The Joy of Prioritisation

Oh, boy. I try to be a responsible adult who keeps things around me in perspective, and any reasonable person would say that the opportunity for a little judicious career development should be higher on anybody’s priority list than the chance to go and play with toy soldiers somewhere. This is a call that I frequently have to make as all the development seminars in my area seem to be scheduled, without fail, for a Thursday night, which is the only realistic time I have for wargaming. More often than not I manage to squeeze them both in. I fear it says something unflattering about me on all sorts of levels that I am currently welcoming any symposia going, not out of a burning desire to improve my methodology and skills, but because right now I’ll take any decent excuse to avoid being kicked all over the shop by any other army going.

At least with the Consecrators I had some highly resilient Troops units and could, you know, grind out the occasional draw. For some reason the Blood Angels are going through a prolonged period of seeming fragile and non-threatening.

Onto specifics: this week I played a guy with whom I’m building up quite a history of close, fun games (haven’t quite beaten him yet, but). This week he was using his Chaos Marine force, which appeared to comprise a mixture of basic tactical squads, supported by three Obliterators, some tooled up Chaos Terminators, a Daemon Prince, a Greater Daemon and some of the Lesser kind too. The dice were quirky and we wound up playing Wave Assault with Chaos in the role of the Tyranids.

I held the board centre and the Chaos army gradually advanced from three directions. Two of the Obliterators came on in the first turn and proceeded to hammer the Blood Angel devastators who were covering one of the approaches. It quickly became clear I had the choice between sitting tight in the board centre and waiting for the Chaos assault or moving to intercept and counter-assault the enemy.

I went for the latter which was possibly a mistake. Acting unsupported, the Death Company managed to deal with the Terminators when they teleported in but were virtually wiped out as a result. The two survivors managed to tie up some Lesser Daemons for a turn but that was the limit of their contribution. The Chaos tactical units and Obliterators concentrated on hammering my tactical squad and dreadnoughts prior to assaults from the Greater Daemon and Daemon Prince. The squad and the Furioso dreadnought were dealt with extremely briskly and painlessly from the point of view of the Chaos army.

I had sent Mephiston over to one board edge ready to pounce on the Chaos elements that would be coming on from there, but this plan was confounded when the Chaos general deployed them as far as possible from the Lord of Death. By the time Mephiston was back in the thick of things my army had been reduced to a lone devastator sergeant ineffectually rapid firing down at the Obliterator advance, my Captain (whose support squad had just been eaten by a Daemon Prince), an immobilised heavy-weapon dreadnought and the Lord of Death himself. (I was technically out of the game by this point as I could no longer contest objectives and had no chance of routing the entire enemy army in the few turns remaining, but I played on out of common civility.)

Well, Mephiston killed the Daemon Prince on the charge, as you’d expect, and then carved his way through a big squad of Daemonettes with no real cause for concern (these were vanilla daemons, of course). The dreadnought took two wounds off the Greater Daemon, which was then charged by the Captain (I judged that what the situation demanded was a pointless, vainglorious gesture, but I only needed one 6 to potentially take the beast’s last wound).  The Captain muffed it and was gobbled up, Mephiston was left contemplating the prospects of fighting the entire remaining Chaos force virtually single-handed, and luckily further embarrassment was spared when the dice ended the game at the earliest possible moment. We didn’t actually check to see if the Chaos marines were close enough to claim any of the objectives, but in every real sense the game was obviously theirs.

My opponents seem to be wising up to the fact that it’s the Death-and-Meph combo that gives my army whatever potency it possesses, and taking any chance they can to neutralise the former early in the game while steadfastly trying to avoid the latter. The extreme fragility of the army’s ability to contest objectives is also becoming painfully obvious. I need to stick another full-size tactical squad in there, probably a mechanised one. This will probably mean dropping Mephiston, but master of carnage and reliable source of good cheer though he is he’s not helping me win games at the moment.

Other candidates for the chop are my perennially-underperforming plasma cannon devastators and the Captain. I suspect a Chaplain to sing the Death Company on their way will be a cheaper and more effective choice of HQ. The jury is still sitting on the performance of the Furioso dreadnought: possibly switching the (as-yet-unfired) frag cannon for another blood fist may help this guy to shine.

In any case we’re looking at significant changes to the design of the list, and I note I still need to address my anti-tank shortfall. Hum. Keep those professional development seminars coming, guys.