Gaming against a new style.

[Corpse.]

I was taken a bit by surprise when someone with japanese calligraphy written all over their pink shirt with an asian appearance at our local gathering when I was called in by a friend to play. Happens often when we get random calls/emails to a bunch of people to see who can come on call. Well it seems that a friends-friend has just come from japan and plays 40k. (He met him on DoW)

 

Well this fella is name Kamasa (I think thats how its spelled) and watching him play the final half of a game when I got there was interesting. He uses Eldar, Tau and Chaos. Painted in more traditional japanese and banners with the pole going up and lined back with the long way of the flag pointed down. In the game he was using thousand sons squads, and I didnt catch his full list but there were two downed dreadnoughts on his end with 7 rhinos and 4 squads of sons with 2 squads of havocs.

 

Now here is what was on the battlefield. He was ruling the middle with the rhinos either dead or immobilised with a long line keeping every man of his troops alive, none were hurt at all, every squad was a small 5-8 size. Asking how the battle went the bud said he had only one rhino full of troops at one end of his rhino line on his deployment line, making sure it was the one destroyed at the beginning with a dreadnought giving it obscurity. (Both were melee dreads)

 

He then pushed the line of empty rhinos forward and made a line where his troops easily followed with the run rule and popped smoke on the other 6 rhinos while the dead rhino was the very end of the diagonal line. Extending in a "| '\. |" pattern of the battlefield leaving everything covered. The opponent tried to take out the line before it could be completed all the way to his deployment zone from end to end but was stopped and that left all his troops to get to one corner. He couldnt remember but he had loaded the rhinos up before they moved (moving troops first into the rhinos before moving rhinos) to make sure which ones got aimed at - obviously the rhinos he wanted to be aimed at of course before using smoke on his first turn while having to go second.

 

I then challenged him to a game so we played a small game of the same forces of a 2k battle.

 

My force consisted of a casual plague list.

2000pt Nurgle

Prince, MoN, Doombolt = 140

Greater Daemon = 100

10 PM, Fist Champ, 2 Meltas, Rhino = 325

10 PM, Fist Champ, 2 Meltas, Rhino = 325

10 PM, Fist Champ, 2 Meltas, Rhino = 325

10 PM, Fist Champ, 2 Meltas, Rhino = 325

Vindicator = 125

Land Raider = 220

Predator, AC, 2HB, Havoc = 115

 

I asked to face against a similar army since I only brought my 2k for a quick evening game. It was odd bowing back to him when he bowed to me after I asked to accept. (I just know its customary to return bows) He asked to share lists because I asked to fight an army I already saw its composition. He was fine with it as long as he could change his list a bit to add more anti tank weapons for the land raider I had brought. He politely translated his list to me while he could understand english, I dont understand japanese calligraphy....

 

Rising Sun list (Thats the name of his army)

1997pt Mix

Sorcerer with doombolt = 110

Dreadnought with 2DCCW = 100

Dreadnought with 2DCCW = 100

Dreadnought with 2DCCW = 100

5 TSons with Bolt of Change, Rhino = 197

5 TSons with Bolt of Change, Rhino = 197

5 TSons with Bolt of Change, Rhino = 197

5 TSons with Bolt of Change, Rhino = 197

5 TSons with Bolt of Change, Rhino = 197

5 TSons with Bolt of Change, Rhino = 197

8 Havocs with 4 Plasma Guns, Rhino with combi-melta = 225

8 Havocs with 4 Plasma Guns = 180

 

The game turned into a dawn of war + annihilation game. (Good for me I suppose)

 

He got first turn with seize the initiative with choosing his entire force to arrive from off the table he moved on with all his models, not having to roll for frenzy with his dreads since they were off the table and then ran them with decent rolls. I moved forward with my HQ+2 rhinos and everything else moved up the left side where my opponent had more models to kill. The forward units jumped out the rhinos with the rhinos forming a small wall+smoke where I could hide everything as best as I could from one side and that was my first turn.

 

Second turn he rolled forward with everything inside his rhinos and the lone footsloggers running from behind and made a line of 7 rhinos, jumping out with all his sons and using smoke with each lone sorcerer with BoC narrowly visible to a target either a rhino or squad/prince each making their shot wounding my prince once and immobilizing both my rhinos while the havoc squad inside their rhino still made their two plasmagun shots and took down one PM. My second turn I rolled forward closer the the table edge where he left a good gap and blocked it off then exited the rhinos shooting at his and took out two with lucky shots and they sat there.

