Redcap’s was kickin’ it tonight. There had to be ten guys there for 40k, plus two guys doing Warmachine (with clocks, pretty interesting!). Add on some kind of Magic draft thing and it was starting to get crowded. I forgot my camera, so no full report, but some comments. One side note is that the kid we thought Buford and I had scared away forever before the holidays was there playing one of the guys, and with his dudes all painted up super well to boot!
Battle
Played James against his Grey (Gold) Knights. Tragically we rolled for Annihilation, which is by far the mission both me and Space Marines are weakest at, and this is one of the toughest opponents for them at it. Even just from unit numbers, the 1850 pt list I used is dropping 15 units versus his 7. That’s a tough uphill battle. Ultimately the Kingbreakers went down, 10 to 5. It looked promising at the start as Sternguard took down one of two Dreadknights in the first turn, but that left them out of place on the wrong side of the table to really contribute to the rest of the battle. The other Dreadknight then barely hung on through a lot of sustained fire to start smashing tanks, Interceptors teleported next to and wiped out the backfield, and Terminators glanced Landspeeders to death.
Little man will mess you up, yo!
Thoughts
Librarian: Useless. Again.
Landspeeders: I should probably go back to grouping these guys up into a squad. Giving away the 3 individual Kill Points is just too much in a Purge the Alien/Annihilation match.
Aegis Defense Line: For venues that permit Stronghold Assault I think I’m going to drop my ADL in favor of an Imperial Bunker with a Quad-gun upgrade and possibly a Void Shield. Sans Void shield it’d be 5 points more than the ADL, but would offer the same cover save to the unit on the battlement and an AV14 wrapper for the unit inside the bunker. It has a special rule such that 8 guys could shoot out from inside, which is fine, but the downside would be that they’d be constrained to only shooting in the front arc; there are no side firing ports, just doors. As a side note, you should be able to use doors as firing ports… I’d probably put the gun on the battlement, which would also let it shoot automatically if not manned, though it could conceivably go elsewhere nearby. With the Void Shield, all of that would be under an AV12 wrapper. The bonus for me is having the guys inside not able to be assaulted under the bunker’s popped, but they themselves could run out and assault if that was useful. The ADL also offers somewhat more length than I need and can actually kind of get in the way trying to castle up tightly.
One interesting note though is that GW, as per its usual, just copy and pasted the barricade and ADL rules from the BRB to Stronghold Assault, and did not use the errata from the BRB FAQ. So I argue that the FAQ wording doesn’t apply, and you could place the ADL segments in multiple disjointed locations; all it says is that one piece has to touch one other, not that they all need to be in a continuous line. The datasheet photo for the Wall of Martyrs Defence Line has the exact same wording and actually does exactly that, creates two separate lines of them. For that one, the way the segments in the kit are, you actually could not physically connect them all up properly in a single line (it has 2 trench corridors and 4 endcaps).
Somewhat worth noting, I did actually pick up an Imperial Bunker, I just wasn’t able to get it before the recent Apoc game due to the snowstorm. It is quite a bit smaller than the homemade bunker I used for that, but slightly taller. It’s actually a pretty neat looking little model. As usual, I have misgivings about buying terrain since you can scratchbuild good terrain fairly easily. But there’s no denying GW’s stuff does look great, and I wanted this piece in particular to forsake all arguments about the fortification at tournaments.
Some other dude’s GW Imperial Bunker.