Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

1530 : Army List
We were both slightly over on points, and ran 1530 for this game. I run this army as the 8th chapter of the UltraMarines. As they are the assault reserves, they all utilize attack bikes to get to the battle quickly.
HQ:
Captain
w/ Bike, Relic Blade, Hellfire Rounds
[175]

Command Squad
- Company Champion
- Lightning Claw
- Lightning Claw, Storm Shield
- Power Fist, Storm Shield
- Apothecary
[305]

Troops:
(8) Bikers, (1) Attack Bike
w/ 2x Meltaguns, Power Sword, Multimelta
[300]

(8) Bikers, (1) Attack Bike
w/ 2x Plasma Guns, Power Sword, Multimelta
[310]

(8) Bikers, (1) Attack Bike
w/ 2x Plasma Guns, Power Fist, Multimelta
[320]

Fast Attack:
(3) Attack Bikes
w/ Heavy Bolters
[120]

Board/Game Layout
The mission was Capture and Control. The two objectives were marked as copper spikey pillars in the images below. Each of the objectives were on the other side of the river (which counted as difficult terrain. I won the rolloff for turns, and passed first turn to the chaos demon player.





Game Turns
Turn One - Demons
Half his troops came in on reserve. These were the units on the left side of the board near my objective. They included a great unclean one, 4 flamers, plagebearers, and a special character of nastyness. For the purposes of this report, I will call them the nurgle blob.

Turn One - UltraMarines
All my troops were in reserve. In the distance the chaos can hear engines roaring.

Turn Two - Demons
The nurgle blob plods forward twords my objective. For being slow and purposeful, they sure were fast buggers. (Between running and moving, he was averaging 10" of movement a round with the blob.)
Near the other objective (as shown in the image), he had plagebearers and bloodletters materialized from the warp.

Turn Two - UltraMarines
Marine bikes began zipping onto the field. (Turbo boosting all my bikes, as shown above)

Turn Three - Demons
On the left side of the board he continues to plod the nurgle blob to my objective.
On the right side of the board, his demon prince dives down from the sky and lands next to his plaguebeares. The demon prince levels an eye at the speeding bikes and blasts chaos energy at them, which the marines dartfully dodge out of the way of. (IE, I made my turbo boost cover saves)

Turn Three - UltraMarines
All of the marines, save for the captain and his command squad, are in the fray. The rest of the bikes zip in next to the rest of the bikes. This focuses all the marines attention on one squad of plaguebearers, bloodletters, and a demon prince.
One squad of fires it twin linked bolters and multimelta into the daemon prince, striking a lucky blow (one wound done). The heavy bolter attack bikes calm their mind and think of the emperor as they let loose a deadly volley ripping the demon prince into pieces (Seriously, he failed 3 more saves vs. heavy bolter fire)
The rest of the marines fire vicious rounds into the plaguebearers, knocking a few of them back into the warp.

Turn Four - Demons
The chaos demons determine that it is time for a reckoning. Appearing from nowhere is a Soul Grinder -- which materalizes right next to the plague bearers near the stalwart Ultramarines. The Soul Grinder fires a volley of shots into the marines, bouncing off the heavy armor of the bikes, and then blasts flame from its maw, vaporizing two of the marines.
To make matters worse, four flamers plummet from the skies and land in front of two squads of marines. Flames lick from the demons vaporizing four marines before they can do anything! (He got unlucky on his wound rolls, but he still wiped 4 marines with no save allowed)
During this time, the nurgle blob, sitting on the objective, decides to start slowly moving to the rest of the battle.

Turn Four - UltraMarines
It is time for a recocking. From behind the nurgle blob, the UltraMarine Captain and his retinue appear. They fire vicious rounds into the plaugebearers and assault the demons, catching the flamers in the process. The blob is heavily engaged and demons are being removed from the warp.
Two marine squads converge on the Soul Grinder. The first squad's multi-melta does the trick blowing the grinder into small fragments scattering across the battlefield. (I rolled a 5 on the damage chart, plus one for being melta). The other three squads of bikers, and the heavy bolter bikers fire righteous bolter fire into the plague bearers. Even with the might of Nurgle, the demons are going back to the warp.
The remaining six marines near the flamers bring an end to the demons. They close on the flamers, "double tapping" on their way in. Eager to show their true loyalty to the emperor, they use 4 plasma guns, which kills one marine outright due to overheating. One flamer dies under the barrage of fire, and the 5 remaining marines engage. The marines chop down the demons and scatter them to the winds.

Turn Five - Demons
The nurgle blob turns it attention on the UltraMarine Captain and his squad. All but two of them are destroyed by the great unclean, the flamers, the plaugebearers, and the special demon of nastyness. (He had a nurgle special character who was nasty and grew in power the more nurgle killed). The remaining marines fled, knowing they would rally after escaping the demons clutches. They were very faithful in their fallback, however, and fell back right off the battlefield! (3d6 fallback can work against you when your 10" from your table edge)
There was one plaguebearer left, who moved twords his objective. The bloodletters closed on the remainder of my forces.

Turn Five - UltraMarines
The marines encircled the bloodletters and lone plaguebearer. A torrent of bolter fire ripped all the demons to shreads, wiping out the remainder of the demons on that side of the river.
Two brave marines hit the gas on their bikes and turboboosted in front of the nurgle blob. Their goal was to prevent the demons from claiming the objective.

Summary
The game ended on turn five. I had two bikers that turboboosted within 3 of his objective, and they were contesting his, and I had owned the other half of the board -- including the objective. This produced a clear victory for the UltraMarines.

