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Made in gb
Death-Dealing Devastator






Well, it was promising from an anticipatory point of view, but I'm afraid last week's game turned out to be something of a train crash for my army. In my defence, the enemy was absolute Kryptonite to my sneaky, mid-to-close range, largely uncentred army.

My opponent this week would be a thoroughly nice chap from out of town. He was in the area for work, and had contacted the club for a quick, friendly, low-pressure game. Being one of our foremost representatives of that style of play, I stepped jovially forward, and arrived with an CAD army consisting of a large Imperial Guard platoon, three squads of Veterans, an Aegis Defence Line and a small Allied Detachment of Raven Guard designed to be a strike element. What I was met with was what might be called a truly Battle-forged army; a Rapture Battalion of the Emperor's Children, thick with sonic weapons and Feel No Pain saves. With the combination of cover-ignoring weapons, high initiative and enhanced toughness, I went into the game with some cynicism, but was nonetheless perfectly ready for a fun few hours. We chose to play a simple Kill Points game, and my opponent took the first turn.


Turn 1 was uneventful for my opponent. He moved some of his army forward, but upon achieving the 18" range that his army favoured, it was clear that he had nothing to do but await my advance. He did knock two Hull Points off my Predator, but said vehicle would go on to fulfil its purpose. Not wishing to risk an entirely empty first turn, I marched my Guardsmen into position and decided that it would be better to steal an extra round of shooting early on. I brought in my Dreadnought, blew up two Rhinos and scythed apart an expensive assault unit with Lasguns. All thoroughly good things.


My Guardsmen are one of my favourite units. They're big, ridiculous, unwieldy, difficult to transport and move on the table, and require frankly ridiculous feats of multiplication to use.


My Veterans set up their heavy weapons, expecting an assault. Instead they received no more than a pounding of awful sound.


Turn 2 gave me a taste of the punishment to come. While my first proper Shooting Phase had been exciting, my opponent's was devastating. Guardsmen were stripped from my blob at a rate I'd never seen before, my Predator was shaken to pieces and my poor Dreadnought barely had time to watch the Rhino burn before he copped a Blastmaster to the upper glacis. Thusly neutered, my response was simply to array my infantry and await reinforcements. When these arrived at the beginning of my turn, I had a brief moment of hope before I started rolling dice. My Assault Squad got into what might have been heavy cover in any other game and awaited their chance to strike, while my Scout Squads rode their Land Speeders in from the flank to attempt vainly to blind and harm the Noise Marines.


This had been promising, briefly.


And this one, while absolutely successful in its application, had not made back its points.


Turn 3 came on with momentum, and my destruction promised to be swift, if not a little brutal. Again, my opponent hammered me with sonic death, and I, in my folly, had fed him more units. A Land Speeder, most of its Scout cargo and very nearly an entire Assault Squad were evaporated by the horrific blasphemies of the followers of Slaanesh. In response, I could do little but lose the Assault Squad to Overwatch, plink away with my Lasguns and try to ignore the fact that half of my opponent's units had yet to take even a single wound.


Frankly, the Chaos army could have been this big, and I still would have lost.


Spoilers: he gets one.


Turn 4 should really have been the last. I finally lost a full Veteran Squad to enemy Bolt Pistols, and decided that the best course of action was to try and save my Warlord. In true Imperial fashion, I drew my Veterans back and positioned them as speed-bumps with my Commander left far away from any Blastmasters and my remaining Guardsmen and Scouts moving to stall the enemy advance.


In hindsight, this assault was never going to happen.


'Dammit, Sergeant, you will hold them until you have confirmed my escape!'


Turn 5 was no more than spite from my Army's point of view, with the meagre remnants f my Blob hurling themselves at the enemy with simple, bloody-minded hatred while their distant Commander made a tacit effort to reclaim his honour. Five VPs to Twelve. Job done.


Unit of the match was, inevitably, my glorious Blob. Ever reliable, utterly devastating, and worth their weight in plastic.


Yes, a quite entertaining game. I thoroughly enjoyed my opponent. His army was brilliantly turned-out, even including Sonic Rhinos (with mounted speakers for the Dubstep). To me it proved that a defeat can be as much fun as a victory, and that modern 40k is not one, but two Sci-fi tabletop games. The one I started playing all of twelve years ago is definitely still in there, but sitting atop it is another, altogether more serious and involved game which I'm afraid still leaves me rather cold.

As a final thought I must say that I found myself feeling rather sorry for my opponent. It seems he asked for a small, simple, low-key game because in his local metagame, that's precisely what his army represents. I find Formations decidedly restrictive and frustrating to build, probably because I begin an army with a vision of what I want long before I consider any rules, and it strikes me in the aftermath of this game that I must be in something of a minority in that regard. What a shame.

   
Made in ca
Mutilatin' Mad Dok





This is a great write-up, I enjoyed reading. Would be great to see more pictures of the battlefield and armies, I dig the Guard models you're using.

Don't worry, you're definitely not the only one who likes having the rules fit their army and not the other way around - I say formations can be useful in that regard, though (at least, some of the time!). If I wanted to stay battle-forged, I couldn't actually run my Eldar/Harlequin combo army with all the units I wanted, before they brought in the Ynnari detachments.
   
 
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