So my 8th edition Thousand Sons marched to war for the first time. They were to face down the vile unwashed (unpainted) Orks. Not a great match up for a a pretty elite focused army like the Thousand Sons. But then both of the armies were index based so it was a level battlefield. Not being used to doing battle reports I didn’t take enough pictures so this will be a rough account.
My 8th edition Thousand Sons army
The Thousand Sons march to war!
So I brought a fairly simple army, a patrol detachment and a spearhead. Plenty of other ways to form a better army but I wanted to take stuff I liked the look. Also that I had painted. If possible I always run painted armies, just a personal thing.
The Ork Horde!
In response the Orks had roughly:
- Warboss in mega armour
- Big mek with kustom force field
- Weirdboy
- 10 lootas
- 10 lootas
- 30 shoota boys, 3 big shootas
- 30 shoota boys, 3 big shootas
- 30 shoota boys, 3 big shootas
- 10 grots
- 10 grots
- 10 grots
- 10 stormboyz
- 10 stormboyz
- 10 stormboyz
- 5 kommandos
- 5 kommandos
- 5 kommandos
- Battlewagon with FW kill cannon
The Sons of Magnus may be out numbered here.
These barren city ruins were our battle field
So my Orky opponent, Skarnir, not only brought the mat we played on but all the terrain as well. We tried to make it look somewhat interesting but it lacked real line of sight blocking terrain.
First moves, so many Orks!
This picture is just after my first turn. We rolled up a weird split board deployment and had the Orks slap bang in the middle. They where far to close to me for comfort! You can see my Demon Prince jumped right up, then Warptimed up to his flier. In the assualt phase he left it with just two wounds left! It took a smite rolling an 11 from an aspiring sorcerer the next turn. The flier then blew up and took out a couple of Rubicae.
The Demon Prince is surrounded
The poor prince recieved charges from 20 odd Stormboyz, 10 grots and a good chunk of the 30 shoota boyz moving in there. All this left him on 2 wounds and he gutted a mob of Stormboyz.
Operation assassin was a massive success! (Mostly)
Sensing his time was rather limited I jumped the demon prince into the middle of the Orks and dropped a smite into the Warboss. Careful placement was key there. Then followed up with a charge that took him out. Did a hand little consolidation into the Bigmek to avoid shooting… but the Mek actually killed him!
The gun line held, for the most part.
Stormboyz on this flank jumped my Rubics to attack the sorcerer behind (who just happens to look like a warpsmith). Which turned out to be a bad idea, as he killed them off and there wasn’t enough Shoota Boyz to kill of the Rubic marines in front. They slowly won that fight.
Last stand of Sorcerer Lord Heka. 10,000 years old and killed by a mob on fungus.
The bodies pile up
Despite everything I had killed the points were pretty even but I was running out of bodies.
Last views of the battlefield. Those Orks would soon sweep onto my rubics and slowly maul them.
I went on to pretty much control this area, killing off the lootas and the battlewagon. But my defiler is up behind that building at the top, fighting a battle with 30 other boyz. A battle it eventually lost and sadly didn’t even explode.
In the end the game was called at the bottom of turn four with the Orks ahead by a victory point (due to time). A riot to play despite the loss. Good opponent and good fun, no sore losers to terrible dice in each side at times. I might try tweak my list and challenge Skarnir again!
Lord Heka will return!
Nice batrep! Hordes are hard to deal with as we lack those crazy number of dice that many armies have nowadays.
Despite removing buckets of them there was still more than 70 of them at the end. Any thoughts on how to tweak the list?
Not really. I’m not having much success at the moment. I find it hard to play against certain armies. I’m looking at more bodies and less vehicles at the moment. I tried Spawn and really liked them.
But what we really need are stratagems.
Spawn might make a good CC unit for sure. With three or more of them to not give up first blood.
Giving up first blood is rough but maybe not the end of the world. They make it cheap to unlock the Outrider detachment.
Sounds like a fun game.
Yeah, as Thomas said, hordes are rough. It seems no matter how many you remove that there’s always more. I’ve had many games like this where I killed a ton of them, was winning the game or had a close game, but the bodies slowly overwhelm me, and by the end I have nothing left and they’ve taken the lead. It’s fun though.
Going to tweak my list a touch I think. Predators were very good though. But the Scarab Occult might be too expensive for the damage output.
They have combi-bolters, right? Well, the Thousand Sons version anyway. If so, then each Terminator is 4 shots at 12″ with the bolters, plus whatever special weapons you have. I find Terminators are great at mowing down hordes with shooting, and then charge them into meatier targets for combat.
Sadly they fluffed the charges to get them into melee this time around. Maybe next time a sorcerer with warptime will move them after they DS.
Scarab Occult are great. They are disruptive and hit pretty hard against infantry, if you unlock CSM Stratagems you can give them Veterans of the Long War for +1 to wound. and then you kan mow down anything up to T7 with decent success. Love ’em!
Wait how can you give them VoTLW?
You need a CSM Detachment to unlock the CSM Stratagems. You can use the Stratagems on all units in your army as long as they have the appropriate keyword. Veterans of the Long War works on all units that have the Infantry and Heretic Astartes Keywords.
The cheapest way to unlock Stratagems is to bring an Auxiliary Detachment but that’ll cost you a Command Point. But you can bring a Outrider Detachment with an HQ and three individual Spawn for 170-200 points.
Cheers. I might look into that one.