Introduction

In the last set of blog posts I discussed the fact that when writing army lists, I felt fatigued by how terrible the armies were from a gameplay perspective due to the meta influence, and then how building a game wholesale, with your opposition, from the ground up to have a common theme and narrative made the game better.

Well, to quote Blackadder Goes Forth:

Made and entry in my diary today. Simply says bugger.

Capt. Darling.

Mission

We used the Battle for Beta Garmon book, Core Mission Three, Sudden Strike. Effectively, you place three objectives (we got Josh, our resident World Eaters/Space Wolves player, to place them for us) and on Game Turn 2 a single of those objectives can be captured and removed from play. On Turn 3, two of them can be captured and removed. You get the smattering of additional Victory Points as usual. At the end of Game turn 4 the player with the highest amount of VPs wins.

Deployment

The Iron Warriors deployed first and went first with a failed Sieze from the Sons of Horus. The Iron Warriors had a more dispersed deployment with several of their armour and Terminators spread across table thirds to cover potential deployment opportunities for the Sons of Horus. The Sons of Horus were deployed in relative cover, as far forwards in their deployment as they could. So far, so good.

The Iron Warriors have two Sicaran Tanks on the left behind the ruin, in between the Rhino with its Tactical Squad and a Land Raider with Legion Cataphractii Terminators in it. The Mastodon held Perturabo and the Dominators, along with two Leviathans. The Siege Tyrants were in the middle of the table with two Rhinos flanking them, one holding the Legion Optae and his squad and the other holding a Tactical Squad.

The Sons of Horus had a far smaller footprint, with Abaddon and his Retinue in Deep Strike Assault, and Horus, his Retinue and a Contemptor in the Mastodon. One Rhino with a Tactical Squad embarked is to the left of the Deredeos in the ruins.

Turn 1

Night Fight was not in effect. The Iron Warriors open up proceedings quite effectively. In Turn 1 they dropped the Mastodons void shields, stripped a sizeable number of hull points from it and damaged one of the Leviathans. They also killed off four Recon Marines. What I will say about this is that most of the firepower went into the Mastodon and Recons, with Evade coming in usefully for the latter.

The Sons of Horus joined proceedings by moving the Mastodon forwards, and disembarking Horus, the Justaerin and the Contemptor into the maelstrom ahead. The problem here was that the Iron Warriors had scoring units on each objective already and had heavy armour backing them up – it simply wasn’t an option to just bowl Rhinos up to them uncontested. The Contemptor went to the far left to clear a blocking Rhino and begin to threaten the Tactical Squad on one objective, whilst Horus and his Retinue went after the Land Raider with Cataphractii in, to blunt the inevitable advance from the contents of Iron Warriors Mastodon. This saw the Land Raider wrecked, spilling the Cataphractii squad out the rear left hatch. The Leviathans went after the right hand objective and the Javelins went to work on the Siege Tyrants, in concert with the Recons, whilst the final Rhino moved in cover up to the centre objective that sat beside the Siege Tyrants. The Deredeos went to work on the Mastodon and Sicarans – but the Mastodon still had one of it voids up at the end of Turn 1, though it had hurt itself with Bitter Fury.

Turn 2

In what would become a defining note of the game, the Iron Warriors firepower reaped a horrific toll on the Sons of Horus in Turn 2. First, the Iron Warriors Mastodon disgorged it’s contents and 500 of the 615 points of Justaerin retinue died to incoming fire, leaving Horus virtually alone. The Siege Tyrant remnants took down the remnants of the Recon Squad, leaving the Master of Signals standing alone and the remainder of the Iron Warriors force wrecked a Rhino, took wounds off a Javelin and ineffectually fired at the Deredeos. They did however, kill the Contemptor with Shrapnel Bolters, whose explosion killed a few of their Tacticals in response. The Iron Warriors burned and scored that objective.

The Sons of Horus had a medicore shooting phase, with the primary action being to take more hull points from the Mastodon and begin to reduce down those squads out of their transports near objectives. Horus was charged by the Iron Warriors Leviathan, which he took down in his Assault phase, and then consolidated towards Perturabo’s mob. There wasn’t space to move to the centre objective and threaten it properly.

Turn 3

Big bada boom. Firstly, the Iron Warriors detonated the Sons of Horus Mastodon, which caused significant damage to the Rhino and wounded Horus. Then they Charged into Horus with the Leviathan, Perturabo and the Dominators, with Horus doing well until the five Dominators took him down.

The Sons of Horus called in the Deep Strike Assault onto the centre Objective, with the intent to come in danger close, kill the Tactical Squad, score and then get stuck into Perturabo with Abaddon on a later turn, to avenge his father. This didn’t go to plan, with a high value scatter landing me on some crates, and the reroll being significantly higher scatter, leading to a mishap Deep Strike, which left them effectively out of the game. It was at this point that I said to Andrew that the game was now effectively done, however I was happy to throw dice and play it out. We had the time and so we did.

The Sons of Horus destroyed the Iron Warriors Mastodon with the Deredeos, and whittled down a few more objective scorers, but the toll simply wasn’t enough. The Iron Warriors burned the last objectives.

