Preparing for an Apocalypse

We're playing a campaign currently on club nights, and I got my first game in last night as part of it. It's a fairly simple structure, with two teams "Good" (Imperial, Eldar) Vs "Evil" (Chaos, Orks, Necrons etc). The Imperial hold a number of planets in one sector, and the evil team is fighting to wrest control from them. Each planet has a points value according to it's value, so a forge world might be 12000 points, but a barren moon might be 2000. The points value is how many points of games the evil team needs to win to take control of the planet, so the barren moon could be capture in 1 2000 point game, or 4 500 point games. After each game, your units can get extra skills, experience provided they lived. That's the system, but there's also a Battlefleet Gothic portion as well, where BFG fleets battle for control of the space around a planet.

In last nights match-up, I played 1500 points of Chaos Space Marines, and took on 3 young players who had 500 points each which was a mixture of Imperial Guard and Space Marines. The mission was capture and control. Setup was pitched battle, and the Imperial side setup first. I was feeling relatively confident, there was nothing in the opposing force that was worrying me to much, with the exception of some Space Marine terminators and some scouts with sniper rifles and Telion high up on a building (power fists and rending weapons make Plague Marines cry).

Now this match is part of the campaign, and last week the evil team had taken the first planet and rolled onto invading the next one. However, the BFG battle between Chaos and Imperial was still raging, so the Imperials still held the space around the planet. This doesn't stop the invasion but it means the Imperial got a number of orbital lance strikes to use, 6 in total to spread between all the tables. These things are S9 AP2 ordnance barrages. I'd forgotten about this, and of course, I setup packed in behind cover. Before the game even starts, the orbital barrage arrives and hits my packed in troops, and naturally doesn't scatter, killing an entire squad of Plague Marines before the game even starts!

As you might expect, this put me on the back foot from the kick off, and as I'd declared my Chosen were outflanking I was starting the game almost 500 points down on my opponents. Fortunately, I managed to pull a draw out of the bag, with my objective firmly controlled by a Plague Marine squad and a unit of Catachans holding the opposing objective having shot my Daemon Prince's last wound away who had been contesting it. My Chosen didn't arrived until turn 4, and the game ended on turn 5 as we ran out of time. Possibly had we gone to 6 or 7 turns I could have got them as far as the opposing objective and killed the Catachans around it, but it ended in a draw.

Anyway, the climax of the campaign is an Apocalypse battle in November. Likely this will be more than one Apocalypse battle rather than one large one, so I need to get prepared for this. There will be no minimum force size requirement I wouldn't have thought, but I would like to get my Chaos army up to the 3000 point Apocalypse minimum. Currently, I have just over 2000 points built and painted, and I have a Daemon Prince and at least 2 more Plague Marines squads to give me another 600 points or so. I'll probably try and get either another PM squad or some obliterators, or maybe some lesser daemon to found it up to 3000 points. Once I'm there I'd ideally like to have a Super Heavy, ie a Plague Reaper but this might be just to many minis in too little time to get painted. I've just been flicking through the Apocalypse Data sheets on the GW website, and I'd forgotten all about the fairly recent Doomsday super heavy. I could probably make something suitably Nurgly for this, mwahahahahaha!

So here's the list of units that need building:

-Daemon Prince
-2 Plague Marine squads
-Doomsday Device

...and the units that need buying:
-More Plague Marines
-Obliterators?
-Lesser Daemons (I'm going to use zombies for these)
-Plague Reaper

Alot to do, wish me luck!