Battle Report: Chaos Space Marines VS Eldar

A thoroughly kicked ass...

Played a game last night, still using my standard list I've been running for the last few weeks.

My opponent was using Eldar, which was a nice change from MEQ lists. He had something like this:

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Autarch
5 Fire Dragons with Exarch (he had the flamer style upgrade)
5 Fire Dragons with Exarch (he had the melta style upgrade, Fire Lance or some such)
6 or so Striking Scorpions
10 Swooping Hawks
10 Dire Avengers with Exarch who had Blade Storm
10 Dire Avengers with Exarch who had Blade Storm in a Wave Serpent
5 Rangers
3 Shining Spears with Exarch
3 Heavy Support Platforms

As usual, you can see my opponent had a crap ton of models.

Mission was Annihilation using the Dawn of War setup. This favoured me on the surface as I had substantially less KP than he did.

The table was pretty dense with terrain. For deployment and first turn he castled up in one corner in plenty of cover and bought on the rest of his force around them. I made a major balls up in my deployment and deployed well away from him with my DP and two squads of PMs and then bought on my reserves on the other side of the table. This simply meant he had two tiny armies to deal with seperately. I'm not 100% sure what was actually going through my mind at this point.

Needless to say the game did not go well (this is not to say it wasn't fun of course). My daemon prince and vindicator died without causing a single casualty, pretty much the same with my terminators. My defiler did well (starting to love the unit), and destroyed the Shining Spears and mauled some Dire Avengers. Two units of plague marines got mauled by the Fire Dragons. Result was a blood bath. It ran to 7 turns, which gave him the opportunity to table me completly. I'd scored a massive 2 kill points, to his 8.

My poor deployment was my most fundamental mistake. I should have deployed everything close and used my 2 ordanance weapons to wear him down. His only long range weapons were the wave serpent and the support platforms which were barrage weapons (forgive me I forget their name) which were weak against Plague Marines anyway. This would have meant I could have held my DP and shorter range troops to attack anything that was thinking of coming in close.

I don't want blame the dice gods too much, but I had some crappy rolls. The wave serprent took 3 rounds of shooting from a melta gun and a plasma gun without doing anything worse than being shaken, my DP lost his last wound to a shuriken pistol, my vindicator died to a jet bike.... Frankly though the dice gods could have gifted me sixes for the whole game and I'd have still lost. Still it was a fun game anyway, and a learning experience.

In more victorius news, I managed to squeak a win on the Warpstone Flux May Army List challenge. I was thinking about the list I'd written for the entry I'd written on the way home from this game, and how freakin' useful 3 orbital barrages would have been :)