Leutnant Zinn: November 2012

This week I played my first game of Warhammer 40.000 using the shiny new Codex Chaos Space Marines. For me this game was some kind of test run. I wanted to find out how well my old school army build for the 5th edition can perform with the new rules. My army comprises a bunch of vehicles, several different cult troops as standard choices and a pair of Demon Princes as HQs. While not a classical vehicle spam list it’s however focused on vehicles and big monsters.

After the release of the new core rules I soon realized that my army wouldn’t be as effective as before. 6th edition is a footslogger edition and I don’t have many boots on the ground. With the release of the new codex two other problems became apparent. Demon Princes are now far from being the best HQ choices. They are just too expensive for their performance. Also the shift of cult troops to the elite section makes it impossible for me to field most of my standard choices at the same time.

Nevertheless for this game I tried my old set-up. I took a Demon Prince with wings and armor as my HQ, as many vehicles as possible (two Vindicators, one predator with twin-linked Lascannon and a Hellbrute with Multi-Melta) and a Chaos Marines squad with two Melters in a Rhino accompanied by two 10-man squads of naked Chaos Cultists as my standards. We went for 1000 points. Again my opponent was Daniel fielding a Space Wolves army. He had a Drop Pod army with four standard units. Three of them dropped in in their pods. The mission was “The Relic”. After the fifth turn the battle was over. Daniel won with a solid 3-0. A clear result.

Well… What are the lessons learned from this game? What does it mean for my army?

The Demon Prince attracted a lot of fire but only survived for several turns because of lucky saving throw rolls. He also didn’t deal much damage. My troops even performed worse. The Cultists were just slain (okay, I let them run through the open field…) and the Marines couldn’t survive much longer. My troop choices aren’t solid. The Cultists are a nice addition but can’t win the day by themselves. I have to bring back one of my cult troop units and at the moment I favor my Khorne Berserkers. To bring them in I need a Lord with a mark of Khorne. So all I need to do is to paint the Chaos Lord from the Dark Vengeance box.

My vehicles performed better than expected. In the end both Vindicators and the Hellbrute were still on the table. I will keep on using my vehicle list and won’t change to an all-infantry-army. In the future I could exchange my Predator (which is used to hunt down other vehicles) with a second Hellbrute to react more flexible on vehicles and infantry.