De spair - The time of The D weapon is upon us

The title of this blog article is a little overly dramatic, but after my most recent 40K game I have the opportunity to feel the power of the D weapon, and for a non competitive gamer like myself, it was a little demoralising.

Imposing Knights. The Farseer? No, he spent most of the game trying not to join the party staying in reserve.

My Tuesday night game was a 1850 point game versus Callum's Eldar and Imperial Knight ally army. Callum is certainly a competitive tournament player and has no qualms about creating a most effective and optimised force. For example, his army for this game consisted of an Eldar Farseer on jet bike, two minimal jet bike units, an Eldar Knight with.....a drum roll please.....two D-Cannons, and three Imperial Knights armed with a selection of toys.

For my army I continued to put my faith in the Iron Hands, but from the new Space Marine Codex I  took one of the new formation, which I thought may help me against Callum's army. Three Las-Cannon armed Land Raiders which take hull points, but ignore pretty much everything else. I also had three Thunderfires Cannons with their bonus to their BS and my usual scouts in Land Speeder Storms. I had the Techmarine with the Conversion Beamer as my Warlord and then two Stormtalons.

My. Aren't you tall?

I decided against the Sternguard in Drop Pod, which may have been a different option, but I don't think it will have changed the result of the game very much. We played a standard maelstrom game with six objective markers and hammer and anvil deployment.

A Thundefire with a BS of 6 would do very badly to miss an Imperial Knight and it is then just a small matter of rolling a six to get a glancing hit on its side armour. During the game I didn't roll poorly for wounding Knights, but then again, I didn't roll above average either. I had managed to get the first turn, and despite focusing only on one Knight, caused only four glancing hits. Bring forth the pain.

To cut a short story even shorter, one Land Raider disappeared following the attention of a D-Cannon, the other two fell foul of two Reaper Chainswords. The Thunderfires lasted a little longer, but not much. The scouts scurried around collecting objectives until the enemy turned their attention to their activities. The Stormtalons buzzed around like mozzies but to little effect. By turn four I was only 6 points to 8 behind. But by turn five Callum had reached 13 points with no additions for me. The final action of the game was a Knight standing on my Warlord.

Knight: 'Oh dear. I appear to have something stuck to my shoe'!

I had managed to kill one Knight during the game but otherwise it had been an extremely one sided affair. This was not a surprise for me, but the potency of the D weapons was. It just seemed a little overpowered and requiring little skill, that you could hit a Land Raider with one dice roll, and with a second roll of a 6 to remove the toughest tank in the game completely from play. Not to worry, I shall just have to come up some better and more effective ideas for my next exposure to the D.

Happy wargaming.