Imperial Guard & Kill Team

 

This weekend my buddy came over and we got some game time in (after the usual geeking out time of talking about awesome stuff) and he was the good friend and brought kill Team with him.  Now I apologize for no pictures but my internet is acting wonky and can't get any to load at the moment, I will add a few later.  Well actually I forgot to take pictures during the game, so I will try and recreate.  The short of it is that Kill Team is huge fun and if you are on the fence on whether to get, go for it, I will be picking it up shortly.  Its a really good rule set and is just ripe for house/gentlemen rulings.  The nice thing is some of your less taken units can be quite useful in this small setting.  The IG have a pretty good time in Kill Team with access to more than a few vehicles and as always Platoons can give you a lot of fun.



So here's the breakdown.  You get 200 points to spend, you can choose 0-2 Troops, 0-1 Elites, 0-1 Fast Attack.  Now the restrictions are where this gets nice and interesting, You cannot take flyers, 2+ save models(note this is any 2+ save not just armored), no vehicles with a combined armor value greater than 33, no model with more than 3 wounds or hull points, and I believe no models with a toughness greater than 6, also bother hood of psyker units don't get to use that rule.  The nice thing is that nothing on the field will be super powerful.  You can really go to town in turns of options and most codex's have a few vehicles that they can bring but none have enough armor to be a huge threat and krak grenades will often be all you need to take them down.

Now once you choose your force you then have to nominate your leader, who is either the highest leadership and is then your default, or is already a character if the leadership is equal (ie a SM Sgt even though he has same leadership as the rest of squad.  If you have no characters and are tied on leadership then you get to choose.  Leader then gets to choose from the warlord table for Kill Team.  Its a pretty decent little list, one lets your warlord choose a specialist power, one gives you an extra vp if you kill the other warlord in a challenge, one lets you choose d3+2 units to outflank, one increases your warlords leadership bubble to 12", one gives him zealot, and I can't remember the last one, I will post it once I buy the book later today.  All of them are decently useful, though for IG I will say the challenge one is not the most useful but is not entirely useless either.  Now after you get your warlord trait, you then choose 3 specialists and then choose from 5 specialist tables.  Each table has 6-7 special rules.  Key thing here is you can only choose from a table once, so if one table has a couple things you want, well too bad move on to the next.  This can make some nice decision points, where you have to decide which rule is more important.  Do pay attention because some rules that affect attacks are in there twice, one for shooting only and one for CC only.  This is nice as you don't just get access to rending, but have to decide.  I'm not going to go through them all, but they have a large portion of the special rules in here and it really goes a long way to giving your kill team that special feel.

You choose your missions just like regular 40k, and the missions are pretty cool, though forgive me I do not remember all the details of each so I will post the missions in a later post.  But suffice it to say they are more then just kill each other, though you can do that.  Now your secondary objectives are similar to regular 40k, you have Slay the Team Leader(warlord), Line Breaker, and then Break the Enemy where you get a VP if you destroy MORE then half your opponents models.  The more than half is the key wording here as you getting them to half doesn't do it.  Now when playing one on one this will be clear cut, but as we played a 3 way game, it was interesting trying to remember who had killed who's models :).  And speaking of breaking, this is important, when you lose more than half your models, you must make a break test.  This is the same as any leadership test, but every one of your models must make this test.  Now your leader has a 6" bubble and if he passes(he goes first if alive) then all of your models within 6" pass as well.  Note that models pass on their leadership and not your leader unless specified.  Fearless models are still fearless and pass automatically and ATSKNF gives you a reroll to the test.  Any model that fails is removed not running away, so this has a huge affect on the game as you can rapidly lose models to break tests.  You make one immediately when broken and then in each subsequent turn before your movement phase.  I will say that this ends game faster as once you get below this point models start disappearing fast.

It really is fun though as when we were playing me and my buddy had only three models on the board(combined), and my brother had over half of his, we were able to knock him just below half and break him and suddenly what looked like us getting tabled turned into rapid close in fight to see who could have the last model standing (I did btw).  It does suck if you have low Ld models, and IG certainly has plenty, but you can mitigate that and it really keeps the game interesting and prevents one person from really taking it away unless they get really lucky. 

So on to what I took and what we played.  Well I faced my brother and my buddy, both who brought GK and SM respectively.  So I decided, hell lets just try something out and brought 4 Ogryns and 3 Ratlings cause I cheat (no one minded, and I wanted to use my unused units).  The bro just brought a regular GK squad with no upgrades, full ten man I believe.  My buddy brought a tactical squad with a heavy bolter and a vet sarge with power weapon and plasma pistol.  So my bud made his heavy bolter relentless, a random marine have sniper, and another infiltrate.  He beat me in the roll off for infiltrators and took the nice terrain I wanted for my ratlings :(.  My brother took furious charge, preferred enemy and hatred for his GKs.  I got the warlord that let him be special and gave him FnP which did me no good.  One ogryn had rending(awesome), and another had hatred, and a ratling had master crafted sniper rifle.  So I deployed then behind some cover on the SM flank and set my ogryns in cover in my corner.  I successfully seized the initiative and took first blood by killing the SM heavy bolter,my buddy was not happy.  Ogyrns moved up to see if they could either make their way towards either opponent, I had decent LoS blocking terrain between both. 

