[Battle Report] The Wound in the World | Eleventh Edition | Incursion XL | Nephrak Dynasty (Necrons) vs Sworn Hunters (Space Marines)

TRANSMISSION DATE: 7.958.026.M42
ASTROTELEPATHIC DUCT: AO-4046-EVT:AO-449-WVN

MESSAGE READS: In the small hours a lone voice cries blasphemy, blasphemy: the slayer of my brother takes the form of a great dragon, a-slumbering in the ashes beneath. Crimson my soiled garb, iron my sacred calling. Fire, fire, our fields alight. Death is waking. Death is walking. Death has come.

TRANSLITERATION: Semantic correspondences indicate this is a distress call, associated with a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, reporting an incendiary incident within the Ao cluster. Ordinarily I would not waste my lords' time with this, save that I believe your Old Enemy is implicated (cf. "slumbering" and "beneath," "waking" and "walking," although "great dragon" is a signifier associated with malleus-class entities in Terran mythology). May the Emperor's light be your guide. 
-Sebille

RESPONSE ALGORITHM: Task Force Mortem can be diverted. Nebulaic conduits stable: ETA 7.961.026.M42.

CONFIRMED ARRIVAL: 7.963.026.M42. Response algorithm failed to predict five separate high risk system failures before successful warp transit. The Omnissiah knows all, reveals all.

My apologies for the, uh, premium content on show in this image, and others. It was - not excruciatingly hot, but warm in a way that goes on and on with itself - in the parallel play room, and we were in there for some hours. The dogs needed walking.

I had sweat pooling in places I can't admit to on a public forum.

As if the atmosphere in there wasn't tainted enough...

Perpetrators of Science / Machine Heresy 

Cryptek Conclave detachment (Priority Assets disposition)

• Technomancer Azhad the Ascended, leading 3x Wraiths (particle casters)
• Geomancer Zanatek, Sentinel of the Gate Eternal, leading 5x Macrocytes (Tesla casters)
• Plasmancer Homanat, the Phaeron's Hand, leading 10x Immortals (Gauss blasters)
• Chronomancer Makhret the All-Knowing, leading 10x Immortals (Tesla carbines) with 2x Cryptothralls
• 5 Deathmarks
• C'tan Shard of the Void Dragon

Pig-Ignorant Savages / Heroic Servants of the Emperor

Librarius Conclave & Subversion Assets detachments (Reconnaissance disposition)

• Librarian (Phobos) and Lieutenant (Phobos) leading 10 Infiltrators
• Lieutenant (Reiver) leading 10 Reivers
• 10 Intercessors
• 3 Eliminators (las-fusils)
• Invictor warsuit (Ironhail autocannon)
• Redemptor warsuit (Onslaught gatling cannons, fragstorm grenade launchers)
• Stormtalon gunship (Typhoon missile launcher)

My list selection was heavily influenced by this being my first game of 11th.  There was things I wanted to try as I am very much a hands-on learner and need to see things in action. 

Like the Stormtalon - with how Flyers work now, I was very dubious as to why you would use the Stormtalon when the new Land Speeder is right there with more guns, actual Objective Control, a significantly lower cost and none of the weird movement limitations Flyers have.  

Deployment

Immortals avoiding the Redemptor. Macrocytes planning to Scout move, put points on the board, maybe not die.

Why are you hiding from him?  He just wants to be friends...

His idea of friendship involves several hundred rounds per second.

I had to leave something out in the open and I felt the Wraiths would take it better than anything else. That's the only reason these Immortals are on my home objective, and I don't think that was a great play, although they undeniably did work when they got to where they were going.

SOMETHING had to hold your home objective, and the Wraiths needed to get stuck in fast.  I absolutely think you made the right choice.

I still don't entirely agree. The home objective isn't important here, except for your end-of-game bonus scoring. With this army list, and nothing really there to sit and screen, I could have afforded to let it go and have more presence in the middle where things mattered. But this did ensure all my Immortals were hidden at the top of the game. Imagine if I'd gone second and left them flapping out. Command point for that 4+ Invulnerable save and pray.

The usual Phobos Phuckery as fifteen infiltrating bodies and their sneaky tactical mech all pile onto the central objective.

The more I experiment with Phobos stuff, the more I like 'em.  This game did nothing to change that, even though they were mostly wiped out.

The fact I didn't kill anything else speaks volumes to their tenacity.

Also, dem grippers again.

