The Deathwing's final 5th edition march to war

This the last (5th edition) march of the Deathwing.....

These are not my Deathwing.

But these are my Deathwing. Notice the slowly increasing numbers

of painted models.

Well this weekend, in my quest to actually use and enjoy my models instead of just having them around I managed to schedule another game against my colleague. Since neither of us has really played recently we decided to take the 5th edition rules out for another spin. When I finally get around to ordering Dark Vengeance or playing at the game store where people can teach me (I hope the language barrier will only cause humourous misunderstandings) I'll switch up to the new rules.

Edina admires Aaron's models because they are fun and 

a different colour to my 'bone guys'. 

Aaron's triple lascannon predator and winged, lash daemon prince.

Raptors, terminators and noise marines ready for battle.

I did a normal deployment with two shooty squads plus the librarian

on the field, the latter for anti-lash defences. We were playing an objective

game and I did the old trick of putting the objectives where I planned to

go and not on my side. I knew I needed to get into assault and there are

three objectives near Aaron (the white dice cube, one under the troops

in his hand, one behind the paper ream, one to the left of the red up and

the conker next to my left squad). I figured I would teleport in and take 

the ones in his lines while holding the middle ones with the shooting squads.

This is somewhere in turn 2 because I have all of my guys on the field. Aaron

kept his terminators and raptors back to deep strike, and the chosen outflanked

in their rhino. As usual when facing a spread out force, I dumped my whole 

force on one flank. It feels a bit unfair sometimes but it's a good way to deal with

the lack of firepower for Deathwing and your lack of mobility. If I can put ~1500pts

against 700-1000 then I've got a big advantage. This time Aaron's havocs and Predator

 were forced to spend a few turns moving back into LOS to fire. 

Luckily for me Aaron forgot to move the Daemon Prince in his first turn

because of his eagerness to shoot my guys. This let me gang up on it totally

unfairly....the best way to deal with such a fast and dangerous monster. It still

took a couple of turns for the squads to bring it down. Him making six out of nine

5+ invulnerable saves was annoying but gave the fight a good epic feel. 

I'd split Belial off the command squad earlier to add more threat options. He 

wiped out a depleted chaos marine squad then went in against four marines and

their power fist sergeant. Despite killing three of them, he failed to get the champion

and took an instant death punch to the face in return. Still, the champion ended up being

Aaron's only scoring unit by the game's end so it wasn't a bad move. 

By mid-late game I'd put Aaron in a bad position where most of his units were too

far away to contest or score and the Deathwing were firmly in control of all but one

objective. The raptors jumped in close to threaten but, in the open, took a bit too much

firepower to be effective. They withdrew. The terminators deep struck but Aaron kept them

back to use their firepower instead of putting them in the middle of the Deathwing, where

they could have been attacked on all sides.

The endgame photo. The Deathwing took a few losses but only Belial was a killpoint. 

We held four of five objectives and were keeping Aaron's last forces at bay. 

Overall it was another fun game against a Chaos force. We discussed the battle afterwards and figured out some alternative ideas for Aaron against the Deathwing. For me, once three squads were in reserve to deep strike I would have kept my whole force on the field and castled on the three objectives near my home base. That would give me maximum firepower on the approaching terminators and keep my assault units (prince and terminators) near my troops so that if my weakened squads got close, they could be attacked and finished off. When you have a deathwing army coming at you with deep striking, spreading out into a thin line is often a bad idea. Most armies are not fast enough to completely redeploy to the other flank in time and every turn you do that is wasted as far as damage dealing goes.

We're looking forward to trying 6th edition and seeing how it changes up our armies and how they play. For me, I'm happy about the nerf to power weapons but uncertain how much will go against or help the Deathwing. We'll see when I get a chance to play.

All the best,

Pete