These are a bit out of time here but this is the first of four battle reports that I played before the Northern Invasion tournament. These were just small scale games of 1000 points to get my head around some of the rules changes for 10th before the tournament. This was the first game that I played, against Space Wolves, the same player I ended up playing against when I got to the tournament. The list i played against was pretty similar to the full tournament list, with some thunder wolf cavalry, blood claws, grey hunters and intercessions, with some eradicators, which didn’t make the final list. My list on the other hand consisted of the infantry, breachers in Valkyries and a Field Ordnance battery with heavy lascannons.
We played a leviathan mission, Sweeping Engagement, Take and Hold with scrambler fields. The scrambler field had no effect on the game, due to neither of us having strategic reserves. Take and hold should have been easy for me, but I really failed to take advantage of the mission.
Guard Deployment
Space wolf deployment
Blood Claws and Ragnar pushing up the centre
Blood Claws
The blood claws and Ragnar went charging up the field turn one, engaged and destroyed a full 20 man guard squad with ease and then proceeded to just sweep through my battle lines almost completely unopposed.
The empty battlefield.
The flyer trying to do something useful
The flyer and everything on the right is dead.
So in this game I found out that flyers are not quite as good as they use to be and when I say not as good, what I mean is useless. You can see the blood claws as the very bottom of the table having slaughtered their way through two 20 man catachan squads and the field ordnance battery.
The guard almost tabled
The lone assassin sitting on his perch
The final result was a resounding victory for the space wolves. I was completely unable to move anywhere on the board, without getting absolutely slaughtered by the space wolves. This game was good though for a number of reasons. The first thing I learnt was that no matter how much I like the idea of 20 man guard squads, 10 man squads are the way to go I think. This means that there is less chance of all 20 guardsmen getting wiped out in a single turn of firing or combat. The second lesson learnt is that flyers are not very resilient, with no natural -1 to hit and even with the extra toughness and save, they are still quite easy to remove. The last thing i learnt was less about the game and more about the system as a whole, that guard are either really over priced or space marines are over powered, as there were as many space wolf units on the table as there were guard units! I’m use to outnumbering the enemy by several units, but this time around I was actually outnumbered!
As a result of this game, I decided to thin down the squad sizes and look at getting more movement options in the list. I wish I could have tried playing this list again with an updated list but there was just no time. I did change the list for my next game, adding in a couple of vehicle to see how that does.
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