Chaos Vs. Chaos Battle Report

This was my first game with the new Chaos Codex.

Here is my army list (2000pts):

HQ -

Chaos Lord with Murder Sword(I chose his Daemon Prince), Aura of Dark Glory and Gift of Mutation
125

Elites -

Helbrute with twin-linked lascannon and missile launcher
135
Helbrute with missile launcher
115
3 Chaos Terminators with 1 reaper autocannon
120
in Landraider with warpflame gargoyles
235

Troops -

9 Marines with 2 flamers
champion with meltabombs
in rhino with havoc launcher
205
9 Marines with 2 flamers

champion with meltabombs
in rhino with havoc launcher
205

9 Marines with autocannon and plasmagun
champion
in rhino with havoc launcher
215

9 Marines with autocannon and plasmagun
champion
165
20 cultists with 2 flamers and 16 with autoguns
115

Heavy -

Predator with autocannon and 2 lascannon sponsons and warpflame gargoyles
120

Predator with autocannon and 2 lascannon sponsons and warpflame gargoyles
120

Predator with twin-linked lascannon and 2 heavy bolter sponsons and warpflame gargoyles
125

My opponents army list was approximately:

- Chaos Lord in terminator armor and Burning Brand of Skalathrax
- Daemon Prince with Wings
- 9 Thousand Sons
- 35 Cultists
- 35 Cultists
- 10 Chaos Marines in a rhino with a havoc
- 6 Chaos Bikers
- 10 Chaos Raptors
- Predator with 3 lascannons
- Predator with autocannon 2 heavy bolter havoc launcher

The game we rolled up was The Emperor's Will with a Dawn of War Deployment.  We each rolled on the new Chaos Warlord Traits table and I rolled the Master of Deception.  This would allow me to infiltrate d3 infantry units.  I chose to infiltrate the Terminators and the Cultists.

We rolled off for table edge and I won the roll.  I placed my objective and he placed his basically straight across the table from mine.  I then deployed and then he deployed then I put down my infiltrators making sure my Lord was attached to the Cultists when the game began.

I was able to move my cultists with my lord up to the building in the top of the picture and my landraider moved up to take a pot shot at his lascannon predator.  My Helbrute with the twin lascannon and missile launcher fired and blew up his rhino, giving me first blood.

I also moved up some of a chaos marine squad up to the top of the ruin.

As you can see my chaos lord is leading the cultists into the ruined building and ultimately to their deaths by battle's end.

The Helbrute opens fire and blows up Professor Chaos' only rhino.  First Blood is mine!

Meanwhile on the far side of the board, bikers and raptors begin their advance backed up by an enormous squad of cultists.

Bottom of turn one and the Professor continues advancing his army.

All of a sudden a winged Daemon Prince flies onto the table and threatens my lines.  

As the Raptors and Bikes advance The Warpflame Gargoyles residing on the tanks of the Iron Warriors light up and lend their warp trickery to the hail of fire.  The Predator sets the bikes on fire!

The Cultists are not phased by the monstrous Daemon Prince as my Lord is still in the unit lending his moral support.

At this point the Iron Warriors realize that unless somehow they can push the opposing army's squad of cultists off of their objective, the Iron Warriors may not win this fight.  A rhino full of chaos marines zooms up the battlefield into a potentially dangerous situation.

The opposing Chaos Marines make short work of the Iron Warriors rhino, and after a short combat they run down the squad inside too.

Losing a squad of Iron Warriors may be tough on the morale of the Legion but they rallied and brutally gunned down the Daemon Prince unleashing bolters, autocannons, lascannons and plasmaguns until its physical form was destroyed and banished back to the warp.

One lone Terminator Champion strides out to meet the Chaos Bikers roaring towards him.  He has seen a thousand battles and fears nothing.

With cultists, Thousand Sons, Bikers and Raptors closing in, the Terminator Champion stares death in face and doesn't blink.

He doesn't survive either.  The raptors move on and prepare to plant krak grenades onto the Iron Warrior Predator.

Pushing up the left flank the Chaos Lord and his cultist retinue finally emerge from the ruins and begin closing on the opposing cultists sitting in the ruins holding the objective.

The cultists in the ruins open fire on the lord and his retinue and they get unceremoniously gunned down.  Over to the left of this killing field one of the Iron Warrior Helbrutes blood rages into the tri-lascannon Predator and rips it to shreds in a spectacular explosion!

A second Iron Warrior Rhino moves up alongside the wreckage of the first.  Its goal in to push forward to the objective and hopefully take it away from the cultists who are holding it.

Their rhino gets wrecked from some well placed melta shots and they have to evacuate .

The Helbrute moves on past the predator wreckage and assaults the cultists in the building.  He defeats them and the run.  The Helbrute doesn't allow a single cultist to escape and he runs them down crushing them under his steel-shod boots.

The Iron Warriors move around the Rhino and open fire on the marine squad with everything they have killing some but not enough.  At this point they are simple doing a delaying action to keep the squad away from the objective that the Helbrute just pounced on.

The Raptors assault the Iron Warrior Predator and take it out.  At this point it is too late.  Turn 5 is over and the game ends.  The Iron Warriors have one objective and scored the first blood secondary objective.  They denied the Professor his own objective with a decisive Helbrute assault and won the game.

The final tally was Iron Warriors 4 and Professor Chaos 2, one point for line Breaker and one point for Slay the Warlord.  I have to say it was a pretty fun game.  

A couple things jumped out at me this game.  

- The new Crazed chart for the Helbrute is a vast improvement over the old Dreanought table.  The Helbrute only goes crazy if it takes a glance or a pen.  And when it does go crazy it has no chance of hurting your own units.  In fact his Predator shot it with 3 lascannons did 2 hull points of damage and stunned it.  I rolled on the chart the next turn and it Blood Frenzied.  I got fleet and rage and it just charged straight into the predator and blew it sky high!

- His regular chaos marine squad in the center was tooled up with close combat weapons, and bolters and the icon to make them fearless.  They man-handled my basic cheap squad of marines with no upgrades.  Chaos Space Marine squads can be fearsome in hand to hand if built properly.

- Flying Daemon Princes NEED power armor.  He didn't take it on his prince and I shot him out of the sky and then blew him away with heavy weapons, some of the wounds he could have saved had he had a 3+ armor save.

- Large squads of cultists with autoguns can actually put out a lot of fire power.  The squad he had in the ruins holding the objective unleashed hell on my cultist squad near the end of the game and just vaporised them, lord and all.

- Warpflame Gargoyles seem to have potential.  I didn't see a lot of them in this game mainly because he deployed on the opposite end of the table from me and a lot of my firepower was blocked by terrain.  An advantage of deploying second is that you can react to where your opponent has deployed.

Overall it was a very enjoyable first game with the new codex.  I have been working on lists since this game and have found that I can field a lot more vehicles, infantry, and heavy weapons with this codex than with the previous one.

I am still trying to incorporate an allied contingent of traitor guard in 2,000points and I still haven't come up with a list I am happy with yet.

This coming weekend I will be attending RockCon, a local gaming convention and I will be playing a lot of 40k games, trying to take lots of pictures and hopefully come home with some new loot.  I will be posting a bunch when I get back.

Thanks for reading.

Until then......