Hello everyone. Zak Ludick here again with another Warhammer 40k Battle Report!
Like I said in my last one... I am severely behind in these... and then I went to hospital! LOL
But I have explained all of that on my blog! Let's get stuck in!
This battle was fought against my good buddy @xenowolfza who was building his Adeptus Custodes army last year for 2024. This year he is building a Necron army... no doubt I will be playing lots of games against Necrons this year!
In this battle we take 750pts of Horde Space Wolves against 750pts of Adeptus Custodes.
Fighting Custodes is like wolves trying to hunt a Bear. Or a pack of Velociraptors hunting a T-Rex.
As a Space Marine you are usually used to the fact that your units are superior to others and equal to other Space Marines. Chaos Space Marines generally have something boosted depending on their patron deity but we all know that this is cheating and Space Marines make up for that with their other abilities that Chaos Marines do not have.
But when you fight the Custodes you realize that your Space Marines are inferior at everything.
The only saving grace for you is that Custodes are expensive in points and there will be few of them on the board.
Let's see how this battle went!
Deployement
Pretty standard here. Long Fangs behind a piece of cover they will use to look out across the battlefield at the enemy.
1x Unit of 10 Blood Claws on the left behind cover led by a Wolf Guard Battle Leader (Lieutenant).
1x Unit of 10 Blood Claws in the center with no leader (bait).
1x Unit of 10 Blood Claws on the right behind the building and the bait unit led by a Rune Priest (Librarian).
One unit of 4x Custodian Guard with Sword and Shield.
One unit of 4 Custodian Wardens led by Captain-General Trajann Valoris
And... that's it... this is what he deploys, out of sight and keeps 1x unit of 3x Allarus Terminators in Reserve.
Make no mistake. Each one of these is worth multiple Space Marines in both offence and defense.
My theory is that people who struggle and fail against Custodes do so because they confuse Custodians for "Very strong Space Marines".
They are not like Space Marines at all! Stop thinking that way!
The Game begins!
I cannot remember who went first. It looks like I did, but I cannot be sure due to the end of game results.
Anyway above you can see that my Long Fangs took up shop in the building looking over most of the board.
Blood Claws Swarmed forward towards the objectives. Those are those skull shaped circles on the board.
Right. I remember now. I shunted forward and on the Leftmost Objective I placed a Deadly Prize on the Objective. That means I hold it even when no troops are there and that squad ran back and hid behind the ruin again.
Meanwhile the two units in the center had a scuffle with the Wardens. What happened there is the bait unit used a Stratagem to wedge themselves in between those two pieces of terrain and prevented the Wardens from making contact with BOTH units.
The Wardens would have been able to shoot one unit nearly gone and then charge a full unit and the remnant and kill BOTH in combat.
So I shoved the remnant into the gap, preventing a double contact!
The following turn I declared Oath of Moment against the Wardens and Trajann.
Then it was Long Fang Lascannons and both Blood Claw units firing everything they had into that unit...
That managed to kill all four Wardens! Treating Custodes like tanks and shooting at them with Meltaguns and Lascannons is more appropriate than treating them like Space Marines.
That unit fought against Trajann and still they did not manage to kill him. The other Blood Claws fought the Terminators and I think they killed one but the Custodes have a Stratagem to bring one back to each squad once per game... so he was back...
I was gaining lots of Victory Points at the expense of Space Marine lives.
It was only a matter of time until the Custodian Guard joined the battle...
And so they did. This killed all the Blood Claws and the Wolf Guard Battle Leader.
End of Game Shenanigans
A small remnant of one of the units managed to survive. They used a Stratagem to use Guerilla Tactics and disappeared from the board and reappeared in the Custodes taking their home objective.
The Allarus Terminators also used an ability to teleport into my back lines, scoring Behind enemy lines.
The Long Fangs then dashed out from their cover to claim and score the objective on the unprotected flank. Unusual for the old timers, but a tactic that was necessary!
Space Wolves Win!
With a large amount of Victory Points scored by holding the objectives for majority of the time and scoring good Secondary Objectives, the game was mine. It was tough and hard fought. We had both learned a lot.
10th Edition game stats
31 Games Played
26 Wins
5 Losses
83.87% Winrate.
Thank you for reading this post!
Tag List:
@aussieninja, @new.things, @alonicus, @dungeondog, @xenowolfza, @riesakashiya, @tomster-17, @exptrader, @borsengelaber, @makerhacks, @jacobtothe, @fredfettmeister, @mirroredspork, @kheldar1982, @surrealis, @oblivioncubed, @owen-turner
*PS, Should you wish to be removed or added to the taglist, please let me know!
Cheers!
@zakludick
I love battle reports so much!
I like to think of Custodes as mini-Knights. They are so tough and sometimes you don't have anything that can really wound them... but they also have so few models that you can potentially outscore them because they simply don't have enough models or models that can cover enough distance to score well.
You are 100% correct.
I treat them like tanks and fire Lascannon at them.
I know they have a 4+ invul but I make them sweat every time I wound them and when some go through, D6+1 damage basically sees dead Custodes happen most of the time!