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The bonesinger moved his hands slowly over the wraithbone, gently coaxing the psychoactive plastic into a gentle curve. Soft humming filled the air - the gentle whisper of souls long dead, imprisoned within a matrix in a kind of half life. The eldar of the Ve'eliyth Craftworld had long ago chosen an eternal prison over the torment and oblivion from She Who Thirsts.

The work of the bonesinger was almost complete. It was a magnificent throne fashioned for a creature much larger than any eldar who even lived. It was a throne fit for the very Avatar of Khaine. A single moment was all that remained. In this moment the wraithbone erupted in a riot of madness. Spikes and blades formed covering the throne. Ruining it. The bonesinger uttered a curse and eldritch energy coursed through his body before being released in a massive blast. The throne was wrecked.

The tones of the whispering souls changed from a melancholy resignation to one of fear.

"I need more materials."

The creature who was once known as the bonesinger Fery'l al Ve'elith sent out a thought to summon his two closest allies as well as the minions whose service his had coerced over the long centuries. The Triumvirate was about to go to war.


Army Lists

The Triumvirate

Fatty Boccis - Great Unclean One
12 Plaguebearers (Icon)
12 Plaguebearers (Icon)
5 Horrors (Bolt, Changeling)
5 Horrors (Bolt)
3 Flamers (bolt)
3 Flamers (bolt)
6 Fiends (Unholy Might)
5 Screamers (Unholy Might)
The Brain - Tzeentch Prince (Bolt, Gaze)
The Eye - Tzeentch Prince (Bolt, Gaze)
Birdbrain - Tzeentch Prince (Bolt, Gaze)

Shep's Mech Eldar
2 Autarchs with Fusion Guns
4x5 Dire Avengers in Wave Serpents (Scatter Laser, Shuriken Cannon, Spirit Stones)
2x5 Fire Dragons with a Heavy Flamer and Crack Shot in Wave Serpents (Scatter Laser, Shuriken Cannon, Spirit Stones)
3x Fire Prisms

Setup and early game
The terrain was pretty nondescript, there was a big building just west of center of table on the south side and another about half way between center of table and east table edge. Almost straight north of that near the north table edge is another building. There are also various craters and such.

We rolled up a spearhead annihilation mission. I won the roll and chose to have Shep go first. He deployed his vehicles and for his move covered up pretty fair amount of space on his side of the table as well as gave everything a cover save.

I set up my first wave to include 1 unit of plaguebearers, both units of horrors, two tzeentch princes and a flamer unit. I got a 2 for roll. D'oh! Guess I was due, though - I have had a pretty good run.

I form a sort of semi-circle with my units, the plaguebearers on the northwest and they scatter 8" into a crater but I make the necessary dangerous terrain checks. The fiends appear just south of them, also drifting into difficult terrain but again are unwounded. I place The Eye in the building closest to center of table but he drifts 11" directly away. Fatty appears center of the table and gets a hit putting a wave serpent in range of breath of chaos. Only I hadn't bought it. D'oh! The screamers end up in front of the building on my east and I drop the flamers into the building in his deployment zone to try and get a rear armor shot on one of the vehicles which I do but they don't really do anything.

My shooting is utterly worthless and everything that can run, does so to avoid the pie plates.

The vehicles start to shift a bit to the east. Shooting wipes out the flamers and the screamers and puts a three wounds on the fiends killing one and leaving one floater. Time for reinforcements to show up. And show up they did...

...in the form of a single unit of flamers and some horrors. Hmm... still no daemon princes. Oh well, at least the massive eldar shift resulted in me being able to drop a couple of flamer templates that can hit two skimmers. The plaguebearers continue to fan out to provide cover for the horrors (who came in off of icons) and advance towards the vehicles. I reason that if I manage to make a large enough footprint he won't be able to just zoom over me out of harms way and 20 plaguebearers is still a decent number of attacks on rear armor. They do leave a small gap for the fiends to rush through, which they do towards the two fire prisms just west of the center of table (every other skimmer was east of it and further on.) I was able to get a dual charge on one of the skimmers after the run from the fiends and a high difficult terrain roll from the plaguebearers. The flamers managed to shake and immobilize one skimmer and stun the other, but spirit stones enabled it to move. The great unclean one continued his (very) slow and purposeful advance on the skimmers. Now that one was immobilized, he might actually catch it... The daemon prince continues to try and get into range.

Mid-game to end game

The horrors missed with their own bolts (in fact, out of 6 shots total with them I only got one hit and that failed to do anything so I won't really be mentioning them until later.) The fiends disappoint on the charge but the plaguebearers make up for it by shaking one of the fire prisms. Everything shifts further to the east and a lot of shooting wipes out the flamers and a couple more of the fiends. At this point I am down 0-3 kill points (2x flamers, screamers.) The game is moving on with potentially only a couple of turns left, I really need my fireplatforms to show up.

