Dark Eldar: Aldershot Ardboyz - June 2013 – Part 2

So back to Aldershot. I had 3 more games to play, 3 awesome opponants to face and a lot of coke zero to drink as the temperature was incredibly high! I was well placed on two wins and went into game 4 ready and willing!

4^th Game

So I had space wolves and Matt swift and it was dawn of war, night fight first turn and I was playing a on foot space wolf list.

Now the fact here is my army excels at killing on foot marines. Matt had A LOT of on foot marines. They were there by the bucket load. This this game went to form, my venoms and ravagers killing most of the army without much retaliation especially with nightfight shielding my tanks in return.

Special mention here goes to Matts Wolf guard leader who tanked 2 ravagers and 4 venoms shooting before he died. What a hero!

Dark Eldar in night fight and going first spells disaster for most armies. So I chalked up an impressive win (probably too impressive as it turns out!) and moved on to my next game against some bloke

5^th Game

So at this point I was on table 2 and I had to play against the one and only Luke Nurser, Death or Glory member and total git.

We were playing relic hammer and anvil, so a hard mission for the both of us without any hard as nail scoring units.

Luke was using a mech Eldar army he’d finished building on the Friday (with my help) which was several wave serpents, 6 war walkers a farseer and a crimson hunter. Having helped build this beast of a list I knew what to expect.

The board we were playing had no area terrain just LOS blocking terrain so I only got the aegis as normal cover.

I got Fortune and got the first turn, no nightfight but can’t win em all. I set everything spread out moving my wych’s to the front and agressivly deploying my ravagers. It was a risk, seize the initiative would have been the end of me (as it so often is)

Luke promptly rolled a 6

With my ravagers with no defence, luke decimated my forces with minimal damage in return. However I did have the beasts unit with fortune who held on until turn 5. Luke had held off and as such I was sitting around the objective so he couldn’t grab it, so he was winning by 1. So I went for it the baron lept from the remaining few beasts and charged into his deployment zone killing Lukes Night spinner… it was a draw at this point and so we picked the silliest looking dice in my dice collection the pink frilly one and rolled for the end of the game… it was another 6…

In fairness that woulda been me stealing the game from Luke so in fairness the victory was his and it was well deserved.

He cheerfully mopped up my remaining army and I went into game 6 with 3 wins and 2 losses.

6^th Game

The last game was unique in any game I’ve played as the set up took longer than the game itself. My previous gaming record for game length was 30 minutes at the Old GT in Nottingham. This game must have been less than that.

In the previous Aldershot I stole a victory from Mark Waterhouse and his Tau army with a sneaky linebreaker. This time he brought daemons to the tournament.

Mark had 4 flying daemons a bloodthirster a death chicken (Lord of change) and a daemon prince of khorne and tzeentch. Finishing his army was pink horrors and plaguebearers.

Mark went first and flew his monsterous creatures towards my army causing no damage with any of his psychic powers.

In my turn I killed the bloodthirster, the Tzeentch daemon prince took his khorne prince down to 1 wound. After a charge in his turn that failed to rout the beastmasters, I hit and ran with the beasts sending the whole unit  to within charge range of his troops.

After my shooting phase he had no big daemons left, a big hole where the nightspinner had blown apart a good 10 daemons in 2 turns. So at this point mark conceded.

Big flying daemon armies have very little chance to beat my army. Its not the volumn of shots but it’s the fact there coming from everywhere making the daemons take multiple grounding checks then taking multiple poisoned wounds from venom fire. Not forgetting the quadgun and the ravagers.

Conclusion

So a couple of things here. My armys still pretty competitive. Some armies are just not going to stand up to them at all pure venom power really did for a few of my opponants. But obviously there will allways be a fragility with Dark elder born from their vehicles. But I’m finding more and more that the manouverability of the army really helps against the static shooting armies were currently seeing.

Will I be making tweaks? Oh yes! In 1850 I really wanna try out a Wraithknight. These guys are a pain in the arse to shift and will hopefully draw fire away from my venoms and ravagers. At lower points levels tho I think ill be keeping my nightspinner. It did pretty well and is pretty useful.

I’ll be dropping the crimson hunter. I made the mistake in thinking I could paper over dark eldars deficiency in anti air by bringing it in but frankly it didn’t really do that very well.

Finally the farseer needs runes of witnessing. Failing to cast fortune is a total bitch.

The next tournament is the brighton warlords tourney which has just occurred. I’ll write my report on this soon and try and get all 6 games into 1 blog this time.

Until then everyone!