Yes, I returned from the weekend triumphant, with all opposition crushed beneath the might of my overwhelming cheese. After my first five competitive games of 6th edition all I can say is WOW, wound allocation takes forever!
With a total of 6 ICs and upgrade characters spread across two units, my games were rife with wound allocation shenanigans. And some of it wasn't even intentional, just the pure fact of having various different saves and toughness values in a unit meant that save rolls usually had to be split into batches of 3 and rolled over and over again, including any fortune saves.
And I wasn't even the only culprit, almost everyone had units with a sergeant or IC leading them, and that just slowed every shooting phase into a slow grind. And as for the assault phase, well lets just say we don't like to talk about the assault phase…
My 5 games (in order) were against a very nice nurgle themed chaos/traitor army from one of the imperial armour books, a mixed Tyranid army, the national horde Ork army, some IG with BA allies, and a nifty Space Wolf force. I won't go through them all turn by turn because so many battle reports often turn into something like this.
But instead, I'll point out some interesting (and by that I mean nasty and cheesy) moments from some of the games, and go through how each unit performed.
Lets start with the star unit from the weekend, the Wraithguard. These guys were just amazing. The stealthed 4+ fortuned cover save just made them far too tough for anything to really make a dent. 3 Vendettas and a Storm Raven blasted them for a turn and did no significant damage.
Hit and run thwarted several attempts to bog them down in combat, and actually gave this otherwise slow unit a nice speedboost into enemy lines. The firepower was pretty neat too, whatever they looked at tended to die rather quickly.
I am very familiar with Eldar, particularly Eldrad, but have never actually used them in a game before. It was pretty fun using new units, or at least once I had got the hang of remembering to cast psychic powers. The various combinations of doom, fortune and guide all worked pretty well.
The only issue was the short range on the powers, which meant I had to deploy fairly clumped up and stay like that for most of the game, which became a real problem in the later turns when units had to spread out to get objectives and get stuck in close combat.
Overall I'm happy with the Eldrad/Baron/Wraithguard unit, even though the slow speed is still a big issue.
As for the rest of the troops: The jetbikes claimed objectives and generally stayed out of trouble. The ridiculously high speed on them was rather entertaining. I wouldn't rely solely on these for scoring, the low model count lets them down.
A few nice big blobs of dudesmen are needed, the two 10 man warriors squads did pretty well for themselves. Either just by adding a little bit of extra firepower, or by hiding on objectives and being a bit tougher to shift than a 5 or 3 man squad.
Having said that, all three of these units rarely survived an game. A few times they needed to heroically sacrificed to ensure the future of the species, other times they just got shot or assaulted.
Most of the time though, they just ran away. Time to invest in some fearless units…
Fearless. Now this led to some interesting situations. Despite the nerf to cover, the punitive wound allocation, the greater amount of anti-infantry weaponry, overwatch fire, and not being allowed to go to ground any more, the Ork Horde still packed a big punch. And against me, it was all due to fearless.
With warwalkers, a harliestar, and plenty more shooting besides, I would normally have been pretty confident against the horde. But the old trick to killing off masses of ors in combat couldn't work anymore. Under 5th ed rules, I would have no problem pulling off a nasty multi-charge and blowing up several boyz mobs through fearless wounds.
But that can't be done any more. I had to sit and wait until the mobs were suitably whittled down so as they could be killed off the good old fashioned way, ork by ork, and make sure I didn't get counter charged by any other mobs.
Through lots and lots and lots of shooting, and some nasty assaults, I did eventually kill off all 150 scoring orks, but the pointy eared people had suffered horrific casualties of their own. I had a depleted warrior squad, two harlies, a single wraithguard, and all three HQs left at the end, desperately trying to hide from the fail of loota fire coming their way.
A similar situation occurred against the nurgle chaos/guard army, with fearless plague zombies with FnP. Now they were a bit easier as the units were only 20 strong and not that potent in combat, but it still took a while to clear them out, whilst still worrying about the other nasty units trying to rip my army to shreds.
Even fortuned harlies charging into a doomed mob of boyz can't do the job reliably. In this case they did, but in short my opponents dice were rubbish while mine were far too good. The harliestar fails due to the strict pile in order at each initiative step, which I think I'll have to explain in a separate article.
The harlies were good for the most part, just about killing what they charged into. They did encounter a few problem though, mainly in the form of characters with an invulnerable or 2+ save, and any unit with Feel no Pain. The main issue is that they are fragile, they need to kill whatever they go into before the opposition gets a chance to strike back, otherwise they will just start falling over.