And they do. I put both on the east side of the table but not too close in case of a bad scatter. Both are fine, the Brain getting a hit and ending up as my eastern most unit. The fiends move through the building and line up a charge on wave serpent which is ultimately also ineffectual. Curses! Shep didn't like these guys to begin with and I really wanted them to have a banner game. I do manage to destroy one of the fire prisms, though.

Combined shooting shakes a couple of vehicles and fatty gets a decent run roll, so next turn he will be able to charge the floating wave serpent. Although I am clearly losing at this point, I feel pretty decent about my positioning. The vehicles are about out of running room (the joy of not playing on an infinite table) and my staggered, spread out placement has helped me to corral them. Eldar shooting is pretty light due to the massive exodus but it is still enough to knock the brain down to his last wound.

My shooting lets me pop a wave serpent with exarch and fire dragons and I force Shep to actually pull infantry models out of the case. The exarch hops into the wave serpent right next door leaving the fire dragons on their own. Fatty charges the immobilized wave serpent and destroys it but the dire avengers disembark safely and are not pinned. Shep cleverly maneuvers a different wave serpent such that I can't get a charge on dire avengers. I really wanted to get a double charge on them and the vehicle with the fiends, I felt pretty certain that they would wipe out the avengers, but it simply isn't possible. Instead they charge the wave serpent and destroy it with a spectacular explosion that kills both of them(!) for no net kill point change. Hmmm... at least there are more soft targets on the table now. The remaining princes put all their firepower into the fire dragons but the go to ground, saving one. If the games ends, Shep wins. It doesn't and we continue. Shep has about half of his units that can shoot thanks to maneuver and they all light up the Brain. His calculations allow him to sidestep many of the shots, but he only had to fail once to be removed and he was. It took a bit more firepower than Shep wanted to use, though. The dire avengers tried to run to get away from big Fatty, but apparently they were still shaken from the destruction of their transport cause both units combined only rolled a 3 (a 1 and a 2).

He fired at the horrors and killed only one thanks to their extreme range. The princes both focused their fire on the remaining fire dragon and finally killed him despite how well dug in he apparently was (he made 5 out of 6 cover saves - but he only had to fail one to give up the KP.) Fatty charged into one unit of dire avengers (since it is impossible to dual charge with a single model) and wiped them out.

The game finally ended with the Daemons having lost 5 kill points (the Brain, screamers, 2x flamers, the fiends) but getting 7 in return (3 wave serpents, 1 unit of fire dragons, 1 unit of dire avengers and 2 fire prisms).

After action review
Whew, what a game! I love playing against Shep, it is guaranteed to be laid back and enjoyable whilst being highly competitive in return. I was a bit worried when I didn't get my preferred wave, but I am not quite so "all or nothing" in my play style as I used to be. Also, as I learned in my game against StJohn70, if I don't panic and stick to my plan, things will go much better. So I basically settled down, realized I had at least 4 more turns to play and possibly 6 and developed my strategy accordingly. The rolls were largely unremarkable. A couple of good rolls and a couple of bad rolls for both of us. Pretty much everything worked like I expected it to - though I wanted a bit more from the fiends, but they were always hitting on 6s (until the turn when they blew themselves up) so I couldn't be too disappointed.

The list is also a bit lighter on close combat than I typically like (I know, I know, four monstrous creatures should be enough for anyone) and after the game, as we usually do, we talked about how the game went - what worked, what didn't and what we wished that we would have had at some point during the game.

I decided I wanted to find a way to get some bloodcrushers in (yeah, I have an addiction) so I made a few changes to see that happen - combining the two units of flamers into one slightly larger squad, taking out a couple of plaguebearers, dropping a fiend and the upgrade. Also, the two units of horrors were underwhelming, but I think that a single unit is still very worthwhile so I dropped one and bumped the other up to 6 strong with bolt and the changeling (one day its power will actually work on something...)

We also came up with a couple of ideas for Shep's mech eldar, but I will let him go into those if he wants.

Eternal Praise
The Brain. His master plan worked and he made some clutch armor saves. The fact that he didn't survive the turn was irrelevant when compared with the amount of firepower he sucked up when it mattered. Besides, it is fun to say "according to my calculations..." every time I do something with him. Just as an aside, I would love to be able to give We Are Legion to these guys. Also, to that last lonely horror, way to stay alive, little guy!

