The March Towards Warmaster Continues

Last night I had a challenge game against Marc (Mark?) aka Tyranous_Dominus or TD for short. We agreed upon 1000 pts so I was feeling very crazy and wanted to be nasty. Here is the army I picked:

Terminator lord
Daemon Prince
Dreadnought
2 x 6 marines
Defiler
3 Obliterators

TD's army:
Sorcerer
2 x 11 Noise Marines with sonic blasters
Obliterator
Defiler

We rolled up a Choose Your Mission result which TD won and promptly picked Cleanse, gamma level.

My strategy was simple: advance the four assault monsters en masse and try to overwhelm his defenses before getting shot or counter-charged to death. I decided to go for a two-pronged attack with the chaos lord and daemon prince moving up the right flank while the Defiler and Dreadnought advanced up the left. The obliterators waited for deep striking in the warp and the two marine squads were merely objective holders.

TD deployed each of his large Noise Marine squads facing off my attacks, with defiler, obliterator, and sorcerer behind them in reserve.

On turn two the crux of the matter came to a head and TD made the fatal mistake: he wisely withdrew the Noise Marines on the right away from the advancing lords, but stood his ground in the face of the advancing war machines on the left. I got lucky and the dreadnought rolled a blood rage and fleeted decently towards that squad so that on the bottom of turn 2 the defiler and dreadnought hit the Noise Marine squad together.

The carnage in that single hand to hand spiraled upwards to take over the game for all intents and purposes. Neither the dreadnought nor defiler would flee, and the Noise Marines were similarly fearless but lacked weapons to hurt the walkers. TD sent in the sorcerer with meltabombs and his defiler and obliterator to even the odds. As the defiler rushed in the dreadnought calmly spun around and smashed it to pieces with one blow. The sorcerer and obliterator missed. Next round luck was with me again: he only managed a stun on the dreadnought (on the penetrating table no less!) and a stun on the defiler which was quickly ignored.

Now my chaos lord was in range and charged the sorcerer. The sorcerer's force weapon (DAMN! Forgot about that!) flared and he got two hits but failed to wound both times. In return the lightning claws ripped him open twice, and the dreadnought finished him off. The obliterator was dealt with by a quick backhanded swipe from the defiler and TD knew the game was lost.

When my 3 obliterators showed up I deep struck them deep to distract the other noise marine squad. They sacrificed their lives but bought me enough time to deal with the main battle and then overwhelm them in the last two turns. They did take down the chaos lord before the end though. Small victories must be found where they can.

Conclusion: massacre for the Black Storm!

Analysis: I think TD made only one poor choice: to stand and let the defiler and dreadnought assault him. Had he backed off and used a couple more rounds of shooting, perhaps one or both of the war machines would have gone down and given him a much needed respite.

As it was, he still might have been able to salvage the game had either the sorcerer or obliterator killed their respective enemies, but luck was not with him and they failed in their mission.

I think TD's army is well constructed, but power fists on those squad leaders (or even meltabombs!) could have made a world of difference.

Good game!