Today the butchers smelled an unusual scent wafting on the air. They said it would be good eating. Boss agreed so we marched after it with his buds.

We found a lot of scary-looking thinlings in lots of metal armor. Some rode horses. One rode a dragon! He seemed to be thier leader. If I had a dragon, I’d be a leader, too.

We met them in battle, and at first the leadbelchers did quite well, making grand noise and knocking several bare-chested thinlings off thier horses. 2 of the ogres got lost in some woods though. They didn’t show thier faces until later. I could still smell them though so they must not have wandered far.

Then the horsemen all charged, and so did the dragon. Some of the ogres tried to get away, but it didn’t work. Dragons must really like ogre meat the way it ate one of the leadbelchers. The big scary armored knights though, they met Muscles the Butcher and his boys. They had a right good fight there, and a couple of the boys went down (good eatin’ later!) but they held them scary men up for a long time.

Then the dragon came in behind the boss’s bunch and tried to breath all over them. It smelled pretty bad, but not worse then some of Muscles’s gas so the boys were ok. I think them other gnoblars hanging around the boss’s legs got sick from it though, ’cause they never tried to hit anything after that.

Boss must not have noticed the dragon’s breath because he just charged on after a bunch of armored men with a biiiiig banner that hurt my eyes. They whomped em good when they charged in. And the Boss, he got to that banner man, squished him up good, then tossed him into that aweful maw on his belly. Smished up scary man reminded me of last gnoblar that got under boss’s foot. Not pretty sight.

Then dragon sneak up behind boss’s gang and start eating his iron gut guards. Good thing Grinder the Butcher had worked his mojo, becuase one of the boys got his gut almost ripped off, but it grew back and then he swung up with his big stick and knocked the scary smelly pussy man off the dragon. Too bad the banner bruiser get willies and run. Other ogres think he know where more food was, but he didn’t. He just lose nerve. Boss find out later, eat him, give banner to iron gut that knock off pussy-man. Now he’s new bruiser.

That’s about when the gorgers started showing up and eating thinlings. Some leadbelchers decided to get some thinling meat before gorgers ate it all, and between them they kill or scare away whole lot of men with not much armor on them. Ogres always like meal with more meat anyway. Iron not taste as good. They still fill men’s banner with lots of meat before heading home.

Muscles and his loud friend finish killing scary armored men on horses and decide it good time to head back towards camp, taking banner with them for new apron.

By then though, fight was over and everyone head back to camp to cook dinner.

–Basic Army lists–

Me:
Tyrant w/ tenderizer, wyrdstone, gutmaw
Butcher w/ siegebreaker, skullmantle
Butcher w/ bangstick, dispell scroll
Bruiser w/ ragbanner
4 guts, 3 guts, 3 guts, 3 bulls; all with bellowers
3 pairs of lead belchers
2 gorgers

Him:
Nurgle chaos lord on dragon
Army standard bearer (in a block of warriors)
chaos knights, musician, standard
horseback marauders
block of 20+ marauders w/ slaanesh, musician, standard
2 blocks of warriors w/ slaanesh, musician, standard

Game results: He ended ahead by only 6 victory points. Tie game.

Footslogging chaos marines have finally finished up.

Havoc squads were worth thier weight in pure awesome.

Lesser Daemons proved thier worth as a backup unit or as a cheap objective camper.

Any icon other Chaos Glory doesn’t work well for me, because the squad will break while under half strength. My dice betray me often on this.

I also learned what you can really do with joe chaos marines and what they can and can not handle. My intuitive grasp of how I can use my troops has improved.

I’ve alos learned to think farther ahead for what I want my units to do. You have to when your mobility is so limited.

I gained an appreciation for a cheap Karmoon special squad of chaos terminators. They get the job done well once you learn where to plunk them down.

Now, with this experiment wrapping up, I’m moving back into my old favored grounds with a mechanized list. But, still looking to shake things up a little and broaden my tactical horizons further, I picked up a few things I wouldn’t normally.

I’ve taken a chaos lord of nurgle in power armor with a daemon weapon for my sole HQ. He rides in a rhino with some plague marines. I normally don’t care for the randomness of daemon weapons, but I think this one will work out well with the new poisoned weapon rules in 5th Edition.

2 Chaos Dreadnoughts are also seeing some table time, and I have to admit I like the crazy little nuggets. Pop a missile launcher and a CC arm on them, pop transports or let them charge around like maniacs. They absorbed an obscene amount of fire ni thier first time on the field and still got one across the board to pull a scoring unit off the objective. For a piddly 100 points each, these guys are pretty brilliant for me. they’ve also sparked conversion ideas I’ll be working on, but that will probably take some time.

I also got around to making some objective markers. I used some nice reaper minis, mounted on the bases I use for my chaos marines, then painted them like they’d been turned to stone, with all thier old gear still hanging on them. Figure we’ve got a few old artifacts on the statues to fight over. Or even to revive them. Whatever, it’s still chaosy.

So, it’s more fragile against most stuff it’s likely to fight. And it has trouble assaulting into cover due to a lack of grenades and a weak save. What’s it good for? Tactical Reinforcements.