Are you starting an Only Fans?

OnlyHams.

I

Step one: move Macrocytes, do action, score points; kill Eliminators, score points. Step two: remove Geomancer and Macrocytes as Invictor and Redemptor take umbrage to their continued existence. I also lost five Immortals to the Intercessors' wall of bullets, despite their emergency Invulnerable save.

I keep waiting for GW to nerf the Intercessors, and they never do.  In fact, the most recent balance pass gave them another minor buff!  The absolute wall of fire those guys put out throughout this game was just crazy.

Shame about my Eliminators though...

They were right there and I wanted VPs. No ragrets.

Infiltrators move up and body some Wraiths, killing two. That's not enough!

Those Wraiths consistently surprised me with how tough they were!  A constant thorn in my side throughout the entire game.  I'm fairly certain the central fight would have gone very differently if not for how resilient the Wraiths were.

II

Top of the turn. See those unoccupied expansion objectives? Can't score those in my command phase. But they're wide open to being scored later. 

The Deathmarks plopped down on the right, where they'd stay for the entire game, arguing over the correct angle of the geomantic pylon. The Void Dragon materialised on the left, and announced itself in grand style by impaling the Invictor warsuit, although it whiffed its lightning strikes on the Infiltrators and didn't make its optimistic charge into the Redemptor. 

(I'd burned my command re-roll on making damn sure the Invictor got what was coming to it: I hate the counter-fire that thing can lay down, and if I didn't get shot of it I'd never be able to clear the Phobos goons out of the centre.)

That C'tan gave me a fright.  The casual ease it KO'd my second toughest model with was scary.  It became very clear I needed to stop that thing and fast, before it rolled my entire flank single handed. 

I will treasure the look on your face when I said "twenty damage" until, ooh, at least next week.

Everything else staged to not be shot up too badly, and did their best to remove Infiltrators before the second wave of Astartes arrived.

Reivers arrive to reinforce the Phobos blobule. Long considered a meme unit by anyone who's seen their silly Punisher masks, let alone their datasheet, they're still ten Marine bodies with Precision and an OC malus aura.

Reivers... I'm not as down on Reivers as most people seem to be.  People look at them and just sneer after noting how they are not as punchy as assault marines.  But I've come to suspect that's not the point.  Nothing that's 'Phobos' flavoured hits as hard as its Tacticus equivalent.

My slow, smooth brain is gradually coming to the realisation that what the Phobos crew lack in raw power, they make up for in board control.

Infiltrators prevent Deep Strike in a large radius.
Invictor uses reaction fire to punish anyone who shoots at his Phobos friends
Reivers debuff enemy objective control.

I stack all of those onto the central objective and my learned colleague was looking at an objective that they needed to take but couldn't Deep Strike into or even NEAR.  Any Necrons who tried shooting at my occupying Marines would get instantly punished by return fire from the Invictor, and if the Crons tried to evict my lads with melee, they needed to screen their characters VERY carefully or risk them getting assassinated by the Reivers - who were also forcing the Necrons to require a near two-to-one advantage in numbers just to match my Objective Control. 

That's a whole headache right there.  

Von HATES my Invictor Warsuit.
I love it and need to give it a name.
Maybe it needs a friend to keep it company?  Wouldn't want it to get lonely...  

It already has a big Redemptor-shaped brother. You need to stop indulging that thing.

A Stormtalon arrives to provide additional back-line dakka-dakka pew-pew services.

Ahh, I begin to see!  The whole point is that Flyers can simply pop up more or less where ever you need them - a Land Speeder might not be able to get into a firing position...

The Void Dragon tanks all of it, an entire Space Marine shooting phase, but that +1 to wound from being Oafed goes a long way and it's only on four wounds. That's enough for a Crushing Impact to finish it off. Right in the robo-nards!

Ye GODS that thing took some stopping.  An entire Marine shooting phase + Oath of Moment + a charge from the Redemptor and me spending CPs on Crushing Impact in the hope that the Redemptor would stand a chance in melee against whatever was left! 

And then the Crushing Impact took it off the board before my big lad could even swing his powerfist.  Epic moment and I loved every second of it.  If I can lay my hands on some cheap C'tan bits (hah!) I might convert the Redemptors base so it's trampling a C'tan instead of a nameless 'Cron...

I hate Crushing Impact (the stratagem formerly known as Tank Shock) even more than I hate Invictor warsuits. At least this time I got to roll some Feel No Pain dice and try not to die. 

