I dislike dogs at the best of times. I’ve been a bit canophobic for quite some time, mainly kicking off when the damn animals start making noise. It’s an odd combination of anger, loathing and fear. Why am I telling you this? No reason.
So, my next enemy were Space Wolves again. You can doubtless imagine my happy-face at this news. Pretty standard wolf list for the most part. He had a core of Grey Hunter squads in Rhinos, a couple of Rune Priests, some Wolf Guard to split up as squad leaders, some Wolf Scouts and a couple of Long Fang Missile squads with a plasma cannon or two and some Lascannon Razorbacks to back them up. The interesting flavour this guy brought was Landspeeders; specifically three Typhoons. It’s an odd choice for Wolves (though not for the regular Codex guys and not as weird as the 11th guys would have you believe) because, from what I remember, they’re only firing at a BS of 3, decreasing their effectiveness a tad, but it’s till a very valid way of sticking a few more independently firing missile launchers into your Wolf list. If, you know, you absolutely needed to.
The plus point for my list above the other DE lists out there (as I’ve previously mentioned) is that the ML spam isn’t quite as effective when I’m packing large squads fast-moving, cover-hugging, feel-no-paining, assault-loving murderous bastards. With a Webway. We were playing kill points, which can be bad for a lot of DE lists out there, but (again) my large Hellions squads even this mission a little more in my favour, as I’m only presenting 13 KPs rather than the more tradition Venom Spam numbers of nearly 20. The Dawn of War setup for this game was another big advantage in my favour. Having to move most of your units onto the board really does a number on the Long Fang aficionados as it stops them from firing for a turn and limits the number of decent firing points they can reach to set up. It also gives me a good round of shooting at them, if that’s what I feel like doing at the time; especially if I’m going first and I get the first turn with decent lighting conditions. I was going first this game. My Haemonculus and the Wrack started forward in the Deployment zone and I placed the Webway fairly far forward. The rest of my army bar the Hellions and the Baron sped on to gain some cover saves.
His whole army trooped on in Turn 1, even the Wolf Scouts, which I thought was a bit odd, but my opponent decided that it would be too easy for me to move away from my board edges, leaving the Scouts all alone and unsupported. Fair enough. Where my opponent boxed clever with his opening gambit was in scooting some Rhinos and Razorbacks forward and turning them lengthways, marching one squad of Long Fangs on behind them, keeping them protected while they set up. The other squad walked then ran into area terrain to nab a cover save if necessary. Unfortunately, this backfired and my antitank units opened up and wrecked one of the Rhinos, stunned another and immobilised a third, blocking his Long Fangs and rendering them mainly useless, which was definitely a bit of a coup for me!
Next up, the Baron’s squad of Hellions turned up in turn 2 through the portal and populated a large piece of area terrain, shooting the freshly wrecked Grey Hunter squad to oblivion. This may have seemed unduly rash, but the main reason I acted so aggressive with them was to use them as bait. So many DE weapons are utterly ineffectual against vehicles and so having an opponent disembark a lot of their army opens them up to a disproportionately large amount of poisoned death. In this case, the bait worked nicely. He disembarked nigh on his entire army and readied to deal with the imminent Hellion threat. Unfortunately for my opponent, the Hellions shrugged off nearly all the firepower levelled at them and although they lost the ensuing assault, they kept their nerve (even though I forgot that I had defensive grenades). The resulting Hit and Run placed them nicely in front of the cover-hugging Long Fangs and the Wolf Scouts. The game was pretty much over at that point. The Baron’s squad pulling through at a decent number (12 out of 18 survived the Wolf counterstrike) was the final nail in the coffin, and the second Hellion squad turned up in Turn 3 to deal with the leftovers. The rest of the game was a mop-up operation from then on. My opponent had given up. It did well for my ego, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for him for this game. Sometimes things just don’t work out.
Still nice for it to happen to someone else though! /Schadenfreude
That was the end of Day 1. Next up was drinking, quiznighting and moaning that they hadn’t bought enough Desperadoes for the bar. I’d done well for the first day and was probably radiating smug at toxic levels throughout the evening. The rest of my team, less so. The Daemons and the Orks had grabbed a win each during the day, but our Blood Raven toting fourth player had not been so fortuitous. Still there was always the next day!
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