[Battle Report] On Murder Road | Tenth Edition | Incursion | Only War | Necrons vs. Space Marines
Reconvening after the Eign's Gate encounter, the Sworn have identified a probable base of operations for Night Lords forces in the Firestorm Nebula. Talassar Kaine and his company proceed according to standardised doctrines of vengeance, but find the facility occupied by a very different insult to the Emperor. It would appear that the Night Lords have already been driven away by an insurgency of the primary target: the ancient malice of the Necron!
Engagement
The Battle Pile deploys! Following our previous engagement, the Intercessors have bulked up into full squads, and are now ready to either push into the Necron Warriors opposite them...
Necron Warriors! Painted lads up top, unpainted lads down below. Parking them on an objective so they could achieve full Reanimation potential... which was not, in point of fact, the correct choice to make.
Immortals, aligned to deliver death across the central walkway: these two objectives were always going to be the important ones, with whoever managed to grab both in place to outscore.
As predicted, the Astartes push onto their landing platform, and a firefight breaks out... and in the background, someone is judging me for putting primed models on the table. At least the Skorpekh all died in turn one without doing anything!
Alas, the Immortals come off significantly worse, and prove to be quite Mortal after all when eight hundred points of Astartes firepower is directed at them. The Aggressors Aggress the Royal Warden, the Eradicators Eradicate the Triarch Stalker, and the Overlord realises that they and their Warriors will be next if they don't phase out and go home right nippy.
Debrief
So... that happened.
Firstly, I think the main thing here is Garbutt actually remembered what all his units did, and that he'd bought Enhancements that also did things, and was back on something approaching form.
His early refusal of the flank which had my most expensive and slowest unit (the Warriors) on left them incapable of affecting the outcome of the game. Stacking his red lads up into large units also made the most of the Stratagems and Leader Abilities being played on them, and fire was very effectively focused on Oaths targets - which is what you need to do to get rid of Necrons. Kill 'em all and they won't be coming back.
Secondly, I misdeployed quite badly. I'm used to camping home objectives with a cheap and chaffy Battleline unit, but treating 300+ points of Warriors and Overlord like 55 points of Cultists was a dramatic misuse. They did have a line of sight over two other objectives, but they're not at their best pinging away at long range. If they'd been holding the centre point and supporting a push from the Immortals up the middle we'd have been looking at a very different game. As it was, very little of my firepower could actually overlap with any efficiency and - the word piecemeal is heading toward this report like an anvil in flight.
Similarly, my Skorpekh died before they could do anything - reminding me of the fifth edition games where I used to leave units in reserve if it wasn't crystal clear what they'd be doing turn one. I put them on, I moved them up, they got Oathed and shot by the entire Astartes army, I was two hundred points down for no gain.
Thirdly, there might be a list lacuna - nothing here redeploys worth a damn. My previous successes with the Necron all involved opening up a new line of engagement when I wanted to, dropping in units with the Night Scythe or Veil of Darkness, and I didn't have any of those options here. Likewise, while I'd been thinking about Stratagem efficiency and making command points do their work on large units, all that did was ensure I had more points tied up in fewer units that could be Oathed, focused and pruned one at a time.
I didn't dislike the Necrons, but after playing with 3+ saves and two or three wound infantry, it's been weird going to 4+ and single wounds. The Necrons feel brittle in a way that isn't my usual archetype, and against an adversary built to point, click and delete a single unit every turn like the Gladius Task Force, the Reanimation payoff never comes. At the moment I am feeling more pro-Chaos Space Marine for this edition, but we shall have to continue our experiments.
I feel the piecemeal lack of redeployment headache on a cellular level. One thing I have discovered the hard way is that Tau jetpack units are *agile*, but not *fast*. They can jostle and jockey around a given point like nothing else, but they always seem to take a long time to actually *get* anywhere. Which is an issue when they comprise half the army and the other half is infantry on foot.
ReplyDeleteMy experiments in trying to off-set this by deep-striking them to the point I want them to jostle and jockey around have been largely unfruitful, save for discovering the utility of harassing gun drones in the back line that I fully intend to exploit more in the foreseeable future.
The problem is only compounded when the army just does not have many actors comprising it in the first place. I ended up splitting a team of Crisis Suits into three distinct agents to try and remedy that myself (and also because it's not like I have anything else to do with the spare Elites slots right now), which helped a little but it is transparently a band-aid stopgap.
I noticed there wasn't any mention of the Instigation's Scarabs, Flayed Ones or Tomb Blades, were they involved here at all? And if not, would having those extra manoeuvre elements have helped?
I shall begin at the end: those units contributed nothing to the outcome of the battle but their untimely deaths. The Scarabs, at least, were fun to use, biting a chunk out of the Invictor Warsuit. Alas, it stepped on the other two bases before they had a chance to self-destruct.
DeleteI definitely recognise the "MSU out of necessity" impulse - I have run three solo Obliterators in prior iterations of the rules because I had the Heavy Support slots and being able to manage their firepower or Deep Strike them separately was a grand advantage. I also recognise the Deep Strike impulse - a major distinction between the Necrons and my Chaos Space Marines being that at least five of my Chaos Space Marine units can Deep Strike, and all of them gain something by doing so.
In the past my Necrons did well for themselves when equipped with a Night Scythe that could deposit a unit behind enemy lines. I am now considering this instead of the Stalker, with a Veil of Darkness on the Overlord and a second Royal Warden, with the Immortals split in half with a Warden apiece. The Tomb Blades, alas, will not be joining me in such adventures, but I don't think anyone will notice their absence.