Raven Guard MSU spam

In my last article on MSU spam I noted that it was a little weak at 1500 point Maelstrom because of the Khan tax. You need scout (and outflank) on all the Rhinos for this army to work. That becomes difficult if you've already paid 200+ for a chapter master and 60+ for a librarian in order to make your Maelstrom list capable of scoring the easy cards. With Khan, your HQ allotment is now 450 odd points, which doesn't leave you much to work with. One solution is to use Raven Guard instead, as their Rhinos come with Scout for free! Now obviously this isn't the most powerful Chapter tactic, but that's great if your scene uses comp score. A sample list:

Space Marine list building for Maelstrom

A quick one today, just compiling some thoughts on list building for Space Marines. I've been reflecting for a while on the fact that the guy who won our tournament scored a 3.0 for comp, which is basically as high as you can get without making an army that is deliberately bad. Yet his list is pretty well optimised for Maelstrom. Let me first explain how to build a Maelstrom army for Space Marines, and then you'll see what I mean.

Note: I'm glad he won the tournament with that particular list. Nobody could be upset at having to face down that army and he played it extremely well. But the guy who came second (with Eldar) was fielding a genuinely shit army featuring a bunker just so his opponent had a building to destroy. His score was 2.75 from memory, basically just because it was from the Eldar codex. He had no wave serpents, no Wraithknights and only one squad of warp spiders. He was using Shining Speers and doom weavers! If the comp scores were reversed the placings would have been reversed, and I think that was the true result, but nobody cares we just play to have fun and the winner was very gracious.

Space marines in 7th edition part 3: MSU spam with Rhinos

Last part in this series. So far we've covered drop pods and bike lists. Today we're looking at armies with lots of tactical squads in combat squads in Rhinos. A version of this list placed 5th at the Bay Area Open, the first tournament to use 7th edition rules.

Something like this...

How to win at Maelstrom

At my club we play a lot of Maelstrom of war missions. It's about a 50/50 split with eternal war and the annual club tournament uses book Maelstrom missions. I've read a lot of commentary complaining about Maelstrom, saying that it comes down to luck of the draw too often. That hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, I don't think I've had a single Maelstrom game come down to luck of the draw. However, you need to build armies that are suitable to Maelstrom. If you bring something that is fundamentally an eternal war army, like Deathwing, Death-stars or a firebase, you are going to lose. Pretty much anything that is designed to kill stuff rather than score is going to have a hard time unless you can reliably table your opponent by turn 5. In this article I've assembled some of the insights I've gained playing around 30 book Maelstrom games. Feel free to disagree with me.

My first display board

I wanted to make a display board for the club tournament because it was my first one with this club. I thought it would ingratiate me with some of the old hands and I also wanted to make some commitment to encourage myself to keep going. I also figured a display board was my best bet for actually walking away with some prize (which turned out to be true). This post is about the making of said board, with pictures!

Tournament write up

So we had the big tournament on two weekends ago. I had a great time but I didn't do very well, scoring 1-1-3. I did, however, win best theme! This was due largely to my display board and some other aspects of my painting/modelling, which I will showcase in a separate post. This article is going to be more about battle reports.

The Emperor's Ghosts in full regalia!

Space Marines - what units are worth taking?

Thought I'd write a post combining all my insights (if you can call them that) on what works and what doesn't for Space Marines. I'll finish with some general list building points. I will only cover units that I think are competitive. Other units that aren't bad, like Vanguard and Legion of the Damned, won't be covered, though there's no reason you can't play them in games and still win. Pretty much everything in the Space Marine Codex is usable. The worst units are Assault Centurions, Devastator Squads (unless you're Imperial fists, in which case they're actually pretty good), Assault Squads and Whirlwinds. Everything else is passable, though I would avoid dreadnoughts, predators, honour guard and most of the HQs, and Vindicators unless your meta is full of Orks/foot hordes. That covers the ugly and the bad, now for the good.

7th edition marines pt. 2

Been a while since I wrote the first part of this series in the wash up of the bay area open. The NOVA open had a drop pod list quite highly placed (13th), so I thought I'd go back and write a bit about pod lists.

Fighting Angron

In my practice game yesterday I played against a CSM 30K list featuring Angron and 4 tactical squads. Each tactical squad has an apothecary - that's something unique to Heresy Era World Eaters. It's kind of cool in that it let's chaos play the way Games Workshop seems to think they should - as a horde of infantry running at the enemy lines. No tanks, no support planes, just bodies. The apothecaries mean all the tactical marines are 3+/5+FNP, which is pretty tough. Angron is a total beast. I7, STR9 on the charge, AP2, fleet, 6 attacks plus rage or something like that, eternal warrior, 5 wounds. His only weakness if that he's 3+/4++, so he needs some ablative wounds about the place.

Not so many lessons

I played a game this week but it was a bit uneventful. It was against a lovely guy who I've played about a half dozen times now and he's just really bad at playing the game. Amazing painter, very poor general. I suppose those things do tend to go together. His list has improved over the months and I even brought a fairly toned down list, but it was a slaughter.

