Sunday, December 28, 2008

How to Survive the Shooty Army

Hello, my name is Wolf Lord Bill and I am an impatient painter. While I like to play strictly wysiwyg and never play with unpainted models, I have never been able to savor the meaningful relationship . . . but seriously I had to go to the hobby store, buy paint, and crank out my scouts in less than three hours like my life depended on it despite the fact that I have another week of sitting around my mother-in-law's house. When I put together my Space Wolves army there were plastic Grey Hunter and Blood Claw boxes but I don't remember there being plastic termies and scouts. The ease of plastic was amplified by the assortment of fresh paints. My one mistake is that I bought black citadel wash and mistook it for ink so I poured half of it into water before I tried applying full-strength to my model. Carolina Comics in Lawton, Oklahoma is a nice, clean, well-run little shop. My only complaint is that I was strongly tempted to spend $75.00 dollars of my GW budget on Cable & Deadpool compilation books. What was the point of this post again? Oh, right . . .
I would really like to add to and complete the promised theme concerning playing against a shooty army. The topic is important to me because it was a major weakness of my initial list. The rhino heavy detachment was light on numbers and depended on brittle transports as well as lascannons that were attached to vehicles. Shooty armies had no trouble ripping up my vehicles and then sucking out their juicy innards from a safe distance. 
My first attempt to address the problem without buying new models was to try to go first turn using my venerable dreadnought's special rule and then use terrain and pop smoke. This was rarely entirely successful. This is about as far as my adjustments developed before I sat out almost all of fourth edition.
With this Christmas, I've taken further measures. A couple of drop prods will hopefully encourage my enemies to run a more balanced force and maybe move around a little bit. Obviously any way that I can engage shooting units will contribute to the survivability of my advancing Land Raiders, Rhinos, as well as units holding down objectives. Space Wolves scouts have the unique ability to remain in reserves and then come in on the side of my opponent. They offer a very flexible range of weapon options including meltagun and two power weapons. Without the added cost of a transport, these guys should keep opponents on their toes. 
I'll be putting pods and scouts to work to see what revelations remain hidden in the experience of future games.

3 comments:

  1. Wolf scouts do have a way of making problems in the back field. Especially with the weapons they can take like you mentioned.

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  2. MMMM drop pods. I love em, other than my deathwing I always use them. A good drop pod placement will tear a shooty army up. Plus with inertial guidance they rarely miss now. survive that round when tey land and then DEATH to all. Only negative to pods is the automatic Point you lose because of them. Also a good scout backfield heck even a good scout forward unit can do some damage. (scouts stealth flank, all mean change of plans to stand still and shoot guys.)

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  3. Pretty cool, I don't really know what the stuff about Wolves are but i would actually make a raven guard based army with them with scouts like that just... geez you could put your entire army on their deployment zone by turn 3 (if your lucky)

    also the one on the far left HAS NO EYES!!!

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