TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 5: Nemesis Dreadknight Puzzle-Solving and Oxford GT Prep

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing log of personal, hobby, and competitive progress for Warhammer 40,000. Last time around I talked about bringing my son into the hobby, painting his first real model and playing a demo game of 40k to learn the rules and turn progression. He had a blast, and it won’t be the last time you see him in this column. This week I’m back on my Crusade bullshit, playing a trio of games for my local Crusade campaign, plus a practice game for the Oxford GT.

Let’s start with the Crusade games, then I’ll move on to the first practice game.

Games 1 and 2: Vinay’s Grey Knights

I’m trying to stay engaged with the local crew for this new Parasbine Crusade campaign, working on getting in one game per phase. This first game comes in just under the wire, and against Vinay, one of the casual players in the Astros Militarum. Playing the casual guys is always interesting for two reasons:

• First, I’m usually slumming it a bit, taking a list that’s subpar compared to what I’d take in competitive games. Which is always fun because for the casual guys this is the most organized play they’ll do, and so they take it as an opportunity to flex and show off, taking their best lists!
• Second, the casual guys tend to play a lot more games than I do, which means they typically come into these games with a ton more upgrades than I have. That’ll be true in these first two games, where I have zero (0) upgrades and Vinay has a few nasty ones.

What this ends up amounting to is that even though these are more casual games, they can be very tricky! That’s especially the case in these first two, where I’m playing a very tough matchup against Vinay. These games are fun in a different way – they’re more like Warhammer puzzles. They remind me of those old “Dead Man’s Hand” puzzles in InQuest magazine, where you can’t win but you have to figure out how to achieve some other goal.

Game 1: Dig Site Raid

The first game has us going back to the Dig Site Raid, in part because I didn’t feel like setting up new terrain this week. Vinay’s army is an issue – he’s running four Dreadknights in his 1,000-point list, plus an Interceptor Squad for good measure. He’s also got more characters than I do – as with last time, I’m only running the single Warpsmith on this mission, making Blackstone fragment extraction difficult.

As a reminder, my 1,000-point Crusade force is:

• Warpsmith (Warlord)
• Chaos Land Raider
• Forgefiend
• 10 Berzerkers
• 5 Rubrics
• 5 Noise Marines
• 5 Plague Marines

I haven’t earned a single battle honour yet, so it’s all raw datasheets at this point. As you can tell, this is a nightmare matchup for me – I don’t have the raw output to really deal with four Dreadknights, and they’re extremely good at handling my power-armored goobers with their AP-2, 2-damage guns. My plan here is to go first (that doesn’t happen), then try and take out two of the Dreadknights as quickly as possible with the Land Raider and Forgefiend shooting one and the Berzerkers taking out the other. This doesn’t happen, either.

Game 1 doesn’t go my way – it’s an uphill battle handling that many Dreadknights, and I give it my best shot, getting an early drop on them with my Berzerkers. Unfortunately the Dreadknight exploded and took out a few of them in the process, as well as putting the last wound on my Land Raider – and I really needed that one to stick around to kill Dreadknights. Meanwhile Vinay has no problem extracting Blackstone. I end up nearly being tabled by the end of the game, but manage to avoid losing my Plague Marines and Noise Marines, and nobody picks up any scars.

Result: 30-50, Loss

Game 2: Relentless Chaos

This is a rough mission. The attacker always goes first, so you know when you deploy whether you’re going to be able to just go to town, and that’s really rough. That said, it’s also fucked – the mission is poorly written, and gives the defender a huge scoring advantage since there’s almost no way for the attacker to score bonus VP in this mission. We play it as written, which is good for me because Vinay wins the roll-off. The plan here is the same, with a caveat: I just need to hold objectives for three rounds and I can get ahead of Vinay, so the game is as much about survival and hanging on. I’ll do that with the Plague Marines and Noise Marines while the Berzerkers, Land Raider, and Forgefiend occupy Vinay’s Dreadknights.

This one goes a little better…kind of. Vinay pushes forward a bit more aggressively, and I use that to get off a turn 1 charge which takes out his Interceptors. From there we trade pieces and I’m able to kill two of the Dreadknights, though ultimately he manages to punch my Forgefiend and Land Raider to death after making a few charges out of deep strike. I’m able to leverage the broken mission to stay ahead on points and squeeze out a win.

