Battle Report: Astra Militarum vs. Grey Knights, 1500 pts

Shortly after the release of the new Grey Knight Codex, my regular opponent and part time nemesis ClauseIV1918 and I arranged to get in a 1,500 point game so he could get the hang of the new Codex.

I wasn't running anything hugely unusual in my list, as I try to only change a few small things at a time rather than making huge changes all at once.

The big change was the Colossus Bombard, but it ended up not being a massive deal on the grounds of the Grey Knights mostly rocking Terminator armour, and thus not minding it all that much! Still, I got the "new unit failure" out of the way, so hopefully it will now be awesome from now on!

The two teleporting Dreadknights decided to hang out behind the bastion until they were ready to go. Meanwhile the allied Inquisitor and plasma-cannon wielding Servitors parked up their Chimera.

The obligatory Servo skulls littered the landscape to help the massive pile of reserved Terminators to come in by deep strike.

I rushed forward with the Hellhound - I knew it was probably toast either way, but thought it worth risking to remove as many Servo Skulls as I could. The right flank, realising that everyone was over on the left, started running over to try and be some use in the fight, keeping the command Chimera neatly wrapped up to protect from those pesky Deep Strikers.

Mr Draigo and his buddies then rocked up to blow stuff up.

I think my Astropath had been lucky enough to roll Invisibility, but I forget.

Some Terminators had planned to land here, but the newly lacking servo skull and my opponent proving that his dice are cursed again resulted in them missing by quite a distance.

I was inordinately happy for my Demolisher to see a "target rich environment"...

Not very surprising Surprise Dreadknight No. 1...

And not very surprising Surprise Dreadknight No. 2...

The Hellhound was badly beaten up, but not dead!. The Terminators all elected to run to spread out rather than shoot things themselves and tempt the Demolisher...

The Hellhound didn't last, though - and with it wrecked, the Dreadknight went on to find other victims.

Spread out - but not spread out enough! One of the Terminator squads evaporated as they were caught in a direct hit by the Demolisher.

The survivors were keen to do something about the Command Squad, however.

The conscripts advanced to tie up Draigo and keep him out of my hair...

The obvious place to deep strike resulted in a bit of a mishap... The remainder of the Librarian's squad was brought down by weight of fire.

While Draigo discovered that Conscripts in numbers (especially with Divination and Orders) can be really dangerous. Doubly so if your player has a bad tendency of rolling 1s for armour saves...

The Dreadknight, meanwhile, punched the Colossus to death to make sure it's "first game bad luck" was properly expunged...

All it had managed to do was knock a couple of hull points off a Chimera. Meanwhile, the mishapped squad of Terminators had a long walk ahead of them...

Slowly but surely, one of the Dreadknights was getting its wounds run down...

But the left flank hadn't simply collapsed - it wasn't even there any more!

Kaldor Draigo stared defiantly at the conscripts before being gunned down by massed lasgun fire. If anyone was curious about the historical animosity between the Grey Knights and my Imperial Guard, it's this sort of thing that adds fuel to the fire!

The (air) cavalry arrive.

The Veterans inconveniently fail to kill the Dreadknight...

He seems really keen to avoid getting into close combat with a squad which is all armed with melta bombs...

With the game nearly over, the command squad gun the engines and run off to the enemy deployment zone for Linebreaker, but I've just lost too many units (we'd rolled kill points), and the game goes to the Grey Knights!