We had a mini-tournament here in Perth, and the organiser Matt-Shadowlord was kind enough to let me take the Lost and the Damned 0.3.
This is the list I took. Tzeentch Cultist Coven with daemonic pact, one demagogue, who is the arch-heretic, eleven mutant squads and 6 transporters. 285 points. Khorne Cultist Coven with Daemonic Pact, one demagogue, seven mutant squads, four big mutant squads, one chaos spawn, one chaos hound, and nine transporters. 430 points. Nurgle Cultist Coven with daemonic pact, one daemon prince (on foot), eight mutant squads, three big mutant squads, in a plague tower. 635 points. Break the Spirit target. Four Silver Towers. 325 points. Three Doomwings. 150 points. Five Daemonic Assault Engines. 350 points. Four Hellfire Cannons. 200 points. Four Contagion Towers. 325 points. One Plague Zombie infestation. 175 points. One Greater Daemon. Eight Lesser Daemons.
The general idea was to get objectives placed as close as possible, and invite the enemy in to a slugging match in the centre of the board. My fire support units, the Contagion Towers, Hellfire Cannons and Silver Towers, are solid but not overpowering, and my assault elements, the two mechanised cultists and the assault engines can kill a lot of stuff in an engage (especially with summoned daemons), but they are erratic. Meanwhile the Plague Tower BTS would roll up the board, advancing on the mid-table objectives, offering either fire support or an engage if the option became available... but mostly just working as bait for people not realising how tough the unit is to wipe out.
The zombies are there to drop around a key enemy unit, either to hold it out of the game, or to prevent it engaging me before I engage it.
My first opponent was a Space Wolf player. He ran an alpha striking list. Six Grey Hunters with a Wolf Lord, Dreadnaught and Rhinos. They started in the Landing Craft. Four Terminators with a Wolf Priest. They were in drop pods. Four Terminators. They were in drop pods. Six Thunderwolf cavalry. Five Land Speeders. Six Blood Claws in rhinos. These guys were guarding the blitz. Two Warhounds. The BTS. Two Thunderbolts. One spaceship.
My opponent picked corners, and I did an okay job of avoiding the worst of the space ship barrage. It still took out a contagion tower, and a silver tower. Then the drop pods came down, and with the extra blast markers and those two units broke, and put the daemonic engines a blast marker off breaking. The hellfire cannons responded with overwatch fire, killing a terminator. One set of terminators activated and sustained, breaking the daemonic engines.
I activated, and engaged the not yet activated terminators with my Plague Tower. I didn't even summon daemons, between the Daemon Prince and big mutants there was enough hitting power, and with a strong combat res advantage the fight wasn't in any doubt. The terminators were destroyed. This opened up for his landing craft to come in and assault my BTS plague tower, he came out on top in a close fight, breaking my BTS.
My Tzeentch coven summoned a pile of flamers, set up a firefight engage with the terminators and wiped them. His warhounds advanced and took out another hellfire, breaking them. My khorne coven failed to acitivate - but it didn't matter, it was about where it needed to be to advance on the warhound in turn two for a third turn engage.
I got lucky in the rallying phase, the daemonic engines and BTS rallied on 5s.
Turn two I teleported in the zombies, I got 13 of them and completely surrounded his warhounds. He started by resuming the attack on the BTS, with the bikes coming in to fire and knock off a couple of points on the tower, to leave me with 1 DC on the tower and the Daemon Prince. The grey hunters attacked again, with supporting fire from the speeders. He won the fight again, and I was left with just Daemon Prince. I brought in the Tzeentch coven, the flamers wiping the intermingled grey hunters and speeders. His thunderbolts swooped in and attacked the daemon engines, they did no damage but it was enough to break them before they could activate. He opened fire with his Warhounds, and killed an improbably small number of zombies. I advanced my Khorne coven up to engage his Warhounds next turn. He attacked the rear of the zombies with the Thunderwolfs, won the combat easily but the fearless zombies stayed put.
