Kill Teams and Battle Missions

A buddy and I played a few scenarios from the Battle Missions book recently. I know that battle missions is pretty much old news at this point, but I wanted to give my impression after actually having played.

We both brought our chaos armies for the evening. Starting off with Kill Teams we plunked our minis down and went at it. I brought a handful of chaos marines with a rhino and an icon, and threw in another handful of summoned lesser demons. On the opposing side was a squad of plague marines with a plasma gun and melta gun.

I was pretty brutally mauled in this game. I managed to keep my guys shooting, and got some two vs. one assaults but in the end the survivability of the plague marines was my downfall. Because Kill Teams is lost by having half your army destroyed, I was banking on having a healthy number of models. Turns out eleven is still not a healthy number. I would have been better off bringing a few special weapons so I could capitalize on the instances where I had a clear shot on one of his guys. In a scenario that revolves around whittling your opponent away, I just wasn't survivable or killy enough.

Fun game though. It played a bit like War Machine without the casters. Very few units moving around and everyone counts.

Next game we played 500 points and since we were both Chaos, we diced off to see who would be the attacker and then rolled a d3 to pick a chaos mission from the book. I came up as defender on the Pillage Mission.

Our army lists started off similarly. We both had flying daemon princes with the mark of Khorne. Demon princes fulfill a lot of roles in a low point game and the khorne prince is one of the cheapest. Following his prince, my opponent had a squad of plague marines and a unit of berserkers in a rhino. My prince brought along two small squads of chaos marines, one on foot and one with a plasma gun in a rhino. Also a defiler.

The game started slow with his berserkers moving up and his plague marines camping the objective closest to his deployment zone in order to rack up some early VPs. His prince moved towards the center where he'd be able to support his flanks. For my part I moved my rhino up a bit and a hail of bolter fire and a couple of well placed plasma shots took out a good chunk of the plague marine squad. The other space marine squad assaulted the berserker's rhino, planting krak grenades and stunning it.

Continuing on the plague marines stood steady on their objective, ensuring more points. The opposing khorne prince bopped over to tear the tracks off my rhino, while his berserkers piled out and attacked my demon prince, putting two wounds on him but losing most of their number in return. On my turn the defiler showed up and tried to fleet close enough to the berserker rhino that it would be able to use it to get some extra movement on the charge but fell just short. The chaos marines piled out of their soon to be destroyed rhino and put some rounds into the demon prince causing a couple of wounds.

The rest of the battle was simply a series of moves and counter moves. The defiler moved onto my objective with the chaos marines surrounding it for protection. His demon prince killed the chaos marines with the plasma gun. My demon prince killed his plague marines. The culmination of the battle was his demon prince bellowing to khorne and assaulting mine. They pummeled each other across two rounds of combat until they simultaneously sent each other back to the warp.

With his entire army gone the final result was a victory for me.