Like I noted in the last post, I haven't been idle in the gaming and hobby side of things. Me and my son played a lot of 40k games using different armies (as we, who have hobby-ADD, do) and I was trying to focus on my Chaos Space Marines. I had to do quite a bit of 'culling' on my collection as the Emprah has replaced many of the models, but my son and another buddy donated to make sure that I was up-to-date. So I owed it to them to put an army to the battlefield.
My son has been using his Dark Angels like crazy and whopping me all over the table with them. I hate those First Legion guys! Mind you, we still haven't busted out the Lion... To show me some mercy, he decided on using his Black Templars, with all the characters and a couple of dreadnoughts to escort his horde. Oh goody- a close-combat army versus close-combat army game.
In the previous games we played, my army was rife with failed Dark Pacts and I probably lost more models to being forsaken than the enemy did. So did I learn my lesson and stop being so reliant on that special rule (further buffed by the detachment rule)? No, of course not! Even with Ld 6 and icon rerolls everywhere, I still took that mandatory d3 mortal wounds on every unit at least once a round. Add that to the craziness of those Templar vows and blenders-for-characters and it was just another loss. There were some cool moments, though!
The moment that changed the game happened in Round 3, well after the Defiler had used its daemonic legs to dash over-and-through ruins and make the central objective a focus, a unit of Chosen had to countercharge the veterans chewing through the Chaos Minions. This charge would have cleared the enemy, claimed the objective, and protected the Daemon Prince and the squishy-parts. And the charge was only 7". First roll- a 4! No worries, a command point was saved just for this key moment. Reroll- a 6! With that failed charge, the Templar dudes destroyed the Defiler, the Daemon Price, and consolidated to keep that objective forever. Did I mention that the middle objective was the most important for this game?
Another cool moment was the recall of the old 'Rhino-wall' tactic that was prevalent back in the days of 5th. I had a Rhino placed to claim an objective, shield some infantry from the Demolisher cannon coming their way, and prevent the berserker-nought from moving too close. That Rhino stood until the 4th round, claiming a weak objective point for an army that just wasn't scoring already! It was destroyed, giving up the 'tabling' as one of the last models, but it was the only scoring unit while it was there and that made it the MVP. A Rhino, that did nothing offensively, as the MVP.
And there it is- yet another loss by a massive margin. My Chaos Space Marines hate me. It wasn't bad dice rolls- in fact, there were quite a few times that I rolled unnaturally well and created some havoc. It wasn't the army list- these were the most effective units from previous losses being focused and it still didn't seem to be enough. And it wasn't balance- while the Templars are insanely good (and cool!), so are the Righteous Zealots! Between Dark Pacts hurting me and key moments failed...
We played another game after, with different scenario objectives and setup, and the result was the same. All-in-all, this means that I've lost five games in a row with my Chaos Marines! Five! I've learned that I hate Dark Angels, I now hate Black Templars, and I should never use the Dark Pacts rule. Maybe I'm a good-guy after all...
No comments:
Post a Comment