Riptides
Gaaargh! What frustrating monsters they be! Had another 3k/side team battle. 3 on 2; unyielding (sm) / dark angels / eldar vs tau / tau. We didn’t make any adjustments to FOCs this time, since the point totals were pretty big, but I think it still threw the balance off a little. Too many troops on our side cut into our bigger options a bit, as we only had 1000pts each to field full FOCs. My own contribution was a vindicator, 5scouts, 5tacticals, a lucius’ed assault ironclad, and an assault terminator squad with a term chaplain attached, which I foolishly decided to deepstrike (reserves *never* seems to work for me).
One of the tau players fielded 2 riptides, which we managed to knock a single wound off of over the course of the game. Nova never failed, and neither did the 3+ invulnerable that he kept selecting. My own dicerolling skillz were seriously lacking, and I managed to make very few important saves. The ironclad was once again the star, lasting a couple turns while wiping out a couple squads and drawing about 80% of the enemy fire. The vindicator did okay, but was eventually torn to shreds by tau super guns, and the troops died in combat. The assault terminators were the real failure though, arriving after everythng else was dead, and therefore drawing 100% of the fire, almost none of which I managed to save successfully. It didn’t help that we had so little left at that point that our only chance was to drop them into the open and hope for the best. They didn’t even last the turn. So that was a third of my army accomplishing nothing.
I just suck with reserves, and now that I can’t assault on arrival, most of my options are useless. I was hoping I could gate of infinity the terms around, but unfortunately its treated like a deepstrike, so they still can’t assault afterwards. So footslogging under heavy fire or a land raider are pretty much the only options. Land raider it is.
I think next time I’m just going to field a ridiculous assault unit. 4 lightning claw terminators, 2 hammer and storm shield, a terminator chaplain and a terminator librarian with a force axe and a storm shield. The librarian will be an epistolary, so he can null zone invulnerables and then still force axe an instakill agains whatever they’re fighting. All packed into a crusader, which should leave me with just enough points for 2 5man tactical squads. And that’s 1000pts. Essentially, I’m planning to build an 820pt assault unit. And it may do nothing else, but I mostly just want it to kill riptides (and, I suppose, other monstrous creatures). My teammates can handle the big guns for once.
I’ll keep you posted.
rats east 