Playtest games with Imperial Fists

I've had two more games with my fists, which I am now 80% confident I will be taking to the club tournament at the end of October. The first game was against Guard and the second against Space Wolves. Battle report with pictures herein:

My list is:
Lysander - 230 points
Tactical Squad (10) in Rhino with grav-cannon and grav-gun - 225 points
Tactical Squad (10) in Rhino with grav-cannon and grav-gun - 225 points
Sternguard (10) in drop pod with locator beacon - 265 points
Terminators (5) - 175 points
Thunderfire cannon - 100 points
Devastator Squad (5) with 4 rocket launchers - 130 points
Devastator Squad (5) with 4 lascannons - 150 points
total: 1500 points

This is very similar to previous versions, only I discovered that terminators are now only 175 points base so I could afford to get grav-weapons for the second tactical squad (instead of melta). This makes me quite nasty against space marines and Tau who will doubtless be in abundance at the Con.

Some basic tactical principles of this list:
- The sternguard don't typically drop super aggressively. They get a good position, usually on or near some objectives, and make a chunk of the opponent's army come to them. When they do, the terminators come in off the locator beacon and have targets to hit and slingshot off.
- Lysander is a huge boon to terminators; he almost makes them good. Lysander can take low AP wounds and masssed lasgun fire (thanks to FNP) with amazing grace, saving your power fists to get into combat. My entire terminator squad has survived every game so far. He is also a monster in challenges which is great in maelstrom and rarely gives up slay the warlord when embedded with terminators.
- I have really maxed out on Imperial fists chapter tactics in this list with 2 devastator squads for tank hunting and just about everyone else rocking boltguns for those sweet re-rolls. The re-roll power should not be underestimated - it gets you quite a few extra wounds over the course of a match and is particularly nasty with sternguard.
- The grav-weapons can hide in the Rhinos and fire out the hatches. This makes the Rhinos much more of a threat and distracts attention from other elements of my list. I will typically turbo boost into the middle of the board, disgorge the 5 man squads to lurk onto objectives and then boom people from my hatches - with 24" you can hit just about everything from the middle of a 6x4 table.
- The thunderfire cannon with bolster cover combines well with the devastators to make an excellent back-field fire base. The tacticals hold the midfield and the deep strikers go downfield for linebreaker and to break open fire bases.
- This is a take all-comers list, which is appropriate for this tournament. I have the heavy weapons for tanks, the grav and sternguard for monstrous creatures and heavy infantry and the thunderfire (not to mention all the boltguns) for hordes.

Imperial Guard

My opponent was using a very old fashioned list with Creed in a footslogging squad of veterans, an infantry blob, lascannons, autocannons and mortars, a squad of veterans with meltaguns and another with plasma guns, a command squad on foot, a squad of Lehman Ruses and a squad of stationary basilisks (they have a platform instead of tracks, but also a lot of crew).

His first turn was pretty nasty because he had ignores cover orders. My devastators took a beating but my cannon managed to survive thanks to T7. I was  lucky to be able to split the cannons and 2 dev squads across three levels of a building so the battle cannons couldn't hit all of them together. After that my sternguard dropped in and killed Creed and his squad with AP4 ammo, and my thunderfire then killed his command squad. Guard need Chimeras for their command squads or Pask or Yarrick, I think. This really limited his ability to hurt me as he couldn't get volume on his lasguns or ignores cover on the big boys. My sternguard took a few casualties but then rampaged through his artillery platforms in assault and my tactical squads through his infantry squads. I struggled to hurt the Ruses until the terminators arrived and punched them to death - lol @AP3.

I don't want to take too much comfort in this game because if I hadn't been able to so easily crush the orders on turn 1 things might have been very different.

Space Wolves

3 pods, some thunderwolves, Ulrick and Ngarl, long fangs. This was a pretty standard drop in, shoot like crazy, see who is standing after the smoke clears game. It was contact lost and I managed to win by 6 or 7 points by staying a little bit more focused on the objectives than my opponent. Here is deployment:

 I was pretty happy with my set up. I wanted to make it hard for my opponent to kill much on the drop without opening himself up to a lot of return fire and isolating himself movement wise. I also wanted to ensure that I could still claim the two objectives in my deployment zone for contact lost on my first turn, hence the spread rather than the castle. The grav in the Rhinos can reach both clusters of devastators. This mission can really get away from you if you get tied up and don't draw cards for a while. I was particularly nervous about this as with the grav the rhinos can't move around as much. The thunderfire bolstered its cover. The Rhinos were positioned so that they wouldn't block each other's line of site and rear armour was only exposed to a risky scatter on the drop pod. I should have put the Rhino in the gully behind the hill a bit more for cover. There is a combat squad over by the lascannons to ensure I hold that objective in the event of a drop.

He eventually came in with all three pods (over 2 turns) into my left hand corner, mostly to kill the cannon. Thanks to bolstered cover I did a good job surviving but I didn't get to draw a card because there wasn't any ob-sec over there. I then needed to secure that objective so I disembarked a combat squad from the Rhino and sent it over to score. The grav-weapons wiped all of Njarl and Ulrick's support crew and the thunderfire cannon put 16 wounds on the other squad, leaving 5 hunters. Another died to flamer on overwatch and then my techmarine slowly chewed through the others in close combat with his fists until the HQs arrived to pummel him.

His thunderwolves came up to the hill in the middle to get objective one. I dropped the sternguard there, gaining cover from my pod against the devastators and firing 20 poison rounds into the wolves. I did 16 wounds and he only failed 2 saves :-(

My devastators spent most of the game going to ground to avoid getting smoked by his rockets. I thought that might happen but I expected Lysander to arrive and pummel the devastators (or even that my sternguard would smoke the puppies so hard that they could take out the rockets). Alas, Lysander only arrived on turn 3. I wonder if perhaps I could have deployed the lascannons more defensively so they would be nearby objective three but out of LoS of the rockets. They didn't have much of an impact on this game besides exploding a drop pod for big game hunter.

My sternguard did okay against the wolves in combat. By the time it was over he only had 2 wounds left on the squad (overwatch was strong). I had, however, made a mistake with my grav-cannon squads when disembarking. I had to get out to drive a rhino over to objective 3 to get it objective secured. I deployed forward instead of backward, which allowed the grav to get tied up by the wolves. They might have managed regardless but if I had gone backwards it would have been a 9" charge and I would have been much better positioned to get slay the warlord. You can sort of see the situation here:

Fortunately the combat squad managed to die only very slowly to the wolves and so Lysander eventually got there and stomped face. My terminators did make short work of the devastators with shooting and held the objective there. At the end I had a few very depleted squads holding objectives drawing 4 cards for two turns and he wasn't drawing any as his wolves and HQs were in combat with small squads in no man's land. This allowed me to jump ahead  quickly for a solid win.

One thing I did lose sight of in this game were the secondary objectives - slay the warlord and first blood. I had several opportunities for both in the early turns but was instead greedy about getting three points out of an objective card to wipe out entire units. I consequently left several bedraggled squads about the place, missed an opportunity for Warlord and First blood and still only scored 1 point.

Overall though I am quite happy with this list. I've got to get a bit better at hiding devastators and using grav-weapons in Rhinos (I am much more used to having cheap flame-throwers), but it is fun and straightforward to play and my opponents seem to enjoy the games. Nobody balks at the list, which is nice. It is quite fluffy with Lysander, all the boltguns and the heavy support.