Grey Knights 1
I advance 2 purifiers up 12" and disembark, forming a rhino wall to protect my purifiers from Celestine's assault. Vendreads advance as well.
Here, 1 unit moves 12" and the other only 6". Crowe moves up as well, but because of poor difficult terrain roll, does not make it into any transport.
Dreads wreck an exorcist and immobilize/weapon destroy one of the battle sister rhinos despite cover.
The fun doesn't just stop there. Psycannons disable both dominion rhinos.
My opponent is shocked by the carnage. He was hoping to stop me dead in my tracks, but I have just turned the tables on him.
Sisters of Battle 1
Exorcist moves to get a better shooting angle. My opponent makes a mistake in deploying his exorcist here, as I use the center terrain to block
LOS to most of my army.
Dominions get ready for some payback. Celestine advances.
My goodness! Retributors take off one of my dread's arm with their heavy bolters.
I believe both dominions fail to twin-link their shots. They only manage to take out 2 purifiers with their shooting.
That is all the offense my opponent can muster.
Grey Knights 2
My rhinos move out of the way. Purifiers advance to take care of the dominions, as does my vendread.
My goal here is to try to assault them but prevent Celestine from counter-assaulting. And if she does, then I will lock her up with my vendread.
Purifiers and Crowe get back into the rhinos and they huff it towards the sisters objective.
Shooting takes down 3 dominions from the left squad and 1 from the right.
I also take down 1 retributor.
Then it's onto assault. Right squad fails their difficult terrain test to make it into combat (I believe they rolled 1's and 2's).
Cleansing Flame and force weapons wipe out the left dominions. I consolidate back and hopefully out of Celestine's threat range.
Sisters of Battle 2
Seraphims come in. Again, they land spot-on.
Celestine cannot fit between the 2 rhinos to go after my purifiers so she moves here instead. Dominions advance, going after my vendread. Ha. Let the try. He's going to find out soon enough how annoying being venerable (and holol-fields) is.
Doh!!! Obviously, being venerable isn't very annoying to tri-meltas enough! Dominions take out my vendread.
Celestine kills another purifier with her flamer.
Seraphims then wipe out an entire unit of purifiers with their shooting.
Wow, they put out a huge amount of dakka! I believe they got off the power to re-roll wounds (or is it re-roll 1's?) and did something like 20+ wounds!!!
His far-right exorcist and the retributors stun both my vendread and the closest rhino.
Finally, Celestine assaults. Luckily, it is my warding stave unit. We both whiff, with Celestine only causing 1W which my 2++ stave saves.
Grey Knights 3
So the Sisters of Battle came back somewhat last turn, wiping out my vendread and 1 unit of purifiers. However, this turn I should be in his lines.
I tank shock his seraphims. Vendread fails his Fortitude attempt.
Purifiers hide behind the ruins and prepare for an ambush/counter-assault.
Purifiers tankshock the retributors to contest the sister objective. Crowe disembarks and prepares to assault the retributors (before his rhino moved).
Most of my units are tied up so I don't have much shooting.
Crowe assaults the retributors and attacks everyone in base contact.
Cleansing Flame and assault only kills 2 sisters, who somehow manage to do 1W in return. They stay.
In the Celestine battle, again she fails to kill anyone thanks to my warding stave and they draw combat.
Sisters of Battle 3
Exorcist immobilizes itself on terrain.
Seraphims jump over my rhino, weary of my dread. My opponent forgets about my purifiers in the ruins so their effort to hide pays off.
My opponent makes another mistake here and forget to move his dominions. So they shoot at the closest rhino because the vendread is most likely out of range. They manage only to stun my rhino.
Exorcist immobilizes the other rhino.
It takes both battle sister units to wreck my rhino.
Finally, Celestine manages to kill 1 purifier.
Crowe, on the other hand, fails to kill the retributors.
Grey Knights 4
Purifiers go after the battle sisters rhino.
Other purifiers come out to play. Vendread goes after Celestine (I doubt he would make it to the dominions).
Purifiers wreck his rhino. Sisters try to disembark as far away from me as possible. I probably need a 6" move to be able to assault them.
Shooting kills 3 seraphims.
They then fail morale and flee.
But I didn't care. I wanted to wipe them out rather than to risk them regrouping. Only the purifiers charge....
....and only manage to kill 3, even with Cleansing Flame. They stick around.
Here I get the
for my difficult terrain roll to make it into assault.
I easily route them and consolidate to try to get out of
LOS of his other battle sisters.
Now the nightmare happens. My vendread assaults Celestine, hoping to lock her up for the rest of the game. However, I end up insta-killing her, but not until after she kills my warding stave.
So next turn, I am in point-blank range of 3 meltas and Celestine has a chance to get back up.
Sisters of Battle 4
And of course, she gets back up. She is more annoying than my resorb necron overlord and the venerableness of my dreads combined!
Sisters mobilize. Uh oh! They can see my purifiers.
Celestine goes after my other troops. Luckily, I have a warding stave in that unit as well.
Dominions head towards my objective....
....though they leave a parting gift to my vendread on their way there. He's not quite dead, but he won't be able to stop them now as his legs get shot off.
Yikes!!! Sisters blow away 4 purifiers!
But that's ok, 1 is all I really need.
Lastly, Celestine assaults.
I survive her onslaught and we each kill 1 model for a tie combat.
BTW, my warding stave is behind the ruins and hiding from my camera.
Crowe continues to fail against the 2 retributors.
Grey Knights 5
This assault is going to be for all the marbles. If I can win here, then I will win the game. If not, Amerikon will have a good chance of taking this game from me.
Rhinos move out of the way. Regular dread shoots and then assaults the dominions to prevent them from 1) contesting my objective and 2) killing another dread.
Purifers kill another seraphim, who hit-&-run away from combat. Celestine continues to struggle against my purifiers.
Now for the finale. "Die you chaos-tainted ecclesiarchs!"
"We don't think so. Burn, heretic!"
On a happier note, at least Crowe finishes off the 2 retributors, but is it too little too late?
Sisters of Battle 5
This could be it. If Crowe lives, I have a chance. Otherwise, sisters may take this one from the grey knights.
Seraphims go to contest.
Exorcist actually does something for once, blowing up one of my rhinos on its way to the sister's objective.
Oh,
! Sisters may have this game in the bag after Crowe eats a melta to face on the ground.
After all those force weapon attempts, I finally manage to take out Celestine.
At the end of 5, Sisters have their own objective, and my objective is contested by the 2 seraphim.
I desperately need for the game to contine on (and for Celestine to stay down).
Will it end here and now? Stay tuned shortly for the conclusion....
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Luckily for the grey knights, the show must go on.
Grey Knights 6
Overview of the top of Turn 6.
GK movement. I am going to try to kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
My last rhino heads towards the sister objective. It'll take at least another turn for it to make it there.
Multi-assault. I cast Cleansing Flame and this time, it goes off.
Booyah!!!
Sisters of Battle 6
Dominions fall back some more. That's right, keep moving...
Exorcist is now on fire. Another rhino, another kill.
But the biggest thing this turn is that Celestine decides not to get back up.
I have my objective.
And my opponent has his.
We roll to see if the game continues and it doesn't.
Aftermath of the battle.
Draw!!!
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POST-GAME ANALYSIS:
Disclaimer: this is going to be kind of long.
Sisters of Battle: (by Amerikon)
Vs Paladins
I'll be the first to admit that I really lucked out in this game. Like I said earlier, I made a ton of mistakes and basically got saved by the second failed break test.
The biggest mistake I made was to not do my tank shocks as the very first moves of the turn so I could use Celestine to run the Paladins off the board. It was a stupid move combined with some rules ignorance. Before the game I thought that the Paladins were fearless and I also didn't know that
ATSKNF doesn't supersede the 6" rule for regrouping. An observer (Janthkin I think) kindly informed me of that after I totally failed to run the Paladins off the board with Celestine.