Eternal Damnation
To me for not ponying up the points to give Fatty a breath weapon! Every single turn from turn 1 through turn 7 he could have had a shot with that thing! From now on, if you were to look in my Daemon Codex you would see the cost scratched out from them with 190 scribbled in its place in crayon and breath of chaos written under daemonic gifts...


The Brain returned to realspace. That last shot had been too close and so he had determined that a quick retreat was better than banishment. He looked around the battlefield. The Eldar had retreated before their losses were too heavy. Tiny nurglings held a struggling Dire Avenger on the ground as Boccis popped another of their number into the warriors mouth. He choked and began to vomit and the Brain turned away to look at the rest of the field.

The Brain was pleased to see that the Fiends of Slaanesh had been banished back to the warp. This meant that the spiritstones were likely undamaged on the fallen Eldar. With a thought he urged the shifting pink horrors to collect them for him. He would take them with him back to his domain in a forgotten part of the webway. He felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of separating them from their home craftworld, but had seen the future. Their craftworld, like his own had been, was doomed. He would add their spirits to the matrix he had taken from Ve'eliyth in those final days.

Most importantly, at least at this moment, he had aquired much new wraithbone from the skimmer tanks and his work could continue.

I've got a lot to say about this batrep. I'll want to edit this reply and add more thoughts later...

First off. Somnicide has been dedicated to making demons work well, I've been putting a lot of time into helping that effort. He did well in Vegas, as did demons in general, but we're already working on improvement. One of the ways people tend to write demon armies off, is by talking about how hopeless playing against mechanized is. So that's why we set this game up. I've made changes to my list since this game, but as you can see. Its all armor 12 its all fast, its all strength 6, and it is what some might call a demon armies "worst nightmare"

Somnicide threw some terminology into the batrep that I want to focus on. 'Coralling' and 'running room'. These are essential concepts when fighting against a fast mechanized army.

My deployment was far forward in the zone, and my turn 1 was a flat out move with every vehicle. After my turn 1 was completed, I had no more than a 5" diameter bubble in between each of my vehicles, and I took up almost my entire table half, there were some mildly safe landing spots on my half near the table edges, but ultimately, I had blocked over 50% of the table from "safe" landings. Upon arrival, I took no immobilized or stunned results, and so was able to collapse back, everything that wasn't already close to the table edge went a full 12" backwards, and everything went more than 6" away from the demon landing zone. With the diminished firepower I took out 2 of 3 flamers and 5 of 5 screamers. On his second turn, somnicide pushed in towards my vehicles, but not in a linear way. If you've ever played football, you know what a pursuit angle is. When you are running to tackle a kick returner, you don't run at him, you run at the hypotenuse of where you are, and where he is going to be. All the while, the plaguebearers were spreading out longways and tallways, like a net.

On my next turn, I had some room to run, I knew that another set of reserves were coming in, and i did NOT want them to be able to land an the other side of my flank. If that happens, then the only running room you have is forward, due to the tables orientation, 'forward' means more charges from more models, and less protection from rear charges. So I ran, I took everything that was in the middle of my long board edge, and moved it as best as i could to the left hand side of my long board edge. I did not completely abandon my shooting. I shot with fire prisms, who would not be able to move flat out and land without taking the uber-dangerous 'flat-out dangerous terrain test'. So my fire prisms traded their shots for the demons getting a chance to hit them on 6's. My risk/reward matrix was well laid out. I got crew shaken, and was able to continue as planned. On his turn he was able to charge and land with more 'net' units, fanning out to block the leapfrog.

This was my big scoring turn, I made more risk/reward choices. I was able to shoot semi-effectively here, but didn't kill anything off apart from another flamer unit. Worthwhile softening up happened, which would almost save me later. The entire formation moved along the short table edge, to outrange the plaguebearers. On his turn he diligently moved his horrors and plaguebearers forward. An inexperienced or impatient player would have looked at the distance from his plaguebearers and my vehicles and just written them off, not really seeing the big picture.

I'm up comfortably on the scoreboard, but now I'm facing the "running room" and "coralling" situation. Thanks to the finite amount of space on a table, I'm now looking at 3 demon princes, exerting a 12" bubble of influence. They are spaced in such a way, that there isn't a safe 'lateral' move to make, that doesn't either take me back towards the horrors and the plaguebearers, or into charge range of more than 1 demon prince. My other option is to go "over" the closer DPs and spin around to face my front armor at their strength 8 shots. But thanks to sound play on the part of my opponent, that move places my vehicles into the range of the plaguebearers. So, I really adjust my risk matrix into, full shoot mode. I take out a prince, and 4/5 horrors, and then in response to that, I lose tons of mobility to enemy attacks. Now my kill point pad has spilled wide open. I have a lead still, but both my mobility and my survivability has been compromised.

