Thursday, March 31, 2011

Stormraven Deathstar - another perspective

The Stormraven bomb found on the web is pretty much one of three things: Death Company, Assault Terminators, or Mephiston. Is there another way...?

My problem with these three is dealing with Mech lists in general. And with mech being the king of 5th, shouldn't your all-comers list accomodate proper counters? So what IS the problem with using Mephiston, Assault Terminators, or DC against mech... 

So why not get locked into combat, with a meched unit turn 1 - or at the very least wipe it entirely and be relatively safe in 4+ crater cover or behind a wreck? How hard is that to pull off with these units? Well, Meph and Ass termies are going to need a hand from the stormraven, and you get one shot. I wouldn't count on a single twin linked multi melta reliably killing the transport target.

Yes, armies are all about synergy but unfortunately in my Lamenters I don't have any type of guaranteed supporting firepower that is going to knock out a transport 100% of the time, which most raven bomb lists also don't have.

So the solution is to make the actual payload unit able to kill the transport then assault the occupants. Yes, you can do that in 5th edition. DC only have a poor chance at this if it's a large 10 man packing 2 infernus pistols. Chances are you won't have the 3" range anyway.

So the unit I have came up with is one that I field all the time anyway. My trusted 2x CML combat squad, this time rolling with a blood lancing terminator librarian. I have assault terminators, but after deep thought I realized how overlooked using a standard terminator combo can be. Zoom 12", dump, blow up transport, assault occupants. Mathhammer wise, the terminator group on its own has about a 70% chance of wrecking or blowing up an AV11 vehicle. If they fail, well, they'll just do the same thing that hammernators would do and blow it up in assault. But if I do get within 6" then the 70% chance is pretty appealing.

Of course, what is a stormraven deathstar without a furioso?

I will try and test this deathstar loadout this weekend and see what happens.

More to come

3 comments:

  1. You know you can't use 'Skies of Blood' and then assault, right? It is the last line of the rule.

    As far as things to put in a Stormraven, I also like putting Sanguinor in there w/ a Furioso bodyguard. It really enlarges his +1 attack aura...

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  2. I don't think you can assault after dropping out of a 24" move. It counts you as deep striking I believe. The cyclone does sound like a neat idea though but it puts those units at risk, they will take the full brunt of the opponents army and get wasted really quickly.

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  3. My bad, I did not realize that. I edited out the part about the 24" move :)

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