Turn 4

With the Warmaster slain, and Abaddon struggling to re-engage, the Sons of Horus lost a Leviathan, and Deredeo to Terminators, then they lost their last Javelins to the Siege Tyrants. Both Tactical Squads died to Shrapnel Bolters. Abaddon and his Justaerin were charged by the Siege Tyrants and the Siege Breaker, with more Justaerin falling than Siege Tyrants. Abaddon took the head of the Siege Breaker, and the Justaerin killed the Siege Tyrants as the final action of the game.

Outcome

Iron Warriors win 7 vs 4 VP.

Summary

A really solid game for the Iron Warriors, without so much as breaking a sweat – in total, they lost around 25% of their army at the cost of 90% of the Sons of Horus.

What went wrong for the Sons of Horus? They started strong in Turn 1, and frankly, the level of aggression was fine at that point. However by Turn 2 the dice were rolling more fails than anything I’ve ever seen before and that caused a major loss of confidence in the offensive.

Instead of surging forwards in Turn 2, I was cowed by firepower that normally wouldn’t get through armour saves of 2+, and the offensive actions became degrading and ineffective preservation activity. The Sons of Horus became overstretched and isolated.

Offensive actions that were occuring in Turn 2 were neutered, due to my inability to deliver tangible destruction to key elements of the table – the objectives being scored by Tactical Marines. This weakened my ability to deliver key effects, and thus further contributed to the downfall.

In Turn 3, the death-knell was heard with a final, aggressive (and somewhat desperate) Deep Strike Assault that saw the pantheon laugh in my face with progressively worse scatter rolls leading to mishap. There was simply no recovery to be had.

The Leviathans were consistent in their work – but still didn’t kill a huge amount. I’m thinking about Drop Podding a melee one instead of walking them up the table – they’re just very costly for that 5++ and could comfortably be a 4++ for their same base cost without causing issues.

Justaerin fell to Shrapnel bolters, or Melta and Las shots due to consistently rolling 1s for Armour and 2-3s for Invulns. Meanwhile their own Melta scuffed paint and Banestrikes merely dented armour. It felt like there was no point firing at a unit of Tacticals with mine, in my shooting phase, because mine would simply die to the return fire and unavoidably terrible saving throws. I’ve never had a game so definitively measured by the dice like this one. The only “Victory” in this is that I actually used the Advanced reaction for the Sons of Horus for once.

The Elite nature of the Sons of Horus army became its undoing as the turns unfolded and the dice failed.

The Justaerin, for instance, cost 5ppm more base than “normal” Legion specific Terminators for what is effectively Furious Charge (1) and and extra attack per model. The hammers cost 15ppm and I had 6 Hammers and 4 Tabars in every Sqaud of 10. They killed a Land Raider with Horus. So 1215 points wrecked a 220 point model. Then most of the Justaerin died to shrapnel bolters and the odd melta. Horus killed a Leviathan, then died. So 600 points killed 315 points. This was replicated across the table with only the Deredeos breaking even, by the fact they killed a Sicaran and a Mastodon. Looking back, I am almost certain more damage was done to the Iron Warriors through their or my own exploding units than I did in direct fire.

The Mastodons were pretty poor. 710 points to last out effectively two turns into the start of shooting in Turn 3 is preposterous. They don’t even have gravis Lascannons. On another table, Josh’s World Eaters Mastodon died very early in a 3,000 point game against Mechanicum, so it isn’t a problem with game scaling either – just that it’s an overpriced mess. Andrew said he’s unlikely to play his again soon and this was its first outing. Mines done three deployments now, and died on two in similar manners. It only survived the first due to the fact the Raven Guard Melta teams died to my Volkite Veterans and they lacked enough AT in other platforms. Then there’s the size issue – we made sure we had options for movement on the table, but there will be those tables that simply mean you have a surprisingly fragile bunker on the table instead of a surprisingly fragile delivery system. As with most Super Heavy Vehicles, the Mastodon is just not worth its points to play and is likely to see less time on the table in a year than it does to build it in the first place, let alone paint. I’d rather just take Horus and risk the Deep Strike. It at least looks good though.

Awful on the table, but pretty nonetheless. Mine probably won’t see another game this year.

I enjoyed writing the lists together on the common theme, as it created a really equal game in terms of unit constructs and the removal of “gotcha” moments that seem to be getting more frequent in Heresy 2.0. I enjoyed playing Heresy after quite some time since my last game, and for those thinking this post is heavy on negativity – no one honestly likes losing. However, this game became a train wreck very quickly that saw me stripped of large numbers of points with little to no comeback being delivered and the root cause was awful dice rolls with a light touch of strategy/tactics errors due to that root cause’s impact.

Discussions are in motion already about the next opportunity for a game between Andrew and I, hopefully in early June. This goes to show that even with the horrific outcome and frankly awful moments in game with the dice, there’s no love lost for the system as a whole. I’ve taken a notable knock, that’s for sure – but look forward to the next game of Heresy.

I’m tempted to run out the Vindicator Laser Destroyers. I love my three, though they normally die awfully. Something perhaps like the list below:

No doubt it’ll be torn apart – but it’ll look nice as it does at least.