Result: 50 – 35, Win

The important thing about these games is I’ve learned that Dreadknights are pretty nasty, and I need to make sure I’m screening them out in a more serious competitive game.

Game 3: The Junkyard War

I pick up a couple of upgrades from those games – notably the Forgefiend can reduce one attack per game to 0 damage, which is a big help, and the Berzerkers can intervene for free which…is not so useful. Still, it gives me a little bit to work with for the next game.

Speaking of which, the next game is a T E A M  G A M E. My team has been setting up a big showdown for a while now, and I may have agreed to it without thinking. Anyways I show up at Asgard on Saturday for a team game. That said, a lot more Imperial players showed up, so what I thought would be a 3v3 or a collection of 1v1 or 2v2 games ends up being a 6v3 with 3,000 points per side. I keep the same number of points with my standard list, but to fill some gaps I bring along an ally. Specifically, Bryce with his single unit of Assault Intercessors. He’s here for hits first game since the intro game, and while he doesn’t have a ton to work with, keeping track of one unit is about his capacity at this point.

The Mission: Scrap Down Scrape Up

This is a custom mission written by Dan “Swiftblade” Richardson which has us extracting resources from objectives in the middle of the table and bringing them back to our deployment zone. My army is the same as the prior two games, but I’ve got two allies in addition to Bryce here:

• Luke’s Chaos Knights
• James’ Thousand Sons

We’ve got a decent mix of units here, but we’re going up against a mix of Space Marines, Astra Militarum, Adeptus Mechanicus, and Dark Angels. We’re way down on Crusade blessings, working with something like 3 additional blessings, one of which is a redeploy.

Bryce wins the roll-off for us and I redeploy my Land Raider and Forgefiend. My turn one objective here is to take out Bryan’s Kataphrons, since they’re pretty nasty and I can actually hit them this turn, shooting at them from just outside their range with the Forgefiend. I cut them down to two models. Meanwhile in the middle of the table we press up to extract a marker from the center objective and Bryce runs dead forward with his Assault Intercessors.

The first turn is mostly us weathering incoming shooting from the Basilisks and then it’s on to turn two. Bryce and I combine our bloodthirsty powers, and I charge and finish off the Kataphrons with Berzerkers while he charges Chris’s Dark Angel Intercessors in the middle of the table, and manages to kill them off. It’s a nice little moment for him, before his Assault Intercessors are shot off the table.

This game took a long time. Having six players on the other side was always going to make things slower, and we run close to five hours of total play time. There are some good moments in there – fighting over the middle, deep striking into each others’ backfields, and trying to steal objectives and double move them back to our home objective with Rubrics.

It’s a bit too much for Bryce, and he ends up learning to play Beyblade from some guys at the store while I finish off the game. Which is cool, but I’d have preferred something a little faster for him to jump in on. Next time I’ll keep things a bit simpler for him.

Anyways, the game is hard-fought and ultimately ends in a tie. There’s a bit of chippiness toward the end with some missed triggers and combat back-and-forths, and we’re pretty close on scoring at the end, making it easy to call it a tie rather than quibble over specifics. Huzzah! My Land Raider will level up from this game, also getting the ability to drop a single attack to 0 damage once per game. Yay, I guess.

Game 4: Oxford Practice vs. T’s Adepta Sororitas

Alright, now we’re on to a competitive game. So if you’ve been shrugging your shoulders through all this Crusade nonsense, now is your time to hop back in. I’m planning to attend the Oxford GT in two weeks, and that means I need to keep on top of things. Right now the plan is to bring my Death Guard. I’m running the same list I was the last time around, in part because I want to keep testing two different units and in part because I’m not sure I want to paint another Foul Blightspawn.