 

His third turn he made the most of I think out of the whole game. He called me "Nii-san" (means three and brother as a word joke) - had to check if he was taunting me... He wrapped his rhinos around my prince and 19 PM's in the middle and pinned every spare rhino he could manage moving every one of his rhinos more then 6" for my powerfists. He had narrow lanes of fire and made good use of them with nearly every gun in range and visible to something, I lost about 20 plague marines to 12 plasma gun shots, 6 BoC shots, and about 36 thousand-son bolter shots while the havoc bolters did nothing.

 

My following third turn I was a bit astonished what to do with what I had left. Missing 1 powerfist and 2 meltaguns already, I try hard to melt his rhinos and get out of the trap. I get three more, though I fail to be able to charge anything into melee contact since I killed what I shot at. My prince feebily stunned a rhino trying to hit on 6's. His plan worked and I steadily lost the game from there facing two dreadnoughts charging my marines with one slowly pacing from far back and a score of rapid fire+bolt shots slew my prince leaving me with just vehicles the next few turns as I had horrible luck with powerfists for a short time before killing them and in turn 6 I get wiped off the map with killing just 4 of his sons and all his rhinos.

 

I should have kept my range advantage with the vindi/raider when I saw him keep his entire force off the table, and he easily split my force up when I started 2 squads+prince on the table and near the middle. My vindi didnt get to fire due to fear of scattering into my own squad, it was a terrible game on my end with plenty of mistakes that fell right into his plan. Honestly I dont face many people who use rhinos effectively. He was planning on wiping me off the table from the start while I was just trying to wrack up killpoints from his many transports before moving onto his squads. That obvious plan worked against me even if I were to build up killpoints, he wiped me off the table.

 

So with a unique experience and another bow at the end of the game he continued with his tau in similar fashion slaughtering a tyranid player nearly the same way he defeated me after I packed up. He says he'll be here for a week before touring US landmarks.

 

What bugs me in the way he played, he played in such a way where if I had wings on my prince, it would have met a dreadnought or two/lots of counter charges and a squad of raptors would have to be small to get a whole unit past the vehicles+1" distance rule, and bikes would have to turbo boost once or twice depending on where they would have been placed. In a mission where he had the disadvantage no less and managed to wipe me clean with a nurgle force of all things where I even had 4+ cover saves most of the times he shot at me as well. Able to ignore enough armor saves that would make any force weep. Then if facing a numerous force it could block/stall long enough to ruin and a deep strike even with drop pods would have the pods used against him to block even more terrain.

 

I look through my lists and I cant really put together a "perfect list" to counter his list. So with his casual list I'm left to just tip my hat. Really I am tempted to mirror his list when he leaves to see how it performs. I always enjoyed messing with people using vehicles and acting like I have mobile terrain on hand, maybe I'll goof off with it later this month. I'll be playing against Kamasa again this week, I'll update here when I see about giving him a tougher fight.

[lord gunthar]

Wow that sounds like a incredibly good match, not 1 sided as you got 7 kps but using 7 rhinos as terrain is pretty awsome !!!

[incinerator950]

Sounds like someone discovered a new way of minmaxing, but had enough brains to pull a terrain mover.

 

Also, no offense but your plague list is rather shook up.

 

Edit: If you face him again, Bring Khârn

[Corpse.]

Im contemplating the list I want to bring against him next but be multi-purpose enough not to be fully against his list.

 

No offense intended I wanted a basic list to welcome a foreign player and not be a jerk using lash forces or something similar, it was a basic plague list.

[incinerator950]

Well now you know that you can't be nice to him as he kicked your ass

[Corpse.]

Well now you know that you can't be nice to him, even if everyone complains that Asians are extremely good at gaming (they're not actually)

 

May I suggest editing that to seem a little nicer to asians. We're on a multi-cultural board after all.

 

I think using my nurgle again in a less friendly style would be the way to go. Going with my 3 full chosen units full of plasma guns and two winged princes will be a good start, all that flank fire and fast stuff will be able to ruffle his feathers and keep to a style I normally play in. I may bring no vehicles and keep to the gun troop theme, since I was lacking numbers last game. I will be pondering still though.