Lessons from 1500 point Maelstrom games

This weekend it was raining so my usual Sunday afternoon tennis sessions were cancelled, which meant I could play twice as much Warhammer! So I had two games at 1500 point Maelstrom. The first was against Chaos Space Marines, where I won in a slaughterfest. The second was against Eldar, where I lost in a slaughterfest. The Eldar guy is probably the best player in our club, and he uses some unusual stuff (e.g. shadoweavers and vipers). I learnt some things

Lessons from 1500 vs. Astra Militarum

Got in a 1500 point Maelstrom game over the weekend against what I imagine is a fairy conventional Astra Militarum Army. I won fairly convincingly, but it may have been because my army is cheese and Astra Militarum is one of the weaker codexes. I also thought marines was not a great match up because you get armour saves against just about everything and his guardsman need 4s to hit and 6s to wound against bikes.

Anyway, on to the analysis:

Some more lessons - placing objectives

I spent more time thinking about why I lost my game on Sunday and I realised that a big issue was that I had not placed my objectives to suit my army and hamper his.

His Necron army had several foot units, one of which couldn't get back in its transport. If his barge moves its gun becomes a bit meh. His jetbikes are fast but they will die as soon as I shoot at them with anything that isn't scouts. That leaves his mini-barge, which is also a bit flimsy once I get around the front armour. Taking these factors into consideration, I need to put objectives out in the open. It will take his OS units ages to get there on foot and if he captures such objectives with other units they will expose their rear armour or flimsy bodies.

Lessons week 3

So we were up to 900 points last night but since the tournament is not so far away and the player's pack is now out, I managed to secure an opponent for a 1500 point Maelstrom game last night. My first time playing Maelstrom, and also my first time playing against Necrons. An interesting game. Very close - I lost by 2 points - but I can't quite figure out where I went wrong, other than some shocking rolling on turn 2.

What BAO means for marines pt1: bike armies

The next three posts will track my thoughts on some of the army lists that came out of the Bay Area Open, which wrapped over the weekend. It was the first big, fully competitive tournament to use 7th edition rules, including forge world and lords of war. All reports are that it was extremely well run and lots of fun. Check out the pics - some of the armies look amazing (I've peppered pictures throughout this post)!

http://www.frontlinegaming.org/2014/07/28/bao-results-rewards-and-some-pics/

The event was won by a White Scars army with a Knight. The other common Space Marine builds were drop pod Ultramarines and a Rhino rush White Scars army that came 4th. I'll analyse each of those lists and hopefully draw some interesting insights. Today, the winner's list.

Lessons from escalation: tactical squad spam works

Played another game last night, this time at 800 points against Space Marines. There were a lot of tactical marines in play in a Crusade mission with a bunch of objectives in the middle of the board. Lots of insights into the new dynamics of objective secured (OS) scoring and minimum sized unit (MSU) spam were to be had.

Lessons from the escalation league 700 points

I'm going to write a brief post each week after the escalation league on Sunday nights tracking what I learn as I prepare for the September tournament.

I played two games this weekend - one four-player 700 points each slaughterfest, and one 700 point game against an ork army. I was a bit disappointed not to get in a third game, but everyone wanted to play Infinity (I will probably start playing next time they begin a league).

The Crows WIP #1

Been meaning to write a few posts about the fluff of my army and how I paint it. This is the first one, starting somewhere in the middle of my fluff making adventures. (Note: fluff is a slang term for backstory, Warhammer cannon etc. Basically all the flavour of the game as opposed to the rules.)

I say starting in the middle because I don't actually like bikes fluff wise, and this post is all about the bikes in my space marine army. Because I don't like bikes, I had practically written them out of the fluff I made for my chapter. So by introducing my bikes before the fluff for the rest of my lads, I'm starting in the middle. I had to do something for bikes because they are the most powerful unit in the new space marines codex, so I had to play them. Now don't go thinking I'm a power gamer, I'm not. Most of the games I play are social and I play something pretty closely resembling a reasonable marines army, with lots of planes, paratrooper sternguard squads and all mechanised infantry. But occasionally (maybe 1 in 5 games) I do play more competitively, and Space Marines aren't (or weren't in 6th edition) competitive without bikes. But I don't like to play without fluff so I went and made some for the bikes.

Escalation League army lists

Hola. Haven't posted much recently because I've had exams, then post-exam vacations and then the club was cancelled because the Australasian philosophy society needed the room - there must be hundreds of rooms at the university! Why ours?

Anyway, so I haven't been playing much either, so my thinking hasn't progressed much. Also, the next tournament I'm playing is a social tournament at 1500 points. Apparently, 1500 might be common in 7th edition because games apparently take longer. I wouldn't know because I've only played a half dozen games in the new format and all but one of them was at 500 points in our escalation league.

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.

Some insights into competitive 6th edition

Let's have a quick glance at two of the most competitive Space Marine list to get an idea of what makes something competitive. Note that this is intended as a rough list. If you want to see actual lists just Google 'Tournament winning white scar army' or 'Super friends bike army' and you find them readily enough.

When life doesn't give you grav-guns > > > Black Scars!