The next big mistake was outflanking the second Dominion squad. I had my choice of board edge, and I should've brought them in near my objective to defend it. I think between the Seras, the Retributors, a
BSS squad and a Dominion squad I probably could've taken down the 5 remaining Paladins. What actually happened: I saw Draigo with a mere three wounds left and I thought to myself "I can kill that bastard!". Oh how wrong I was.
There was some concern that Draigo would wipe that section of the board by himself but it mostly came down to greed. I really wanted to kill him. That said, my Dominions whiffed pretty hard. I failed both acts of faith to twin link and then they missed most of their shots. I think the squad that shot the Dred either missed entirely or got a single hit and failed to pen.
Overall I was amazed by how ineffective my shooting was. I got a single shot from the Exorcists (which admittedly hit pretty well). I only had one meaningful round of shooting from the Retributors (although it was key). My Dominions together managed to only put a single wound on Draigo, which is the worst they've ever done. The Seras actually dished out a little pain on their first turn and probably would've been able to bring it on the next turn as well.
Other things of note:
The deep strike wasn't that risky. There wasn't much that could've gone wrong. Sure, I could've mishapped into the Paladins but it's unlikely. If you look at the table, the directions I could've rolled to get a mishap were probably less than 1/6th of what was possible. The real risk was that I'd end up out of flamer range. I kind of wish that they had been able to play out the next turn as I would've had another round of shooting with them and then I probably would've charged what was left as a delaying tactic.
Also... CELESTINE KILLED DRAIGO!!!
That is all.
Vs Purifiers
Some thoughts on the second game.
In my deployment, I split the one Exorcist out wide for a couple of reasons. First there was no more room on the left side (from the perspective of the pictures) and I wanted it in cover. Also, since I was deploying first I wasn't sure if jy2 would try to put a dread or a Purifier squad on the right side of the main ruin to try and "outflank" my deployment. Putting an Exorcist over there was my way of trying to keep him on "my" side of the table. And say what you want but, it didn't get killed on Turn 1 like every other vehicle in my army!
So I was pretty stoked about going first in this game. I was ready to just unload everything into his Dreadnought/Rhino castle and I had visions of shutting down his right flank before he even had a chance to strike. So you can imagine how utterly demoralized I was at the end of Turn 1. My glorious alpha strike had been ingloriously alpha struck and both my Dominions gave the full monty to a single Purifier squad and only managed two kills! I was completely blown away (as were my tanks) by the volume and quality of fire coming from what was essentially just four or five small units.
I got a little luck in turn 2 when jy2 made some bad terrain rolls and I was able to keep at least one Dominion squad alive. After that it was Seraphim to the rescue! I'd mentioned before that I wanted to send them after the squad that was babysitting the objective but if I couldn't swing the tide on the right flank the game would be over by turn 3. When the dust settled, I had lost my two Rhinos and a Dominion squad, but I'd taken out 2 Purifier squads and a ven dread so I was actually winning on that flank!
I think not giving the Seraphim
VSS an Eviscerator really cost me in this game. I think I still have a "Witch Hunters" mentality about her. In the old rules Seras were impossible to tar pit thanks to their automatic hit-and-run, and it was very hard to rout them thanks to the
BoSL. Without those abilities (and of course their 3++) I had to play more cautiously than I wanted. If I had an Eviscerator I probably would have gone after the Dread that ultimately locked my Dominions in combat and that could've been a game changer. These are the things you can learn when you have a good opponent who can exploit your lists' weaknesses!
I'd have to say that the Seraphim and the Battle Sister Squad (from the immobilized Rhino) were the stars of the show. There's a lot of, let's say "uncertainty" about Seras on Dakka but I just love them. They're quick, they can deep strike, and with WS4 and an effective 5++ they're reasonably tough. They also embody the
40K ideal of throwing a bucket of dice at a problem. The Battle Sisters really did a great job holding that objective, taking out a Purifier squad and then Crowe. It was ultimately lucky for me that their Rhino got immobilized because I was in panic mode and ready to start committing everything I had to the main fight. Since I had to hold them back they were able to basically save the game.
