Hi folks, I'm new to the forums and was wondering how taccom would deal with something I found myself facing recently.

Last night I was playing my flatmate with my newly built Black Legion against his ImpG in a 5000 pointer and I came accross something truly nasty: a unit of 9 manticores surrounded with leman russ which were again surrounded by a dragnet of sentinels sitting on his blitzkrieg. Now thats an 18 bp indirect disrupt unassaultable castle. (admittedly its slow firing but c'mon).

What would you do? Try to dislodge them? I did. and failed spectacularly.

Hit them with aircraft or long ranged shots from Death Wheels or bring a spaceship next time.

or a Banelord

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I agree, you've got to bypass that cordon, and fast.

To do that, I'd use long rang units (Death Wheels, Defilers) or more likely aircraft (Especially the Harbinger Bomber if you use it).

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Or maybe ignore it. That sounds like 1/3 of his army and all it can do is fire 1 8 or 10 bp barrage at you a turn. Losing one formation to breaking a turn is hardly that nasty for Chaos. Sticking a bm on it from long range fire will mess up it activating somewhat as well.

Play corners and he may be tempted to put everythign as far away as possible giving you free reign to hit everything else.

Also get a spaceship on the off chance you bombard it dead on.

once everything else is dead converge on it lead by chosen - a couple of small formations with the possibility of demons can be safely left till the last turn in a 5000 point battle.

And finally - make sure you are playing on an 8x4 table. 5000 point games are meant to be played on the larger table in the GT scenario. On a 6x4 it alters the interaction between units.

Cheers on the advice. I've not looked into using spaceships but it might be something to look at as camping artillery on the blitzkreig is a fairly common tactic for his guard. Sad to say my banelord and half my army were desperately trying to hold the other side of the field against another unit of russ and a superheavy tank company.
I still need to add chosen to the army and have been going with:

2 x Black legion retinue
2 x Cult marines (Thousand sons / Death Guard 1 in each)
6 x Obliterators (3 in each)
1 x Havocs (in the Tzeench formation)
2 x champion / icon bearer / daemonic pact (1 in each)
2 x dreadnought (in with tzeench)

2 x decimators
1 x death wheel
1 x banelord
2 x black legion bikes (champion, icon bearer and daemonic pact in each)

20 x lesser daemons in the pool
1 x greater daemon in the pool

Seems like I'm always going to be out activated but its damn hard to break fully tricked out chaos space marine units (especially when you throw an meat shield of nurglings out in front whilst advancing)

Is that really 8 activations at 5,000 points. Now I know everyone says that activation count is a UK thing but that sounds at least 4 too few to me.

Plus if you go with lots of smaller formations it will be harder for the arty company to find a big enough target to kill each turn to earn its points.

It is indeed.
To be fair, the fact that the nurgle unit was fully stocked was instrumental in it surviving 2 full blasts from the manticores and leman russ (admittedly breaking on the second time round). So buying the full unit did seem worth it. Chaos are weird as they are not space marines and dont get tsknf so I felt that to be effective they would really need boosted up which eats up the points.
I could have abandoned the banelord and taken fliers but I know he always has a hell of a lot of flak sitting amoungst his units for that specific reason.

You need to cut back on the upgrades and daemon pool in order to get more activations, you really want an absolute minimum of 12 at 5000 points, and even that's on the low side.

Drop some upgrades and get some nice cheap folorn hope formations.

This is 1800 points, so with the Banelord, you have 3 formations that are each pushing 1000. That's cutting seriously into your flexibility. Also, with big barrages, more units is just more targets.

You've got some mixed role formations here. It's okay to have some multi-purpose formations, but specialists are more efficient and the sheer size of these formations is more than offsetting the gains you get from the flexibility. If you focus more, you'll end up with a greater variety of specialists for more punch and increase the tactical options enough to actually improve your flexibility, even without the generalist formations.

