Anti-Daemon?

[Banville]

I've only played Daemons twice so far and twice I've been pretty well beaten out the gate. We generally play 2000pt games and in the list I tend to use a pretty balanced Salamanders force: Vulkan, 3 Tacticals, 2 Rhinos, Ironclad, Termies, Crusader, Bike Squad, Pred and Dev Squad. Whereas my esteemed opponent fields a Bloodthirster, Lord of Change, numerous Blue and Pink Horrors, three maxed out squads of bloodletters, a Soulgrinder and a few other little shooty gribblies.

 

The problem is this; as I see it my army is tooled up to take on MEQ and Hordes with equal facility (and does so quite well). The problem with the Daemons is they tend to smash into my lines before I can whittle them down enough. Once I start taking casualties and squads become locked in combat the rate of fire and therefore the amount of saves I'm forcing him to take diminishes rapidly.

 

To combat this I was toying with the idea of bringing a cheap Librarian and just sticking him in a Rhino. Swapping the Termies out for a Squad of Sternguard who will sit in the other Rhino and basically using the Firepoint of the Librarian's Rhino to create a null zone bubble in which the Sternguard operate whilst hopefully keeping the little blue-armoured weirdo safe.

 

Any thoughts?

[Twin .44]

Is this to keep an all comer list or are you out for personal blood and vengeance?

 

If it's vengeance you're looking for, add in Lysander instead of vulkan to your Sternguard with a Librarian Epistolary. All the while drop podding in dreads. try to get second turn on these games and do not sieze the initiative. Gate of Infinity can move your guys around the board and keep them safe. here's a clever one for you.

 

Drop pod in dreads with locator beacons on top of his annoying bloodletter squads. If they try to move on to another thing, give chase and use the Gate with Null Zone to chop them to bits when the dread moves in for the up close kill. Lather rinse repeat.

 

if it's not a vengeance thing. Load up on some other dreads in general to rip them apart and tie them up. It'll be rare for them to do anything and then you can concentrate all firepower on the stuff that can do damage (grinder, thirster etc) while your troops will be lalalalalala-ing on objective uncontested.

[Aidoneus]

Now, if you are really out for blood you should ally-in a Daemonhunter Inquisitor+retinue.

 

Inquisitor Lord: Psycannon, Sancturary

3 Warriors: Plasma Cannon, 2 Heavy Bolters

2 Sages:

2 Mystics:

-222pts

 

Seriously, take this, and watch him despair! He can't move within or shoot through a space 3" around all members of the squad, and the squad (or another within 12") can take a free round of shooting against any unit that deep-strikes within 4D6". Not to mention staggering amounts of firepower in your actual shooting phase. And if you're incredibly mean (and I mean absolutely a little #$^%&), you can take another identical squad with a regular inquisitor in Elites. :)

 

Apart from that, what you need is to inflict lots of wounds, rather than powerful wounds. Remember, even though he has invulnerable saves, for the most part they aren't very good saves, so even though he can always take them he will fail 2/3 on most units, and 1/2 on the rest. A good buy might be Kantor, as he gives the 12" bubble of +1 attack to friendly models. And since he also makes Sternguard scoring, you might as well take them too. An assault squad with flamers would work well to make use of Kantor's bonus attacks and to slap some templates on the deep-striking daemons, although they're not strictly necessary. The benefit of a strategy like this is that it gives you a good all-comers list too, not just one dedicated to killing daemons.

[gil galed]

Or just ally in some GK with incinerators, no inv saves and ap4 means you're gonna be toasting some daemons

[DevianID]

You have trouble with daemons and you are running THSS termies? Hmm... vulkan + THSS termies seem to be the perfect solution... just charge the bloodthirster first with the raider based termies and you are good to go.

 

Keep everthing in a transport, keep the ironclad away from the bloodthirster (see above THSS charge) and drive around in the rhinos. If you are in cover, you also greatly increase the chances of surviving an assault from blood letters.

 

Finally, the libby with nullzone is a very capable addition to your force, but dont forget null zone is useful versus other armies too! If you play in a mirror match, vulkan and his THSS friends will not like null zone, I assure you! Also good versus eldar too!