This was one of the most exciting games I've played in recent memory. I was able to claw back from a desperate situation early on and almost every roll in the final two turns was absolutely critical. Thanks a lot to jy2 for doing all the work to put these reports together. This one was certainly worth reliving!
Grey Knights: (by Jy2)
For my post-games, I'm going to focus more on what I thought about the Sisters of Battle. After all, no one really wants to know about the grey knights. Heck, they've got their own 50+ page thread somewhere here on dakka.
Hopefully, this will also answer some of the questions in this thread.
I'm going to break it up into 3 parts: game #1, game #2 and Thoughts on the
SoB's. Unfortunately, I need to go to work now so my post-game will have to wait just a little longer.
Game #1 - Paladins
I felt the Sisters actually matched up well against my Draigowing. At 1500, the weaknesses of Draigowing really showed. No, the weakness wasn't really their vulnerability to all those S8 AP1 guns. Rather, it was their inability to be in more than 1 place at the same time. Go after his objective and I couldn't defend my own very well. Protect my objective and I'm not really threatening his. I felt that if my opponent was able to exploit that weakness, then he had a good chance to beat my paladins the objective-based game. Basically, I just tried to scale down my 2K list to 1500 but it did not work very well in this game at all. I think I will have to redesign my Draigowing from scratch for 1500 to include more support units (besides the librarian) and more mobility.
There was a debate in this thread about strategy - whether to deploy everything and scout the dominions forwards or whether to outflank them as my opponent did. Honestly, I felt that Amerikon made the right decision in this case. It was what I would have done as well. Normally I would agree that deploying everything on the board so that you have maximum firepower on Turn 1 would be the right way to play it. However, against my army (and other deathstar armies as well), I feel that it may be more advantageous to force them to choose instead. Especially if the army is slow and have very few units. The strength of my army is its resiliency. My paladins can survive most alpha strikes unless I roll horribly. Why take on your opponent's main strength head-on? For example, even if both dominions make it into melta range without cover for my paladins (and that is only if they went first, which they didn't), I would allocate 1 wound on Draigo and probably lose at most 1 paladin from each squad of dominions. Then next turn, I would've split up Draigo and go destroy both units of dominions, because if they're in range to melta me, then I'm in range to assault them. The trade off is that I lose 2 paladins, but I wipe out 2 units of dominions. I also gain an additional 6"-12" of movement from assaulting and consolidation, bringing me closer to my opponent's objective. It's much better to exploit their weaknesses. In this case, it was my lack of mobility and my relatively few units.
We both did make some mistakes in this game. If I had only shot at his exorcists not just once, but 2 times, I could've probably prevented the 2 tank shocks. 16 psycannon shots, of which 1 was master-crafted, had a very good chance to wreck face, but I got greedy. Instead, I went for the extra movement and tried to sling-shot my pallies towards his objective with assault and I paid for it dearly. The first time, I was out of assault range and the second time, I failed to wreck or even immobilize the exorcist. And by not wrecking those exorcists, of course, I set myself up for the 2 successful tank shocks.
Other than that, I did what I could with my limited resources. The rest was up to the dice and this time, the game just wasn't meant to be mine. Amerikon, despite some mistakes on your part as well, you played it well. Congrats. I'm still reeling from my scoring vendread getting shot in the back. Ouch!
Game #2 - Purifiers
This game, unlike my first game, I felt confident going into it. I felt I had the tools not only to win this one, but to actually dominate it. And I was dominating in the beginning. After stealing the initiative and my first turn of fire, it looked as if this game was going to be a blow-out. But somehow, my opponent was able to come back not only to pull off the draw, but he almost won it! Where did it all go wrong for my grey knights? Honestly, I don't think I really made any tactical blunders. Rather, whereas I rolled well in the beginning, Amerikon just rolled better later in the game.
I don't believe I under-estimated the battle sisters. I took into account their shooting and Celestine's combat prowess. The only unit I under-estimated were the seraphims, but that was more due to me not being familiar with that unit. I don't think I really made any major mistakes. I did have some bad dice. Then again, I also had some great dice on Turn 1, stealing the initiative and then crushing his mobility. Amerikon's dice was decent, probably a little better than mine, but he had some bad rolls as well. Overall, the dice wasn't really lopsided in favor of one player or the other. My opponent just had the better dice when it probably counted more - later in the game.
