Playing Mission # - Paved in Blood!
Hello again, Sam here with another instalment of my ArcArmy Challenge...
Theory crafting is good to a point… but sometimes you have to play to see if it all works.
So when the preview mission (Paved in Blood) was shown off by Legends and Lore YouTube channel.https://youtu.be/Ea94aaTG03w I was keen to give it a go...
For me this is a looked to be a good mission - simple and balanced.
There are a couple of different ways to approach it as well.
You can rush out and try to take your opponent’s objectives and leave yours at risk… or, do you defend your home objective and attempt to go for a late game steal. It's important to note, as Ben mentions in the Battle Report you score is totalled up and averaged across everyone, your not really playing against your opponent.
I was playing against a good friend Nick Steel, a 13 year Arc40k Veteran himself, running the newly dropped Astra Militarum codex and the Nephilim rules.
As you can see Nick's army is lovingly converted and painted. It also has a LOT of fire power!
I was keen to see if he had enough to worry Be'lakor?
So here’s the report of play:
Nick deployed very aggressively but then used a redeploy strategem to move back into what he felt waa a safer position. I deployed defensively, but as I was going first I advanced quickly onto the middle objective during turn 1. Be'lakor and some troops set up and me hoping to press the advantage and go ahead towards the Primary.
I knew that this tactic would open Be'lakor up to all of Nick's shooting and potentially any charges he might want to launch to lock him up and slow his advance… but I was keen to see how tough Be'lakor actually was.
I wasn’t wrong!
Nick killed my Beast of Nurgle quite easily with his Sentinels… But he only managed to put a couple of wounds onto Be'lakor - despite shooting him with everything else! What a beast..
Nick then followed up with a charge and thanks to Be'lakor rule of no re-rolls and -1 Damage he only suffered a couple more wounds.
In the mean time, Nick had two chameria full of troops moving up and threatening my home objective.
Nick diverted one chameria to the centre and unloaded the troops in an attempt to hold up Be'lakor for a turn or two.
This ended up keeping Be'lakor in combat for two turns - that costed me dearly in terms of achieving my game plan.
In the mean time, my Flamers were summoned up and cleared the units around Nick's home objective whilst Nick's Chimera full of troops moved onto mine!
There was little I could do about this situation as I didn't have many units left at this stage and getting control of the whole board was proving difficult.
At this point the game started opening up and I was able to take Nick's home objective but it was a too late… Nick had gotten ahead on VPs and I was unable to stop him continuing to score.
In the end Nick won the Battle by a small margin…Ok it was 95 - 75 a good win for him and a high scoring loss for me.
But I was pleased that I was able to learn some important things:
Be'lakor is very survivable and his teleporting power is extremely good. However, the 9" deep strike is too risky. It will be better to use Be'lakor’s locus to come in closer.
Daemon saves are good but you do loose models. This is compacted with the daemons low leadership characteristics.
Plaguebearers & Beast of Nurgle under performed but that might of been just this game. Or how I used them!
So I played this game before Chapter Approved, Balance Sheet and new points dropped. All up I’m sure Arcs of Omen will defiantly change things up.
The new detachment doesn't change the way I will build my list but the new point limits will allow me to fit in more objective secured troops in. Hopefully it will give me better board presence. Playing 1350 points limit on a big board - 6’x4’ - does feel a bit open, but it does allow you to play through the mission.
I defiantly recommend you give it a go as it still took us a while to finish the game. I’ll need to manage my game play to be more efficient and secure the points from playing all the turns.
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