40K Battle Report - First Foray into Heresy

Well, as every reader of the blog well knows, Horus Heresy fever has bit us hard for the last year or so. Byron and Greg have been madly accumulating and painting Forge World resin Space Marines of various antique specifications, and I kid myself that my vintage all-metal Howling Griffons more-or-less qualify as combatants of the 30th millennium of man. They have MKII Rhinos for Pete's sake!

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to wheel out some of these models for a game. Greg came up with the backstory:

"A group of World Eaters, with a few Sons of Horus and Death Guard, are part of a small Crusade stub force that was re-assembling and re-fitting on Toxo IV. They were waiting for new heavy equipment to be delivered - all the other fully assembled units had gone off to Istvaan already - when word of the “developments” on Istvaan arrives.

They move to seize control of the planet.

These “traitors” lack much heavy equipment, so one of their first objectives is a raid on a Planetary Defence Force armoury to steal some tanks. With the support of a lone Sicarian tank, they assault the PDF armoury - their goal will be to activate various tanks and armoured vehicles found there and get them off the table in one piece. A reaction force of Ultramarines also stationed on Toxo IV (the Howling Griffons company) arrives to block their plan."

We set up the opposing forces diagonally in deployment areas 24" apart. I chose a list from the new Forge World "Crusade" army book; two squads of 10 Marines in Rhinos, heavy weapon squad of 5 with lascannons, squad of 5 Terminators, a 7 or 8 man Destroyer squad with jump packs, and a Land Raider Armoured Proteus.

Greg and Byron lined up several giant squads of Space Marines with ridiculously broken weapon combos :-) plus a Legion Sicaran battle tank, a squad of Marines with multimeltas, some guys with Volkite Calivers (nasty), etc...

Byron did a very nice job on the Sicaran tank. Unfortunately its weaponry wasn't quite strong enough to damage the Land Raider, but that turned out not to be a huge problem...

Melta-dudes...

I advanced my line of troops (upper left) trying to refuse a flank and block the melta-goons from getting shots at my Raider. At the same time I dropped the Destroyer squad and Terminators into the backfield to try to hose off the melta guys.

This is about half of what I was facing to my front - pretty strong stuff!

I had some success against the green guys, nearly wiping out the squad, but my own forces were suffering heavily. It was a straight kill-points game so I needed to kill squads, but was falling behind...

Destroyers and Terminators were wiped out. 2 more VPs for Greg and Byron...

Greg's command squad rolled up another of my Marine squads - +1 more VP for the bad/good guys.

But a clash of Titans was imminent as my command squad disembarked from the Raider...

In the middle the two opposing commanders clashed. Artificer armour with 2+ save and the new power weapon rules (AP3) meant the combat was loooong and drawn out. My boss eventually killed Greg's, salvaging a VP for me as a warlord kill. I think they both got so tired that Greg's boss just gave up.

Gilles doing his impression of Greg's traitor warlord

In the end the Griffons got trounced, about 7VPs to 3. Volkite Calivers are nasty but the special SM Legion bolter rule (double shots) and 20-man squads are even nastier. Obviously, escalation in the form of Reaver Titans is in order...

 

Thanks to Conscripts Greg and Byron for bringing out their cool new toys and to Greg for the scenario. The fun factor of 40K is almost entirely dependent on your opponents and the spirit in which the game is played, and we are lucky to all be of similar minds on that!