I've been travelling for about three months and so only played my first two games with the Ravenguard over the past fortnight. Here are some quick thoughts. Short story: it's a great list!
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In my first game I played the mono-Raven Guard version against a Tau Farsight-bomb army with a lot of plasma, the close-quarters riptide and Kroot in a city-fight mission. This is a really bad match-up. My army is a command squad, 4 scouting Rhinos, 2 storm talons and a thunderfire cannon. I have a hard time hurting his death-star because of its high armour, ablative drones and distancing shenanigans. If he wins the roll to scout first (which he did) then the kroot can be placed such that I can't effectively scout towards his death star for a bit of rapid fire action, which is pretty much my only hope. Because of all the plasma (including the tide's plasma-flamer), I am unlikely to be able to survive while simply holding objectives because my Rhinos and marines can be easily killed. Note that the Farsight bomb has ignores cover every time it shoots because of one of the battle-suit upgrades.
So my main lesson is that Tau is a hard matchup, especially if there isn't much LoS cover (they don't care about area terrain).
The other main lesson is that you absolutely must run the Ravenwing command squad rather than a regular command squad. If your Rhinos scout forward it is almost guaranteed that your regular space marine command squad will be left either way back in your deployment zone (probably in a ruin of some sort that forces a terrain check) or sitting in the open ready to get face-stomped by shooting. In my second game I used the Ravenwing squad and they scouted up behind the Rhinos who provided wonderful cover.
In the second game I played against a tyranid list that, while not generally overpowered, was quite well tooled up to take on my army, with devourers and low AP blasts everywhere. He had 30 termagents, a flying tyrant with twin devourers, two carnifexes with twin devourers, a Tervigon and 2 squads of 3 Malanthropes, who are pretty nasty against marines because of the AP3, a biovore and a venomthrope (who is so much more balanced than the stupid forge world equivalent). My list is:
Chapter Master with bike, power fist, artificer armour, shield eternal, auspex
Librarian (DA) with bike, force axe, auspex
Ravenwing command squad (DA) with apothecary, grenade launcher
10 tactical marines in Rhino with meltagun, combi-melta, melta-bombs
10 tactical marines in Rhino with meltagun, combi-mleta, melta-bombs
10 tactical marines in Rhino with plasmagun, combi-plasma
5 tactical marines in Rhino with flamer, combi-flamer, melta-bombs
5 scouts (DA) with close-combat weapons, land-speeder storm with heavy flamer
Thunderfire cannon
I really like this list and will be using it a lot over the next couple of months. I can't think of anything I would change at the moment besides maybe the load out on the scouts. The auspexes mean you can roll on telepathy for psychic shriek (die Riptide, die!) and hope for invisibility or shrouding rather having to do divination for ignores cover. Shrouded has great synergy with the Raven Guard chapter tactic, which grants stealth on turn 1 (hello jink!).
He deployed first (and first turn - we still play by the 6th edition rules). We were playing the Maelstrom mission where you can score your opponent's 'secure objective x' cards. An ideal situation for me. Cityfight table with lots of area terrain but lots of windows so difficult to really hide.
I scouted up into the middle of the field and hid everything in or behind ruins. The cannon, scouts and speeder stayed behind to mind objectives in my deployment zone (or just to stay out of it in the case of the scouts) in case I drew those objectives. This granted me a 3+ cover save for the tanks and bikes because of stealth from the chapter tactics and a 2+ for the scouts and thunderfire because they were in a bolstered ruin! His first turn shooting was rather ineffectual, killing one Rhino and nothing else.
Fast forwarding...I won this game relatively comfortably by scoring about 20 objectives. If I hadn't drawn two 'Secure Objective 3s' on the penultimate turn when that was the only objective he had it would have been a 10+ point margin. I killed almost none of his units - one squad of Malanthropes, the genestealers and a carnifex at the very end. I spent most of the game just standing around in ruins scoring and then driving away from shooting. The command squad stayed out of it early as a venomthrope was providing good cover to his big guys, but then got involved in the latter turns to own the middle of the board and prevent him from really coming out and roaming towards distant objectives. He played quite conservatively with his hive tyrant, which surprised me.
It's nice knowing that your opponent just wasted a turn of shooting to kill a rhino (35 points), a landspeeder (45 points) and 3 scouts (27 points). I was a bit aggressive with my tacticals in the first turns and this resulted in a dead squad by about turn 3. My feeling at the moment is that it is best to not even bother trying to kill stuff if you can hide from it effectively. This army has so little firepower that you are unlikely to get a good result if you put yourself out there. Hide all the time, deploy your objectives into area terrain in the middle of the board and drive around in your metal boxes (which make outstanding LoS blocking terrain).
You should be especially conservative with the command squad. They are your only beat-stick. You need to keep them alive so that they can hit something, like a riptide, when it counts. The most notable case being when you need big game hunter, slay the warlord, blood and guts or some similar objective.
The only time I would play aggressively with this list is if I get first turn and can scout up for a rapid fire alpha strike, but even then my objective is to simply push my opponent into a turtle deployment that he can't unpack from in time to stop me scoring all the points. I don't really care if nothing dies.
Give this army a try. It won't win the LVO but it is very competitive without being cheesy and I don't imagine anyone will have a boring time playing against it.
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