Objective Secured Transport Spam in 7th Ed. - Theoryhammer

Kevin Rogers (who has an awesome blog on competitive Warhammer) has posted a list of all the armies he is worried about playing against at the Bay Area Open (BAO). One of them them is objective secured transport spam. There are, I suppose, three main varieties - Chimera spam (6 maybe) backed by a squad of Wyverns and some other tanks; White Scar Rhino Spam and Wave Serpent Spam. Wave serpent spam is indeed a worry, but the other two, I don't know...

I suspect these armies are all very strong in the BAO format which has progressive scoring and (as I understand it) objectives in all games. However, transplanting them to regular book missions won't work very well in my opinion.

7th Ed. Escalation League

My local gaming group is playing an escalation league for everyone to get familiar with 7th edition. I'm super excited. Escalation (or build up) leagues may be my favourite way to play Warhammer 40k. The basic principle is that you start from a low base, 500 points our case, and add a small number of points each round, 100 per week in our case, until you reach a set target, 1500 in our case, at which point you hold an end of league tournament. People can play higher points values each week if they want, but you must have the minimum number of points available each week.

I have a preference for escalation leagues to be fairly complicated, with rewards for having stuff painted each round, playing lots of games and collecting a new army. Our club has instead opted for the simplest format - 500 +100Wk points per week, with no other rules. There is no overall winner of the league, it's just a contrived format to help people get gradually introduced to 7th Edition. Probably ideal for our rather erratic gaming group. I'm especially happy because a lot of the players who've moved over to other games like Infinity, Dystopian Wars and Dust in the last year or so are now all black playing 40K, which means I get a variety of games every week.

Super Friends in 7th edition

One of my favourite armies in 6th edition that surprisingly did not see a whole lot of play compared to more bike+bike+bike armies was the Super Friends list I mentioned in my first post. It was something like:

White Scars Chapter Master w/Bike, power fist, shield eternal, artificer armour
Khan on bike
Wolf Lord on bike w/thunder hammer, runic armour, saga of the bear (eternal warrior)
Rune Priest on Bike w/runic weapon
Command Squad with four grav guns, four melta bombs, apothecary, 3 storm shields

Tactical Squad (10) with melta in a Rhino
Tactical Squad (10) with melta in a Rhino
Grey Hunters (6 - if memory serves me correctly) w/ flamer in a Rhino

Stalker
Stalker

Thunderfire Cannon

It was a great meta-breaker. The death star and solid mass of scoring units meant you could handle any general army and do the whole 'break apart on the final turn and contest objectives' thing. The stalkers were beautiful, cheap anti-air that could also pop transports and hurt monstrous creatures (notably flying demon princes and Fateweaver). The rune priest meant you had a decent chance of shutting down fortune on a Jetseer Council and then assaulting them to pieces afterwards.

Enter 7th edition. The stalker is now a piece of overpriced scrap metal that can't reliably shoot ground targets and doesn't have enough muscle to reliably down the only flyers that will still be around (I'm thinking storm ravens will make a comeback with GK and the apparently imminent Blood Angels). The jetseer council won't be around so much anymore so psychic denial as much of an issue. Contesting objectives with ICs on bikes doesn't work anymore because objective secured is the new black, and mechanised infantry platoons are going to be everywhere, so you need to be able to pop transports. Seems Super Friends is dead.

Starting to understand 7th edition - Eldar still set the standard

So I started this blog about 10 days before 7th edition came out planning to write a bunch of tactics stuff (and a few hobby articles tracking my own army - The Emperor's Ghosts). That had to be put on hold for a while because of the new rules. I've also got university exams at the moment which got in the way. So today only a brief post.