For example, if the Tzeentch retinue is going to be primarily a shooting/area denial force, then the assault options are somewhat wasted. You might keep a pact around, just in case you end up in a position to assault, but that's not going to happen often, so the rest of the summoning kit is not likely to be helpful. TSons are largely assault as well, though their 4+RA "meat shield" capacity might be okay on a shooting formation.

The reverse is true for the Nurgle formation. You can bring down the shooting elements so it can focus more intently on closing and assaulting. A token Obliterator is probably enough, if you even need that.

Retinue (Tzeentch) + Havocs + 3 Obliterators + Pact = 675
This can garrison with 25 shots on Overwatch, daring the opponent to come at you, even with armored vehicles.

Retinue (nurgle) + Cult + Pact/Champ/Icon = 550 (Maybe 625 with Obliterator.)
This can garrison forward to help reach assault range. You can summon 3+ save daemons that don't cause BMs as meat shields, averaging 8 at a time. That is a huge help in letting it cross the board and pressure the opponent. Also, since the formation only moves 15cm and the plan is to close with the enemy, this makes a good formation to possibly summon a Great Unclean One. It's not a shooting formation, but it has enough firepower that shooting while closing is worthwhile, and you might even (rarely) end up in a situation where something like Sustain Fire makes sense.

Both can take a fair beating and retain effectiveness as well.


You're almost never going to need Icons in a Bike formation. Bikes are too fast for most daemons to keep up with, so you are rarely going to want to keep the daemons from turn to turn. If you want to keep a Tzeentch-aligned bike formation kitted out for summoning a Lord of Change, that's probably OK but outside that, you really only need a Pact to give a bit of oomph once you get close. Adding ~4 daemons is still an appreciable bump.

Also, if you're trimming down the summoning kit, Raptors are a better buy, so you can replace the stripped down Bikes with Raptors.

Overall, 2 formations that can summon a GD is all you need. The above changes would leave you with one Retinue and one Bike formation able to do so. You could probably also trim the LDs slightly. If you figure ~10 for the Nurgle Retinue's meat shields and a couple assaults where the unkilled LDs are going to go back into the pool, you can probably get by with ~15 lesser daemons.

Between the Retinues and the Bikes, you can easily trim 600 points. If you are concerned about AA after dropping the Obliterators, you can pick up an air formation and still have enough for another serious formation. For example, aircraft and termies, both of which increase your "deepstrike" capabilities.

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For a more direct answer - First action, Banelord sustains fire on the arty company. With 12BP, you should be able to cover it all and average 3 kills (2 if the entire company is actually in cover when deployed). Killing just a couple arty units will make a huge dent in their firepower (2 kills + 3 BMs = only 4 unsuppressed units, 3 kills is only 2 unsuppressed). If you have aircraft to hit them, you might even get lucky and break them on your first activation before they fire.

Plus you can possibly cover a Russ or two with the Banelord barrage just for BMs to slow them down.

Hey Neal, thanks for the food for thought there. I'll give a much more specialised force a shot next time. It does seem like a shame to lose the obliterators in an assault (2+ ff and RA is not to be sniffed at) but I'll definately be looking more carefully at where I need them and try to pare them away from where they are not absolutely nessesary as they are expensive.

Also you are bang on the money about the daemon pacts and icon bearers etc. I did find that I didn't use daemons in the Tzeench unit nearly as much as the Nurgle assault monster, so I'll be looking much more carefully at my use of daemons in the future.

I'll also be building up some raptors and chosen soon (models still on order) in the next few days so that'll give me a bit more flexability in terms of covering the battlefield. I'm going to play about with the army list over the next couple of days and see if I can assemble a slightly more focused army and we'll see what happens.

How's about Rhinos for some/all the retinues? 10 points per box, acts as mobile cover, increases the number of blast markers a formation can soak, and gives the formation a massive movement boost when getting into position to assault and lots of flexibility around the table.

