The Corroad Goes Ever On and On: Eater of Worlds

Following on from the Autumn ITT, I didn’t do anything interesting so I skipped a week. Well, I didn’t do nothing, but I didn’t play any 40k which is all that both readers of this column want to read about.

I did get some painting done, finishing off a Plagueburst Crawler which I’d started before the ITT as well as sorting out the Slaughterbound I’ve had around forever.

I also took pictures of the two Myphitic Blight-haulers that I mentioned the other week, which came to the ITT with me, so enjoy those.

I have a bunch of upcoming events over the next few weeks, starting with a local RTT and then going into the Goonhammer Open and LGT in September, before Wings and I head to France to play in the Paris Wargames Expo at the end of October. While I own a ton of Death Guard models and may play them in future, most of them aren’t painted, and I had no intention of rushing to get a bunch of them done, so I was left with a decision to make about which army to play next.

The obvious answer was to go back to my Blood Angels, which is what I was playing before the ITT broke that particular combo. Sooner or later, Knights and Death Guard were going to get nerfed (and lo and behold that happened on Wednesday), and Blood Angels got some great buffs in the last balance update which have flown under the radar a little thanks to the dominance of the top dogs. As a man with the Death Mask of Sanguinius tattooed on his shoulder, Blood Angels are near and dear to my heart. However, they’re my most-played army in tenth edition, and I thought it would be refreshing to have a bit of a break from them.

I didn’t exactly go far – not even so much as changing Detachment rule. I’ve had a World Eaters army for a few years now, and never really played it despite it being mostly fully painted. What it was missing were Forgefiends and Maulerfiends, stars of the current codex which I didn’t own before. I also had never yet gotten around to finishing Angron despite him being sat on my shelves staring at me for the last year, and having been basecoated even longer ago. After looking at the time available, I decided that getting two Forgefiends done and finishing Angron was very achievable, and would give me a good incentive to finish things off for this army without feeling up against it like I might have with Death Guard.

Having taken last Friday off, I had three days free to myself to crack into some painting, and got a Forgefiend done and the big man himself.

That leaves me with 10 days at time of writing to get the other Forgefiend done before my RTT. The list I’m planning to take is:

++ Liam's World Eaters list - click to expand ++

It would probably be better to drop Angron from this and take two Maulerfiends and another unit of Spawn, but I don’t want to set an unrealistic target for myself painting-wise, so this is what I’m going with.

List in hand, it was time for a practice game, so I headed down to the club to play against Ash’s Grey Knights.

++ Ash's Grey Knights list - click to expand ++

(He did have real wargear on the units!)

We played Terraform/Sweeping Engagement on a UKTC layout.

I was only dimly aware of what anything in the army did prior to the game, so this was mostly a learning opportunity about what the datasheets do. I put the Goremongers and one unit of Chaos Spawn on my right, the other Spawn in the middle with the majority of the army, and then some Jakhals on my home objective on my left. The Forgefiends went into Strategic Reserves to try and get better firing angles later in the game.

Ash started one unit of Purifiers and a Grand Master Dreadknight in Deep Strike and put everything else on the table. Crowe and his big squad of purifiers anchored the centre, while Strikes and Interceptors and the smaller Purifier squads started on the flanks. The Razorback was positioned on my left to push out onto the objective on that side.

I won the roll to go first here which I generally do not want, but in this case was ideal. I played more aggressively than I otherwise might have just to see what everything did – Chaos Spawn went rocketing forwards, Angron stepped onto the middle to get me Area Denial, and the Berzerkers in their Rhinos staged around the central ruin ready for turn 2.

The two Spawn units crashed into Grey Knights, and I overextended a bit – the right hand squad swung into two units rather than just focusing on one, while the second unit in the centre was meant to both swing on the same one but Ash used a Heroic Intervention to bring another unit in and split their attacks up too. I’d gotten the Sustained Hits and Dev Wounds blessings, and things looked like they were firing when my first 9 attacks put up 4 Sustained Hits, but I ended up only killing 3 Interceptors on that side. The other model killed two Grey Knights in a Strike Squad, then the other two Spawn killed nothing much at all thanks to some strong saves from Ash. I rolled no 6s to Wound at all, which was just great. The Grey Knights swung back and killed the central squad of Spawn.

Overall, I’d killed about six Grey Knights across three squads – not an ideal result. That said, it had put Ash under serious pressure, including knocking him off his home objective, and I had lots of fast, punchy units staged ready for turn 2.

Ash picked up a squad of Purifiers and a Strike Squad for his turn 1. He was caught in two minds here about whether to try and shoot Angron or not, pinned back by fear of the Forgefiends arriving in the next turn. In the end he decided he wasn’t going to put enough shooting into Angron to seriously harm him, so played more defensively instead. The Dreadknight in his back corner killed the Spawn, and the Razorback on my left came forwards to try and Sabotage a ruin in the middle and hold an objective there. The three Strikes dropped on my left to screen and block me from bringing in a Forgefiend to kill it.

One big mistake here from Ash was failing to secure his home objective – in falling back from the Spawn he’d left it open. This not only lost him upcoming primary points for turn 2, it also meant he only scored 2 for Extend Battle Lines on this turn.

My second round draws were Bring It Down and Assassination, and a GMNDK was standing right by Angron. Keeping to my plan of maximum aggro, I sent the Red Angel forwards. On my left, Kharn’s squad jumped out and went to bash the Razorback to pieces to prevent both the Sabotage and the primary scoring there. I opted to only bring in one Forgefiend this turn, which was a mistake – I should have just left it off the table entirely, and it ended up doing nothing much at all.

Everything this turn went pretty much perfectly. The Berzerkers killed the Razorback, Angron killed the GMNDK, I picked up 16pts of primary and both my secondaries, and was cruising to being well up on points while denying Ash most of his.

Zeroed on primary, Ash pulled A Tempting Target – not great when I could pick two objectives that I had piles of stuff on – and Assassination. He was set to kill Angron, which was something, but it took a lot of his army to do it with the Purifier brick both shooting and fighting and a GMNDK lending support. On my left, he shot off a couple of Berzerkers who then Blood Surged into the Strikes who’d fallen out of the Razorback.

This is where the wheels really came off for him. He’d had to commit to two different combats, and since I had 2CP in hand he had to go for Angron first. The Purifiers got the kill there, but this meant I could Counter-offensive with the Berzerkers on the left, who promptly wiped both units engaged with them – Kharn on his own killed a full squad of Purifiers. He was critically down on assets, and I had plenty left. We played out my turn 3, in which the Slaughterbound and Master of Executions unit killed the big squad of Purifiers while the Forgefiends killed the second GMNDK. On my right the Daemon Prince killed some more Purifiers while even the Rhino managed to pick up a couple of stray Interceptors.

At the end of my turn 3, he was left with one GMNDK and one squad of Strikes left which I hadn’t gotten around to yet, and we called it there, randomising out the rest of the scorecard just for completeness’ sake which left us with:

Ash as always was a pleasure to play, and was finding his feet with the Grey Knights too so we were both doing some learning. While this is a stonking win for me, pretty much everything went my way here – going first, the way the objectives fell, every charge succeeded and every unit did its part in combat. With those caveats in mind, it was still a very fun army to play and it felt quite different from my BA even though they’re both red-painted Space Marines who want to do their heavy lifting in the Fight phase. It’s a good omen for the upcoming couple of events.

Next week I’ll talk about final preparations before the RTT, and then go and play in the thing and report how I got on in the week after.

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