I've been putting a lot of thoughts into this. Any time I lose a game I put a lot of thought into the game to contemplate how I could have won it. I am not sure how well my army would have done if given a 2nd try. From my experiences, I will switch out havocs for predators. I lose 1 heavy weapon, but AV13 is much tougher than 5 normal marines.
Niiai wrote: Turn 1 focus fire on the gun (only T7) and pour shots into the beasts or the wytch squad (depends on your ranged weapons and what is most dangerush.)
Well the quad gun is pretty darn ineffective against drakes. Even if fired by Eldrad, only 1/3 of the hits will penetrate, so hes going to have 1 pen per round, and the drake has a 1/3 chance of making its save. A pen has a 1/6 chance of killing the drake. His quad gun will do more damage to my rhinos.
With my army I don't care about his wytches. They wound on a 6, so each wytch attack has a 1/54 of killing a
PM.
PM's wound wytches 8/9 of the time and have 2 attacks each. 10
PMs will make short work of 15 wytches.
However, I am worried about his beasts. I did shoot every gun into the beasts, and I managed to kill a few of them, even with his 2+ save.
Niiai wrote: As soon as the flying birds come in you need to burn the razorwings down. They instant death to S6, so you "only" have to burn through 5 khymerra's before the invunerable saves disapear (and even then you can posistion the flyers better for this.)
I think your overrating what you can do with drakes. I did just that. I got 3 beasts under the template and vector struck 6 times between the two drakes, for a total of 10 wounds. I even got 2 of his birds, as I was able to carefully place my vector strikes to get the best effect. Simply put, it was not enough.
Niiai wrote: If course if you start hovering with the dragons the wytches can charge you and throw grenades at things. But they die really easy to bolter fire if you can find a "safe" place among the beats and wytches to shoot at them.
You also lose the ability to vector strike. Going to hovor mode for a second strike at the beasts sacrifices the drakes as they will get haywired to death. The drakes managed to kill 4 of his units on the next 3 turns, so thats a hard sacrifice to make.
Niiai wrote: Flamers inside a transport with a shooting hatch would also be good as he have to charge your tanks to death, very little long ranged weapons.
You don't want to be in flamer distance in a rhino when a unit that can assault you is that close. It will completely surround your rhino so when it wrecks you won't have anywhere to disembark. That's a fast way to have a dead squad.
Here is what I plan on doing the next time we play
* Bring tougher long range support. Havocs are to fragile. I need predators or a bastion for the havocs.
* Fearless is the key to the beasts. I will make every vector strike and flame template hit Vect first. Sure its a 1/36 chance of Vect getting insta-gibbed, but once every model with outside 6" of him, I can then lay into Vect. This is helped by the speed of the beasts to the speed of Vect. Vect trails behind, so there are about 3 models between him and the rest of the squad. Once I burn/strike those I can focus my long range guns on Vect. I just need to make him fail a 2+ with a
STR 6 or greater weapon and its GG on the beasts.
On round 3 of that game I assaulted the beasts with 20
PMs and did a ton of wounds to him, enough to cause a break test on 2+. If he was not fearless I would have had a good chance to break the beast pack. That would have given me a turn to open up with bolters on it at close range.
* Like the last game, I need to keep back and use the rhinos to shuffle around the board. My goal is to keep his army out of assault for as many turns as possible.
* A sorcerer casting a solid debuff like weakness, or even a Nurgle spell would be useful. While Eldrad makes it dangerous to cast, the payoff can be huge. If my normal marines can start insta-killing T2 bird packs that would be excellent.
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barnowl wrote:the gun is going to have 4+ or better save with eldrad and bodies back there. Set up right, it will eat a ton fire before going down. All that fire will let the really fast beast back and fast enough witches get down the board were you want them. In both Vangruard and Hammer anvil deployment, if going first they will be in your lines by the start of your second turn. The list is not unbeat able but it can be very difficult to play against. Night fight and going first will give this list a smooth start.
Agreed that the list is not unbeatable, but it is very solid list. That's why I suggest it for any
DE/Eldar player (when playing one you should expect to ally with the other. The synergies increase exponentially when you do)
As I mentioned, the quad gun is low threat. In my game I used two drakes to vector strike it, which (unsurprisingly) destroyed it. The first drake vectoring it has slightly less than a 50% to kill it, as it will do 1.5 wounds to the gun. The second drake vectoring it makes it a pretty solid bet.
