Nids v Dark Angels

Okay I was going to do a full battle report for this game, then I decided not to do one at all, now I've changed my mind again and I'm gonna do a quick game summary instead:

first I'll say that this game was the quickest game I've ever played - we got through 5 turns in a little over an hour and a half - I was very concious of how long games have been taking in 6th so I upped my pace - perhaps a little bit too much in some ways as it probably would have been nicer to move at a slightly slower pace but once I opened that fast I kinda wanted to see how quickly I could get a game done in :-)

It was 1500 points a side we decided just to do pitched battle due to playing on a table in the iddle of two others - logistically it was just easier - we rolled up the scouring (6 objective)

My list was:

The Swarmlord
1x tyrant guard

Tervigon - 3 psychic powers - crushing claws
Tervigon - 3 psychic powers - crushing claws
14 termagants
14 termagants

3x Hive Guard

Trygon
Trygon

His list was along the lines of:

Chapter Master
5 honour guard (?) with power weapons

3 x 5 tac marine squads (some combat squadding goig on in there)

2x 10 an assault marine squads with jump packs

5 man Devastator squad 1 ulti meta 1 lascanon
5 man dev squad - plasma cannon
5 an devastator squad - plasma cannon & heavy bolter

Land raider 2 lascannons and heavy bolter

it was a nice looking pre-heresy army with an old school landraider and some really funky jump packs - should have take pictures really, if you're one of the ones visiting Plymouth though you may get to see it

Deployment

I rolled for my psychic powers - getting iron arm on the swarmlord and 1 terv and endurance on all 3 guys (I didn't end up using any of the other powers I had)

Tony won the role off and elected to go second

I deployed the swarmlord in the middle of the board flanked by a terv on either side - hive guard in front of him, a gant wall in front of all them and the 2 trygons on the right flank.

He put his land raider opposite the trygons spread the 3 dev squads left right and middle 1 set of assault troops on the right 1 in the middle 1 tac squad on the left and the other 2 in the middle with the captain and his guard.

Tony rolled to steal the initiative and failed on a 5 (so close!)
(we completely forgot to roll for night fighting at any point)

Turn 1

Usual tyranid turn 1 everything moved up 6 inches (anyone else find everytime you move up 6 innces it's only every the first guy in the unit that moves the full 6 and each guy after progressively moves less or is that just me?). I also remembered to run this game as well - yay for me! Both tervigos spawned 12 gats each one squad moving up the left the other movig to the right to huddle on an objective (I now notice we forgot mysterious objectives)
The hive guard popped a few shots at the dev squad in the centre knocking off a boltgun guy ad that was it for tyranid turn 1 - a whole lot of not much as usual!

The dark angel assault squads all moved up 12" as well as the tacs and the HQ unit moving up 6" The dev squad on the left shot as my swarmlord scoring a hit but he made the 5+ cover save. The central des shot at the other terv and failed to score a wound due to him being a boosted T8 from iron arm The land raider and right side dev squad unloaded on one of the trygons knocking him down to 3 wounds.

Turn 2

the trygons both moved towards the assault squad who had graciously sprinkled themselves with salt and pepper prior to presenting themselves for tea, firing their bio-electric pulses they both scored 0 wounds, followed by a double charge.

1 set of termagants shot at the assault marines in the middle and followed it up with a charge

The hive guard fired again at the dev squad in the middle killing 2

The gants on the left moved up shot and assaulted the 5 man tac squad in front of them killing 2 overall
and losing a couple of termies in return

The dark angel tacs and hq again moved up in the middle - the tacs all moving towards the swarmlord rapid firing into hi and failing to cause a single wound. The tervigons finished off the assault marines on the right and moved towards the devs and landraider on the right with their consolidation - there was some shooting but I don't recall much happening in shooting from here on out...

Turn 3

If I'm honest here the game was done, tony had failed a fair few armour saves, moved tac marines into assault range (1 squad assaulted into my hive guard on turn 3 or 4), and had his assault squads assaulted themselves - I realised I'd not been utilising all of the swarlords psychic abilities but laid off them as I could see where the game was going - the gants on the left finished off the tacs and moved across the board to take on the devs - they made some major leadership tests to pull this off as they were out of synapse and lost a combat with the devs but stayed in there until the end of the game

The assault marines in the middle were surrounded by 2 squads of gants and were quickly eaten - the swarmlord tore apart the tac squad in font of him (there were a fair few whiffs in there though - the amount of 1's I rolled was kinda silly!) and moved on to knock out the hq unit with the help of the iron arm tervigon.

he trygons took out the devs on the left and smooshed the land raider - 1 trygon went down in the process

Tony conceded at the end of turn 5 with 3 devs alive on the left 1 honour guard and 2 tacs in cc with the hive guard and about 6 termagants

Tyranids win!

Summary

Quite simply he didn't have enough big guns for all the high toughness guys I had - if I'd paid more attention to his list rather than the shiny new psychic power toys I had I probably wouldn't have rolled for them as it ended up being a bit of a pounding. Credit it to him though, he took it well and was still smiling at the end. I've offered him a rematch at some point with the same list so he can have a chance to adjust to it, he's got several armies one of which is IG I have a sneaking suspicion they might be heading my way soon

When you get the rolls on the psychic tale with nids it makes it really nasty for your opponent - going up to T9 and then using endurance to get back the single wound he caused after a round of shooting can be pretty harsh. But as he said afterwards, ultimately he was the master of his own defeat as he advanced upon tyranids and that isn't going to end well for the vast majority of armies!

Also - I'm getting really sick of this keyboard continually missing m's and n's off things and goig back to edit it, if only it was a pretty backlit one that cost me waaay too much I'd smash it against a wall and get a new one!!

Took me a while to find this as I was expecting it in the battle reports. Thats said a battle requires two sides fighting....

Sounds like a comprehensive win. Tyranids are always a struggle for standardard marines (and even though iot was a DA list it sounds like a solid SM list without the additions of the DA specials). It's hard to try and get the balance right between big shooting, horde shooting and counter attack units.

Were I playing that list, I think I would have gone second and castled in a corner. I would have concentrated my fire on the tervigons and hope that weight of fire took the larger MC's out. Wait until the smaller ones get closer and then hit them with assault marines.

I think the land raider is a brave choice against Nids. Possibly put the command squad in them and use it asd a counter charge. The I'm trying to rmember prices of weapons off the top of my head but I think you could give two of them thunder hammers which maight even up an encounters. If no you could get some points back by replacing the plasma cannons ont he dev squads with missile launchers.

Either way, once again the nids are well fed! you must be making quite a name for yourself in that store!

Yeah I kindof thought it was a campaign battle report section, not sure why... Next one will go in there! There's a tournament in a couple of weeks I was going to enter down there unfortunately I don't have enough painted gants for the paiting requirements...

Standard marines (i.e. not space wolves) so have a hard time against nids. I think they really need to be tailoring to stand up to us. But i'll go over that in the "how to win" article you requested They definitly have enough about them to win and if he'd played differently he could have pulled it off with a bit of luck, unfortunately he didn't get much luck at all. I made 4 5+ f'n'p/ cover saves against his big guns on the first turn - that just unlucky!

The land raider was the first thing he said he wouldn't bring against me again, as he said; it was bascally just used as a very expensive dev squad and the second I get the big boys to it it's toast anyway, so you don't even get the survivability you pay for in the price

added a new subforum for non campaign bat reps

fiddled with the settings and hopefully might have fixed the pictures thing in the battle report areas. (fingers crossed!)

now back to reading