In my third game I was up against a Evert-Jan's Nurgle Chaos Space Marine and Nurgle Daemon army.
His list (as far as I know)
Daemon prince with wings with poison 4+ instakill weapon
Great unclean one (6 wounds T6, 5+ inv save with possibility for FnP)
1 or 2 units of plague bearers (t5 poison 4+ and shrouded)
2x 2 obliterators, the 'dreadnought'
2 Nurgle marine squads (t5)
Heldrake (flyer with s6 ap3 flamethrower)
Expectation
I didn't know the instakill ability yet, so the Great unclean one looked like the worst thing on the table (at least before the heldrake would arrive). A lot of T5 on the table and 2 very creepy big ones. Not much long range shooting though, so it would be a challenge, but not impossible.
Game on
I again got first turn. I have to say I've been lucky with getting first turn.
First it has to be said that we laughed a lot about our deployment (and so did the guys next to us). Since both armies are best in close quarters, we deployed the objectives in a 4x4 range instead of using the 6 foot wide table. We basically ignored 2x4 feet of the table :)
Having learnt from game 1 and 2 I deployed the Trygon. Now I had to pick a target which would need to be First Blood. The Great unclean one had 6! wounds on T6 and a 5+ inv save and the daemon prince had t6 4 wounds, but a 3+ save. Even with 24 re-roll to hit shots s6 I probably wouldn't be able to kill any of the marine squads so I went for the Great Unclean one. Both Tyrants blazed and killed it outright. Pfew...
The Daemon prince (just left of the right Flying tyrant was unharmed still).
The Great Unclean one got send back to the warp before it got a chance to do anything but look evil.
Evert-Jan is giving off a dark look. Not sure why the Inquisition is letting him get away with wearing their shirt...maybe they were in on it? Whatever, rotting food is food too.
Sadly I didn't get around to taking more photo's...it was too tense of a battle I guess.
The Doom arrived in T2 and killed a bunch of marines and got stuck in a squad of marines before it (t3 or 4) got instakilled.
In the meanwhile
The Daemon prince turned out to be a real nasty beast. When the flying tyrant was grounded, it charged (took a wound from overwatch) and instagibbed my Tyrant. With Initiative 8 and poison 4+ instakill attacks, this was no challenge. I wtf'd. This beast has to die, and quick!
In the meanwhile, my Gargoyles moved up leaving room for the Trygon (left flank) to assault the obliterators which were coming close. I charged, managed to hit and wound all 7 normal attacks.
EJ claimed they were ap3 attacks instead of ap2 as I've always thought..since we didn't find anything about it after 5 minutes of paging through the book I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Looked like I had to declare Smash attacks (halving the number, doubling the strenght), which I didn't. They made all saves and hurt my Trygon (which was already down to 3 wounds out of 6). After that, the Daemon prince came in and killed it instantly, just like it had with the Tyrant. I checked back later...I díd have ap2 attacks (check the entry for Smash).
I'm not mad about it, it's just a game and these things happen, but it wóuld have greatly influenced the game.
Daemon prince
Somewhere either before or after it charged the Trygon, I Vector striked the daemon prince with the remaining tyrant which took it down to 1 wound. It was now on the move to kill off the rest of my army and it wouldn't have a problem doing so. It hád to die.
Plan A: shoot the hive guards (4 shots s8 ap4) missed, no wounds or saved. Plan B: Zoanthropes: 1 wound, cover saved. Plan C Psychic Shriek with a tervigon: dénied. Shit...out of options...this is going all wrong.
Wait...maybe..just máybe...Plan D. There were just some gargoyles left after the Heldrake burnt most of them. How many times haven't I lost my tyrant to lasgun fire... ok. Here goed. I roll 1 hit (s4 ap5), wound on a 6...and......................He fails!!!! Wow, my beast of the match, instantly.
Obliterators
The obliterators (which should've died earlier..) moved up though and the Heldrake refused to go down too (darn daemon saves) and burned gargoyles and gants at leasure. The obliterators killed off some gaunts and managed to contest one of my objectives. The other one I kept.
I tried hard in his deployment zone. The Flying tyrant vector striked and shot and whatnot..but eventually it was just out of reach to contest one objective and the shrouded plaguebearers shrugged off my 12 shots.
I tried to contest the other objective by running up a squad of gants, but too little, too late.
ResultEJ had 2 objectives and contested a 3rd.
I had the final one.
I had first blood and line breaker. He had slay the warlord and linebreaker.
I had 3 killpoints (great unclean one, daemon prince and a 'dreadnought')
He had 1 Tyrant, 1 trygon, the doom and its pod, 1 tervigon and 1 or 2 squads of gants.
Captain hindsight
A véry very close call. I lost, but had a great match againts a cool opponent. It sucked that the Trygon died before it could do anymore damage...in hindsight it would've killed the obliterators, which might have made the difference. I also should have tried running the tyrant as close as possible to the objective held by the plague bearers to contest it and the gants running up should've tried assaulting..but that would have been a hit-or-miss too.
My 'man' of the match: the Gargoyle who was a last minute plan D to take out the Daemon prince..and did.
His 'man' of the match was that Daemon prince which instagibbed my tyrant, my trygon and attention whored across the board.
Labels: 40k, tyranid