Anyways, here’s the list:

TheChirurgeon's List - Click to Expand

T’s a very solid player and he’s running Adepta Sororitas, fresh off a win with them at a teams even the prior weekend, so he’s a good player to practice against. For this game I have a few goals in mind:

• Practice on the UKTC terrain and get used to some of the layouts they use.
• Practice against Adepta Sororitas, one of the game’s top armies right now
• Figure out what changes, if any, I need to make to my army

T's List - Click to Expand

T’s running a list with two Castigators and three units of Arco-Flagellants. The Flagellants are real bastards – they can do a ton of damage, and if you kill one or two models the unit becomes stronger thanks to the Detachment rule, so if you’re going to deplete them it has to be by 4-5 models ideally. That said, they’re good targets for the PBC mortars. The Castigators are a tough threat here – they can’t do that much to the PBCs, but they can outrange them and force me to move forward and interact. That said, they’re no Exorcists, and so they don’t force me to put anything in reserves. I hold one unit of Nurglings for my home objective as a result – I need to screen it from deep-striking Seraphim.

After some initial pre-game discussion I opt to go with the Rattlejoint Ague; that seems like the right call in pretty much every situation these days, as even when opposing armies have an invulnerable save, they often have a good enough save that I want to be putting them on -1 or -2. T mentions that he usually sees opponents pick -1 WS/BS against him (Skullsquirm Blight), but then I ask him if he lost any of those games and he says “no,” which seems like a solid endorsement for the save modifier.

The Terrain

The first step here is to set up a table with the UKTC layout. I’m working on mission 1 in the mission pack here. This is tougher than I was expecting – I don’t have all the pieces exactly, but I can get pretty close. The bases here are all based on 8″x8″ and 8″x4″ and I can make those pretty quickly from The Old World movement trays. Then I put it into the format shown in the UKTC tournament pack. All told, it’s pretty sparse, with some big open shooting lanes that make it hard to hide. Going second here is not a good deal. I drop my PBCs back behind the middle ruin as best I can to hide from Castigators, and drop a rhino on each side.

The Mission: Priority Targets – Chilling Rain – Hammer and Anvil

This isn’t a standard Leviathan GT pack mission; Priority Targets does three main things: First, it has scoring for the home objective (good – I can clear units off that with my PBCs to force an opponent to commit units they didn’t want to), and second, it scores for hold one/hold two, so you only need to concentrate on keeping your home objective and one other for most of the game. That said, the third thing is that this mission gives you endgame scoring for objectives held, so having board position at the end of five is important. The goal here is to hold two or three and deny the opponent one. This is also an area where sticky objectives can pay off.

I’m Going First.

That’s a pretty good deal for me, since it means I can start things off by chipping away at the Arco-Flagellants. At least, that’s what I’d have done if I were smarter – we’ll come back to that. My turn one plan is to bring my Rhinos up and claim the two side objectives while Morty and the PBCs keep the middle clear. On turn one I draw Deploy Teleport Homer and No Prisoners, which changes the plan a bit. There are three key moves I make on turn one:

• I get the Plague Marines on the top half of the table (my left) out of the Rhino, then advance the rhino to the point. My plan is to use it as a speed bump for the Arco-Flagellants. I don’t want them to be able to advance past it, but I need them to stop there so my Plague Marines can pick them up.
• You can’t see it in the photos, but there was a unit of Nurglings in that top ruin as well. I moved them out so they could reach the center of the table, and they deployed a Teleport Homer to score me 3 VP.
• I moved the PBCs up and pushed the other Rhino toward the middle of the table – there wasn’t any reason to put something on the bottom half as T wasn’t committing anything there, and by not forcing me to spread out, I can gain the upper hand here.

Anyways I fire two mortars at the Seraphim before realizing that’s not going to do much, then use the third to kill a few Arco-Flagellants. Next time I’ll just shoot the Flagellants so they have very little punch from the jump.

On T’s turn he presses forward and kills the Nurglings and the Rhino, taking both objectives. Not ideal as it puts me on 5 primary for round two but I think I can make that up by holding the middle on the following turn. T pulls his Rhino full of Sisters up next to the Triumph and Vahl’s unit in the middle of the table. He’s staging to try and hold the middle, and there are some nasty units in there. T scores Secure No Man’s Land and discards Behind Enemy Lines, while I’ve kept No Prisoners.

