We had a terrific game of 2nd edition Warhammer 40,000 to celebrate that both Jonas and I are getting some traction with painting up our armies. We both fielded 1500 points armies and Jonas had Squats, while I used my trusty Blood Skulls. I have neglected doing proper unit updates on the blog for each time I have finished a unit, but the army is now around 2500 points.

Scenario

The scenario we played was based around a piece of terrain I had just scratch built. The piece is meant to resemble an enourmeous missile launcher of some sort. Perhaps from a titan. It has now lain in the wastes for long enough to be discovered by the Squats. However, the Blood Skulls have also set their eyes on this archeotechnological marvel and wants to strip it for everything of any worth. Hence the battle commences.

The scenario was straight forward: We would play 4 turns and the one with the most units over 50% touching the base would be awarded the objective (5 VP). Vehicles cannot claim the objective. On top of this we counted the VP as given in Dark Millenium.

Armylists

I decided to go for an “elite” army with just 8 marines. They would have 2 dreads in support and an awesome terminator squad of 5 with (only) 1 reaper autocannon, heavy flamer and melta combies. I was originally intending to teleport them in, but I had forgotten that this is not possible for Chaos. A something, and also new, I brought a Chaos Sorcerer Master (level 3). Psychic power are just so much fun.

Deployment

In addition to the troops being deployed as shown, Chaos had the “ambush” strategy card, allowing them to let a unit deploy up to 24″ into the board, and in hiding and on overwatch. In addition to this, the veterans also infiltrated their way to the Squat side of the board and set up in hiding. The squats

Battle

Chaos had a high strategy rating and easily won the roll to start. The plan was rather simple. Shoot up as many Squats as possible and then when there was 2 turns left converge on the objective with whatever was left. Pretty straight forward.

My Night Lord veterans quickly learned that the Squats were full of dirty traps and ran into a minefield directly after emerging from their hiding place. They were lucky enough to escape unscathed even though they set off a multitude of booby traps over the first two turns. (This was the Booby Traps strategy card played by the Squats).

I deliberately placed my terminators directly opposite Jonas’ terminators. I thought a showdown between the armoured giants was too cool to miss out on. But to my dismay I quickly started loosing terminators at an alarming rate to small arms fire! I kept on rolling 3…. and with a -1 from bolter fire that is not cool!

The Blood Angel allied terminators were hunkering down and arguing amongst themselves about who got to stand behind the barrel that they all deemed to be the perfect cover against chaos weapons.

The nightlords finally managed to get into the haven of close combat. The combat turned out to be rather long winded as they couldn’t really make any wounds. Eventually the Warriors Blue squad was decimated and the Battle Standard was conquered.

My Master Sorceror had the great fortune to draw the Assail and teh Hellfire powers. And well, also the Chain LIghtning. But Assail was the one I had the highest hopes for. The ability to draw out an enemy character is super cool. I used it to draw the Squat Living Ancestor. This pulled him within charge range of my frenzied Bebop Dreadnought. His thunderhammer quickly made it a Dead Ancestor.

But then something started stirring! A Termite borred it’s way up through behind the lines of the Chaos Marines. Just wihtin range of both the Sorceror and the Marine squad (which had relocated towards the objective as per the plan above).

The Squats in Exoarmour started pouring out of the Termite and the autolaunchers blocked off the rest of the chaos army with blind grenades. The Chaos Sorceror had a Displacer field but this sent him directly into the clouds of blind grenade smoke, which completely debilitated his psychic powers.

The Exo Armours were a real problem and started tearing through the chaos marines. Their power axes were good, but it was not catastrophic yet. I had an aspiring champion with a power fist hoping to do something about them still.

The chaos marine squad took lots of casualties, but Harkonn The Slayer (the Chaos lord) come to the rescue. I was quite eager to get this guy in combat, as he had a Mark of Khorne and rode a juggernaut. However he couldn’t even nearly kill enough to make up for his cost. Close combat is somewhat of a special case in 2nd and it is really difficult to slay many miniatures like in later editions. Heroes are better off going for other heroes, rather than getting bogged down in squads of troops, but there was too far to any good targets for the Lord.

The Squat warlord had a vary funny Warp Jump ability but even though he jumped around the board, he failed to roll “hit” even a single time and the 2d10 scattering saw him going just about everywhere except where he wanted. Eventually he got close enough to the scuffle to try and shoot his melta… there was a 1/4 chance he’d hit his own guy in the combat.. and so he did. We had a good laugh about it. Unfortunately the Exo armour took the melta hit and he survived. It had been quite funny if he’d gone down to blue on blue.

Turn four ended looking something like the picture below. It is quite typical of 2nd edition games that you’re left with just a few models wandering around aimlessly after both armies have been nearly decimated. In this case there were 2 squat exo armour and an intact thunderer squad left. The warlord was of course also still alive. The rest were gone. Chaos had a few marines, some terminators and both dreadnoughts still. The dreads had really proved a tough nut to crack, and Jonas had had no luck at all with his lascannons. On average he would have rolled 19.5 for armour penetration and the dreasd have between 18 and 21 in armour. Still, despite several hits all he managed to do was to mangle the leg of Bebop.

Conclusion

The terminators and the chaos marines were below 50%, and one dread was damaged. This was enough to give Jonas 6 VP. His exo armours were taken below 50% in the final turn which cost him the objective (and the victory). Conversely I had destroyed enough squats to gain 9 victory points and also did not get the objective.

Final score 6-9

It was a fun game I thnk. It took us 4 hours roughly which is quite a lot for 1500 points, but this is the way it is when there is a while between the games. In comparison with Warhammer Fantasy I think there is a lot more detail to the individual figures in 40k, which really makes things take longer. I was super fun though, and I already look forward to more.