Battle Report – Imperial Knights vs. Astra Militarum (100PL)

Warhammer 40,000 – When 8th edition came out I had decided to focus on learning to play my core troops and leave the super heavies in the cabinet until after the first of the year. The majority of my local group has stuck by that, except the guard players have been chomping at the bit to put the Baneblade variants on the table. Being as I really want to play my Knights more often I put out a warning, "In the event someone brings and Super Heavy and I'm paired against them, I'll be running a four Knight list." This week guess what I got paired against?

My opponent brought a Doomhammer, two maticores, some gun encampments, a bunch of infantry squads, sentinels, ogryn, priests and several psykers. My list consisted of:

Super Heavy Detachment (+3 CP)

LORD OF WAR - Knight Gallant - Leader with Relic
LORD OF WAR - Knight Paladin
LORD OF WAR - Knight Atropos
LORD OF WAR - Knight Acheron

We played the Dominate and Destroy mission out of Chapter Approved. I like the format of these new Eternal War Missions as they seem to be better balanced and more fun then the previous missions. Scoring each turn for objects you control forces some movement if the objectives are deployed outside of your deployment zone. At first I thought it was silly that each unit only netted one point instead of the Power Level of each unit, until it was pointed out that weighting destroying units invalidates the 1 point per objective. (One rhino kill is worth sitting on four objectives sooo ... we played the mission as written)

The board set up was a desert with a defense line and bastions set up on one edge and a pump station and bar on the other end of the table. Sadly we rolled football field deployment so walking into a gun line should be a challenge. I chose the short edge with the Bastions as my deployment zone only to deny it from my opponent. He'd make far to much use out of the defense lines with that many troops. I finished setting up first and won the dice roll, sadly my opponent was able to seize the initiative and take the first turn.

Weathering a hail of fire my Knights managed to survive the initial onslaught of preliminary bombardment and the entire force unloading on my four models. Oddly enough I only failed my saves against the lasguns showing that yes even a lowly lasgun can wound a Knight Titan with a lucky shot, when the volcano cannon bounced harmlessly off my shields.

My return salvo was less than impressive but, I was able to get into my opponents lines with the Atropos making a juicy target he would later attempt to counter assault. After pasting several guardsmen with my Titanic Feet, I moved closer to the Doomhammer, intent on taking it out before my Knight's reactor went critical.

By the time the Atropos connected with the Doomhammer it only had 7 wounds left. It turns out even that badly damaged the colossal machine was able to bring it's lascutter to bear and slice open the Titanic tank. The resulting explosion took out almost everything with 12" of the massive tank and caused a the Atropos to also go critical finishing off anything left in the area.

Having four Knights on the table was fun, I don't know that I'd play them all the time but occasionally busting them out is fun. Having access to a decent stratagem and relic make a huge difference, taking this list from mediocre to impressive. Once the Knights has a full codex I'm sure there will be many more options available to make the force unique and fun to field.