On round two I pull Behind Enemy Lines and this one’s pretty scorable, though I don’t overcommit to it. My main focus this round is to pop the rhino using the Entropy Cannons on the PBCs and then clear out everything inside. That’s something the Deathshroud are great for, since S3 anti-infantry snot flamers are amazing for that particular task. I get out the other unit of Plague Marines and push them to the middle of the table while the Rhino retreats to the bottom objective to hold it.

This is where things all go according to plan – the PBCs drop the Rhino and the Deathshroud make short work of everything inside. The PBCs make short work of the flagellants using the line of sight from the Lord of Virulence, and while I fail every charge I attempt this turn, Mortarion and Typhus kill the Triumph of St. Katherine, doing some back-breaking damage to T’s army. I score 3 for Behind Enemy Lines and 5 on No Prisoners.

On T’s turn he attempts to salvage things by dropping Seraphim in my backfield (and attempting to take my home objective a turn later), while Vahl and her posse make a play for the middle. I kill one of the suits in Overwatch, and that makes a huge difference as Vahl and co aren’t able to completely wipe my Plague Marines off the table… but they are able to kill Mortarion when I fail most of his saves. Tough break but things are still very much in my favor at this point. T scores 3 for Engage on All Fronts and 2 on Investigate Signals.

On my turn three I pull Defend Stronghold and Cleanse. I’ll end up discarding both as T is easily able to steal my home objective at this point. That’s a brutal draw but I can’t afford to waste time Cleansing right now – one good turn and I can wipe T out, and this all becomes trivial. I kill off Vahl and her team with the PBCs while the Deathshroud make their way over to T’s Castigators.

The one unit I’m still struggling with here are Celestine and her meltapistol Seraphim, and they put up an extremely annoying fight with their regenerating numbers, but once Vahl and the Castigators are gone I can just focus on them completely with the PBCs. On his turn T manages to snag Assassination killing off my Tallyman, and at this point things are pretty close – T will end up outscoring me on Secondaries this game as he doesn’t have the dead turn I do.

I’m able to eventually reclaim my home objective using PBCs and their OC 4 bodies while Typhus and his Deathshroud are able to take care of Celestine and her retinue. I max Cleanse and Extend Battle Lines on round 4, then Capture Enemy Outpost on the final round (I can’t score anything for Bring it Down at that point as all of T’s vehicles are dead). It’s not a full tabling, and T snags a kill on the final turn and recaptures an objective to pull 5 for Storm Hostile Objective and 2 for No Prisoners. He’s only holding one objective at the end of the game though so while it’s been pretty close up to this point, I pull 15 on Endgame to outscore him 82-70.

Result: 82-70, Win

This was a solid game and a good first practice effort on the new terrain. Here are the key takeaways from this game:

• This terrain is hard to hide on. I’ll test other layouts in the future, but this game one layout is really open and shooting-heavy. I’ve got a few more games to play on it to get used to it but I need to figure out a good balance between “conservative deployment” and “being so far back I spend a whole round digging out of my deployment zone,” especially since that just puts me in the open a turn later and that’s no good either.
• Verdict on the Squads: Still out. I would have really liked to have two Fights First units and two solid overwatch squads, but on the other hand I did use a free grenade and benefit from the Putrifier’s 5+ crits so it’s hard to say if I want to replace him yet. More testing required.
• Shoot the Flagellants early. My biggest mistake was trying to chip the Seraphim. I’d have been much better off taking out Flagellants early to whittle them down and make them less effective.
• Keep a sharper eye on the backfield. I haven’t figured out a good way to protect my backfield on this mission while pressing forward and that’s an area where I probably should just use the Nurglings, keeping them near the corners so they can Investigate Signals and I can use the Rhinos for turn 1 nonsense.

Anyways it’s always a blast playing against T and I’m looking forward to our next match-up. That dude gets better every time I play him.

Next Time: Practice for Oxford

That wraps up my games for this week but check back next Thursday when I’ll talk about my prep and practice games for the Oxford GT, with a focus on the strategies I’m employing and what I learned. All of that plus my last-minute hobby progress as I painted a few of the missing models from my list. It’s going to be heavier on practice games for a bit, so stay tuned for that.

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