The Contagion Towers rallied, as did the Daemonic Engines.
Turn three he opened up with his Warhounds, killing a bunch of transports and mutants in the Khorne Coven. The damage was bad, and if I'd taken two turns of that I would have broken. Thankyou to the zombies. I activated the Khorne Coven, and didn't get enough points for the Bloodthirster, but still got a bunch of bloodletters and hounds in, in addition to the big mutants. They won the combat, and one surviving Warhound fled with a single DC, although still with both shields, funnily enough.
That was effectively the end of the game. I advanced some units up to secure all three objectives on my side, and make sure he couldn't get any unit on to my half. I couldn't summon the firepower to break the Thunderwolfs and stop them contesting an objective, or take the last point off the Warhounds, leaving it as 2-0.
My various support covens did very little throughout this game. It was won through the durability of the Plague Tower and it's pile of mutants, two assaults from the Tzeentch coven and one from the Khorne Coven.
My second opponent played Scions of Iron. HEAVY TACTICAL - 4 Tactical units, 2 Land Raider, 4 Land Raider Helios, Hunter, Captain HEAVY TACTICAL - 4 Tactical units, Land Raider, Hunter, Supreme Commander in Land Raider TERMINATOR - 4 Terminator units, Chaplain LANDING CRAFT TACTICAL - 4 Tactical units plus transport, 2 Vindicator, Chaplain SCOUT - 4 Scout units plus transport, 4x Snipers BIKE - 4 Bike Unit FIGHTER SQUADRON - 2 Thunderbolt Fighters
This was an odd game, and honestly it was over fairly early on. I garrisoned the Contagion Towers and Hellfire Cannons up the board. This meant they were in cover and in range early and along with some very good dice I won the shooting match convincingly. His Helios did little while my Towers put a lot of damage and blast markers on one of his key units. This prompted my opponent to push his tacticals up the board aggressively, leaving them open to the rest of my shooting. The Plague towers, Silver towers and hellfire cannons killed most of the two tactical squads. My opponent didn't have much choice but to try and miracle attack on the Plague Tower with four terminators in the landing cradft. They bounced after doing almost no damage and that was pretty much the game. I actually failed to activate the Tzeentch and Khorne cults, even with a SC re-roll, but it didn't matter.
My opponent did make it hard for me to claim more objectives, but there wasn't much he could do by that point. I ended up killing everything but the BTS, which remained untouched guarding his BTS. The only point of note was an assault on his four stands of bikes, I got enough points to summon a greater daemon, who stormed in and wiped the bikes, but suffered two wounds in return, one of which critted and sent him back to the warp. Oh, and a Helios volley killed two Daemonic Engines, breaking them and making them unable to claim an objective. Those guys had a really crappy tournament.
In contrast to the first game, the win here came from the support units. While vulnerable to damage and easy to break, when they are able to stand and fire without blast markers these guys can inflict a crazy amount of damage.
It was only a small tournament, 6 players and two matches, and I was the only player to win both games on objectives. So it netted me and the Lost and the Damned the best general prize.
In terms of how the list performed I think most things felt pretty decent. The list has an interesting dynamic with a lot of small units that are fearless - easy to break but hard to kill. But then they are also the large cult units, which are hard to break. All of it packs a lot of hitting power, but it often unreliable thanks to the low break points and 2+ activations.
Probably the only unit that feels wrong are the flamers, who can summon up a crazy amount of firepower. They are clearly superior to the other daemon options, and dropping 7 or 8 of them in to a combat to wipe the enemy and take no damage the main unit, and no blast markers does feel OP. It didn't come up in this tournament but there's also an added advantage to flamers as they reduce the normal risk of summoning and then then failing to activate, while the engage is lost they can still be positioned to provide supporting fire instead, and so will still often be able to trash an enemy unit. It isn't a huge thing, but when they're already clearly the best daemon unit it adds another layers. They should probably be moved to having a single 3+ FF. I understand this impacts a bunch of other lists, but I also understand the problem exists in those lists as well.
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