[incinerator950]

It's not really offensive, a lot of gaming groups assume Asians seem to be instant winners.

[Corpse.]

Considering that asians who take english as a second language would take offense to that with easy misunderstanding is all I'm saying. (I said multi-cultural because its not just UK/USA asians that will read that)

[incinerator950]

Well, my apologies ahead of time.

 

On topic, this guy's army is giving me an idea on what I should make resin copies of.

[Corpse.]

Plaster of paris works better then rubber by the way...

[Hellios]

Hah I really want to play his Eldar army. If his 1kson army (I play 1ksons and do fairly well IMO, however the jeske for example would rubbish such an army :)) plays so well I would love to see what his Eldar force could do :)

[the jeske]

this is a tailored list to kill sm and sm only . he has almost 0 ways to open mecha lists , no ways to counter LR rush and I have no idea how he plays orks or IG.

[DuskRaider]

LOL... Hellios called it. :lol:

[Corpse.]

Yeah its a rough list against marines but I can see where he can bash horde by keeping a horde list tied up for several turns straight, and how many 6's he rolled elite carnifexes and 3+ tyrant and guard saves would melt under the pressure he pushes in small areas.

 

The tyranid player he fought (and I didnt pay much attention to) was a mix of 4 fexes a tyrant, 3 zoanthropes and a lot of spineguants. He won as easily as the previous two games using his tau. *grumbles*

 

Now that you mention it I'm curious whats in his eldar too, I only saw two of his three armies. He said it played similar or rather a mix of his tau and chaos in style so I assume lots of wraithlords/avengers/fire dragons.

[GlauG]

Being one, (or half of one) I can't help but be amused about comments about Asian gamers. I wish I'd had a chance to play some Japanese players when I was living out there, but very few people seemed to play 40k at my local Yellow Sub and all the GW stores are in Tokyo. :/ FWIW, IMHO I'm the least intense (in that way some people can be) of all the Asian/half-Asian guys who play down my local store that I know of (6-7 of us or so). One guy has a tricked-out Eldar list and a very tough SW list, someone else uses a very "Fire" SM army, yet another guy uses those horrible 'Nid combination armies and heads the Fantasy/LotR league, while I use a very standard "Doublewing" DA army and totally uncompetitive Termie-heavy CSM... But I'm going OT.

 

As for his list, he does seem pretty lacking in anti-tank. Conversely, you were fairly unlucky with your Melta usage. I can't help but find the Rhino abuse hillarious though, and my GF and I are considering building a list where she can do something similar with Immolators for her SoB. Imagine being able to combine that encirclement with twin-linked HF spam into the middle. While it might not suit your style of play, Bikers or Raptors with meltas might have been useful against such a list, since you would get an extra turn's worth of Rhino-popping out of them due to their speed (hopefully). He'd probably destroy my usual Chaos armies, but my Doublewing would probably have avoided the problems between Deepstrikes, bike-mounted melta and multi-meltas, and an AV-14 Skimmer... Best equivalent I could think of would be Melta Bikes, DS Termies, and Oblits... Or a Land Raider or two. You could have rammed two Rhinos at once with around S8-9 depending on how he tried to deploy... And THEN fired if they were Daemon possessed.

[Night Lord Dred]

I dont understand, you ran your plagues in a tiny circle at him? The guy had no range, overpriced units, and no anti tank other than bolt of change. You should be sitting on your side of the board in cover (negate those Ap3 bolters) forcing him to come to you. As you pick off the rhinos youre a) winning the game, and :D forcing his S&P marines to run towards you. You had a land raider and predator, and should have had WINGS on your DP with warptime (doombolt...why?). You should have had him outgunned completely and then been able to slaughter him in CC.

 

Im trying to picture this in my mind, and Im really having a hard time understanding how 12" rhinos in Dawn of War completely surrounded 25 models.

[Argon]

LOL... Hellios called it. :lol:

 

Would you expect anything less? Honestly, I can't wait to see what he thinks of my 1500 point list, personally.

[Corpse.]

I dont understand, you ran your plagues in a tiny circle at him? The guy had no range, overpriced units, and no anti tank other than bolt of change. You should be sitting on your side of the board in cover (negate those Ap3 bolters) forcing him to come to you. As you pick off the rhinos youre a) winning the game, and ;) forcing his S&P marines to run towards you. You had a land raider and predator, and should have had WINGS on your DP with warptime (doombolt...why?). You should have had him outgunned completely and then been able to slaughter him in CC.

