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.

So here I am dipping my toe into the battle report thang. The light at the venue was pretty poor so no pictures, hence I have tried to buff up the interest by making cutesy little maps

Forces involved:

My Guard, including

CCS with missile launcher, MOO, Astropath in Chimera

PCS with 2x flamer and 1x heavy flamer in Chimera

2x infantry squads with HB and GL

Veteran squad with 2x flamers and 1x heavy flamer in Chimera

Veteran squad with 2x melta and 1x plasma in Chimera

6x rough riders with 2x melta

3x scout sentinels with 2x AC and 1x ML

Vendetta

Hydra

Leman Russ Battle Tank

Opponent's Sisters force:

Command squad with heavy flamer and melta in Immolator

4x Sisters squads with heavy flamer and melta in Rhinos

Support Immolator

2x Exorcists

The icons to be used in the following diagrams are as below:


The Setup:
Rolling up a mission and deployment gave us Annihilation of the Pitched Battle persuasion. The Sisters won the roll off and decided to go first in order to bring their toasty makers that much closer to my melt in your mouth vehicles and tinder dry infantry. Both sides deployed their full forces (kinda negating the use of my Astropath, but what the hey) and the Guard made their Scout moves as follows:


Light grey are infantry passable buildings, dark grey are impassable buildings, brown lines are hill contours and the green thingy is a forest.

As can be seen in the set-up the Sisters vehicles clustered up as much as possible to provide mutual cover. This was unfortunately to prove too tempting a target for my MOO in the opening stages of the battle. The Guard set up was based around keeping open fire lanes to the likely avenues of advance of the all important Sisters rhinos.

Turn 1:
The game kicks off with the Sisters storming forward in their transports, about half of them popping smoke to cover the advance as much as possible. The only sisters shooting was the Exorcists failing miserably to do anything to my Vendetta


The Guard turn opens with the Vendetta nudging forward to close the range a bit with the Exorcists and starting the exchanges of stunning fire that were to last the whole game. Otherwise the chimeras and the sentinels shuffled about a bit and the second infantry squad moved into better firing positions in the ruins. Guard shooting was a bit more impressive... The MOO opened up by calling accurate fire on the Sisters transport phalanx. Bang went 1 rhino and one of the sisters inside. Following up on this the various autocannon, missile launchers, multi-lasers and the Russ battlecannon carved open another Rhino (with another couple of sisters losing out) and de-weaponed and immobilised the support Immolator. So Turn 1 ends with about half the Sisters having to walk quite a long way!

Turn 2:
The remaining mobile Sisters transports rush down the right flank attempting to get meltas into range of the Guard transports. The lead Rhino attempts to conceal the advance of the other 2 and pops smoke. The foot sloggers start making their slow way toward the Guard lines. Again the Sisters shooting is pretty limited. The exorcists again fail to do anything of significance, but do manage to stun the Vendy. Infantry fire panics the ML armed sentinel into uselessness.


The Guard lines continue to make small adjustments to their positions but no major movements. Let the witches come! Some sniping manages to whittle down the visible foot troops a bit, but the big result is the popping of the covering rhino and immobilising and de-weaponing the Sisters command Immolator. More targets in the open!

Turn 3:
The sisters are now just about in effective range and start moving to engage, except for the command group that attempts to rush around the solid cover to a better advancing position. Infantry fire destroys one of the sentinels and stuns the other 2. An attempt is also made on the right flank to hit the Chimeras with extreme range melta fire, but this comes to nothing. The exorcists again fail to perform.


Although the sisters are now in effective range for their weapons, unfortunately this also places them in prime range for the Guard counter assault. The flamer transports rush forward and drop their cargoes in positions around the handily bunched up Sisters squads. The rough riders also move up in support. The melta vets stay put inside their chimera to snipe at targets of opportunity. The combined fire of most of the Guard army falls on the two flanking Sisters squads, swiftly reducing them to ashes. Most amusing moment was the flamer vets dropping 18 flamer hits, 9 heavy flamer hits and half a dozen las shots into a single squad The Vendetta finally manages to find a proper chink in the Exorcist armour and dusts one of the things.

Turn 3 also sees my first ever use of my Stalker class rough riders in assaulty anger and they charge into the single remaining sister, blowing her to bits with their assault launchers.

Turn 4:
At this point the Sisters are starting to run out of steam. The command squad re-deploys and massacres the oh-so-recently victorious rough riders with accurate bolter fire (damn do RRs melt away quickly!). The other infantry squads also manage to de-weapon the remaining sentinels but little is left to worry the remaining Guard vehicles. Except of course the lone remaining Exorcist that finall realises what all the flashing lights actually mean and explodify the prowling Vendetta with a well aimed barrage of missiles.


The Guard response is also a bit less apocalyptic, partly because there are fewer targets to go for and partly because I knew it was the last turn and I was winning The flamer squads move up and start whittling down the Sisters command squad. The melta vets de-bus and open up on the central footslogging squad leaving a couple of troops for other supporting fire to remove (making the incipient sentinel assault unnecessary). The Russ continues its adequate provision of supporting fire and kills a couple more walking sisters.

At this point our time was up and we needed to stop the game for a final score of 7 kill points (3 rhinos, 3 sister squads and an exorcist) to the Guard and 2 kill points (vendetta and rough riders) to the Sisters.

A game that was kinda fun but a bit 1 sided. The sisters absolutely had to forge ahead and try to close the gap, while I was able to hang back and do bad things to the transports with my wide array of S5+ weapons. The Sisters were also hampered by a general inability to cause any harm to my vehicles. I was quite lucky in the first couple of turns by being able to take out a bunch of transports, but then I also had a fair weight of heavy weapons targetted on them.

I think if it was an objectives mission then it would have been a bit more fair, but i guess thems the breaks.

No obvious man of the match for the guard, but a solid performance all round.

I think the spider-sentinel symbols are cute :3

you spent so much time on the IG tanks, and then the poor sisters got nothing but rectangles! xD

your icons are awesome. I want a spider sentinel

I like the stalker class rough riders..great idea! They were a bit redundant though in this game....but they did net you a KP!

Nice to see you getting some experience with your RR's. Also I really like your graphic format - what program do you use?

Nice job, and nice report.

As you noticed, your opponent was very light on anti-tank, with basically all of it being comprised of just two vehicles. That's just asking for bad luck to wreck a game. As well, clustering in front of a guard player is suicide, a lesson your opponent hopefully learned. Also, no smoke launchers turn 1? What was he shooting at?

Your opponent was playing kind of silly, and you efficiently and professionally slaughtered his forces. Clean dispatch. Nice work.

Also, those RRs are win.

@Greyspark and Dumplingman - Thanks It was the best way I could think of representing these guys


@Bottle - Well the Guard are my army and I might want to re-use my icons. If I do any more of these then my opponents are likely to get less accurate depictions of their units

@Freddieyu1 - They got both teams a KP I think in future I will be a little more circumspect with them and hide them behind vehicles as much as possible.

@CaptainRoderick - umm... Powerpoint. I use it a lot at work for making diagrams for reports. I think its a pretty powerful drawing package, although it does have some quite harsh limitations.

@Ailaros - Thanks He had a lot of short range AT with at least 1 melta in each squad, I was just able to keep the infatry at arms length the whole game. My opponent did tell me that he knew little about Guard so I think it was a slightly harsh learning experience, especially about MOOs He did actually smoke up a few of the vehicles on Turn 1, but I forgot which ones... As I said, I think the mission was seriously against him, but I'll take compliments any time