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Hi – need some help with a proposed Mission & Deployment to kick off a campaign. Does this mission (discussed below) sound feasible? Balanced? Interesting? Im also interested in the suggested mechanics for destroying ruins.

The basics of the campaign are mostly cityfight (we are using the GW vogen map) – with eldar & chaos assaulting an IG city to hunt for 5 pieces of an artefact (gotta catchem all!). The Artefacts are 5 spheres with trapped Chaos daemons in them. CSm want to release them, Eldars want to keep them trapped. Poor old IG simply dug them up by accident!

Taking a bit of imagery from the Gaunts Ghosts novel “necropolis” – I thought a good starting mission would be a ‘Penetrate’ mission – the invading force needs to attack the city walls, and destroy a key building to gain entrance (and get the first territory).

Now I want this mission to be achievable (if the players constantly stay outside the walls, its not much of a campaign!), but I also want it to be challenging. Ive considered a set up as shown below, with the city walls being considered ‘ruins’ (prelim bombardments has weakened the walls), and very limited scenery set up outside of this.



The high ground building is the one that needs to be destroyed – success and the attacker wins and gains the first territory inside the city.

Defender (almost always IG) deploys first, but the attacker goes first.

So far as destroying the ruin, I was going to class this as a ‘stationary vehicle’ AV12 all round. To destroy it, the attacker must first get a ‘vehicle destroyed’ or ‘vehicle explodes’ result to bring it to ‘dangerous ruin’, then a ‘vehicle destroyed’ or ‘vehicle explodes’ result to remove it from play (and win).

Does this sound like a reasonable mechanic? I think it borrows from the city fight and the 5thed approach.

Criticisms and comments are welcome. This campaign is supposed to be both balanced, but with a little narrative as well, and the IG are under pressure and under resourced (the players share the role of playing the IG - who at least at the start, are very likely to lose).

Ive also got rules for 'special effects' caused on the battle field by the chaos spheres - I'll probably post these later .

Uh.... so I bring two squads of lascannons and win?

Any objective that is "Destroy this AV x structure" is VERY easy, not challenging at all. Just shoot it, and it goes down unless you are unlucky.

A better approach, if you want a challenge, is just to declare that it's too strong to be destroyed with conventional ranged weapons. It needs to be brought down with titan-class weapons. But the attackers don't have any! Instead, they must use special demolition charges. Every infantry model in the army is armed with one, and only one needs to activate. Basically some infantry unit needs to assault the building, then spend their ENTIRE next turn there next to it. If they do that, they win. Just make sure the building sits at the edge of the IG deployment zone, so they can't just deploy a line in front of it and prevent anyone getting to it without moving there after the game starts.

Well those points were exactly the issues I was concerned about! I do like those suggested rules - tough, but not impossible. Also has the advantage of bringing the action to a single location.

I'll swing it past the other player, and get comments, but thanks for the feedback.

Any other comments welcome too!

Yeah, your idea gave me flashbacks to 3rd edition, where two missions "Bunker Assault" and "Sabotage" were common. Bunker Assault gave bonus VPs to the enemy for destroying or capturing bunkers - they always chose to destroy them. It was so bad, the defender would only choose 1, as more became a liability. The more you had the more likely you were to lose. 4th edition made the bunkers tougher and the troops safer, but it still gave VPs for destroying them, and it was still easy.

Sabotage was like I said, but the objective was in the center of the board and it used tricky sneaking rules with sentries and such. Led to a very boring first few turns.

In 4th I made a campaign with missions similar to this, but I gave the Defender the option to "buy" extra force fields for the objective. You'd have to cost them yourself. I also had another mission where the Defender could have up to 5 or as few as 1 of the objectives, but the more he had, the lower armor they were. Obviously just divide whatever VP equivalent the building is worth by how many buildings there are. Just a couple of ideas.

I think the base idea is good but the walls need strengthening AV 14, maybe you could work both the forcefield idea (it could have rules similar to 4th ed. IG codex for Yarricks force field, reduce strength of hit by D3) and Spellbound's demo charge idea. Both would cost extra points in proportion to what your playing...

Thanks folks - good ideas/suggestions. We will be using cityfight missions on top of this, and I recall there is a mission "total devasation" that requires the attacker to flatten a specific (secret) building. Now that mission may require 'easier' to destroy buildings, as the attacker will likely try to destroy most of them! I did like my rules for that mission, and thought that I should try to keep rules consistent...

How does this sound (working off Green Skin Fryer's idea) - stick with the rules as originally stated - that is AV12, two hits to bring it down. But for this 'penetration mission', the attacker first needs to bring down the 'shield generator' - located the largest building, and only susceptable to assaults/demo charges. that means the attacker must get in close and dirty to take out the shield (requiring the touching of the sheild for a whole turn), then the wall is 'easy' to take down by massed lascannon/earthshaker fire?

