League Battle Report: Merkan 76th IG vs. Grey Knights

This and the following few pics are not from my game, rather a couple shots from the table set up for Sunday's game between Vinny's Tyranids and Landon's Luigi Marines.  Lots of terrain rolled, and lots of big buildings on hand makes for a very crowded table!

Landon is obsessed with a big fan of the Mario Bros. games and is building a chapter of Luigi-themed marines using the Space Wolves rules (easier for Yoshi cavalry).  The green pipe is his drop pod; pipe pops up from the ground, marines jump out.  Probably catching a few gold coins while they're at it.

OK, onto the actual game!  I'd been wanting to have Eddie over for a game for a long time, and we finally got our chance today as part of our league.  He brought his Grey Knights, I had my IG.  1250 points, we rolled up Crusade (4 objectives) and Dawn of War (long edge) deployment.

I had:

Company command squad with standard

Two platoons with two squads each (co 2xflamer, squads 1xplasma)

lascannon, missile, mortar squads

Russ (battlecannon/lascannon)

Manticore

3xplasma vet squad

Marbo

Aegis line w/icarus lascannon

GK had:

Terminator Librarian

2xPaladins, 3xPaladins

2x6-man strike squads with assault cannon razorbacks

3xdreads, various weapons

Warlord Traits I got move through cover for 12" bubble around warlord, he got his librarian to be scoring.  Above is my setup.  Aegis and some stuff in far corner, but spread other things out a bit to avoid being one easy clump.  Objectives are: behind aegis, next to middle big grey bunker, behind green crate on right in middle, behind Thunderhawk.  This is the paper thunderhawk I won at the Games Day event; makes for a good big terrain piece!

Eddie is a slacker trying some different things out, so there are a number of proxies.  The Rhinos are his razorbacks, various figs standing in for the strike squads, dreads WIP.  Two dreads set up on the GK right flank, one by the TH with a razorback, other razor on far side of TH, one strike squad hunkered on objective.  Termies all deep striking.

I have first turn, and initial shooting takes out the razorback in the middle and damages a couple of dreads.  First Blood!

Return fire from the surviving razorback killed one lascannon team, forcing the other two to abandon their perch and fall back.  Fortunately they rallied during my next turn.

Dreads advance, strike squad from destroyed razorback goes ahead and seizes the objective by the crates.  Three of our four mysterious objectives were sabotaged.  I pulled out some old GI Joe surplus Cobra Stinger missiles to mark them as reminders.

Two dreads get wrecked.  Three-man paladin squad arrives, one gets shot up.  Moe Berg (Marbo) arrived and demo charged the strike squad on the crate objective, killing them all, but was soon psycannoned to death himself.  My veterans showed up too, and took up position to get into the sandbag position, but multiple horrible difficult terrain checks kept them outside of it for several more turns.

Another view, same stuff.

The librarian and remaining paladins arrive, scattering just in front of the bunker.  The librarian didn't have very good luck, trying vortex of doom twice, but I managed to deny the witch both times.  At least he didn't hit himself with it.

Paladins clear the lower level of the bunker and position to do more damage.  Lone paladin charges and beats the squad up front, squad with hammer fails its charge against the Russ.

The squad beaten by the lone paladin rallies, adding its firepower to the mass of shots coming in on the various terminators.  Hammer guy dies, librarian goes down to a lascannon shot.

Aftermath.

Paladin gets up to assault the defense line and break into the objective area...

...but is killed by overwatch.  Plasma gunner hit and killed him with one shot, overheated and killed himself with the other.  

End game we each had one objective, I had first blood and slay the warlord, he had linebreaker, 5-4 IG victory.  

Some good luck on my part, some bad on Eddies.  The deny the witch rolls as noted earlier, I had several squads break but they all rallied before running off the table, some bad scatters but mostly pretty accurate.  Eddie had horrible luck on his cover saves for his vehicles; I think he made one out of about 15 chances he had.  It was an interesting game.  Once I started taking down the dreads I felt more confident, but I was worried that the paladins would show up closer to my defense line and rip me up.  Them being further away meant I had a lot fewer shots at them, but I had more time to whittle them down, and I think that made the difference.  Next round we're going up to 1500points; I'm sure that the Grey Knights will be even more powerful then!

Thanks for reading!