Chaos Units
I was very impressed by the firepower of the flamers. The only reason he did not kill more than just 4 bikers was just bad rolling on his part. Even still, the flamers were the most scary thing in his army IMHO
He rolled poorly for his demon prince, but either way it would have fallen. Monstrous creatures cannot stand a torrent of fire. This Soul Grinder was also rather useless, and popped very easily due to multi-meltas.

Marines
I sacrificed my captain and command squad to keep his nurgle blob from getting in the game. I was hoping they would contest that objective for the entire game, but even a few small turns was good enough.
I was highly impressed with the power of volume of fire. When I had ~20 bikers get within "Double Tap" range of the bloodletters, and fired every twin linked bolter, the effects were staggering. The biker army is definitely a mobile, shooting army and can do that role very well.
The Chaos player complimented my army, saying it was very fast and hard to play against. The ability to be anywhere on the board you need to be is a huge advantage.

Poor daemon player, you really ran circles around him.

Are you liking the plasma guns? Most people seem to be going melta or flamer and not even bothering with them.

Also how are the hb attack bikes holding up? It looks like they did well this game, but again, most people seem to be toting more melta.

What are your plans for expanding to 1750? More attack bikes?

I've had good luck with plasma thus far. I played a CSM player later that day, and decimated his squads with plasma. He moved a rhino up and dropped 10 khone bezerkers near my army. Instead of falling back and trying to pluck them off, I moved 2 squads of bikes up to engage. Each was combat squad'ed and had 2 plasma guns per the squad. 12 TL bolter and 8 plasma gun shots later, there were no bezerkers to charge -- much to my surprise.

My HB Attack bikes were not even targeted in either game I played. I held them back, and shot them at range most of the time. This prevented the TL bolters on the bikes from also firing, but kept them out of range of most of the enemy. For the AT, I relied on the MM's and melta guns in the bike squads, and had great effect.

Moving up past 1850 gets tricky for bikes. Part of the fast attack army strategy is to place your army on one side of the board to prevent him from being able to bring their entire army to bear against you.

If you throw more bikes in there, and a horde appears, eventually you lose one of the strongest values of a fast army. Every enemy gun has a target it can fire on. The challenge is that a bike takes roughly 2* the tablespace as a infantry marine. 40 bikes has the same footprint as 80 footsloggers. How many models can you put on 1/3 the board without becoming template bait?

When pushing from 1530 to 2500, I would add a LR with Vulcan and some assault terminators. Any remainder points would go to attack bikes and a 4th bike squad. Any more bikes and I think there would just not be enough table space for them all to be effective.

Yes, volume of fire is nice, now imagine if you had some bikers with flamers...if at least to diversify the weapons (I know I told you this before, but it's like a knee-jerk reaction).
________________

It look like a pretty standard game, biker movement and and such.

Flamers of Tzeentch were really good the day they came out, I guess Daemons are rare in your neck of the woods as mine. I know of only 2 players one of which who is a regular with it, though I don't see him and his Harrowed too often.

About hvy bolter bikes, mine always miss.
I don't know, it's like they have BS2 or something, they just don't want to hit.

My 7 Cents.

That was an aqwome battle report, very detailed, i saw it play out in mind mind at some parts. Thats the power tho of having a bike army

I am liking the sound of those attack bikes. Im not surprised they get ignored for the standard bike squads/command squad yet they are lots easier to kill than those sqaud. But while staying beyound 24" (sadly for your own boltguns) and being a low priority I can imagine them putting out consitent death.

As for the tablespace footprint of those bikers; while they do cover twice the space as a marine, they can move 4x as fast as infantry when they need to and 2x as fast normally.. all of which allows them to further increase thier movements with a possible charge.

As for anti-horde choices & if you dont like template action (understanable) then get some typhoon landspeeders with heavy bolters. A squad of three may be expensive but it does unleash 6 seperate blast templates, 2 of which will hit and generally the other 4 wont scatter more than 3" (which should still land atleast most of it within a hordey squad) and 6 blast templates at str4 ap6 (anti gaunt/ork, the generic horde) will kill quite a few models. If your up against MEQ armies, 6 krak missile shots equalling 4 str8 ap3 hits is nothing to sniff at.

Edit: A lightning claw is nearly good as a relic blade for wounding T4 stuff 75% compard to 87% (58% compared to 66% forT5) and for high toughness stuff (and vehicles) you have krak grenades and power fists. The lightning claw allows for a lightning shield, which when along with artifacer armor allows for some beefy captain. I recommend atleast some form of added durability for your HQ

Excellent report! I am working on a bike list myself so it is interesting to see what works. I have discovered in my own playtesting that their short range shooting has the potential to be absolutely brutal. I have been considering Korsarro but (unless you are 10" from the table edge) combat tactics is a beautiful thing for the bike list.

Thanks again, and I'd love to read any other bike reports you have.

A quick question for you - do you find the power swords to be worth the points?

With respect to bikers:

Power weapons are not good on SM Biker Troop Vet squads. Actually it would be akin to giving a cigarette to a baby.

Power weapons are only viable on the Command Squad on bikers, as they actually can get the benefit of 2 CCWs...but even this is questionable.

The only time it's 'worth' the points is on the Company Champion in the command squad...mainly because you have no choice in the matter of his weapons, but gain a bit of a WS boost to boot, for the same cost as normal power weapons.

My 7 Cents.

Sanctjud wrote:With respect to bikers: Power weapons are not good on SM Biker Troop Vet squads. Actually it would be akin to giving a cigarette to a baby.

Heh, I would no go that far, but fists are much better options for bikes, as they don't benefit from the extra attack anyway.

If someone gave a marine a power sword, he would not kick it out of bed, he would just much rather have a fist.
Don't think about that to much...