Get Off My L'aun: T'pau vs Crypt Angels

 The Crypt Angels are very much in the mood to remove some illegal immigrants. Jimulthuan Quadrant turn five has just started, and they're coming in hot!

This is the first battle of turn 5, and it's a Exert Battlefield Dominance in the Crypt Angel's home system, Rylstone. Kas is determined to deport or destroy the aliens, it's high time they were gone. 

Here to Stay

Kraken here. I'm the Greater Good tonight, and running 2000 points of Mont'ka. Purge the Foe - keep calm and kill Space Marines. Kas has also played right into my trap by buying lots of shiny new toys for his home armies. I'm very keen to try some of them!

• The Twin Lance - shooty and punchy? That's how T'au spell 'cheating'. These two named heroes are bonkers, able to nip around all over the place and punch down into pretty much any target. 
• Darkstrider - who I cannot help but call Darkwing all game. He's leading the Pathfinders and has a nice 12" deep strike denial bubble
• Coldstar Commander - leading the Starscythes and giving them an extra turn in Mont'ka mode with the Exemplar relic
• Enforcer Commander - running lone today with triple plasma rifles and a markerlight drone, he's more for utility than shooting, but he's also got a relic that gives two units a 6" scout move. Today, it's the Broadsides and one of the Riptides
• Cadre Fireblade - to lead the Fire Warriors, but also give me extra OC on a chosen objective. I choose the more distant central one
• Firestrike Team - a controller and three sniper drones, more here to make up points than anything else, but also potentially a useful action monkey
• 10 Fire Warriors - big guns and big hearts
• 10 Pathfinders - don't let them spot you! 
• 5 Stealth Suits - Three burst guns and two fusion rifles, these are a fantastic utility piece
• 5 more Stealth Suits - So let's have more of them
• 10 Vespid Stingwings - Brand new, these are jumpy and shooty in equal measure
• 2 Piranhas - fast and light, here to tag vehicles with their fusion guns and seeker missiles
• 2 Riptides with Ion accelerators, missile drones and plasma rifles
• 2 Broadsides - Rail Rifles and missile drones, they're faster than they look in Mont'ka
• 3 Crisis Starscythe Battlesuits - flamers and burst cannons probably not the best choice against Marines, but a good mobile unit to have anyway
• 1 Ghostkeel - because all the rest of this stuff wasn't enough already! Tough and hard to deal with, this can help me tag units in the middle. 

As a Purge detachment, I want to kill stuff. Being able to jump about quickly early on is going to help no end, I reckon, this is as competitive a list as I've taken in a long time. 

Here to Slay

Kas has an experimental mix of detachments. The new look Librarius Conclave makes his Librarians pretty potent, and the Orbital Assault Force makes Drop Pods and the units jumping out of them that little bit nastier. 

• Kasfunatius! It's Guilliman really, but don't tell anyone. The Crypt Angels Chapter Master is here to shout orders and cleave heads
• Biker Chaplain with the Outriders
• Chaplain with the Bladeguard
• Bladeguard Ancient - boosts their OC
• Terminator Librarian - with the Terminators
• 2 more Librarians - both with Sternguard squads, these give their teams 4+ invulns in this detachment. Nice!
• 2 Apothecaries - in the Sternguard, picking up the injured and keeping them rolling
• 2 units of 10 Sternguard - pairs of heavy bolters, led by lots of small characters, these get a heap of buffs against Oath targets. Kas has further upgraded them so that one unit gets devastating wounds against Vehicles and Monsters, and the other can do uppy-downy things once a game
• 5 Infiltrators - a token attempt to claim the midfield against my huge swathes of cloaked battlesuits
• 5 Terminators - Cyclone launcher and stormbolters
• 6 Bladeguard - choppy, and here with their bannerman, pretty good on objectives
• 3 Plasma Inceptors - vicious close-range shooting
• 2 Drop Pods - one with the Bladeguard, one with a Sternguard team

This is a Recon disposition, it generally needs to spread out and do actions. There's a lot of redeploy stuff Kas can do with it, but I think his plan is more or less to shoot and kill first, do missions later. The Drop Pods, being useless after they hit the ground, are here as action monkeys, which is a smart plan. 

Mission and Terrain

Recon vs Purge gives us this as the game: I get Consecrate, he gets Triangulate. 

Any time a Tau unit kills something, they get a blessing that they can then stick on an Objective to Consecrate it. The more objectives I bless, the more I score, with a big bonus if I can do that on the enemy homefield. 

Kas can perform an action to Triangulate an objective, one a turn. He scores more per round the more he maps out, again with a bonus for getting my backfield. 

The terrain is not an official map, Kas had just played some other games and we booked this at short notice. Rather than redo his table, we split the middle objective in two and used what we had. 

Deployment

We're Zooming this game, so photos are a bit thin on the ground again. I managed a few of the state of play, though! 

With my million billion units, infiltrators and scouts, I could lock down pretty much my entire half of the table. Deepstrike through that, Drop pods! Kas was particularly anxious when he learned about Darkstrider. That 12" denial bubble was immediately messing with his plan to stick pods on objectives and tag them. 

He's also got almost everything in orbit, ready to hit later. Only his infiltrators and the Chapter Master are on the field, hence me getting the run of everything to start. 

Then he gets first turn, and off we go. 

Game On!

You know how I said the Ghostkeel was tough to deal with earlier on? It seems Kas shares my opinion. Turn one sees a drop pod full of Sternguard slam down into the midfield ruins near it, select it as the Oath of Moment and then riddle it with their bolters. 