In all earnest though, I can't grumble. You had to refocus an entire turn on killing that C'tan and you only got away with it because your army rule is overtuned (and you twigged that mortal wounds would skip a good chunk of its defences). Even in its failure, the Void Dragon kept me in the game.

III

My secondary objectives for this turn forced my hand somewhat. A Tempting Target, when there was only one objective in no-mans-land that I didn't control: the central pylon, now infested with even more Phobos-armoured delinquents. The Wraiths weren't going to crack it on their own, so I pulled every Immortal around quick sharp...

If I remember correctly... Tempting Target is written in such a way that when I read it, I more or less looked at the board and asked 'well, where else WOULD I put it?'

Well, quite. You were hardly going to put it on an objective I already held, were you? Frankly, I think I'd played the refused centre with at least half of a plomb, and now it had come back to drop the rest of... you know what, that's going back to the workshop for a while. Forget that. Bad pune.

The point is, I had to focus on the middle, right when I had just lost my biggest asset.

The Wraiths were proving problematically tough, especially with their habit of refusing to stay dead - I was definitely feeling the lack of the Invictor and Eliminators to support the middle, but the Reivers and Infiltrators between them still turned it into a complete tarpit.  All I needed to do was get some support in there somehow...

So I was forced to charge the Reivers in a desperate attempt to get more OC on the point and outweigh their bloody aura. I didn't kill them, neither did I kill enough Astartes to tip the balance back my way this turn, but it was incredibly close.

Tarpit for the win!

As you predicted, I didn't really want to charge the Reivers, but once you told me about that OC malus I couldn't leave the Wraiths to do the job alone.

My Deathmarks continued their standard operating procedure while the gauss Immortals hunkered down and put their faith in 4+ Invulnerable saves on cue to save... enough of them.

And then there's THESE assholes.  Those Deathmarks spent the entire game carefully lurking on an objective and not drawing attention to themselves, reliably scoring Von 5VPs a turn.  I wanted them gone but there was always something that needed my attention more.

I may have to hunt them down at some point, just to remind them that I haven't forgotten they exist.

That's what they do! Turn up, hold objective, score points, do actions, score points, occasionally snapfire at anything that dares to Ingress near them.

The Stormtalon shows up again and does unspeakable things to my Chronomancer's unit: I'm starting to wonder if I should have ignored the Tempting Target and focused on shooting this obnoxious airborne brick instead. (I do like the way it looks though. There's something so gloriously redundant and daft about Marine aircraft bulldozing their way through the air, and Garbutt's colours work so well on them.)

Thank you for your kind words.  :)

When the bullets stop flying the Chronomancer is alive, barely: he has three wounds and he's Battleshocked.

IV

Rather a damp squib on the Reanimation front (almost every unit I have left can reanimate and every unit I have only reanimated one wound) and rather a quiet turn as a result. Everything except the Immortals piles into that middle building, finally clearing out sufficient Reavers to score Tempting Target and take control of the centre. The left flank, however, is falling apart, as I have nothing left that can really answer the Redemptor... 

Around turn two or three I felt like Von was running away with this game, they were scoring VPs faster and I wasn't seeing a way to catch up.  How things change - poor reanimation rolls were a definite relief and my learned colleague was gracious enough to point out that I could charge the Redemptor into the middle to help in the melee... or I could leave it where it was, scoring a nice easy Purge secondary for me. 

A Cleanse, but never mind that. You didn't need the killing power, you did need the points. Stopping me from scoring was only half the battle: you still needed to reach where I already was. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but I like to believe El Redempto was just making sure that geomantic pylon was well and truly deactivated. With his fist.

V

It's all over bar the shouting as I pick up a handful of points, and then Garbutt dispatches the rest of the Immortals in the centre for a handful of his own. The battle's been done and dusted for a while - this is just about seeing through the game.

And what a close game it is, considering we came out with... a 79-75 win for the Sworn!

That was great fun.  a really tight game where - my earlier misgivings were entirely the fault of my own pessimism, and once I got past that I was able to pull off a win that I actually would have told you wasn't possible around turn two.  

Really tense game, with some great moments in it.  No regrets.  More games like this please!

