Battle Brothers Game 3 - Titanic Fenrisians vs. Daemons/CSM

Middle of Turn 1

Another thing we were hoping to avoid that we hadn't seen much of around the room was big units of screamers and flamers. You can guess what Pyro and Pus had then can't you? Alex and James were running (again from memory/photos):

Chaos Lord with mark of Nurgle, fist, terminator armour.
2 lots of plague marines (i think one lot of 5 and one 7-8 man squad)
Havocs with autocannons and mark of nurgle
Predator with Las/Auto

Herald on a disc
9 flamers
7 screamers
2 squads of plaguebearers

This time we'd be playing Relic on Vanguard deployment. A lot of high toughness in there but the CSM half of the army wasn't too much of a threat to us at range. We'd struggle to kill units off very quickly and would probably end up victim to the screamers and flamers. We were relieved they'd restricted them to one squad of each though because of the Daemons being the allies. We didn't get first turn this time around and failed to Seize but it actually helped....

Battle Report
They deployed the havocs on top of a derelict bastion (I wish GW would stop giving our opponents these) with the plague marines in front and the predator off to their left. I elected to walk my wolf priest and his grey hunters this time to have as much shooting on the table as early as possible. We otherwise deployed in a similar manner to the previous games.

Bottom of Turn 1

They put the plaguebearers in their preferred wave and dropped one on the relic with the other not far away.  Their shooting was pretty ineffective but managed to wound the dreadknight. In retaliation we brought the drop pod in centrally (to allow us easy access to the objective) and went after the smaller plague marine squad killing 3 with rapid fire from both grey hunter packs. One dreadknight went after the plaguebearers on the relic without needing to shunt whilst the other went after the other plaguebearers in a similar fashion. We wanted them locked in combat in case the screamers/flamers arrived so were quite pleased when we didn't kill many plaguebearers despite ignoring FNP. They'd probably not last another turn though so we'd have cut their scoring units in half. We'd also secure First Blood in the process.

The screamers came down (but the flamers didn't) and luckily for us they scattered away from our army. This meant they were restricted in what they could use their sweep attacks on being forced to hit the grey hunters and not killing many. We hoped the lord would take the bait and charge the dreadknight. He'd be forced to challenge it and with S10 we hoped to insta-kill him and then stay locked with the plague marines/bearers and slowly cut them down. Sadly, in what was becoming a trend for Matt. The dreadknight in question wasn't the one with the sword. He still managed to get 2 wounds through meaning it'd be 5++ saves for the lord or instant death. He failed one and we were about to celebrate when, thanks to the 5 plague marines cheering him on the lord got a re-roll and passed it. This allowed him to easily kill off the dreadknight in return with his power fist. Gutted.

Mid Turn 2

Bit of a blow but all was not lost. With the greatsword the dreadknight wouldn't be so unlucky and by killing a couple of plague marines first we'd get rid of that irritating re-roll. Anyway, before all that the grey hunters were in combat with the plague marines, killing them over a couple of turns, and the thunderwolves swept round to charge the screamers. We were pretty sure we knew it would end badly for them but needed to hope we could at least thin them down about or else hold them in combat. We didn't want them zipping around sweeping us and killing marines in combat.

Whilst Matt was finishing off the lord easily this time the thunderwolves charged in. I forgot hammer of wrath (as I did every game except the last) but killed off 3 screamers nonetheless. In return Alex was incredibly unlucky. He only managed to get through 3 wounds despite S5. This meant I only lost a single wound thanks to my shield and I'd cut down their effectiveness significantly. The purifiers cut down the remaining plaguebearers and left Alex and James with very little. The flamers still hadn't arrived in turn 3 which meant that if we could clear the board they'd have nothing left and the flamers would never show up.

To do this we needed to kill the predator, remaining screamers and the havocs. We were pretty confident about the tank and the screamers but the havocs would be tricky to shift. They were stuck up on top of the derelict bastion. We could shoot them with the grey hunters and incinerate them with the dreadknight but we'd be unlikely to kill them. The dreadknight could charge the building too but with them on the ramparts S3 hits weren't likely to harm them much and frankly neither was the jump down.

We cut down the screamers with help from the grey hunters and the purifiers got rid of the predator easily enough. The other grey hunters failed to kill any havocs and the dreadknight only got two of them. The dreadknight charged the building but despite destroying it it wasn't an explosion. The havocs took no damage from the building's demise and passed their leadership test.

The flamers were guaranteed to arrive in turn 4 but Alex and James decided that they wouldn't change the course of the game much. Sure they'd kill a squad easily enough but then our entire remaining army would hopefully have enough shots and attacks to do them in and the acolytes were on the relic at this stage. For this reason they elected to concede giving us a 6-0 win as we'd secured all 3 secondary missions.

Conclusion
Had the flamers arrived sooner and the screamers come down more accurately this game could've been very different. As it was it wasn't really that close. We were unlucky to lose a dreadknight in combat challenge with the lord but they were equally unlucky with their screamers against the thunderwolves. This doesn't really change my opinion of either unit as they weren't taken in big enough numbers to cause the problems that they normally do. I think Alex and James played a good game and the scoreline doesn't reflect this at all. The only thing I'd have done differently I think would be to put the screamers and flamers in the preferred wave as you want them in quick to do as much damage as they can and keep us pinned back.

The plaguebearers coming in first actually worked to our advantage allowing us to lock the dreadknights in combat and take an easy First Blood in the second round of melee. Had they been coming down later on and contesting the relic and killing acolytes then things may have worked out differently.

We'd finished the day with a maximum number of VPs in our final game (well you could just about get more if you had a warlord trait with the bonus - but still). We therefore would be going into day 2 feeling much better than we had down after game 2. We were still concerned about facing more flyers though.....