Saturday, February 18, 2012

Corsairs vs. not blood angels!

I got my third game in with a pure Corsair list last night, the first vs. a non-blood angel opponent. It was a pick-up game vs. a new MSU student that I had never played before. He didn't have an 1850 list so we played 2000 points. I added a warp hunter to my core list (if you can call it that after 3 games) so my list consisted of:


Prince with power weapon
8 Warp Spiders
10 harlies with kisses and seer
5 corsairs with flamer in vyper
5 corsairs with flamer in falcon
10 corsairs with jetpacks, 2 missiles
3x 3 jetbikes with cannon
Nightwing
Nightspinner
Phoenix
Warp hunter


He was playing space marines with a 10 man terminator squad that teleported around, a couple of tactical squads, a vindicator, some missile devs, a redemmer and a 10 man assault squad. The mission was kill points. He was "newish" to the game, he knew his rules but his experience to date most consisted of him and his friends.

The game details aren't that interesting, he got first turn so I used a unit of harliquins to pull most of his army to one side and than brought everything else from reserve in on the other side and killed anything that tried to turn back.

I did learn a few things though.
1) Corsairs (like eldar in general) benefit more than most other armies from tactics. The combination of fragility and shooting specialization mean that even minimal losses will severely hamper your ability. Now you may say but imp guard are just as fragile and also awful in hth. The difference is that if you take out a Vendetta or Russ, there are probably at least two more waiting for you. If you kill a squad there are probably 8-10 more groups of guardsman. Corsairs don't have that for hth or anti-heavy armor, they do have plenty of S6 options. Because they rely on their speed and shooting they need to either shorten the game by hiding or making the opponent waste movement (such as chasing some harliquins into a corner)
2) I miss fire dragons. Land raiders are hard to stop when the only thing you have that can pen them is a single nightwing (and if the nightwing stays in reserve for 4 turns ...) Of course if the land raider is polite enough to immobilize itself it is less of a concern.
3) Outflanking jetbikes are cool. In kill point games being able to come in behind the enemy lines is very powerful.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Post game Grey Knights

This post will be an example of why you shouldn't wait a week before posting a battle report. I did my initial analysis of his list here. In the end I went with 2 farseers with fortune, fired dragons in a falcon and a fire prism. The idea would be to fly the farseers with the dire avengers and keep fortune up on the two planes as much as possible. While the bomber killed the dreadknight. (How did this work?

Friday, February 10, 2012

(pre) Game 4 - Grey knights

Later today I've got my fourth league game scheduled. My opponent is playing a Grey Knight list detailed below. Although he was only required to put 1500 points in his fixed list he opted to put his entire list. As a result, I already know what he will be playing and can plan my 600 points accordingly. Below are some of my observations and plans going into the game. Stay tuned for a post game report.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Fixed List Analysis- Phoenix Bomber

As stated in my post about the Nightwing, one of the main reason I went with Eldar for the league was that it would allow me to use my two flyers (or fast skimmers after the rules change). As with the Nightwing the Phoenix was massively overpriced before and now is still expensive but definitely has some firepower.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Fixed List Analysis- Vyper

Image from Bruno at CoolMiniorNotCVinton over at Dark Future games did a nice article on using little used units, such as the Vyper. One of the nice things about the Eldar codex is that even the worst units in the codex usually have some value. They tend to be overpriced but are usually capable of doing something if used properly.

The Vyper is probably the exception to this rule. Open-topped and Armor 10 make it to fragile to get near the enemy, BS3 makes it too unreliable to shoot the enemy. About the only good thing you can say about this is that is such a non-threat that you don't have to worry about it getting blown up so it can contest an objective late game.