Or is this too complicated?

Hardly. Sounds good. Will all sides know the mission beforehand? That might lead to something incredibly precision-tuned for it.

Yes, all sides know the mission before hand - although the penetration mission is played once (unless youre beaten off the map, then you need to start again!) so I figured a purpose built army is what you would see.

I think (with the agreement of the players) we will go with the last option, and I'm going to use my Power Generator Strategem marker (that I completed last night) as the shield generator.



Thanks for your help, and further suggestions are still appreciated!

G’day dakka-ites

Thanks for the feedback on this one, played the mission the first time on the weekend and it worked a treat.

2000pts battle.

The set up was the same as disccused above, we had a shield generator in the central building, in the defenders deployment zone. The shield made all the buildings invulnerable, until it was shut down, which required any kind of infantry unit to touch it and keep touching it for a whole turn. Once it was down, the walls were AV 12, and you needed a 5 ‘tank destroyed’ or 6 ‘exploded’ result on the vehicle damage to reduce it to a dangerous ruin, and then another AV 12 hit with a second 5 or 6 to destroy the building entirely.

Victory for attacker occurred if they destroyed the central building. All other results were a loss for the attacker.

Defender got to deploy entirely in cover.
Attacker got the ‘without number rule’ on all troops choices (dedicated transports were treated as individual troop selections after initial deployment), picked the time of battle (day, night, or which turn it turns dark or daylight) and had first turn.

This was a lot of benefits for the attacker, but this game was designed to be a narrative style ‘desperate last defence’.

Both sides had special objectives (giving a bonus to the next game if successful):
- The defender needed to ensure the central ‘victory’ building stood for at least 3 turns.
- The attacker needed to remove at least three buildings.

As it played out, none of these benefits proved excessive, and the buildings proved tough to take down – the shield meant that the attacker needed to bring the battle to the front of the board, and needing two 5+ rolls on the damage chart (so a penetration is a must except for AP1 weapons).

Next time I’ll look at recording it better for a battle report, but I managed to get the shield down in the 3rd turn – with a single zerker model - very very cool moment, and destroy the building on the 4th with some previously ignored havocs.

If anyone else trys this, Id be interested in hearing your experience!

Thanks for your contributions guys!

I had to post this - this is the decisive moment in the Penetrate mission game, where the sole remaining Khorne Zerker (from the first wave) survived a powerweapon assault (1 hit, not enough to get through the toughness) and stayed through at the end of the third turn to shut down the shield, setting up the havocs in the background for a double pop of lucky lascannon rolls, bringing down the walls.

Very satisfying.

For a fluffy story w/ CSM and IG, it seems to behave very well...

But what if the attacker's a Tau army without any Kroot (I mean, a shooting-based Cadre)?!?

How do they survive a turn in CC with any other army??? (Not that I care uh...)

Still, very nice mixing of ideas....

Thanks for the comments Yggdrasil (although Im not sure if this constitutes thread necromancy) - I have encountered this very problem as the other player (ELDAR) is seriously struggling to get through the wall. He has had one abysmal attempt and one very close go, and this guy is a good player (better than me at least).

I did run the mission past him before hand, and he was enthusiastic, but if he fails again, I will sit down and discuss a more 'eldar' way of attacking an IG city (Eldar not know for dashing themselves against the walls of the enemy).

Looking at his lists critically - I would take more troops - in this mission the attacker has recycling troops (including dedicated transports), and he hasnt capitalised on this. Eldar are very quick, so I would send troops in waves, with enough dooms and fortunes to keep them in the fight! If we create an eldar specific mission, I'll post that too.

Ah ok if he can make his squads of Dire Avengers in Wave Serpent come back endlessly, maybe even an Eldar stands a chance lol ...

Still, I agree it's not an Eldar-ish way of conquering cities... Maybe allowing a large part of his army to first turn - Deep Strike could help him (fluff is: an elite detachment storms the city through the Webway while the rest waits for the shield to have been put down), with something quite like the Chaos Daemon deployment rules, could do the trick!

(Anyway, I may have done thread necromancy, but I'm the one to blame uh...)

Very very very nice camapign mission but what if the defenders were somehow orks, the other armys wouldnt stand a chance but i love how you have changed the rules as you go very good.

Interesting point Lukeslayerh3 - it really plays to an IG defense vs assault army attack position (Orks, Chaos, Tyranids) etc.

If it were ork defenders, you might change the conditions of victory for the attackers - ie wiping out at least half the troops, or making it an assasination mission - kill the HQ and the defense of the wall falters.