EGGS Game 3 - Imperium vs Chaos

Hello!

Here's the third of my reports from the Element Games Grand Slam 2018 40k event that I attended with regular opponent John recently. I took this list. In case you don't want to follow the link, I took a mixed Imperium force with an Adeptus Mechanicus battalion and an Imperial Knight super heavy detachment.

Ryza:
HQ: Tech-priest Dominus, Tech-priest Enginseer
Troops: 5 Vanguard, 5 Rangers, 5 Plasma Destroyers
Elites: Cybernetica Datasmith
Heavy Support: 2 Phosphor blaster Kastelans, 2 Fist Kastelans

Taranis:
Lord of War: 2 Armiger Warglaives, Knight Valiant

I apologise for poor photos, lack of details and any mistakes that pop up over these reports. As usual I just took some pictures and am relying on my brain for the rest, and there was lots of stuff that went into my brain over the weekend.

Game 3 was against Liam with a Chaos list featuring a couple of Primarchs and their daemon buddies. This looked quite scary to me, though Liam was very concerned about the Valiant, apparently having been on the receiving end of a pair of them recently! His list was something like this:

Thousand Sons:
HQ: 3 Daemon Princes
Lord of War: Magnus

Death Guard:
HQ: Daemon Prince
Troops: 2x10 Cultists
Fast Attack: Spawn, 2 Bloat-drones with Fleshmowers
Lord of War: Mortarion

The missions were Dominate and Destroy and Contact Lost. That meant scoring for both missions would take place all game long, and with the event's kill point difference score, killing units effectively scored double points. This was destined to be a bloodbath.

Liam finished deploying first by virtue of placing the first unit, and got first turn. His force lined up across the board with a big blob of scary daemons slightly offset to the right. I popped the Valiant down last, hiding it off to the left (and out of shot on the picture above - also note, this was after deployment but Liam had just moved the first Bloat-drone.)

The Daemons moved up, psychic powers went off, and Mortarion warp-timed right into my face. He murdered the fist Kastelans in short order, putting mortal wounds out elsewhere with his aura. Consolidation into the shooting bots shut down a chunk of my counter attack.

On my turn, I only really had one option - Mortarion must die! My remaining units surrounded him, including the Valiant moving into harpoon range, and I pulled the trigger. It took pretty much everything, but when the dust settled the daemon primarch had been blasted back to the warp! Unfortunately there was another one on the way.

Liam's turn 2 was brutal. Magnus and a pair of princes, accompanied by one of the mower-drones, moved up into close range. Between smites and melee, the Kataphrons and both Armigers fell, leaving me with few units remaining in the fight. Seems like I'd have to rely on the Valiant to destroy Magnus...

And this is where he stood! The Valiant opened up and a second primarch was felled. Take that, warpspawn! Shooting from the Kastelans also put some hurt on a prince, but I still felt like I was being overwhelmed.

Over the next few turns, the Valiant went about proving that it was, as they say, an absolute unit. Smites, fleshmowers and daemonic talons chipped away at it, but the mighty war machine stood tall, and eventually killed off all the drones and princes!

By this stage, we had both been accumulating maelstrom points and been claiming out home objectives with our troops units (and the spawn), and on points it was very, very close. Now that I had cleared all the big daemons, I was able to start firing some long range shots over, destroying one unit of cultists with the remaining Kastelan. Then the game ended after turn 5. Tallying up the points, Liam had just held on to the lead by about 4 points. With the Valiant still standing and a 'defend objective' card mid way through to completion in my hand, I think if the game had gone on, I would have claimed it.

Liam's narrow victory gave him 12 tournament points to my 8. This was a fantastic game that went right to the wire. I'd like to think I played this one pretty well under the pressure of a wave of giant daemons crashing against my lines, but in reality I panicked and just threw the Valiant at the problem. And it worked! Elsewhere John defeated another Imperium army, putting him into a decent position for day 2. I was now sitting on 3 losses, but I was scoring progressively more points so I was still hopeful that I could make up some ground.