If you want to go to war ... bring Knights

Warhammer 40,000 – Recently I was able to play a 2,000 point game of 40K and was able to field my three Knights as a Baronial Court allied with a Combined Arms detachment of Fire Hawks fro the Imperial Armor Badab War Supplement.

I made a custom figure for Knight Commander Elam and used bits from the Death Company to make some Tactical Sergeants with hand flamers. (Of course they'll be painted in Twilight Raven colors to match the rest of my force and keep my options open).

My list consisted of:

Knight Commander Elam

5 Vanguard Vets

2 Tactical Squads with hand flamers, flamers and multi meltas in drop pods

1 Land Speeder

1 Knight Gallant

1 Knight Crusader

1 Knight Paladin 

I faced off against a First Company Taskforce using Black Templar Chapter Tactics, allied with a White Scars bike CAD. These were painted in Dark Angels colors and my opponent is of the opinion that the Space Marine Codex does Dark Angels better than Dark Angels do Dark Angels. I don't remember exactly what his list consisted of other than a conversion of a land raider into a Spartan which carried a ten man squad of Terminators and he had Fast Attack drop pods to carry his five man squads of Terminators.

We played the second Maelstrom Mission and I got first turn. My opponent scouted his bikes far forward before I went which put them in the danger zone. My first turn the Gallant and Crusader unloaded on his command squad reducing them to just two models in the shooting phase, the assault phase finished the job although he was able to remove a hull point from the Gallant. On the other side of the table the Paladin dropped templates on the bikes causing some massive casualties. The number of 2's my opponent rolled for jink saves was astounding. 

The rest of the game was a bit of back and forth with the Fire Hawks failing to do much to impress me. The Vanguard Vets and Knight Commander did some damage to the blob of Thunder Hammer Terminators that poured out of the destroyed Spartan; but became a red mist when initiative 1 rolled around.

Just before the end of the game my opponents last squad of Terminators was able to kill the Gallant and died in the resulting explosion. 

In the end my opponent had two models left on the board  to my thirteen and was able to win the game 12vp to my 8vp. So even though it was clearly a slaughter he was able to tactically outplay me for the win. I think this shows the strength of the Maelstrom Missions especially when facing off against 3 super-heavies. If he wanted to my opponent could have ignored the Knights and just played to the mission which is essentially what he did.