Essentially, these little guys are good for popping up where you need a little extra help. They can assault the turn they arrive, so they con pop down and join an on-going assault, or tie up a nearby enemy unit that stinks in melee (hi guardsmen, how are you today?), or they can also be a cheap scoring unit to leave sitting on an objective twiddling their thumbs instead of wasting one of your pricey killy units on that job.

For example, Plague Marines are often looked to for holding an objective. But even a small squad is very expensive. And if they sit on the home objective all game while the rest of the army goes after the enemy, they usually just sit there being an expensive paper weight. Lesser Daemons can fill that same job for much cheaper.

They can also throw enemy plans off. 1 scoring unit moves near 2 objectives and the enemy commits to trying to contest the 1 the unit could likely reach. Suddenly there’s a second scoring unit and not enough enemy forces to stop them both.

Now, not every army has equal use for these things. A highly mobile army with lots of bikes, transports, raptors, etc, probably has the speed to change up the battle plan as needed. Less mechanized forces can find the extra flexibility of bringing them in quite desirable.

And that’s ultimately what lesser daemons offer. Tactical flexibility. Anytime you can reliably place a unit where it needs to be after the battle has already started shaping up, that gives you an advantage. They’re a bit on the weak side, but for the price, they’re worth it.

The Havoc squad has yet to be wiped out, and yet it consistently kills more vehicles then the obliterator squads. I basically get told the enemies just don’t have a good way to remove the entire squad.

The Lesser Daemons have been doing well. they either enter combat and die but not before killing off at least 1 unit, or they sit off in never-land camping an obscure objective that wins me the game. In a slow list like this, thier ability to pop in where I need them makes them very handy.

The big Khorne marked squads are kinda so-so. They tend to be the focus of enemy attack and often die rapidly. In fact, thier most often cause of death is fleeing from close combat and either running off the board or getting swept. An Icon of Chaos Glory would greatly alleviate that, albiet at the price of some offensive punch.

So, what I’m thinking of next:
Drop the Prince and the Oblits entirely.
Take a cheap lord.
Add in another squad or two of basic CSM with missile launchers
Change the melta squad to Chaos Glory from Khorne and add a combi-melta on the champ
Beef up the size of the main Khorne squad some more.

The net result of various tinkering on this leads to about 80 models in the army. 72 in power armor, and 8 daemons.

Other ideas:
Add in what is known as a “Karmoon Special”. It’s a squad of 4 terminators. 3 with combi-plasma, and 1 with a power fist and Heavy Flamer. It’s a deepstriking suicide squad that’s only 140 points and can unleash a lot of havoc.

We both made a battle line towards the middle of our deployments, me with the heavies in the middles, khornies to either side, and the prince and plagues both reinforcing the left near the eldar objective.

Right off the bat the new baby-sitting squad made itself worthwhile. I put my objective back in a corner and just parked that lascannon squad right on it. Over the course of the game, they didn’t do a whole lot, but thier lascannon did contribute to wrecking a fireprism and immobilizing a falcon before it could jet over to contest. Not bad.

The smaller khorne marked squads still did thier jobs quite well. Neither survived the battle, but they did bring the fight to the eldar objective, keeping them occupied the full 6 turns just defending thier marker. The jetbike seer council was a royal pain and wound up dealing the bulk of the enemy’s damage to my troops, but I didn’t have the ability to catch them, and shooting them while perma-fortuned just doesn’t work well as I’d have to ignore the rest of the army.

Even so, the lesser daemons served well, summoning in and pasting a dire avenger squad then marching on to help soak fire on the way to the enemy objective. I did make a mistake trying to assault a wounded firedragon unit instead of forcing them to waist a unit’s shooting on thier own turn to finish the squad off. Had I done so, I might have had something left of my last khorne squad to limp over and contest the eldar objective for the win.

The nekkid daemon prince did his job exceptionally well. Pasted a transport worth more then his own points while forcing a unit of dire avengers to flee in the process (they managed to regroup about 2″ from the table edge ). He then proceeded to absorb basically an entire round before eating an assault from the seer council on his last wound and flubbing his attacks back.

The plague marines did basically the same as the prince, eating a large amount of fire., letting the prince and khornies get in close. I actually beat my way through his entire army to contest his objective, and eleminated all but 1 of his scoring units, downed all of hit tanks with only one not completely destroyed.

Havoc squad probably took the MVP award though as they downed multiple skimmers and polished off one of the objective camping squads. The oblits assisted as well, but mostly just took the brunt of the missle / lance fire.

In the end we had a tie, both still hanging on to our repective objectives. Big shock, I know. Not like that scenario ever winds up as a tie (gasp, shock). I won on Kill Points, my opponent took the win on Victory points, so we both could come away with morale victories after a fashion.

The biggest thing I think I should have done differently was to bring in the daemons on the left instead of the right. The right offered a ready charge, sure, but the left could have tipped the balance enough to let me finish driving off thier last scoring unit, or keep something around to contest at the end.