Debrief

So, you were testing some bits in this game: the Reivers, the Stormtalon, and the brand new Redemptor Warsuit. I was also testing something: I wanted to see if a single C'tan at 1000(ish) points was as much of a dick move as I'd been told, or if I could justify taking it to the Newport Narrative as my ace in the hole should someone unload a Baneblade or Stompa or something else that is of course totally fluffy and not at all a motion of the cock in its own right.

How d'you think all that went?

The C'tan? Powerful enough that it absolutely shapes the game around it, but I don't think it was an automatic show-stopper... but we were playing 1200 points, not 1000.  

Its arrival was dramatic as all hell - it popped up out of nowhere and the Invictor promptly underwent an Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly.  I think the fact that ol' Void Dragon was feeling lazy and failed its attempt to charge my Redemptor was a huge blessing - in melee that C'tan would probably have taken out the Redemptor just as swiftly as it did the Invictor at range, and then I'd have been badly short of realistic options to counter the thing.  The shift in tempo from losing my two most resilient units in one turn would probably have not been something I could recover from.  

Is it an 'I Win' button?  No.  I don't think it is.  But it does force an instant change in the game.  It can't be ignored.  If someone decides to get cute and drop some absurd super-heavy on you... I say let 'em taste the fury of the Dead Gods!

Then I believe the experiment was a success. My largest, Voidiest son will be in attendance to manage anything of a similar proportion to itself, and if nothing of the ilk presents itself, I'll plonk a bunch of Canopteks down on the board instead.

As to the stuff I was testing?

I've already said I am coming round on the Reivers - not a lot to add, really.  Different use case to Assault Marines. Teaming them up with the Infiltrators to hold the central objective was a great move, if if I do say so myself.  

It was rather. As I said up the line, I didn't kill anything that didn't have the Phobos keyword, and while that did mean twenty Marines, a Lieutenant and the Invictor got flushed, that's a lot less than (checks notes) my entire army bar the Deathmarks. The OC swing in your favour alone was decisive.

In fact, I'm gonna say it: Reivers are not inferior to Assault Marines, they're just different - and people who think they're competing for the same job are using them wrong.

I haven't the heart to tell him Assault Intercessors aren't exactly considered "S tier" either.

The Redemptor was on his first outing and I was expecting New Model Syndrome to render him utterly ineffectual throughout the game.  Instead he wiped a Geomancer plus bodyguard, brought down the C'tan, scored my Cleanse (see?  I got it right this time, I do learn) and generally made my flank something you weren't willing to go anywhere near from turn three onwards.  Exemplary first performance.  No notes.

Well, you did ask me not to nuke him at the first opportunity. I wanted to take the shot and see what came about. But yes, after the C'tan debacle there was nothing I could do but abandon my left flank and reform around the middle objective. All of a sudden I didn't have much stuff left, which is what you get when almost 35% of your points are locked into a "go big or go home" choice. I'm only going to get worse with this now that a detachment exists specifically to enable that kind of bullshit.

The Stormtalon versus Land Speeders?  Still not convinced.  Let's try and break this down.  Being a Flyer, the Storntalon was able to appear basically anywhere I wanted.  Screening from your units - especially the Deathmarks - did limit my options a bit, but never enough that I couldn't get its guns pointed where I wanted them.  

But the price I pay for that is less shooting, no Objective Control, no presence on turn one and costing sixty points more.  Don't get me wrong: the Stormtalon absolutely did work all through the game... but I remain unconvinced that a Land Speeder couldn't have done the same work more efficiently and at a lower cost.

I'm half tempted to insert a "I'm you, but better." meme here, but I have already meme'd once and firmly believe there should be some sort of legally enforceable limit on that sort of thing.

Make The Internet Text Again would be my loopy political manifesto of choice.

But with all that said... new edition, new Codex on the way - and apparently Oath is either getting reworked or getting replaced entirely.  I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some units get reworked too. Probably best to withhold judgement for now.

I'm just glad you gave it a try. The thing is, Flyers are your Bit, and I'd be sad to see you give it up just because there's a new Primaris-era toy with an unreasonable amount of guns in a slightly different classification. Some might say you already did that with your transition from Castaferrum Dreadnought to Dune Buggies With Legs, but that would be unnecessarily cruel. I prefer to think of your little face when you described three different action sequences of your Redemptor judo flipping, trampling over or simply Iron Manning its way through a star god.

You had just as much fun with that as I did.

Yes I realise that last idea was mine. I dub that Redemptor "Dragonslayer" and am noting it in my oath book.

Conversion ideas bubbling...