Massive Robots vs. Droves of Space Marines? Horus Heresy Battle Report
If you're more of a casual Warhammer player like me, then you might have gotten tired of the new changes to 10th Edition Warhammer 40k. However, there is still another army-sized sci-fi Warhammer game out there that I happen to have an army for: Warhammer: The Horus Heresy.
On the slim chance you *haven't* heard of this game, basically it takes place 10,000 years before the main Warhammer 40K game. The Emperor and his sons, the Primarchs, have taken their legions of Space Marines to go conquer the galaxy. One of these Primarchs, Horus Lupercal, falls to the corruption of Chaos and leads half of the Primarchs and Legions in attacking the "Loyalist" armies that stand with the Emperor. So it's basically a lot of Space Marine on Space Marine fighting (with some other human forces sprinkled in).
I won't go into the detail of how to play, there's plenty of great resources out there for that. But Horus Heresy is a game that I love, as it is tailored for the more casual/narrative style player. There isn't much of a "meta", largely because most of the armies are using the same units, just painted different colors. Each of the legions have their own traits and specialties, but they are varied enough that one Legion isn't much more powerful than the others.* So, you can just pick the units and vehicles you want to field and throw them on the board against your opponent's list without worrying too much about what to bring.
Editor's Note: The only big "Meta" discussion I've seen online is how overpowered Dreadnaughts are and how hard they are to kill. However, most of the community has solved this by using a "House Rule" of 1 Dreadnaught per 1,000 points of models. If you go to any big events, you'll likely see this rule used.
Originally, I had painted my Heresy army to be the Imperial Fists legion. When 10th edition of Warhammer 40k came out and I decided to have Ultramarines be my main faction, I decided to strip the paint off most of my Heresy models and repaint them for the Ultramarines legion. This way, I could use some of the models and vehicles in 40k if I wanted to, especially for non-competitive type events.
Due to this, my space marines and vehicles are still in the process of getting repainted. I did have another force that could be used in Horus Heresy though - my Imperial Knights. I've had them for quite a while and I wanted to see just how well they would do in Heresy. I have 2 "Questorius" Knights and 6 "Armigers" that come up to about 2,000 points in Horus Heresy. For the last 1,000 points, I put in an allied detachment of Ultramarines* consisting of a tactical squad in a Rhino transport and an assault squad (marines with Jump Packs). Based on a recommendation from another player, I also proxied in some apothecaries to try out and buff those space marines.
Editor's Note: You'll see some yellow Imperial Fists on the board too, I was using those as proxy for the Assault squad I'm building right now.
Round 1: Early bird gets the worm right?
For this game of Horus Heresy, I was going up against a friend playing Blood Angels. The special detachment rules he decided to pick was the one that let him drop in his whole army during round 2 instead of having to roll to see when they come in. So when you look at the board in the beginning, it seems very lopsided. I've got all these massive machines, and he's got 3 Baal Predators and two squads in hiding. The mission we were playing was from the Battle for Beta-Garmon campaign book. In the center of the battlefield was one single objective. If you held the objective at the end of your turn, you scored 3 points. After 4 turns, whomever had the most points won.
I won the roll-off, meaning that I would be going first. This meant that I would have 2 turns before the large portion of the Blood Angels were on the board. So I needed to score both rounds and try and bunker down on the objective for at least another round to give me a good chance of victory. Since terrain was blocking most of the line of sight, I ran many of my Armigers up towards the objective to secure it early. I kept the two large Knights somewhat in the back for support. Also, I parked my Rhino of Ultramarines not far away and had my assault squad nearby on the opposite side. My thinking was that if the Armigers fell early, then I would be able to quickly shift in my Ultramarines. I didn't want to pile up all my forces in the center and have him quickly whittle them down.
On my opponents turn, he moved his squad of tanks up and formed a column of firing aimed at my front most Armiger, the only one who was able to get on the point. Between his shooting phase and a well-timed Return Fire on my next turn, he was able to blow that Armiger away. Luckily, it had done its job first and gotten me those first 3 points.
Round 2: Incoming!
Other than moving more units on the objective, there wasn't much to do besides unloading into the column of tanks. My three more-melee focused Armigers were able to reduce the tanks to slag. Bonus - two of them didn't explode, which in Heresy means they stay on the board as terrain pieces (which is why they are flipped over in the pictures). This meant that they blocked up one of the other paths to the objective, making it harder to move units around on that side of the board. Also, the back 3 Armigers managed to shoot out his squad from one of the buildings, reducing the units on the board even further.
This didn't last long, as his Round 2 happened and ALLLLL those other space marines joined the party. Suddenly the center of the board was chock full of marines ready to slice and dice up my Armigers. It's all good though, right? I've got my melee armigers in there, and in 40K they can pack quite a wallop. I've also got my melee big Knight nearby that can whittle down another one of his groups.
Um, no not quite actually. Turns out, in 40K these units are great at melee because they can either do a couple of really strong attacks or a mob of lower powered swings. The second option is what is great at whittling down units with a lot of figures, like Space Marines. In Heresy, however, they don't have that second option. So both my melee Armigers and my melee Knight have 3 attacks against these mobs. Granted, they hit hard, but each one is only taking out 3 figures at most at a time. Meanwhile, he's getting in enough damage to hurt my boys, getting through the "Ionic Deflector" that beefs up my armigers. Wait…what's that other ability under Ionic Deflector? What happens when it dies?
Yeah, when my first armiger died, we totally missed the part where it explodes and deals damage to each MODEL within range, not UNIT within range. So while the Armigers were ineffective in clearing out the space marines during melee, they were VERY effective at getting rid of them when they exploded. Too effective, it turned out, as the chain reaction from one Armiger exploding caused enough damage to finish off the second one, causing it to then explode as well.
Round 3: He who remains…
Thanks to the explosive massacre of the previous round, the board looked a lot emptier at the start of my next turn. The Blood Angels had control of the point, which means that I needed to score another round in order to secure my victory. Unfortunately, there was only one Armiger that had the movement to get onto the point, and he had 2 units on the objective. So the rest of my army had to work to clear off his units so that I could score.
One problem with this plan. My biggest "gun" at this point, my large Knight packed full of guns, had been stunned by the explosion of the melee Knight. This meant that I could still shoot, but I only was able to hit on sixes…on a six sided dice. Needless to say, it's guns were pretty much worthless this round, and sure enough it didn't really hit much of anything. The remaining two armigers and tactical marines were able to whittle down one of the units so that the figures on the objective were gone, but not enough to remove the other unit from the board.
With time running out and most of my units running on fumes, I conceded the game when I was unable to get the last set of victory points during Round 3. The momentum was in his direction, and I doubted much would be left for Round 4 to attempt to score then.
Conclusion
This was actually the second game of Horus Heresy that I had played in the past few weeks, and it felt great playing Warhammer again without having to worry about "balance dataslates" or "competitive metas".
Knights can be a lot of fun in Heresy, but more so as an add on to another army, not necessarily as an army by itself.
However, it is really tempting to run just a crap ton of Armigers and charge into piles of space marines and have them detonate and clear the board.
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