Their bolters don't like Oath of Moment targets, they get devastating wounds on 5+ against them. Re-rolling all the everything results in a very dead Ghostkeel in as long as it takes Kas to rake the fistfuls of dice he's rolling into order. Including the heavy bolters, it's about thirty wounds or so, so holofields or not, I'm toast. 

Thing is, that's about it - Kas was hoping to slam his drop pods down further forwards and then use them as action monkeys to start triangulating. My army is so big and so spread out across my entire half that he can't get anywhere that he really wants to be. Special thanks to Darkstrider, whose 12" denial bubble has totally screened my near expansion. So he's advanced down the left side with Infiltrators, Kasfunatius is skulking at the back and there are some Chaplain-led bikers getting ready to hit my right flank, but that's all he's brought out so far.

In my turn, then, I get the Stealth teams sprinting up into the middle and left, a pack of bigger stuff advancing out of the ruins to support and light up the Sternguard, and consolidate my right side further up, moving the Broadsides into the open to provide cover. 

This is roughly the end of the first turn, I think

Once markerlit, the Drop Pod gets slagged in seconds, and I'm able to dedicate its death to the Greater Good on the near middle objective. The rest of my shooting puts a good dent in the Sternguard, about half of them, but I don't quite have the numbers of guns (or the dice skill) to clear them as well. Then, for giggles, the Stealth team on the left charges the Infiltrators, who are surprised enough to lose a wound to them and muff their return attacks. 

So far so good, I have a small lead and Kas is sounding anxious. He still needs to find a hole to start hitting me, and he still doesn't have one. Turn two sees his Terminators teleport in to back the Infiltrators, who fall back. The Stealth Teams have to go, their improved Guidance is pretty nasty, and Kas sees it done using a strats to let him pick two consecutive Oaths. He also pops his Inceptors in on the other side of the far expansion, and they perforate the Piranhas handily. 

Those Bikers are ready to make their play, aiming for a Pathfinder team on my near expansion. The Broadsides blast a couple away with Overwatch, then their shooting mostly hits rubble, and then their charge wipes the Pathfinders. 

Almost! Because Darkfinder doesn't quite die, holding on with a pair of wounds. This is excellent - it means he can't consolidate into the Broadsides, so although he scores for grabbing the objective off me, he's left very exposed. 

And so it proves - the Broadsides shoot all the bikes away in my next turn, leaving only the Chaplain on a single wound. He loses that when they charge and tank shock him, and I dedicate his death to the nearby objective. 

Elsewhere, though, it's less rosy. I've got my eyes on the Terminator brick, and hit it with everything I've got, including close range fire from the Twin Lance. Everything rolls a bit tame, and Kas has a 4+ invuln from his Librarian. Even after charging the Twin Lance in, there's still a pair of Termies left, so I bounce back away from them. 

My dice are failing me - I couldn't finish the Inceptors, even with Vespids and Firewarriors, even with a desperate charge! And moving everything up has now finally left a big backline hole, just big enough for a Drop Pod. 

Kas's turn three swings the table pretty well. The wounded Sternguard have been healing up, and when their unwounded brothers arrive, they tag team one of the Riptides with ease. The other Drop Pod arrives, full of Bladeguard, and that charges and threatens my home objective, killing the Enforcer Commander who'd been guarding it and pinning the Vespids in combat. 

That's the end of turn 3, the Bladeguard have burst out of that Drop Pod and taken my home objective

My Firewarriors melt away, and those damned Terminators come romping up the field, have a really good turn of shooting and charging and kill the Twin Lance. 

At least I still have the right flank. And over the next two turns, as Kas slowly mops up what's left of my resistance on the left and middle, I still manage to cause him headaches. 

I've got a couple of tiny units (the Firestrike team and Darkstrider) who are sneaking about in ruins, hitting secondaries and keeping my points up. My Broadsides, Crisis team and the other Riptide are all over his home objective by this time, and he really can't do much about it except feed units towards it bit by bit. His big Sternguard are out of position, as is the Chapter Master. His Terminators can redeploy to help, but Darkstrider still forces them further back than they want to be. 

We end up having an excellent shootout over his home objective - he stopped me scoring Defend Steonghold earlier, and I return the favour. The extra saves from his Librarian means it takes me the rest of the game, but the wounded Sternguard are finally reduced to just an Apothecary, after the Firestrike team snipe the Librarian away. 

End of turn 4, I think - we've split the table down the middle and taken half each!

So it comes down to my last turn, and a last draw of secondaries. The scores have ended up neck and neck, and Kas is just ahead by about fifteen points. I'm still scoring well, especially as I'm almost certainly going to kill that apothecary with Broadside fire in the last turn. If I can draw Assassinate as a secondary, and I know it's in the deck, then I'll clinch it. 

It doesn't show, even on a redraw. Checking the deck afterwards, it was two cards away - so close! The game goes to the Crypt Angels, but only just, and it was a hell of a battle. 

Result: Crypt Angels win, 72:68!

Aftermath

That was great! A much better game than our last one, we were both sweating it until the last. 

Kas has already played quite a bit of 11th Ed, and he says this game is pretty typical of what he's experiencing for the most part. Close fought games where one side takes an early advantage, but that the mission balance is good enough that it creeps back for a tense finale. 

Both of us like the new strats, and being able to keep Secondaries for later makes for a much more generous experience. I don't mind getting something I can't do right now, it's there for later. Great rule!

Yes, I took a very poky list, but that's okay sometimes! Especially against Kas's Sternguard list, that's a great bit of synergy. It led to a very narrative game overall, the Marines dropping in and purging points, the T'au sprinting about and working in teams to murder the Astartes. 

Kas took it, though, and this is tied in to the campaign. So Rylstone is now finally once more Dominated by the Crypt Angels. He's got another match to play as he looks to knock Chaos out of the system too. Watch this space!