To add to all the good points Neal has already made I add the following

(1) Activation is everything, get caught on the short end, as this list does, and you are dead meat. Figure an activation rate of 2.5 to 3.5 per 1,000 points fielded. For a 5,000 point game that is a low end 12 to a high end 18 activations. Go below 12 and you will not only be out activated but spend too much time trying to remove BMs that are hindering your army. It is also a sure bet, as Neal has pointed out, that you have too many 'Jack of all Trades' formations and not enough 'specialist' formations.

(2) Tactical Flexibility is very important to success in Epic-A and if you have it both in your Grunt (Line) formations, and across the army as a whole (Specialist Formations Fast Attack and Support) then you can always exploit an opponents weaknesses when they over specialize (As your worthy opponent here seems to have done here with his army depending on a strong firepower base). Basically you DO want tactically flexible Grunt formations to get into the face of the enemy, take ground, and hold ground. But you also NEED tactical flexibility in the army to exploit what the Grunt formations accomplish and that requires specialized formations. Ok now that I have said it what does it all mean

An army can function well if no more then 50% of its points are spent on Grunt Formations (Jacks of all Trades), or in this case 2,500 points max. That is provided those same formations DO NOT drive the activation count below the minimum. As a minimum DO NOT go into battle with less then around 1,600 points of Grunt Formations. Yes it is trying to find the right balance for the type of army YOU want to field. The weakness in your army, from what I have been able to gather so far, is in Fast Attack formations. Your opponents big weakness, to me at least, is in a total lack of any Fast Attack Formations of his own. Yes Sentinels can be used as a trip wire to slow down fast attack formations but there are ways around this.

I hope this helps,

Jaldon

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Another way of stating this is that you need to be in the 2:3 ratio for activation count in order to maintain tactical flexibility. Outside of that the options for the outnumbered force drop off precipitously.

This means that if you are near the low end of activation count, you need to make sure your activations are solid across all (or almost all) formations. There is some value in small, fragile formations for extra activations if you are near the top. However, those small formations are a liability if you are on the low end. If you end up with a few big, tough activations and several dinky formations just to increase activation count, the dinky formations will die quickly, leaving you with an effective disparity much larger than the starting army lists.

So, for example, you are on the low end with 12 activations. The opponent has 18 activations. If 3 of your 12 formations are small "activation padding," the opponent can often pick them off. Even if he sacrifices some of his formations to do so, you can easily find yourself with 8 or 9 remaining formations to your opponent's 14 or 15, and you end up outside the 2:3 ratio where it becomes very hard to maneuver.

Basically, you need to consider activation count not only from a raw total but from a "real" count of relatively tough formations. The "real" count becomes very important towards the bottom end of the range.

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Note, this is general commentary. A Black Legion force with lots of summoning kit can push this activation count guideline a little bit. You can summon daemons to drop the hammer. As a result, even a seriously damaged formation which might otherwise be a token activation can remain a threat.

In other words, summoning allows formations stay "real" in terms of activation count for a bit longer than most armies.

On similar note, it sounds to me like you and your amigo enjoy regular play. He probably got tired of seeing these huge formations and having to deal with them, so he solved the problem in a big way: the Manticore Castle. So it is possible you are the Dr. Frankenstein of this monster.

When you are playing regularly with the same people, it is easy to get caught up in using the same types of formations, the same types of tactics. You need to conciously change that by altering your methods.

You can't have a fight with somebody who isn't there. My buddy ePilgrim got tired of me bombing the snot out of him with aircraft so he responded by spamming his army with anti-aircraft. My response was to not bring any aircraft at all which made him re-think his tactics for the next game. I used to bring a lot of TK weapons. His response? No War Engines.

I suggest going for a bunch of tiny formations, if possible. The more the better. Out-activate him by a lot and note his reaction when he fires off 18BP at... a 200 point scout formation. My guess is the BMs alone will overwhelm him if you play it correctly. In the end you and your friends will end up fielding a variety of armies and you won't get stuck trying to take out his big gorilla with your bigger gorilla every time.