Battle Honors - Update

Warhammer 40,000 – For the first part of 2019, I’m running a Battle Honors campaign. This is a super flexible system that allows players to participate whenever they can. Since each non-character unit gains honors the more you play with it, most of the players are keeping the same 2000 points to maximize the growth potential. If players miss a week or fall behind the power level increases help to balance out the games by giving the lower power level a ruse card or sudden death card from the open war deck.

This week the brutal cold kept most players bundled up at home. Luckily one of the Ork player braved the weather to get in a game. We opted to stick with 1,000 points for this game to give us a chance to finish a game and help my opponent learn 8th edition a little easier.

Going through Chapter Approved 2018, the campaign is just progressing through each mission in order starting with Eternal War. Being the third week we played the third eternal war mission, which meant distributing “intel points” to characters and then trying to get them to the center of the board and keep them alive until the end of Turn 3.

After a less than impressive first turn, the Death Company (or for my chapter The Murder) was able to almost wipe out a unit of Nobs and the Big Mech with Forcefield. They put a hurt on Thraka and his Meganobs but splitting my attacks and whiffing on more than I should have meant I had to take some brutal return attacks. (My Captain rolled a one last week so was sitting the bench for this game, a librarian and lieutenant just don’t have the same impact on those hits.

For this game we were using the new bolter rules, and I love them suddenly my Primaris could hold down the fort and protect the objective from range. Double-tapping at 30” out made them more effective and hiding in cover while doing it made them a little more survivable. However anything that focused on them could still easily take them out. The issue with power armor with this AP system means its rare that you’re actually ever trying to making a 2+ or 3+ save and even when you are massed fire with anything means you’ll fail just enough saves to lose your small unit. I hope we’ll see more beta rules in the future to address the “durability” of Power Armor.

The game was quite fun and ended with Gazkill hiding trying to stay out of LOS of my Primaris who had to move up to get their sights on The Beast. The orks managed to pull out the first Xenos win of this campaign so now all factions are put at least one check in the win column,