Not to say they are a bad unit, they are still pretty awesome, but they need to be kept back more as a deterrent or for counter-attacks. Flamers and barrage weapons also make them cry.
As for Vect, well he can be best described as a leaky sack of monkey feces. He was useless, beyond useless infect, he actually hampered the army more than helped it.
The first problem is being only AP3 in combat. This makes him great against bog standard troops, but rubbish against anything tough, which is kinda what I needed the unit to be killing.
Next, he slowed down the harlies. Several times they got bogged down in terrain that they could have ignored if Vect wasn't telling them all to wait up while he puffed along with his zimmer frame.
Finally, he nearly led to their demise more than once due to the initiative pile in steps. Without him, I would have been a bit more cautious and tactical in their usage, and used the points elsewhere, rather than having to plow this rather expensive deathstar into things that it perhaps shouldn't be going near.
Now, he was not all bad. Giving the harlies Fearless was very important, and saved them from an embarrassing lost combat more than once. Preferred Enemy is also brilliant on harlies, it allows them to reroll half their misses in combat, and with doom up the number of attacks which wound drastically increases. But still not quite worth it, the points would have been better spent on another character or unit.
That leaves us with the heavy support.
The Warwalkers were fun, and killed more than their fair share of stuff. But they like to stay near Eldrad, which clumps the army up a bit.
The Ravagers did their thing. The dark lances had bit of a problem, either there were so few tanks or MCs that they ran out of targets after turn 2, or there were too many tanks and they couldn't make a dent before getting blown up themselves. However, the disintegrator ravager was awesome, blasting apart light vehicles and any infantry unit which dared look at it funny.
Overall, I was impressed by how effective the firepower out of these unit was, but that is more a symptom of this edition, everyone's firepower was just so much more effective.
Now, a few notes on what went right and what went wrong in my games.
-Right: Shooting. Lots of shooting, I want more of it, lots more of it.
-Wrong: Assaults. We don't like the talk about assault. Even with rerolls from fleet, I failed more point blank assaults than succeeded over the weekend. This wasn't limited to me, everyone failed a lot of sensible charges, and got punished from overwatch fire on the way in to boot.
-Right: Psychic powers. Guide to take out flyers, doom to kill off infantry with assault and poison shots, and fortune to keep all my expensive stuff alive. Now I almost always had to use fortune twice, so that limited options a bit.
-Wrong: Leadership tests. So many failed tests… From now on, everyone is to be fearless! Warriors running off an objective did cost me a game that would have otherwise been a massacre. It's the sort of thing that would make me rage for months had I not won the event…
-Right: Infantry. It's no secret that I just don't get vehicles, aside from light skimmers. Lots of infantry on both sides of the board makes life so much easier for my poor feeble mind.
-Wrong: Speed. The downside of infantry is that it's a bit slow, both to play with and in terms of movement. Faster moving armies will generally perform better, and be a bit safer to use.
-Right: The Baron. I'm a big fan of the Baron (except when he decides to run away, which is quite often), I will try to keep him in my lists as much as possible. The shear amount of stuff he offers an army (especially elder allies) for the points cost, it makes it hard to justify not including him.
-Wrong: Wound Allocation and Look out Scrub. This has since been fixed with the latest batch of FAQs, but the amount of abuse this got, combined with just how unbelievably time consuming this was made for some exhausting games.
-Right: Flyers. Well, not my flyers. There was the foundation for a nasty IG/BA list, with 3 vendettas and a storm raven, which when added to al the other stuff BA and IG can field, can make quite a nasty army.
-Wrong: The Meta.
Ok, so I had better add the disclaimer that there were no Necrons at this event, so no Necron Air Force (or NAFfy as I like to call it) to mess anyone up. My list was slightly ahead of the meta at the time, and it was generally agreed going in that it as one of the nastier armies there.
A lot of the armies were fluffy or experimental, with lots of squishy infantry, not too much shooting, and not too many flyers. The poor nids just died in droves to my sustained firepower and assaults, whereas I played against 5 flyers in total, and just had to ignore all of them.
Against more competitive lists, mine would quickly fall apart due to lack of proper anti-air firepower and speed. This is something I'm looking to rectify in future iterations of this army, but the NAFfy has already proven itself pretty effective in every tournament since.
I've already looked at a few options for updating the list, which I will post up here soon, but it's quite hard to get good, killy, and inexpensive units without resorting to assault units. And I really don't want to go back to venoms…
If you have any more questions about the games or this army, let me know in the comments below.
Next up, I take an in depth look at what makes the harliestar work, and more importantly, why it doesn't work.
