As the slow rate of my posts might indicate I’m having a bit of a 40k slump at the moment, I enjoyed the game that I played before this and I enjoyed this one too. But it didn’t get me fired up, and it’s been summer with lots of other things going on.
Anyway, I wanted this army to be faster than my previous one. Playing on the bigger table it a problem for a slow army like the Death Guard. So the Plagueburst Crawlers came out and were replaced with a Deamon Prince and two Foetid Bloat Drones. I also intended to deep strike Typhus and so dropped his Poxwalker horde and took him with the Deathshroud as bodyguards instead. I still too a lot of Nurglings, because they’re lovely.
The Game
We played the mission out of the core rule book again, so nice and simple. I’m not going to do a full round by round report but here are some highlights.
Failing a charge after deepstriking, some things don’t change.Tank shock hurts small elite units.This looks like it’s bad, and it was, ouch.My Plague Marines are about to get ripped apart.This feels a little unfair, my poor Nurlings!
Post Game Thoughts
The Nurglings still offered me a lot of table control when it came to where the Grey Knights could teleport to. I think they were my best units.
The Plague Marines just melted when it came to combat, they feel very squishy now. But I do need to look at the characters that I could attach to them to buff them.
Tank Shock is a great stratagem, it lets a vehicle do mortal wounds to things that it charges in to. The Death Guard in 10th, as in 9th, are vulnerable to mortal wounds and this really hurt me.
Nurglings have an ability that gives a -1 to enemy units in melee combat, and this is in all combats not just against the Nurglings. I could have used that a lot to really hinder the attacking Grey Knights, much to learn.
Melee is now not quite as useful as it was when it comes to getting free movement. Charging, piling in and consolidating are now very much restricted. In earlier editions I could use those to push myself forwards into better places, in 10th that’s much harder.
I do worry how on earth I would fare against an army that’s better than the Grey Knights, the Knights seem to be about as bad as my Death Guard so the game felt pretty balanced. But I hear things, bad things, about the state of some armies such as the Aeldari.
This would be my first game of 10th Edition. It was a little bit unexpected, I thought I’d be sat on the side lines for a bit longer. But the chance came up, so I went for it. I had no idea what I would take so I built the list around two concepts. Firstly I wanted to get my Nurglings back on the table, I can take up to 25% of my army as Daemons of Nurgle without consequence. Secondly I didn’t want anything too complicated, so, for example, I didn’t want to have to worry about how to load out Plague Marines or what characters to support them with. Therefore the army has selections that don’t have that many options.
The Game
We played the Only War mission out of the core rule book, this has us capturing objectives and has a few differences from how the new mission cards play.
I’m not going to do a round by round report, it wasn’t really the point of the game, but here are image of it.
Spreading out so as to prevent teleporting.Looks like Nurglings are back on the menu!Getting stuck in, but damage output felt low.The “Tank Shock” stratagem is awesome, the tank handed out loads of mortal wounds to the Poxwalkers.The Grey Knight teleported in, did hardly any damage and then teleported back out before I could shoot it.
Post Game Thoughts
In short the game was a lot of fun. However it’s worth noting that Death Guard and the Grey Knights are, seemingly, performing very badly in 10th Edition. We’re basically equally rubbish armies. I’m not sure I’d have enjoyed the game as much if I’d spent the evening being tabled by the Space Elves.
List building is very easy, it’s very flexible now. But it is very weird that they’ve done away with “Power Level” and then simplified points so much so as to make them the new “Power Level”. With weapons and upgrades being free they work the same way now. There is a loss of granularity, if you’ve got 5 or 10 points left to spend you probably won’t find something to spend them on, back in 9th (or 8th) you would have no problems finding an extra thing to pick up.
The table for 1,000 point games is now bigger. You used to play on a smaller 44″ x 30″ table, but now you play on the same 60″ x 44″ table that the 2,000 point games use.
The smaller table should have given the Grey Knights, with their ability to teleport all over the place, a big advantage. But when I put units into deep strike and reserve he felt threatened that he would lose his objectives so he held stuff back.
It’s a real pain that the Nurglings can’t hold objectives, but I did use them to screen out vast areas of the table from the Grey Knights teleport abilities. They still have a stratagem that allows them to deep strike 3″ away from one of my units, but they can’t charge and it’s only one unit a turn.
There are a lot less CP in the game now, and less stratagems to spend them on. You start with 0CP and get one in each battle round, this makes using a stratagem a rare and important decision. This compares with 9th where I’d often be spamming stratagems straight out of the door in turn one, often to little effect I might note.
Both of our armies appeared to have a very low damage output in general, not a lot of stuff seeming to be dying.
The Plagueburst Crawlers did almost nothing. 10th has knocked the range of the Entropy Cannons down by 12″, and this hurt me.
I was very troubled by the new Precision weapons which allow for characters attached to units to be shot at. Typhus was with Poxwalkers which have a lower Toughness than he does, and it’s their toughness that’s used when the unit is shot at even if Typhus can be selected as the target. This seemed like it would make him vulnerable. But, as it turns out, having basically 20 wounds around him (which also have a 5+ Feel No pain and can be added back into the unit) is a great level of protection. When he gets into combat you can kill off the Poxwalkers rather than take the hits on Typhus. If the enemy is packing weapons with high damage, which in previous editions were a big problem for Typhus, then seeing them kill of one wound chaff models is a good feeling.
Plague Gardening 