The following games were played during the weekend:
- Imperial Guard vs. Space Wolves / 1999+1 each/ Purge the alien
-Tyranids vs Necrons/ 1999+1 each/ The Scouring
- IG & White Scars vs. SW & Necrons / 1500pts each player / Big guns never tire
(space wolves being necron worshipping techno barbarians?)
-IG & SW vs Tyranids & Necrons / 1500pts each player /Crusade
(That planet would have needed a good amount of exterminatus love anyway!)
Overall feelings from the games:
-Terrain placement is both fun and in a way even more important than army deployment!
We're currently building up our terrain pool, though we do have 8 large buildings and a decent amount of other terrain as well. The large buildings were a boon to any army that wanted to get close and personal without suffering too much attention from big guns, while the other side would try to counter by placing low hills or terrain that didn't block LOS at all. True Imperial Guard know that they also need much cover as possible since the Emperor is too busy to watch their backs.
-Most of the matches had night fight on turn 1. Coincidence or Necron plot? Didnt sit well with gunlines and it was important to keep your **** mobile so the enemy couldnt creep up on your guys by using the cover bonus from night fighting.
-Flyers are deadly due to lack of dedicated AA units in the game. Hydra is alright, but apparently can only skyfire with full ballistic skill or hit ground targets with 6s. Twin-linked its also great against them if you dont have any flyers or your own.
-Charriots are simply awesome, but the close combat rules are confusing as they keep referring to it as a vehicle, while you're suppose to hit and wound the guy riding it, though can't hit both? Also charriots hitting flyers with sweep attack is kind of ridiculous, but we played rules as written so its all good. OR IS IT?
-I have mixed feelings about the "look out sir" rule, but nobody can live without it. Not with the new shooting rules; hits going to the closest model.
-Duels are playing hell on low armor & gear characters and I heard from a loyal servant that in the future excess wounds from duels will NOT affect the combat resolution.
What changed for the Imperial Guard?
-The common cover save now being 5+ for most terrain and situations hurts like hell and its sometimes harder to keep important models alive with the new wound allocation. Gone are the days when my company commanders and his squad could just sit at a balcony and give orders to guys in lower floors. Now its important to check from which directions the enemy might be firing you and how many bodies are there in front of your more valuable models.
-I always had a soft spot for the valkyrie and now the IG flyers are plain great. On the downside vehicle explosions and especially being inside a flyer when it happens just got a bit more deadly for your basic guardsman, but its what they signed up for! Also nobody is quite sure how deploying from a flying vehicle works if youre not a necron. I say it works just like it says in the valkyrie rules. Roll scatter and all models take a dangerous terrain test.
-Duels are a real bane for IG. Back in the day you saw a few melee heavy IG armies, but those were mainly fanatics and dreamers. I wouldnt recommend melee for anything but keeping your enemy in a tarpit if you have the commissars to keep it going. Power fist isn't all that great now if you dont keep an eye on how your models are placed or you end up challenged/running to the back row. In a few cases the enemy would cause so many woulds that eventually they'd reach the fist and take it down before it could strike.
-Overwatch is a good addition and with my dice luck its going to play hell on my foes.
Flamers cause D3 hits and everything else hits on 6s, though charges are now an average of 7 inches so there is that also. I employed several squads as speed bumps to slow down any ****train heading my way.
-Shooting with blasts and ordnance is more deadly now that you always substract ballistic skill from scatter rolls and you can usually move 6 inches and still shoot ordnance + snap fire other weapons.
Next month our DIX campaign starts and there's still tons of WIP models and flavour text to write. In the end this is pretty much how my games went last weekend:
