a bit, and make a bit of sense given that as a siege army they really shouldn't be relying on fighters so much all the time.

I'd agree with that. It's also the case that nerfing flamers would wreck 1k sons as a list. Mark's had some joy with EC and their daemons but that's definitely allied to a far more situational use of daemons. I agree they lack the defensive power of flamers. I had a game with Gavin last year where due to his Biel Tann having far better engage range than my list I just summoned daemons and marched into cover with all my 1k sons retinues in order to play defensive.

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I agree that ruining the 1ksons (who rely on a smaller number of activations doing brilliantly)to slightly downgrade Black Legion probably isn't a great move Whilst I'd say Flamers are better than the EC seekers, the seekers greater speed make me feel it isn't the worlds worst trade off. Keeping up with Rhinos and 10cm countercharge is very useful. Richard seems to have had some joy with the Beasts for the same reason.

If we wanted to maybe boost some of the 15cm CC demons I'd suggest infiltrate as without it and no great deployment options there very unlikely to make CC no matter how good you make the stats. Could represent, like Warp Spiders, a lightning fast strike from the warp for those demons who aren't cavalry?

Oh, and +1 Iron Warriors could use ground based AA!



So long as it's a Tournament down under I'll happily take those off you!

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I think the flexibility to summon either flamers or beasts is the problem. If you had to declare at the time of writing your list what type of Daemon each unit could summon (and it can only summon one type) would that sort things out a bit?

Or simply specify what you are purchasing for your daemon pool when you make your list?


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I don't think a sensible nerf to flamers would completely ruin the thousand sons list, indeed they have the best win ratio of all the chaos lists, even post-tweaking

a single FF3+ attack is more than enough, it puts them on par offensively with daemonic beasts and daemonettes, and still makes them fantastic at supporting fire, which frankly they are much too good at as they currently are, several orders of magnitude better than any other lesser daemon

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At the moment every Black Legion list seems to be Tzeench almost by default which speaks wonders to me of the unbalance between the Daemons. Bear in mind that apart from the Plague Bearers' 6+ FF they are the ONLY Lesser Daemon that can Supporting Fire other assaults

Sorry for the delay in getting the results up and sorted, the Expo kinda stuffed my back up for a while!

Again I can only apologise for messing up the final round of the team event. That said I think we all had fun, and the venue was pretty good this year I think we can all agree?

So the team result was as follows

1st Son's of Anarchy
2nd Mostly Harmless
3rd Team Tanelorn
4th M&D
5th TnT
6th Border Reivers

Individual result can be found here - http://epic-uk.co.uk/ukepicachampionshi ... hp?tid=100 and the championship and plate are updated too.

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