[Daemons] Belated Game Thoughts

Morning all,

Been a few days without a blog post, and due to a lot of illness and such on Monday night, there were no games. So I thought I'd get around to posting a few things from the week before, when I gave my Khorne Daemon army a run out (since a 2k list fits inside 1 shoe box).

Last Monday was a bit of a "reverse tournament army" night, where everyone seemed to use the army their opponent would normally. Sanguinius used his Orks against my Daemons and Angryman used Eldar against Col. Straken's Tyranid trial list.

The game was Objectives (4 I think) at 1500pts. My list was something along the lines of:
- Bloodthirster
- Herald of Khorne on a Juggernaut
- 3 or 4 Bloodcrushers
- 2 x 10 Bloodletters
- 3 Winged Daemon Princes off Khorne

In the end, I kneecapped myself in an objective based game really, by taking only 2 scoring units that were very easy to get killed off. So... lessons learnt from my most recent game with a Khorne Daemon army?

1. Think more carefully about the units you're placing and where to place them when Deepstriking.

As an example from Mondays game, I had 2 Daemon Princes come down in the first wave, which had the Death Strike shooting attack, which meant that I could happily plop them down and take out the 2 Trukks that the Orks had with relative ease.

What I didn't account for in that, was to attack the Trukks as such, I would have to land within range of all the Bikes (20 of them), 9 Deffkoptas, Wazdakka and the units from inside the Trukks.

I managed to destroy 1 Trukk and immobilise the other, but then both princes got mowed down by sheer amount of S5 rate of fire weapons from the Bikes and Koptas.

Now... if I had thought on, and remembered that I had paid the hefty points to give them Wings, I could have hidden them somewhere and used the Wings to get into firing / assault range later on.

2. Shooting Attacks

Leading on from point one, something else I learnt was that just because I have given a unit a shooting attack - Death Strike on the Daemon Prince - does NOT mean that he needs to be in a position to use that 1 shot per turn weapon, on the turn he drops in.

In my eagerness to use the shooting attack and try to destroy the Trukks, the princes were left open to getting shot to death.

3. Think more carefully about First or Second Turn.

Choosing to have the first turn as Daemons, was a stupid thing to do in this game. It meant I had to weather a full turn of shooting upon landing, from the centralised Ork army.

If I'd taken the second turn, then likely that the Orks would have dispersed from the cluster and moved towards the objectives, and I could have spread out around the board a bit more - who knows?

I find it weird to play Daemons and take into account denying the opponent a full turn of shooting.

4. Khorne Daemons and Combat.

In short, Khorne Daemons, when assaulting, are absolutely rock solid and can smash most units to pieces with little to no trouble. A half depleted unit of Bloodletters manage to smash a Warbiker mob to pieces and make them flee at the same time, losing 1 or 2 Bloodletters in the process.

Then when the Bloodcrushers came down, they managed to batter whatever was close by, before the opponents even had a chance to know they were in an assault. Khorne Daemons show up to drink milk and kick arse.. and they've finished their Milk.

5. Invulnerable Saves are pants against Volume fire.

As the title suggests really... The amount of S5 or S4 weaponry coming my way from Ork Warbikes, Trukks and Koptas meant that each Bloodletter was taking maybe 2 or 3 saves over the course of a turn. There's only so many that they can take.

I'm putting all this failing to make saves down to the fact my army isn't painted Blue...

6. Bloodthirsters

No matter how cool you think he is, how many people he's going to club to death, he always ends up being my opponent's public enemy #1. I need to think more carefully about how I deploy this fella since all the games I've played (still counting on 1 hand...) he's had his face smashed in by shooting, and some really bad armour save rolls.

As with the Daemon Princes I need to remember he has wings and also not to get trigger happy with my Death Strike attack.

7. Increase the amount of scoring units.

At the moment, I've got 20 Bloodletters bought and painted, but I'm starting to think I could do with a fair few more. 2 units of 10 just don't seem to cut it in most games I've played.

I'm not sure what would be the best option with it, either to expand to 4 units of 5, or buy some more bloodletters and go 4 units of 6, 3 units of 8 or maybe 3 larger squads of 10... Even more? What do you reckon?

Conclusion

That's all really... I just wanted to talk a bit about how I've been doing with the Daemons, where I'm really enjoying using my most "unloved" army a bit more. I've maybe shot myself in the foot somewhat by insisting on only using Khorne stuff but maybe...

Get a Soul Grinder in there?
More bloodletters?
2 Bloodthirsters?
Get rid of Thirster alltogether and have more Heralds on Juggernauts?
Or even give into temptation for new models... and expand beyond Khorne?

Peace out,
SB