Counter Offensive 2: Imperial Guard  by Rob Van Pelt-Cathcart
I actually never got the chance to play my general IG list this weekend. Guess I was having too much fun with the rest of them! In the long run, I don’t think it will really be a big deal. I called this my general list because it is what I normally field and I have played a list exactly or very close to this many times so there wasn’t any real experimentation to do here. I have a pretty good idea of the strengths and weaknesses, although I would have liked to play some armies I have not played against with this army before.

Armored Company
I played this list twice. The first game was my first of the day, against an Iron Warrior army that was completely mechanized with tank support in an Omega-level Seek and Destroy. The result was a loss by about 300 Victory Points, so it was a fairly close game and, indeed, that outcome really came down to the last couple of turns. By the end of Turn 4, I felt I had a marginal lead and would have a draw by about 100-200 Victory Points. The last two turns saw the Iron Warrior player have a spectacular amount of either luck or cunning, where he blew up more tanks in those two turns than the pervious four, about five tanks total. Meanwhile, I had been plodding along slowly all game, causing a little bit of damage each turn. I guess here, the turtle lost the race. I can’t really pick out any big things I did wrong. The game was a close one between two armies capable of inflicting a lot of damage from sheer firepower.

The second game was the big fight with Godzilla and Monster X. I amended my list to get rid of the weedy infantry for a few more tanks. Then I set up so that roughly half my forces would be facing each monster. My first impression was that they would quickly descend into my army and rip it apart: big, nasty monsters have a habit of that. But by the end of Turn 4, it seemed quite the opposite was happening: I was blowing through their Mass Points with ease with very little return damage. I was afraid I would kill them too easily, which wouldn’t be much fun either. But over the last few turns of the game, with each monster down to its last Wound or two, they got a second wind and learned how to make Armor Saves. It was a good, close game, and very fun to play.

Airborne
“I wanna be an airborne Ranger!” How does that song go? Anyway, I played one game with this list and it did about as I expected it to. I played a Secure and Control Alpha against a shooty, all-infantry Dark Angels army. Needless to say, my meager ground element got shot up pretty bad. Two Chimeras were popped on Turn 1 and the Hellhound never got to do anything by being shaken until it was destroyed in Turn 3. 

I was able to drive away his bikes, destroy his Dread, and pluck off a few Marines here and there with what was left of my ground forces, but the game rested on the air element to do some real work, and I think it performed very well. The “trick” to this army is the ability of four flyers to throw the enemy off balance with something they don’t expect.

Turn 2 was slow going, with only two flyers showing up, but doing some damage. The Valkyrie performed admirably, laying down four frag missile shots, plus multilaser and two heavy bolters turn after turn into packed Marine squads. The Vulture had one good turn where it laid a nasty salvo of six krak missiles and heavy bolter shots into a Command Squad about to assault a squad of groundpounders. The Lightnings were a little mediocre, with one doing one round of decent damage with its own salvo of six krak missiles and two lascannons, but the other didn’t pull much off with its autocannon and lascannons. In return, they drew quite a bit of enemy fire, of which only two stunned results occurred throughout the whole game. 

My only disappointment was Turn 6 with the Valkyrie. My opponent had a few of his units around one marker on my left, the middle one was pretty much open, and the right one was also pretty much open with a single Devastator Squad that may have been close. My plan to guarantee myself a tie was to have the Valkyrie go into hover mode by the rightmost marker, drop off the Stormtroopers, and have both blast away the Devs so they could not contest. Meanwhile, the Vulture would go into hover mode near the middle marker and it and the two Lightnings, along with the remaining ground forces, would shoot as much of his army as possible. This would give me a tie and a long shot at a win if my shooting was good enough. 

As luck and the dice gods would have it, the Valkyrie refused to show up on a 2+, even with a re-roll from my improved comms. So I lost, 0 markers to 1, pretty close even with me suffering a lot of casualties. All things considered, though, this army performed pretty well.

Related Pages 
Counter Offensive
Countdown to Counter Offensive 2

© Copyright Rob Van Pelt-Cathcart, September 2005
 

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