Deathwatch Third Outing: Finally a Win!

So last night my fledgling deathwatch force were up against a ynari list, and all their shenanigans. Still, after getting the initiative seized by a khorne army (allowing a lot of assault units to be halfway across the board before I could blink) and then seized the following week (allowing a lascannon squad to fire twice, absolutely decimating half my firebase) I was confident that my army, expressly designed to have a small number of drops so I should have the first turn the majority of the time, would have a good chance now we were finally fighting actual xenos, what we are supposed to fight.

So we set up, he seized...

Sigh

I'd just like the first turn once with this army. Just to see what it is like.

Anyway, he managed to strip one of my Corvus to half health, so I dropped the squad off among my own lines rather than risk carrying them to their deaths, and sent the Corvus off to harass and grab objectives. And other than that I went with an A-Team plan...

Knowing that things dying lets them do shenanigans, I was careful with my firepower. Ok, those boltguns at long range, and just the boltguns, will fire at one unit. Two frag missiles at a different target. Couple more frag missiles at a third. One krak missile at the wraithlord. This way I whittled most of his units down to being one or two members each, meaning that when something finally did die, he was left with fairly limited options about what to do... hmm, do I have the one wych charge or the one dire avenger shoot?

I held a lead on points for most of the game, and managed to pull off an 11-9 win. Things may have been closer but my opponent made a fatal error in turn 4, charging off an objective with a warlock to back up the big dead god avatar thingymajig. Absolutely unnecessary to the combat, but took him off an objective he needed to score for a single point AND for supremacy... Now he realised his error and scored them the next turn, but that cost him two cards for turn 5. We drew an extra two cards at the end of the game, one was easy, one was impossible, so only a slight narrowing of the scores... but then he didn't have linebreaker, and could have had it. But then neither did I. Still, a very close game.

Star of the show goes to my Corvus (the second one) that, aside from scoring me at least 4 vp over the course of the game, survived a shot in turn 5 by passing a 6+ armour save on one wound. It then went and put itself in a linebreaker position just in case, next to a unit with a blaster. It inevitably died, but the resulting explosion took out the unit that killed it. Result!

Overall, I felt this game went a lot better for me than others have. Special issue ammunition is more fun when you're not against just basic marines. I also felt I had a good plan for minimising the risk from the ynari special rules and it seemed to work quite well, although I'd have to face it a few times to be sure it was a good tactic and not just a good game.

I'm still waiting to see what it feels like to get the first turn with this army...