Monday, October 18, 2010

Today In Awful Warseer Tactics Part 7



Welcome back to the fun series where someone asks an innocent question of the Warseer herd, and gets a couple dozen horrible answers in response.  Today, the question is how a noob's Chaos Space Marines can compete with close combat oriented loyalist Marines, and Black Templars in specific.  If there is one 40k army I can speak about with some authority it is Black Templars.  Onto the madness...

Vuuil:  Anyway, it ends up i'm facing a black templar army, or space wolves.  Problem beeing, i have an awful lot of 'basic' troops, but not so much punch to send, say, terminators, in hell.  I have at my disposal (I don't list an exact army list, as we don't strictly play wysiwyg, i always can tool around)... :

-Terminator sorcerer w/ Mark of Tzeentch, warp time, bolt of change
-5 dual LC chosen w/ mark of Slaanesh (as i'm often fighting marines with i4), i was hoping to use as a beacon for oblis / terminators if i could grab a few
-10 smc w/ 2 meltas
-2x 10 khorne zerkers, 1 rhino to carry em around
-5 raptors decked w/ 2x flamers, or more likely meltaguns
-5 plague marines

My problem lies in defeating terminators...  The BT army i face often carries a venerable dread (or 2, depending on points) loaded with either plasma or assault cannon, a Crusader LR carrying a dual LC assault terminators squad (or on foot, depending on points again), a 'normal' 5x terminator squad with terminator captain, 2x 5sm to fill his troop reqs, and an emperor's champion somewhere to benefit from his to hit rerolls.

(No need to explain the pain of his assault terminators clawing their way after a furious charge through my army, rerolling hit and wound, i believe)

So, my problem is...  What would be an efficient way to boost up my army ?  By the way, we're doing 1k - 1.5k battles mostly.

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The Easy Answer is: bring Plague Marines for your troops.  BT Crusader squads cannot beat Plague Marines in close combat.  Neither can Grey Hunters nor BA Assault Squads, even with a FNP/FC bubble.  

The key to playing an effective close combat army is having your troops be able to beat the opposition's elite units in close combat.  If your basic troops aren't good enough at CC to kill the enemy's basic troops, how good of a CC army are you in the first place?  The answer is not very.   As I said earlier, Crusader Squads cannot kill Plague Marines in close combat.  That means his rock unit of Lightning Claw terminators are forced to kill your troops rather than the elites they want to be killing.  Once that shift begins, you are a long way towards winning the battle.

Second, you only have 1 Rhino.  I know you're new to the game, but I'll say this for emphasis: your troops need to be fully meched up.  His close combat troops won't be doing much if you are still tucked safely in your Rhinos, shooting two meltaguns per turn.
Third, close combat armies have to voluntarily leave their transports in order to, ya know, close combat things.  Things outside of transports can be Lash of Submissioned.  Things that get Lashed tend to die.  At 1,500 points your HQ should probably be a Lash Sorcerer who is Lashing BT Terminators from the safety of a Rhino so that your Dual Lightning Claw Slaanesh Chosen can rip them apart on the charge.

So now that you have the correct answer, let's see what bad advice the Warseer dumplings have for you...

Erwos:  Obliterators are your best bet. They shred terminators like nothing else with their plasma cannons. 

No.  No.  No.  Obliterators are great against BT terminators.  They aren't great against BA, Vanilla, or SW.  Obliterators are a good all around choice, but for different reasons.  They are reliable anti-tank in a list that is sorely lacking it.  But they shouldn't be on Anti-Terminator patrol as a point of interest.

Aiwass: In other hand, if the termies are not TH/SS just assault them with berzerkers.

On the other hand, you're an idiot.  How do you suppose your Berserkers in a Rhino will reliably get the charge off against assault Terminators who are usually in a Land Raider Crusader?  Pro tip: they won't.  2/3rd of the time it will be the Terminators charging the Berserkers.  You know what happens then?  Yup, you guessed it: the Berserkers die a horrible death.

Volandum:  Lash/Obliterator seems optimal, so I'd suggest a Slaaneshi Sorc (as you already have MkS in your list). Probably drop your Berzerker rhino squad to 9 so he can join them in the rhino. Then you need to break Raiders so you can get at the Terminators, your options here include melta Raptors or just mechanising your other melta squads to increase how far away you can melt vehicles.

As usual, we get the right answer tucked away, unnoticed, in the middle of the madness.  I would put the Slaanesh sorcerer in the Rhino with the DLC Chosen, but that's just me.  Either way, you win the thread.  If you've been reading these though, you will know that it never ends when the right answer is given...

Vexbane:  another tactic you can use is to kill his troop choices. With only the very minimal you can make it so he cannot win any objective games by killing his troops.

Astonishingly dumb.  Seriously, I cannot believe that you are able to survive on your own in the real world without some kind of service dog to guide you.  Who would have thought that you can win objective missions by killing the opponent's troops?  These are the metagame shattering tactics that you can only get on Warseer.

And with that, the thread, and my sanity come to an end.  Luckily this was brief, I'm not sure how much more I could take.

 
 

1 comment:

  1. Man, I am really glad I am reading your blog. I am learning way more about BT than I can think of due to your wonderful experience. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete