7th Edition – first battle

No camera since I was focused on learning the rule changes.

Recently I got together with the guys and we tried out the new 7^th edition rules – well something like them, we were really just trying to get to grips with it all and I know we made mistakes – and in this battle we decided to ignore the normal ally rules and both of us went unbound just to see what happened.

My army was as much as possible models I could field from the night lords list without too much proxying. A librarian turned up accompanied by the terminators in to order to allow me to test psychic powers, the jet bikes turned up as a standard fast attack unit with a mulit-melta for some tank busting.

I took one contemptor since I still have to not gotten my arse in gear and sorted out the second one. I also brought 10 tactical marines in a rhino since I thought mobility would be useful (we decided we would try one of the new maelstrom of war missions) and I also had a unit of 20 tactical marines on foot since I was running out of options. I did proxy in a fire raptor using a vendetta model, I am aiming to add a fire raptor to the army soon and wanted to see how it handled.

I also persuaded Knight commander Pask in a leman russ punisher and another punisher to accompany the force since I had run out of night lords and wanted some more firepower.

My opponent brought dark elder and demons – this could have been savage but he did tone things down with only one flying monster (a lord of change) and no venoms – we both had kind of soft lists.

The battle itself was strange, as I say we made lots of mistakes but I absolutely demolished huge swathes of his army despite the demons trying to exploit the maelific powers to get lots of summoning of pink horrors in trying to cascade the nastiness. A prime example of the brutality was when on turn 2 the squadron of punishers finished obliterating a unit of 19 pink horrors and herald, they did not even get round to firing the heavy bolters, the punisher gatling cannons (especially with Pasks BS 4) did more than enough damage.

The fire raptor stayed out of the battle until turn 4 but when it arrived the effectiveness of its fire power was so savage at least one of my gaming group has declared it ‘broken’. It did exploit power of the machine spirit and the reaper batteries independent targeting to allow it to butcher 4 dark elder vehicles on the turn it arrived but I suspect that opinions of its fire power were slightly overstated by the fact that I could not help rolling 6’s on the vehicle damage tables when I got pen’s resulting in half the dark elder being immolated in their exploding vehicles.

At the end of the battle we ran out of time closing turn 5, I was behind on victory points due to not getting anything I could score in the first turn and my opponent getting one objective awarding multiple VP’s but my opponent only had 1 bloodletter and 18 pink horrors plus 3 witches, most of that was locked in combat with the last surviving jet biker but aside from that I had lost one leman russ and the contemptor, everything else was more or less intact and I felt I was either positioned to table my opponent or to be able to sweep out and grab multiple objectives in the following turn (I already had first blood and slay the warlord and was going to get linebreaker).

As I say I know we got things wrong due to misinterpretations of the rules but overall it was a good game and very interesting, I think I had a slight edge in the dice rolling but nothing unbalancing. I think we should have arranged it for a day when we would have had more time and not had to rush towards the end in a desperate attempt to get the game close to completion.

The maelstrom of war missions really do change things up enforcing a need for a mobile force, I do not like the fact that it is almost impossible to plan ahead since you often do not know what your objectives are until the start of your turn. It accurately represents the flux of combat but it removes some of the tactical planning of the game, you cannot do a refused flank for example in case the strategic objectives you draw all end up on the flank you refused.

It does reduce the effectiveness of gun line armies, I do not think an exclusively gun line army is viable in the maelstrom missions unless you somehow think you can table your opponent but I think have a balanced army with static elements emplaced while other mobile elements are trying to grab objectives does work. I am certain that I will always be playing bound armies just for the secured objective rule on the infantry.

7^th edition has had an additional effect in that it has killed my intention to use the terror assault rite of war, night fighting is something of a joke now in my opinion simply giving stealth across the board and with the requirement for mobility in maelstrom missions I felt the terror squads were simply too expensive and the rite had lost most of its effectiveness.

This has caused me to change up my planned army list massively, I will still be having the praetor on jetbike with command squad, I will still have the two contemptor mortis dreadnoughts and I will be having a fire raptor and the main reason for that is that I own all of the models or I have them on route having placed the order. Aside from them though the terror squads are gone and in their place I am going to be running a couple of 10 man assault squads pretty tooled up since they count as bulky meaning they can really take advantage of the night lord special rules and they have the mobility to objective grab. A 10 man tactical squad in rhino is also planned – making the most of troops for objective secured seems sensible and I love fury of the legion on these guys. Finally I am now planning for a 4 bike unit of outriders a couple of which will have twin linked flamers, I like the idea of these guys since they have scout they can get a head start towards isolated objectives and from what we have seen recently flamers are hilarious against open topped vehicles like the dark eldar’s due to the no escape rule and the flamers also give them the wall of death rule to make people less willing to charge them – at least that’s the theory.