Thursday, May 17, 2012

After several months of playing mostly fully mechanized eldar, I've started toying around with "footdar" lists.  I got a game in at Four Horsemen Comics and Gaming.  It was a 2000 point game and I fielded the following:

HQ:
Eldrad with a 5-man seer council (3 destructor, 1 embolden and 1 enhance warlocks)
Avatar

Elite:
2 x 6-man Fire Dragons (including exarch with crack shot and fire pike)
8 Harlequins (2 x melta pistols, 5 x kisses, shadowseer, death jester, troupe leader w/power weapon)

Troops:
2 x 10-man guardian defenders (scatter laser and warlock w/conceal)
10 dire avengers (exarch w/power weapon, shimmershield, bladestorm)
10 dire avengers (exarch w/dire sword, bladestorm)

Heavy:
3 x War Walkers (eldar missile launchers and scatter lasers)
WraithLord with 2 flamers, bright lance and starcannon

My opponent had (roughly)
HQ:
Company Command Squad (with orbital strike)

Elite:
6 Ogryn in a vendetta w/tl lascannons

Troops:
3 x 10-man veteran squads w/chimera (heavy flamers)

Fast:
Devil Dog Squad (2)

Heavy:
Basic Russ
Vanquisher (multi-melta sponsons, lascannon, pask)

We rolled up annihilation with spearhead deployment.

For those who are familiar with the four horsemen store in Morgantown, we played on the cityfight table.  The guard player won the roll for deployment zones and elected to go first. He deployed in the corner furthest away from a canal that runs diagonally through the board.  My deployment zone basically bordered the canal opposite of his deployment.

Given that it was not an objective based scenario, I was able to deploy my guardians and avengers in cover, as well as stringing the harlequins out between the two ruins at the canal edge.  behind this front line were my avatar, seer council, war walkers and fire dragons.  Given the scenario and the terrain, I elected to take a defensive position and let my opponent's armor come to me.

Most of the game we traded fire as the chimeras and devil dogs advanced upon my lines in order to bring their flamers in range.  The vendetta-mounted ogryn outflanked in turn two and managed to kill 5 of the 6 fire dragons in one of my squads.  In the ensuing turn, a squad of avengers bladestormed the ogryn and killed all but one, who promptly turn and fled.  my remaining fire dragons, war walkers and wraithlord then turned their weapons on the vendetta and destroyed all of its weapons and immobilized it.  the following turn, my lone fire dragon finished it off.

In turn 4 I ran the harlequins across the canal and assaulted the last devil dog.  It blew up in my face, killing two harlequins.  The rest of the squad were then gunned down by the combined fire of two veteran squads and their transports.

By the end of turn 5 (when the game ended), the final tally was 5 kill points for the eldar and 1 kill point for the imperial guard.

Overall, I was please with the performance of the foot eldar list.  Having said that, my opponent was having a pretty bad time with cover saves and ordnance scatter rolls.  In addition, the scenario and terrain really allowed me to dig in and focus my fire along the 2-3 choke points that his army had to pass through to get to me.  With a slight change in luck of the roll, and a different terrain layout, it could easily have gone the other way.

2 comments:

  1. Looks like an interesting game on the new table - sorry I missed it. Incidentally, my latest project is going to want a word with your Lynx once it's finished.

    How did you find the footdar movement-wise? I've heard a lot of bank and forth over how effective it is in terms of threat range, and can see it going both ways.

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  2. Given the scenario, terrain and army I was playing against, I pretty much took up defensive positions in 2-3 ruins where I could overlap fire and make him come to me.

    There really wasn't much movement on my part, so I can't really comment on that issue at the moment.

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