I have played well enough to win if the game ends, but it doesn't. the rest should make sense in reading his report.

I apologize for going into so much detail here about a batrep thats already been described, but I think there are a lot of people looking at demons as a potential new army, and I want them to have the confidence to go out there and start collecting. You'll have to play well, and you'll have to think about the 'game' and not about the 'units' (Don't miss the forest for the trees) the perspective from the opponent might give demon players a bit more insight, and I wanted to make sure people knew why i didn't just "fly away from them" which seems to be the theory-hammer counter to the demon army. They started close (deep strike) and the table edge was the rock to their hard place. Don't discount the table edges when doing any armchair theory.

Looking forward to the rematch Somnicide!

great batrep guys, good to see someone using daemons against mech without crying about the match before it's even begun. I have a little contributing to do on this topic.

I know people won't stop talking about Soul Grinders, and I agree that they're overused (kudos for triple shooty princes btw), but I've never stopped relying on 4 S10 attacks fleeting across the board, and hitting a reasonably sized tank with phlegm sits in the 60% area. Plus the Grinders do wonders for corraling, the topic Shep was referring to, as they take up so much space physical space, making it hard for skimmers to hop over or go around. They do that job even better against ground tanks, as unlike your infantry they cannot be tank shocked out of the way. Grinders also create a (rather small) vulnerability to anti-tank fire (which normally gets used to put wounds singularly on GDs), but they've become as big a mainstay in my army as my bloodcrushers. There's more praise on these forums for grinders than there needs to be, so I'll move on.

The screamers. Good to see them hitting the field, an underutilized unit imho. It's a shame to see them get waxed so quickly, but I don't blame them. And yes, they only hit on 6s, but you'll never get away from them and they'll take you out if they hit. Screamers and Bloodthirsters are your best tools against the "dreaded" AV14, but I usually find their point to output ratio to be abysmal (for obvious reasons. transport capacity, AV14, machine spirit, etc.), so if you clear off their scoring units (a forte of the daemons), and you're laughing (much the same way I deal with pesky monoliths. terrifying, sure. but they're not so bad once they phase out with everything else.) Clearly not a catch-all solution to the problem, but it's something I keep in the back of my mind in those matches. "how much of a threat are these tanks, when it comes down to it?" As for the fiends, It's a shame they underperformed. When the dice go down properly they're one of our better tank killers, esp anything with rear AV11 (rending makes your 6s auto-pens for fiends).

I assume you didn't know you were playing annihilation beforehand, as the 2 suicide flamers, the screamers (essentially a suicide squad no matter what size you make them, sadly) and the min. pink horror squads put you at a large disadvantage for KP right off the bat. Combined with the KP-denial of mech lists, you did admirably considering. If this had been objective based, I frankly see Shep being the one at a disadvantage. But then I personally always have a hard time with KP missions for daemons.

Great batrep. Lots of good info on both sides.

Shep: 9 grav tanks at 1750. Jesus. Is this your normal list or did you tool it for this game? How well does such an army deal with MEQ spam?

I am a big fan of Soulgrinders (I have 2) - I had actually planned on just taking my motorcycle over there and the grinders are a bit of a pain to transport, whereas I was able to fit that entire army into a sabol platoon.

I am going to give the screamers some time to work - I think that they have great potential it will just take a bit of time.

Typically on games day's at Shep's people just show up with whatever list they want to play and then pick up games and generate mission straight out of the book. We also do schedule games occasionally ahead of time (particularly story driven narrative campaigns) but it is cool to just show up and see what you end up playing against.

There are about 5 regulars and between us we have: daemons, eldar, IG, orks, SM, Dark Angels, Black Templars, tyranids, CSM and tau so most of us will typically bring all comers lists.

Good batrep and great analysis ,this whole idea is also very helpful with Nids and Orks or such foot infuntry based army ,thx.

MarvinGayeIsMyDaddy wrote:Great batrep. Lots of good info on both sides.

Shep: 9 grav tanks at 1750. Jesus. Is this your normal list or did you tool it for this game? How well does such an army deal with MEQ spam?

That was a candidate for my normal list. I came to the conclusion that I'd rather have 8 tanks and more substantial passengers. Ultimately 9 grav tanks is far too light in the firepower department. As it should be.

The new list has a pair of maxed out dire avengers with bladestorm exarchs, and one 6 man dire avenger unit (or a 5 man unit and 2 scorpion chainswords for my autarchs), at a cost of a wave serpent. They've already had a clutch game against a biker nob/stormboy match that would have been rough going without high volume infantry kill.

spending 240 points on 4x5 man units that I had no intention of disembarking with was just not points efficient.