Warpcon Game 5 - Chivite's Daemons of Chaos

Fateweaver: He's a decrepit monkey-skeleton.

After scraping through game 5 by completely gypsying my opponent and stealing 4 BP at the end thanks to a Rhino's tank shock I was in a big pack of people on about 51 points after 4 games and there were a few I was hoping to avoid. Luckily, I got to play an army I didn't want: Daemons. Despite their fall from grace post-Warp Quake they're actually a good foil to mech-based armies as many of their units don't go down to single shots so require enemies to focus fire to remove each target (no shaken/stunned shenanigans) and their units can tear through most units with either the sheer number of attacks (Fiends) or the amount of power weapons attacks they possess (Princes, MC's and Bloodanythings).

Then Chivite told me his list and I knew that this would be one of those games where I would either win big or lose big as Fateweaver surviving for a long period of time would decide how this game went. I have had a decent run against him, as Angry Merl will testify, as he has a nasty habit of being killed off early whenever he's showed up beforehand. I was hoping that my luck against him would hold this time and I'd be able make a game of it.


I'd love be able to figure out how to do one of those Spanish upside-down exclamation marks that you place before a word because it would describe Chivite perfectly. He speaks really quickly and punctuates it with hand motions and when he gets excited he babbles sound he sounds like the Spanish lads in the Fast Show. Which makes him great fun to play against as he's horribly enthusiastic and it rubs off eventually. Which means that you're willing to forgive him when manga-style pics of two girls rubbing each other appear on your facebook page because he's clicked like and you have to explain to your missus that you haven't been looking this stuff up yourself...

The mission was Kill Points Primary, Multi-Objectives secondary with Pitched Battle the deployment.

I went first and deployed my army with the Fangs covering the board and spread out so that if Chivite committed to taking something out the rest of the army could keep shooting as he tried to cross the board while GH squads would either shoot and charge or shoot and move away from the horde taking them apart with guns and tank-shocking them back allowing my units to escape for another turn and hopefully giving me enough of my guns to bring the daemons down bit by bit.

Turns 1 & 2
Cue one of the funniest games I've had in ages. The good wave of Daemons came down (Fateweaver; 6 Bloodcrushers with Icon, Rending, Instrument; Plaguebearers; 2 Heralds of Tzeentch on Discs and a Tzeentch Prince) with the other half (2 DP's, Letters, more Plagues and Fiends) in reserve.

Fateweaver should come with instructions with one of those being the necessity to drop Fateweaver first every time. On this occasion however, the Crushers dropped first, then the Heralds, followed by the Plagues and finally Fatey himself. Having lots of units around him meant that his odds of landing safely had been reduced due to the space taken up by friendly units. Fatey dropped down, scattered and landed bang on top of the Plagues. And reliably (for games against me) he rolled a 1 and died. Class - that made things must easier. And things got better when the shooting phase did sweet FA.

The DP before his inglorious demise.

I was able to open up on the units that had landed and decided to focus on the big Crusher block that was without re-rolls because if it was allowed to hit my lines it could single-handedly roll through my armies as I had no Dreads to tarpit them and they'd mangle any infantry they hit. The rest of the army could be dealt with later on (the Tzeentch Heralds would fall over to a unit of GH, ffs). I managed to get rid of 3 of the Crushers with Rockets & Las  with the DP joining them in hell, with me trying to throw 2 units of GH at them but one unit was out of range. One unit with a Wolf Banner would have to do. It didn't win through in one round but I managed to thin the herd over two rounds of combat with a single unit with only 3 wounded Crushers left.

More daemons arrived (the Fiends, Letters, the 2nd Plagues) but they did little as they couldn't assault while the big Crusher combat continued with only 2 guys left fighting off a trio of Grey Hunters.


Turns 3 & 4
I had a few units of GH lying about but what units could get mounted up did so they could hide from the Daemon units trying to trap them in combat and hop out of their tanks later on to kill anything that got too close while the Fiends, Letters & Heralds were all shot with one Herald keeling over and the Fiends being reduced to 3 models, with one on one wound.

Moar Daemons: The DP dropped after his comrades and he landed on top of the unit of Crushers in combat and rolled a 2, killing himself while the last Daemon Prince, desperate to put pressure on the middle of my lines and buy time for the other units dropped into the same spot as the last DP and he careened onto the GH in the right of the picture. He rolled a 1. Who needs Dreads when you have Wolf Banner Grey Hunters? Yes, that was 650+ points of scattered Daemons that had killed themselves. I could only lose the game if I did something really stupid or luck deserted me completely.

The GH were eventually dispatched by the Crushers & Letters but they were able to do enough damage to weaken them enough for the rest of my guns to wipe out the Crushers and slowly whittle the Letters & Fiends down. Sadly, the Fiends were able to reach the Scouts in combat and kill a few of them but at least they wiped the Fiends out (the lack of grenades helped massively) and while the Letters mangled a unit of Fangs they had to run the gauntlet of lots of Wolves with nothing better to shoot at.

Turns 4-7
My army fanned out. The Daemons had to concentrate and focus on one unit at a time but by spreading out I was able to buy time for all of my more mobile units to get into position and shoot each unit as it came at my lines so that when one unit died, the others could either get out of dodge or add their firepower to the rest of the army and take out entire units.

On my far left a unit of GH unit spent a few turns in a Rhino moving up the left-hand side and the unit eventually got out, tackled a 7 man unit of Plaguebearers and ground them down before being attacked by a Herald on disk late in the game to clear an objective, which didn't end well for the Tzeentchian Daemon, leaving the GH in possession of the objective on my far-left.

Bitches (Tzeentch) can't cover our Wolf Banners: They bend over.

The Letters chewed through the Scouts in the centre before being hammered by Bolters, Murderous Hurricane and Long Fang firepower so they disappeared leaving my lines uncontested. By the end of the game, all that Chivite had left was a unit of 5 Plaguebearers that were hiding behind a piece of terrain sitting on an objective while I had over half of my army left and was well ahead on Kill Points and Objectives.

It ended up 18-2 to me based upon the VP difference and as a result of that final win I ended up 7th out of 57 overall.

I won't go into what I could have done differently but I do have some thoughts about how the army performed both as a whole and individually and I'm going to write something up about that instead, starting with a long overdue write-up on Scouts.

And btw, here's how you solve Fateweaver's riddles.