Tedwin's Tip of Thursday: Feb 26th.

[tedwin183]

So I decided I am going to start writing a small post every thursday regarding something I've learned during my thursday night gaming. Let us begin...

 

So this week I faced a Thousand Sons player. We all know the Thousand Sons are the "Marine-killer" army, what with ap3 bolters, 3+ armour, 4+ invul and a bunch of nasty magic thanks to Tzeentch. From my past games against them, it always seems like I find myself saying "God, that is SUCH a stupid rule!" Make no mistake, however, they can be killed. At first I was going about it all wrong. Trying to stand toe to toe with them and out shoot them just isn't going to work. They have a statistical advantage with ap3 bolter rounds. I also tried throwing full sized squads of guys at them, again, to no avail. Finally, tonight, it dawned on me. There are 2 types of units you can take that will almost ALWAYS benefit you and penalize your pointy-eared opponent. Dreadnoughts and combat squads. There's a key to using them though. It starts with how thousand sons typically kill Marines. They move up in rhinos, unload in rapid fire range and torch your squads. IF anything survives, they have sorcerers with force weapons and all kinds of nasty that can mop up. With combat squads you have an advantage: SPREAD OUT! My opponent made the typical aggressive up the middle play with his "flagship" rhino, unloaded the guys and started shooting. Luckily he dumped some fire into camo cloaked scouts in a ruin, which got a lucky break on some rolls. I immediately realized that was the key! I began moving my army in a double flanking position. I had guys spread across the whole board. He simply didn't have enough guys to concentrate on all of them. I then got the dreads up and began harassing him with an ironclad and a regular, stock dread. Because they don't come with grenades standard, he literally had no way to get out of combat once they were stuck in. Sure, they have their invul save, and my opponent ended up making a ridiculous amount of those saves...but the important part was those guys were tied up and thusly not shooting at my scoring units. I used a predator as a decoy and made a gamble with a vindicator, which got blown up. We ended the game me winning 3-1 on seize ground mission. SO, to recap:

 

Those of you having troubles with Thousand Sons, bring dreads and combat squad! Thousand Sons munch power armour to pieces...they don't have anything to deal with dreads though. Happy hunting.

 

 

~T

[River Black]

I have found that a Libby using null zone and avenger works well against 1Ksons. Pair him but with some sternguard and they will make short work of the squad. If you want to you can drop the avenger for gate. Teleporting stern can be a really pain in the butt for your opponent. Yeah you might lose one but I think its kind of worth it.

[greatcrusade08]

Just run termies and honour guard those AP3 bolters wont make many dents in that armour :P

Plus those AP3 weapons dont work in CC, use some scout bikers to get first turn CC and tear them a new blow hole :D

 

GC08

[foster]

I remember a particullar match against the Thousand Sons with my very aggresive BA Baal Force at 1000pts. These were 4th edition rules at the time, the only difference between now and then is turbo charge which was key for this type of army. All I had for troops were two 5 man assualt squads with only powerfist and sword, 3 Death company lead by Lemartes, 2 MM attack bikes and 3 Baal Predators with heavy bolter SSs. All I remember from his list is that they were very well painted and modaled modals (using chaos warriors from Warhammer as his troop bodys, slapping on boltguns), he even had one thousand son coming out of a stone piller, very ghost like). He had a Defiler, 2 ten man units of thousand sons with two wizards and a foot slogging deamon prince (don't know the upgrades, but very nasty in combat).

 

The ability of having a fast force able to concentrate all their fire power on one unit at a time, as well as the Death Company's sheer number of attacks proved too much even for Thousand sons saves'. Turn 2 had me take out his defiler from a flank attack with both MM Attack Bikes. By turn three both his troops was gone. He had some luck at blowing up a Baal with thier accursed phycic attacks, as well as whipping up an Assualt squad with his demon prince, but when his troops was all gone the match ended with me lapping up the remainder of his forces.

 

From that experience I found that to truely make the thousand sons ineffective is to not get your troops shot at with his ap3 weaponary, prefering tanks to do most of the damage and keeping the troops covered by hiding behind or in armour. The fact that he didn't have rhino's 'may' have helped.

 

It was pretty much a one sided match with such a cheesy spam list, since no-one expects to see three turbo-charging Baals in a 1000pts spearhead.