The orks are back on the table and it feels like a homecoming. Man I missed these greenskins. Had a great battle last night using the previously posted list. There were a lot of flops and a lot of surprises. The dice gods were not at all with me, but overall we ended up on the winning side, I think.
My opponent brought:
Lucius The Eternal
Helbrute w/ power scourge, TL-lascannon
Helbrute w/ thunder hammer, multi-melta
Thousand Sons x6 w/ sorcerer
Possessed x 6 + rhino w/ havoc launcher
Noise Marines x8 w/ sonic blasters + blastmaster + champion w/ powersword
Noise Marines x8 w/ sonic blasters + blastmaster + champion w/ powerfist
Bikes x3 w/ x2 plasma
Nikes x3 w/ x2 melta
Obliterator x3 separate units
After typing this out, I figured out it wasn't a bound list with 4 elites. Not concerning, just a note that I'll have to bring it up with my opponent. With only half dozen games under his belt, he's still learning.
So he rolls for boon of mutation on the psychic table and takes the primaris as well. He has two gifts for his possessed champion and rolls for shrouded and, guess what, gets daemon prince again.
I preset the table with terrain, having a certain scenario in mind. I thought we'd have the chaos army defending a city from an advancing ork horde. I gave him line of sight blocking terrain and buildings, to give his particular gun-line style army an advantage with my orks having a few ruins and ork barricades to hide behind.
I setup first and give him the advantage to setup after me in response. Then we roll off to see who goes first. I win and my entire first turn is spent moving and running forward.
He had ended up keeping most of his units on the bottom floor of the building, so he had no line of sight of most of my army. He advances his bikes and with their plasma and melta and all of his obliterators, they end up killing two kans from my center unit and
I fail a cowardly grot test. The rhino with the possessed and daemon prince advance.
My turn brings on 3 of the pairs of koptas and one of the green barons. The kans on the right advance on the bikes, my left dread on the other unit of bikers. 4 koptas come in behind his noise marines on the left side of the board and 2 kopta and the baron come in on the right side behind the other marines. The kans on the left advance and fire their grotzookas into the noise marines in the ruins and annhilate half of them, including the blastmaster.
The kans on the right charge the bikers. They kill one in combat, but I lose a hull point in overwatch and then two more to krak and melta bombs, one of the kans losing his klaw. The dread charges the other bikers, who fail to damage him. He kills two and the champion flees. All the koptas on the board only end up causing a single hull point to be stripped off a helbrute.
Now that my opponent has a threat in his back field he turn all of his attention to the koptas. The sorcerer attempts some Tzeentch's Firestorm, does no damage but ends up sucking himself into the warp. The decimated noise marines advance and fire sonic weapons killing off two koptas. The helbrutes take out some more with the help of the full squad of noise marines. The rest are cleaned up by obliterators. Only my single buzzsaw kopta remains unscathed. Havoc launcher from the rhino picks off a few boyz and there's a lone shot on a kan and I lose another hull point. The rhino and daemon prince advance further. The prince tries to charge my dread but rolls snake eyes in a horrible charge attempt.
A little devastated with my loss of most of my koptas, I reassure myself that I was able to nullify his entire turn off shooting with sacrificng 180 points. The other koptas fail to arrive from reserve this turn and I set my sites at exacting some revenge.
The dread that was about to be charged by the daemon prince, skirts him and charges into the combat with the bikers and kans, easily finishing them off. The large unit of boyz with my warlord move in to fill the gap the dread left and unload sluggas into the prince, removing 3 wounds. They charge into combat, lose a few to his high initiative attacks, but it takes only the regular boyz to take him down.
A unit of grots advance on the now recovered biker champion on the other side of the board and charge in. They end up holding him up for another full two rounds of combat, before being relieved later on by the lone kan to finish the job.
The other dread advances on the thousand sons, but neither cause a wound thanks to my terrible close combat rolling and their invulnerable saves.
Full unit of kans fire into an obliterator and cause an unsaved wound. The buzzsaw kopta attempts to get into combat with the obliterator on the other side of the board, but fails his charge.
The boyz advance and run to setup a charge next turn with the smaller unit of noise marines.
His turn sees some boyz in the warlord units going down from sonic weapons and the helbrute, but not nearly as many as should have thanks to feel no pain. His obliterator charges the killsaw kopta, he fails horribly in his hit dice and the buzzsaw slices him in half with two wounds. The possessed disembark, even though their rhino is surrounded and stand behind the orks looking silly. The thousand sons lose two in combat, he chooses not to voluntarily fail his morale with the "our weapons are useless rule" and fails his combat resolution anyways and the dread catches him. I realize they had fearless, as I'm typing this now,but, hey. 40k is a complicated game. We all make mistakes.
The small unit of noise marines fire into the other boyz and only take a few. The last two oblterators fire into the kans and fail to do any damage.
At this point, I declare my Waaagh! The warlord and his boyz, move, run and then make it into a charge with the large unit of noise marines, but not before the grots try to charge them to redirect their overwatch and lose a few and fail their charge. The champion with the fist calls out my warlord and I accept. I horribly fail my attack rolls, but luckily he does as well. The only wound that the boyz end up causing are from the power klaw nob, as amazingly, 16 boyz on the charge failed to make a single wound stick. It didn't help I was making 30% of my rolls where the average should have
been 50%. Oh well, the dice gods are always fickle.
The last of the koptas come in and take paltry shots at the helbrute with no results. The three damaged kans and the dread charge the helbrute with the scourge. The kans first and they survive the overwatch. I lose a kan to his attacks and the dread causes only a single hull point of damage, thanks to more terrible rolling. My other dread, hot off the thousand sons kill charges his other helbrute, but he rolls a 6 for his overwatch and ends up immobilzing my dread with his multimelta.
The other boyz charge the small unit of noise marines and lose a few to overwatch. At this point my opponent reminds me that Lucius is in this squad and I get a little nervous. He calls me out and my other warboss accepts. He hits me with 5 dice, but thanks to my toughness, he fails to cause a single wound while my warboss causes him an unsaved wound. The boys take out two noise marines only, but don't lose any of their own.
At this point we're at the bottom of the turn and we decide to call it after this. He uses his obliterators to finish off the immoblized dread. My warboss strips another wound off Lucius and comes out unscathed, while his boyz finish the rest of the marines.
My warlord kills the power fist champion and a few more marines go down. I lose another kan to the scourge helbrute, which is finished off by the dread, finally with some good rolls.
So in the end, I've lost 6 koptas, 4 kans, a dread, some grots and some boyz. He's lost a helbrute, and obliterator, daemon prince, two units of bikes, a unit of noise marines, and a unit of thousand sons. His remaining helbrute has a single hull point left, his
remaining noise marines are being ground down, Lucius has a single wound left, and he has the two obliterators and possessed marines unscathed.
As we were not playing tactically with objectives or missions, I feel that it was a close game, edging on an ork win.
I felt a little lack luster with the kans, only because they didn't have many viable targets. They did a wonderful job when they had something to shoot at (5 marines dead in one turn of shooting with only three kans) and drew a lot of the enemies fire power, which helped my assault army to make it into combat. The Koptas were the same, very little luck at hitting anything, but they did their job at distracting the enemy, which allowed me to deliver my payload of greenskins to the enemy lines. Even with terrible dice rolling, the green tide did their job and I was certainly surprised that the
warboss made out so well in his combat with Lucius. Dreads with four close combat arms are going to be my go to from now on, as it allowed me to run them every turn without being distracted by the idea that shooting a single rokkit with ork ballistic skill is a good idea.
Thanks for reading. I believe a game of man o' war is up next in a few weeks. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures.