> You have to protect the GD's until dsome of thos attacks go away. I
> usually took KOS's and
> Mortarion against Eldar, since they don't need line of sight for their
> attacks to work. They
> were kept in a forest gaurding an objective or two until the psi
> levels started to come down.
> LOB's are less vulnerable to eldar psi weapons; You've got a 66%
> chance of negating the wave
> serpents and prism cannons before the armor save; and its practically
> eldarish if you're winning.
> We did play that LOB's were command units (which was alternately
> confirmed and denied in the codex
> and Q&A's)
> so with 2 deathstorms, it could be a very sad fireprism or falcon
> which popped up against it.
--------> Maybe you used a different pop-up rule, but I believe the text
was "can see anywhere on the table" so how do you hide from them? Also
LOB's are fine (always take mine!) but psychic saves don't negate beam
attacks like the Weirdboy bolts and the Prism cannon - that's in TL I
believe. Also the range on the deathstorm wasn't anything great, so even
with this immunity to prism cannons rules interp, I think I'd have to
use a Tempest on it - can't hide from it, can't outrange it, and it
gets 2 very nasty shots. <POP> goes the LOB, there go his
followers...I've done it before as my chaos forces were usually used by
another player. The LOB will be long dead before the Wave Serps become
an issue. The Prism cannon can pop-up and nuke any GD's that think
they're out of LOS, and the psychic lance can march over and find them
> Minotaurs were great for gaurding objectives or advancing in 22 strong
> waves towards a phantom.
> They were also good for keeping jetbikes off of a warlord. No doubt
> you've seen the effects of 2
> barrage missile launchers on eldar titans.
--------> Well the built - in titan weapon multi-launchers werren't any
huge threat - no save mod. Barrage missiles were one-shots, and they
were nasty, but it's a 1- missile 1- titan kill at best, unless the
Eldar player bunches up bigtime.
Minotaurs were cool, but they usually died before they got anywhere
in our games.
> Chaos Marines RocK!!!! I almost always took Mortarians and/or Magnus's
> guys, as they were great
> for either wiping out a bike swarm or a Tempest group/phantom. They
> also had a save modifier and a
> better chance to hit, and are quite capable of taking out tanks and
> titans by sheer volume.
-------> The marines are good, esp the two you mention, but they did
have to get fairly close to use their powers. With the swarm, they'd
come to you, but I don't see anyone getting near the tempests on FF...
> Getting them there; If I was going to use thunderhawks for deploying
> marines, I always put out
> empty thunderhawks first and closer. The extra 50 points was worth it.
> Sometime I just charged
> with Doomwings straight into CC with the firestorms, and sucked up the
> snap fire that way. So long
> as the firestorms died.
>
-------> I thought there was some kind of restriction on flyers entering
CC with ground units? Might work, but it takes a lot of flyers to kill a
pair of firestorm batteries.
> Incidentally, the best way to run doomwings is to line them up behind
> each other on the baseline
> just off of an objective your opponent is going to try to take. Then
> you can fly straight ahead
> and turn at the end of movement, covering that objective with flame.
>
> Of course their are counters to these sort of things, but unless your
> opponent is playing a
> balanced army, he won't have all of them. Thats why balance became so
> important in our group; we
> all learned how to wreck a cheesy army that kept showing up.
>
> > >Keep expensive infantry in buildings.
> > ---------> Buildings? No building with infantry in it finishes the
> turn
> > standing in our games..Expensive Infantry? Yow...
>
> We usually played with the 2+ buildings. If your opponent tended to
> take a bunch of building
> killers, the you could probably keep infantry out in the open with
> only a few losses per turn.
> Building were too vulnerable in that game; the range should have been
> from 0+ to 4+ saves.
>
> Also, you dont have to put a whole squad in one building if the
> building were close enough. we
> were more than willing to have one stand out in the open keeping uniti
> coherency between two
> buildings. (You didn't want to have too many people owing you money in
> my army..)
>
-------> We usually had mixed building types, but considering any
barrage weapon had a chance to drop 'em, that's still fairly risky.
Eldar probably had the fewest normal barrage weapons of any army, but
the titans could also advance up near a building, perhaps to a side
where the inhabitants had no LOS, slap it with a power fist as they
didn't have to be on charge orders to do this, probably collapsing it,
and then hosing people behind it. Didn't happen every game, but it
happened a few times.
Against Imperial armies, this'll get you killed. Artillery,
quake cannons, etc.
> > Cheap infantry buffers; Guard your titans
> > >and tanks with infantry. If nothing else, keep someone on advance
> nearby to
> > make
> > >the opponent pay for his kills on your units.
> > --------> Which Infantry is cheap for chaos - Cultists?
>
> Minotaurs, space marines, chaos squats. I never had any cultists, so I
> don't know much about their
> abilities.
>
-----> Cultists were just like IG tac troopers. I might point out the
above, in additoin to being cheap, is also slow, only the marines have
any decent transports, and all are extremely beatable in CC by the
Eldar. For the walking troops, you could keep them away from objectives
just by spraying a bunch of doomweavers into the area. The webs persist
for a few turns and troops cannot willingly enter them, so they get to
walk around. If someone manages to place an objective in the middile of
a bunch of buildings, even better, as the webs are permanent when stuck
on a building - you can seal off access from everything but flyers &
skimmers.
> > >Good tactics could win out against these cheese armies on a
> regular basis.
> > The
> > >people who beat me regularly did not do it with any of this crap;
> they did
> > it with
> > >normal armies well played.
> > >
> > >Thane
> > >
-------> The Eldar armies we played were mostly going to sit back and
shoot you to death before your troops could get into HTH. A few select
opbjectives would be swarmed with bikes and falcons full of scorps,
banshees, harlies, and exarchs, probably along with a few warlocks.
Tempests would pick off the tougher units, like LOB's while titans would
zap GD's or Chaos titans, and Bike Swarms would either engage the weaker
chaos stuff at the back like cannons and squats or mass-swarm a titan in
a good spot for a critical reactor failure. At least one falcon element
or an entire second host would stay on pop-up to deal with targets
unworthy of the tempests or knock down titan shields. A spirit host
would hold one end of the board with the wraithguard keeping cc'ers off
while the dreads with their -2 save mod took out tough guys or titan
shields and a warlock kept the nasties away. Massed _guardian_ fire
could keep chaos CC troops away as with a 50cm range you'd always get at
least 2 chances for a shot, depending on terrain effects Weenies trying
to hide in buildings or woods either were nuked with barrage weapons or
webbed to death with doomweavers.
> The Eldar CC troops rarely were fielded against me.
----------> Extreme variance from the norm, at least the norm down
here...they popped out of falcons & serpents all the time.
> I always kept Fliers up high to crush the wave
> serpents if they strayed across center board, and that's a lot of
> points with stricking scopions
> on board.
---------> Someone needed some Nightwings, sounds like. Or just a falcon
host/tempest host on FF. I honestly never had much problem with the
chaos flyers, as any army - Eldar, imperials, or even orks. The
Doomwings flame template is only 25cm long, putting them within range of
about every unit in the game, and their armor save isn't that good, so
their only defense is that to hit modifier, which stops some infantry,
but not anything even slightly nasty. If the target gets a shot off
before the 'wing, it's usually toast. You don't even need to counter
them with flyers - the target or something in it's vicinity would break
them even if they did get off the first shot. You basically got one
attack with them, then they died. Talk about bolters killing the avatar
- that's how I killed most of the Chaos flyers - they kill a few
infantry stands, then the survivors fire back...
> The Avatar was always present; I always made it a goal to kill it with
> a bolter. It was
> a little game we played within the game; could the avatar kill
> anything before a bolter killed it.
> Chaos Squats were great for this, because you got a bunch of weak
> shots for few points, they could
> stay out of range from the psychic lance, and you didn't want to waste
> real weapons on an avatar.
> I also used them for stipping shields from Eldar titans; my weak shots
> always went for the wings
> or shoulders.
-------->< Yeah, the avatar was pretty much chrome. People were always
surprised that he was free... until they'd played a few times.
As for nuking Eldar Phantoms, I found those Cannons of Khorne with
unlimited range and a -4 save mod were pretty effective.
> God, I miss those games. My biggest embarassment was playing against
> eldar; he hid a jetbike
> behind a building corner that had an objective; I thought I had won
> because I had surrounded the
> objective at about 6 cm with various troops, then he smuggly lifted
> the building to show the bike
> hiding in the corner. Serves me right for not walking around the table
> more! He still tells anyone
> I'm playing against about that story, even though he stopped playing
> when they cut off the
> miniature line...
>
> Thane
------> Heh. that's a sneaky thing to do, but if you can't be bothered
to look...
Anyway none of this is hostile in tone, I hope - I just don't
understand what your Eldar player was doing with his troops while you
were doing all this to him, as Eldar vs Chaos has been a foregone
conclusion for so long around here and other places. I don't know if it
was his army selection, bad rolls, or what, but most of the things you
point out are fairly standard Chaos tricks - the Thunderhawk of disease,
the thunderhawk as Vortex transport, marines are good, etc - so they
shouldn't be too big of a surprise. A new trick could work on anyone
once, but if it works over and over on the same person, there's a
problem somewhere
We had 4 different people rotate through Chaos trying different
things - no titans, mostly titans, tons of flyers and t-hawks, etc and
other than a few times when we were learning how to play, Chaos rarely
won. The one way they could win consistently was by taking some traitor
Imperial guard units - you know, a rebellion. Adding an artillery
company with some support, or even a heavy weapons company made a pretty
drastic change.
House rules and varying interps can make a big difference, but the
only things I see are titan battlegroups for chaos(which we usually
allowed also so no big deal there), how you handled pop-ups (not sure if
any difference there), and the LOB's being a command unit which I think
isn't right as I believe it says somewhere he _has_ to be on advance or
charge orders (I'll have to look through stuff), and the LOB thing isn't
crucial. The pop-up issue is, though. Maybe that's it.
Chris Miller
Received on Wed Feb 25 1998 - 16:29:03 UTC