Daemons Vs Necrons

I've been kind of a hobby madman lately; it's true, it's true.  I've been spending quite a bit of time on my super-secret Eldar build for the team tournament with Fritz at BoLSCon, not to mention working on and painting my Daemons and Blood Angels.  I've been frustrated with the Blood Angels, if you couldn't tell; more on that later this week, but suffice it to say, the all-infantry army list I put together sucked pretty hard.

You wanna know what I learned about Blood Angels?  They're still Marines.  That's all - they've got some extra stuff, here and there - but they're Marines all the same.  I can hear you now, "No shit, Brent, get your digital head out of your ass."

Problem is, I think I have a point.

Blah!  This is a battle report, and I've wasted 4 paragraphs already.  Okay, while I've been having problems with Marines, my Daemons army, and my ability to play it, has peaked nicely.  I took a version of my BoLSCon variant to the FLGS tournament today and won 1st place.  

Here's Game 1 against Necrons.  This game was called Brawl; you earned 3pts/HQ, 1pt/Troop, and 2pts/other unit type.

 

I took the 2nd turn, so the original Tony (Chemotep) moved forward.  He's rocking a 3 Monolith variant; the 3rd, which he borrowed from me, is Deep Striking.

I stack my Alpha Strike drop - that is, everything with a shooting weapon - and dropped modestly.  I was more passive than usual with my Heralds, but I hoped to save them.  The Horrors didn't deviate - they were bait.

When playing Necron, I always ignore the Monoliths and concentrate on phasing out the army.  This game was no exception, except for this one shot and joking around at the end.  Having no other shot, I Bolted the Mono, got lucky, and blasted off a weapon.  To represent that, I broke his toy.

The Wraiths take the bait, moving up to take out my Horrors.  I'm a bit unlucky and fall to his rapid-firing 'Crons, so the Wraiths are even more out of position.

My Heralds blast the Wraiths off the board.  My Daemon Princes and Great Unclean One sweep to my left flank.  My drop is nice; I'm conservative, since my Fiends have plenty of speed.  The Original Tony is a canny player, so he constantly shifts his units in and out of whatever combats I manage to engage in.

This is from the left flank.  I've learned with Deep Striking that it's best to be fairly conservative if you can afford to be.  In this case, his threats are centralized, and while I can't pin him in the center completely, as his Monoliths can run me over, I do feel in control of the flow of the game.

On his turn, the last Monolith Deep Strikes in and deviates to the edge of the board.  The Deceiver moves in to threaten my Great Unclean One, but without fleet I see it coming a mile away.

 This is a pretty chaotic picture, but basically I'd set up my charges on the previous turns and on this turn pulled the trigger.  This is the aftermath.  The Other Tony was completely unprepared for the Fiends; reading an entry or having a unit explained doesn't prepare you for what they're capable of.  I charged the Deceiver with the Great Unclean One and a unit of Fiends, trying to torrent wounds through Rending.  That worked, there as well as against the other units.

The combats wind down and wrap up.  I find out I'm a model away from phasing the army out.  Tony pulls his army through the Monoliths, moving away in 3 directions, trying to salvage what he can. 

The last two pictures are just wrapping up the game.  This was a bit of overkill, but I needed to assure this unit's complete destruction in order to end the game a turn earlier than it normally would...

...and this was my experiment, trying to bring down a Monolith.  It's pretty impossible - or I should say, the odds are long.  I had 4 monstrous creatures shooting then charging, but it was a huge waste of time.  It wasn't important; I was curious and the Original Tony thought it was funny.

After the game, the Original Tony commented on the Fiends; basically, he thought they were broken.  Don't get me wrong - he didn't bitch or whine, he's not that kind of guy - but he thought they were pretty overwhelming.  I'm not sure I agree.  Certainly I think Fiends or Bloodcrushers are powerful and one or both units are necessary to a competitive Daemons army, but the army is designed to drop, take a certain amount of punishment, then attack in close combat.

The stats reflect the assumption the unit(s) won't be whole, but rather shot to shit.  Most armies are fairly capable of of dishing out that kind of damage, if played properly, and modern games become an application of applied force.  The Necrons aren't capable of that, regardless of what others may say.

Most people think the Codex is broken, or at best challenging to use.  The best build at the moment is the Destroyer-spam, with the idea of keeping the Troops off the board to avoid phase out while the Destroyers and Heavy Destroyers play the angles.  While this is the best version, I don't think it comes close to competing, all things being equal, so I don't think of myself as some huge tactical genius for this win.  I just played my army properly and it worked out as expected.

My next game was against Birdsong... the same dude that a month prior had pulled the Sanctuary trick on me.  While that's a personal favorite game of mine now, I wasn't interested in a repeat performance.  That was the first question I asked, but it turns out that Birdsong was playing a Mephiston Blood Angels variant.

(to be continued)