RE: [Epic] SM Chaos - wasUncheesy detachments

From: Miller, Chris <CMiller_at_...>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 16:17:30 -0600

-snip much relevant troll & minotaur comments...
> They had
> a long history of being chaos card victims and suffering from the
> plague
> wind (damn magnus and mortarion):).
--------> Now now, you're going to start sounding like one of THOSE
eldar players..."my poor victimized scorpions" etc. While they're busy
sucking up plagues and beams of power (though it was the superheavies
which usually received that blessing on our end) and being clawed,
tentacled, long-legged, etc, your guardians are stealthily moving into
ambush position...


> > --------> Yep, the cards made the difference pretty often in CC.
> (Ack -
> > that stupid growth card...)
> That and burnng bodies which forced me to spread out (and risk
> being
> ganged up on) or stick together and lose a bunch of guys at once. And
> you
> never knew if it was there or not......
-------> Ya know, I think I , um, lost that particular card...
("of _course_ we're using my deck...")

> > Well that's a new one - massed chaos tarantulas? I still think the
> > pop-up factor would win it for the eldar, - along with a big mobile
> > assault force, but that is something I haven't seen before.
> Hmm well 300 points of falcons was worth 4 VP and would kill 3
> T's per
> turn. 300 POints of T's would give 15 shots (just in FF) for 5 hits
> and 2-3
> kills on falcons (oh yeah the T's were only worth 3Vps). We played pop
> ups were
> all made at the start of the FF phase so the order of shooting became
> important.
---------> Ah - this makes a difference, as we didn't, so our pop-ups
tended to come late in the FF phase - as late as possible as a matter of
fact, meaning a lot of other things (like Tarantulas) would have already
fired. Winning the initiative was a major coup, as you could guarantee
at least one unit firing without being fired upon. With Eldar it was
usually Tempests or a revved up Prism Cannon, or Falcons if you had
nothing better (or no one's guns were in range of the tempests). With
Imperials it would be the deathstrike missile, so you had about zero
chance of shooting it down before impact.

> I guess the falcons were more able to get a local superiority than
> the T's
> but there were plenty of cases where convenient cover for pop ups
> wasnt
> available. Allowing the falcons to be hit by first AND advance fire
> was a
> losing proposition. Tempests could sit back out of range but using
> them to
> kill tarantulas was such a waste......
-------> Yeah, normally I'd say more cover would be good for chaos and
was one way to balance them out, but against Eldar it didn't do you much
good, and gave THEM more places to hide.
> I tried jet bike charges as well. If I moved second it wasnt TOO
> bad.
> 1 unit of jetbikes could about wipe out a tarantula unit. (Bikes
> charge 1-2
> get killed on way in and then maybe a third killed by advance fire
> from the
> remainder). However moving second was asking for the bikes to be
> ganged up
> on by lurking CCers.
--------> I can certainly see one use for Minotaurs at this point:
Bodyguards for the Tarantula Company...

> > --------> The big flaws in the Chaos marine army locally were a lack
> of
> > range (50cm tops for CSM's) and a reliance on easily-killed
> transport
> > vehicles (which also lacked offensive capability) to get anywhere.
> Umm Tarantulas , LR's and titans. Thats an awful lot at 75 and
> theres
> not a huge amount of 100cm stuff out there (and all was expensive). 75
> was also
> quite enough with decent positioning. POint for point chaos marines
> really kicked regular marines and their gun was one of the better 50cm
> ones around.
--------> LR's only real flaw: every two tanks out of 3 you kill cough
up 2 VP's. I always took a few, but thought they were overpriced
compared to some of the other stuff.
    Titans, of course are best met with other titans, and a Psycannon
was hell on titans, especially if you had a friendly pulsar to knock
down the shields. The tremor cannons were handy too, as then you didn't
have to knock down the shields. Course, like many Eldar thingies, they
were the old "eggshells armed with sledgehammers" with barrage weapons
except there weren't many titan weapons which used the barrage template
which had any kind of decent save mod, oddly enough, so Phantoms &
Warlocks were pretty effective against other titans (though not against
my cheese-smashing deathstrike head cannon combined with a fire control
centre heh heh heh - no cheese here...) Now if they'd just leave the
artillery companies at home, the Eldar would have been all-powerful.
        As for Chaos marines, they were good, but they were still 50cm
range like most other infantry, and against them the save mod didn't
matter, and you still had to pay extra for the transport. I liked them,
I just never thought they were especially better than regular marines.
Were nice for knocking down the shields of foolish titans who strayed
too close though - especially warhounds."Dink. dink. dink - oops...he's
down..."