 

Im trying to picture this in my mind, and Im really having a hard time understanding how 12" rhinos in Dawn of War completely surrounded 25 models.

 

 

Trying to explain it in detail is a little hard a few days after the game.

 

He moved once with 100% of his rhinos, then I moved forward, he blocked me off and kept surrounding me the more I moved in the less room I had to maneuvre and the tighter his shooting got. He only needs to see one model with each of his and with my larger squads he could get his small squads able to fire on everything. The rhinos were not entirely straight when blocking me off it was sort of like a coiling snake where the "V" angle of fire wide on his end and narrow on my end, add the 1" distance rule and its easy to get all of his models in line of sight to mine.

 

By the time I wiped out his rhinos he kept moving so that I couldnt get into charge distance + difficult terrain moving past the rhinos and past the 1" distance when the rhinos died, I only had narrow passages of 2" directly over the dead rhinos between two living rhinos. It was a cluster :P .

[Zealot Of Chaos]

if you play him again could you take pics during the turns and upload them, as you say its hard to describe

[DuskRaider]

It sounds like a really nifty (if difficult) tactic to pull off. I might try this at a game sometime. Although... I do refuse to play anything that has been branded by Tzeentch.

[Corpse.]

if you play him again could you take pics during the turns and upload them, as you say its hard to describe

 

Wish I could, I just use a crappy laptop and no means of taking pictures. I left all my stuff back at home way up north and people decided to borrow pretty much everything before I could grab it. (Way too many siblings.....) $<--also lacking to buy a digicam. :P

 

Think I pieced together why he prefers thousand sons. With higher value firepower (plasma guns/bolt/TS bolters) that he wastes only 4 bolters when using his sorcerers bolt of change when he decides to hit a tank with a str8ap1 shot that moves and shoots (obliterator-ish). Then it enhances hitting and knocking down anything else he decides to slap with the other 4 TS's when hitting troopers. On top of small squads if he wasn't so hard pressed to pin me in he could easily get his entire squad to see my whole squad and remove my 4+ cover saves I had through most of the game. In return he has his 4+ cover save or rather, invulnerable save so he doesn't have to worry about his troops positioning other then probly making sure his small squads are not visible, like my land raider had such issues hitting his guys until it got around to one side.

 

Pretty clever little force I want to try out more and more. The first real damage he did to me is the turn where he had 6+ to hit his rhinos in melee moving them above 6". I think that was the critical point in his strategy, otherwise it looked like it could fall apart at that stage.

[Corpse.]

Shamelessly bumping the thread with an update and double post.

 

The game I fought against him was a total massacre. We shared lists as usual, but as I noted to him that 3 units are coming in reserves he lined up his rhinos against either side of the table. Tank shocked the first unit that came in about 6 times until they finally ran and ran them all the way off the table keeping within 6". Two of his rhinos died to death or glory and I lost 2 plasma guns that way (one more to overheat) and decided to stop doing that with so few guns left in the unit.

 

His army was split up and he didn't use the same tactic, I wont bother with the details since the same style wasn't used. It was a normal game where I got stomped with the rhino wall push, singling out my units one by one. A point where I wished I used ord instead of oblits. My list was oblits/plagues(8 size units) with 2 princes using wings and IoCG plasma chosen in mass.

 

Wish I had more time to play the guy, the game ended about an hour before I had to leave on errands so, it was bothersome I couldnt force him to do the same thing. I didnt think he would go to such lengths to stop them. (Perhaps where secrecy would have been best) - he used the same exact list as before.

[Drudge Dreadnought]

Certainly interesting, but in most cases it sounds a bit gimmicky. It should crush my non-competitive slaanesh list (its a marine killer) but i doubt it could do much to my standard competitive list.

[Corpse.]

He seems like he plays enough to know what he's doing, I doubt he would have done so well if we didnt share lists. (Though we agreed he would use a similar list, and I used a different list) So it cant be helped he got me good.

[IronWinds]

I would personally love to see that list fight troop heavy guard w/ a couple leman russ. Or orks, or nids.

 

He has a lot of anti marine killiness. But his over expensive units would not fare any better against guardsmen than regular marines.

 

Ad I imagine in apoc he would just run the rhinos as little firing platforms for the sorcerers, it is a pretty nasty list.