Daemons vs Imperial Guard - Battle Reports from the 9. SiG - TrotzkiHatesMe Round 1

This being the first game on my first tourney I was really nervous about the army my Daemons will meet. When the games were called I was partly relieved partly terrified to hear that I´m going to have to take on the Imperial Guard. I´ve played Guard before so I knew some of their tricks but I also knew, that they have a lot of evil tricks upon their sleeve that can hurt Daemons badly (I´m looking at you, Officer of the Fleet). Big blocks of chimeras also really scare me, because they really take a lot of firepower to get to their juicy inside and that´s exactly what my Daemons can´t dish out.

My opponents list consisted of 3 Leman russ,a basilisk, a Thunderer (basically a Imperial Guard Vindicator sourced from FW´s Imperial Armour), a Command Squad in a Chimera (kitted out with Master of Ordnance, bodyguards and Officer of the Fleet [here we go - 5+ for reserves]) and loads of footslogging infantry.

We played Capture and Control (One objective in each deployment zone) with Dawn of War setup. My special objective for this mission was to get one troop choice into one of the terrain features in his deployment zone – quite a good one for Daemons because that´s exactly where I´m going. Terrain featured a big AV14 bunker on one side and several ruined buildings on the other with some craters and trenches in between. I won the roll to go first and let him go first. He chose the side with the bunker and deployed everything he had during his turn. In my turn I got lucky and my first wave struck all over the place. I won´t go into turn by turn details but the game was very close with a lot of loses (my Demon Prince and the Lord of Change soaked many, many shots but where both sent back to the warp) for me in first turns against the overwhelming firepower of the Imperial Guard. I slowly munched through his right flank and the Officer of the Fleet proved to be more of bonus then a hindrance. Most of my unit deepstruck in later turns directly into his right flank where the bunker shielded me from much of his firepower, while my horrors held my own objective against a hell lot of fire. I was able to contest his objective with my Soul Grinder, who proved to be the absolute Monster of the Match by killing the Leman Russ squadron and absorbing 2 turns of incredible amounts of firepower without a scratch.


So I won with 1 objective to 0 but hadn´t it been for the additional victory points I collected for holding one terrain feature in his deployment zone, I would have lost by about 200 victory points in the secondary. With the 300 points for the special objective I luckily left the game with around +100 victory points (draw) and 14 tourney points for the one objective I was in the lead.