> At the price of wrecking his
> marines on turn 2-3 the standard number of objectives he could hold
> was 4-7.
> If you got it to 4 you would win. In a 4000pt game (or was it 3500)
> 6-7 and
> maybe even 5 would be enough depending on how much 1-2 rewards (heck
> the
> vortex one had nearly a 50-50 or doing a titan.
-------> Even considering the plague, I always hated the vortex thing
the most. Probably because my regular opponent painted his up as
Thousand Sons, but even on paper it's just nastier somehow.
   Silly me, I started Chaos pretty early on in Space Marine and made
mine World Eaters before I realized the Airmobile plague marines were
allowed and unpleasant...had enough left to make a second company,
though and it was soon rectified... : )

> Given the size of the
> template and the titan it could scatter and still often hit) had done
> plus
> the incidental damage done by his attacks. Maybe I sucked but I think
> I was
> winning about 1 in 5 vs this army and I tried damn near everything.
------> Nah, I doubt you sucked : ) You just had a chaos player found
some good combos and things worked out for him most of the time. My
chaos player tried different things, but they usually weren' t too hard
to counter, and he never would have come up with 20 tarantulas.
Honestly, neither one of us would focus that much on any one unit. About
the worst we got was one game with a Bthirster taking 5 jugger support
cards, but then we always did like juggers for some reason. He went nuts
with Tzeentch discs too once, though that didn't work out as well. We
both had fairly large Chaos armies, and would draw from both of them
when one of us played chaos, so we had tons of the plastic, but less of
the metal. I added a titan for each power, with a 3 Warlord group for
Khorne along with a Banelord. Most of our fights were Chaos vs
Imperials. Lotsa fun there. Gonna have to do it again and post it...

> > slower than slugs, but at least you could use cards to save them
> (and
> > the troops inside) until the Eldar titan w/psycannon got a line of
> > sight.
> Never saw any of the demon engines with the exception of doom
> wings.
I used the Khorne, and Scott has debated their +'s & -'s with me before.
My friend liked the tzeentch. He got the nurgles toward the end, but we
used them very little. All that tower was was a very slow unshielded
target for psychic attacks. Never saw the Slaanesh stuff, but it looked
too gofy for me anyway. One of the titans was OK, but the knights just
looked thrown together to me.

> > Against orks & imperials you had a pretty good game, but against
> > eldar it was almost always a lopsided win in 3 turns or less (for
> the
> > eldar). Squats I didnt play enough to see a trend, and 'nids I
> ddin't
> > either, though it seemed like they had easy access to psychic
> attacks.
> His constant taking of Mortarion and the Death guard always
> screwed the
> orks and imperials right up. TOo many troops to spread around meant
> whole
> clans /companies broke (heck virtually wiped out...) with the use of
> one card.
> That was sad. Seeing a large woods go up in flames from buring bodies
> and
> wipe out the whole goff clan (sheltering from a Barrage Missile) was
> also
> pretty sad as well.
>
---> I'll concur with that - I've never had ork clans break as fast
against anyone as they did against Chaos.



> Sigh - that was long winded.
> JAC.
-------> Now it's longer...

Chris Miller
Received on Wed Feb 11 1998 - 22:17:30 UTC