Then the only explanation I can think of is this. Sisters of Battle are a good army when run by a competent general, especially at the lower points games.
Congrats, Amerikon. You did well against one of the best armies currently.
Thoughts on the Sisters of Battle
My opponent brought a somewhat different list than the ones most
SoB players nowadays consider to be "competitive". I applaud him for that - to take a build not considered to be the most competitive and to do well with it. This just goes to show that the list is not everything. More important is knowing how to use the units in the list, what roles they play in the overall scheme of the army and the strengths and weaknesses of that particular army build. In other words, it's the skill of the player which is more important than the list itself. And my opponent showed himself to be a very skilled Sisters of Battle player indeed.
Instead of the customary review of the units in my army, for these battle reports, I'm going to put the shoe on the other foot instead. I'm going to be reviewing my opponent's army instead.
St. Celestine: A-. How many points is she? A
MEQ killing machine that just doesn't die? She may be one of the best named
HQ's in the whole game and if you take into consideration her cost, there is probably none better for the price. In most of my other games against her, she didn't really do much (except in 1 game against my guardsmen at 1K), but for this game, she's been eating her spinach. My goodness....she killed Draigo! She didn't do as well in the 2nd game, only killing off a few purifiers, but the threat that she presented - being able to come back to life and annoy me some more - that was priceless. A must-have for any sisters army 1850 and under. The threat she presented tactically is much worse than the actual physical damage she caused, and even that was very good.
Battle Sisters: A. In game #1, they killed my librarian and stomped on my soladin going to contest their objective. But where they really shine was in game #2, where they wiped out a contesting rhino, my contesting purifiers and Crowe. They won the game and stole the show in game #2.
Dominions: B+. In game #1, their performance actually wasn't very good. They failed to kill my dreads or Draigo. In game #2, they did slightly better, wrecking 1 of my vendreads and immobilizing the other one. However, what made them good was the fact that they forced my paladins into a very difficult situation by outflanking. I really like their flexibility in the army. I'm not sure I would've made them into 10-man squads, but they seemed to have out well for my opponent in these games.
Seraphims: B. They did alright in the 2 games. They caught me by surprise with the amount of damage they could do. In game #1, they only killed a couple of paladins but were able to escort them off the board. In game #2, they wiped out 1 unit of purifiers before I finally took them out. I believe that there is still a place in a
SoB army for seraphims. My only concern with them is when fighting fully meched-up armies, as inferno pistols and expensive (assuming they can even take them) and eviscerators and not reliable
AT. Overall, they performed respectably here. Not spectacular, but far from useless.
Exorcists: A. It's true that their shooting didn't do much. 2 paladins and 2 rhinos is all that their shooting claimed. You can blame that on my psyfleman dreads. However, what they did was arguably much more effective....rendering my paladins ineffective with 2 successful tank shocks. Just for that, they pass these 2 tests with flying colors.
Retributors: B-. Their shooting was rather ineffective other than immobilizing my vendread in game #1 and blowing off 1 of the autocannons from my dread in game #2. However, what was significant was holding Crowe in assault for 5-6 combat phases. That, I did not expect (well, actually I didn't expect them to immobilize my vendread either).
MVP's: Battle Sisters. This was a tough choice. Celestine was worthy of MVP consideration for her role as an uber-distraction as well as actual threat. She also slew one of the biggest bad-a$$es in the game as well. But she was only really a supporting character. The exorcists definitely won my opponent the game in game #1 with their tank shocks, but they didn't really do much in game #2. Dominions actually under-performed in comparison to their costs, but their ability to outflank in game #1 affected my entire strategy.
However, I finally settled on the Battle Sisters as the most important unit in the 2 games. They survived in both games to claim the objectives and in game #2, they actually managed to defend their objective successfully. Along the way, they took out my librarian, soladin, Crowe, 1 purifiers and 1 rhino. In an objectives game, the most important unit is the troop and here, they definitely deserved it.