Ratlings died to return fire and me rolling horribly on my cover saves (even with night fighting) and then the game devolved into each of us taking pot shots and not quite going after anyone in particular.  I got really unlucky with my cover rolls and my brother was rolling 6s like it was going out of style and I quickly lost an ogryn which put me under half and I had to take a break test.  This got me next turn as my Bone ead decided to run :(.  I ended up killing a few more GKs with my ogryn with rending and he camped and objective and decided he didn't know what fear was and refused to break.  The game ended up with a tie with everyone under half and with either an objective or a secondary.  We could have figure out a tie breaker but who really cares, it was a draw.  So how were ogryns?  Honestly not bad, they still suffer from being way too much but are tough enough that if you can keep out of LoS or in cover they can survive and then wreck shop in CC as there are few heavy units to match them.  Now you can take 3 in a Chimera and that really could be a fun little list for kill team as it gets them mobile which is their huge weakness besides having shitty armor.  So you can take them and with specialists you can really bring them over the edge to make them really nice and almost worth their points.  We also found sniper weapons to not be too bad, as you can make them specialist and add lots of little things to make them better.  Mastercrafted is nice, it really is. but you can also make one relentless or do plenty of other things to  bring them up.  Ratlings are more playable and useful than Ogryns here simply because of points, you can bring a few and still have plenty for other units. 

The Second game I brought a vet squad and 3 scout sentinels with multi lasers.  I will say, they rocked house, though only one survived, it was the last man standing and won me the game. My buddy brought 5 assault marines and 4 bikers cause he cheats too(they were "troops").  My brother switched to SM and brought a Tac and Scout sniper squad.  This was a close game till the end and I thought I was surely going to lose.  Basically my bud sent like one assault marine after my brother and then sent everything after me.  We ended up duking it out and I go lucky enough to get a couple over watches in and my sentinels held the line and soaked up shots and grenades with good cover saves and bad rolls on his part.  I got his biker sgt and he killed my sgt and we ended up having a bike and assault marine and a sentinel at the end of our group hug.  Now during this time one of my sentinels had stomped through 3 of my brothers scouts and my bud's lone assault marine killed another and took lots of shots, he prob would have done more but he rolled a low charge distance so that screwed him.  So we looked up after trying to hug each other to death and went after my brother and broke him, and he then failed a few of his leadership and lost a few more guys bring the fight to a more even state.  My sentinel gunned down his leader and he lost another to bolt fire from the bike and assault marine(not sure which got the kill shot).  His last guy was killed in cc against the assault marine.  I then gunned down the assault marine and then the bike and sentinel played chicken.  The bike broke first and ran away, leaving my sentinel with one HP left and the only one alive!!!!!

This was a lot of good fun and I really recommend this. You can get some quick games in and once you get the hang of choosing specialties you can really make for some quick games.  Now your turns can still be long as you move and shoot each model individually as they act on their own and not in units, but you get the hang of it and using markers is a lot of help to make sure you are keeping track of who moved/fired and who didn't. 

As for what to bring for IG, Sentinels are actually a real good choice.  As both variants can be taken, as single armored sentinel is a really good choice as he can be much more durable with that front armor 12, and since a lot of other CC walkers or MCs don't make the cut, you aren't quite so outclassed.  Krak grenades will still kill you and you will certainly have to watch out for.  Speaking of grenades, we gentlemen ruled that you could only throw one grenade of each type per round of shooting, as 10 thrown frag grenades make pretty effective light artillery.  You don't have to, but grenade spam is kind of uncool so I would recommend it.  A good little kill team is Harker with a vet squad and marbo.  Now there are no reserves so you basically deploy marbo like an infiltrator except he has none of the restrictions.  This is the same for outflank, you deploy them in their outflank position(after rolling for which side).  You can just fit this in and have a few pts left over for weapons and gear, with two infiltrating units you can put them in nice cover and dig in, with both having stealth you can have a nice squad that is hard to dig out.  Plus it would be fun as hell to model up that kill team :).

Chimeras are the other vehicle that makes the armor value cut other than sentinels, so are something to consider, but you will probably only be able to fit one in anyway.  Platoons are your obvious choice here and its really hard to argue against them.  Mortars can be good, but since models move individually a good opponent can mitigate that by spreading out just enough.  Don't bring too many as they are good, but with spread out models they will have a hard time killing more then one to spend too many points on.  This is where they make a great 5 pt upgrade to a squad.  Heavy bolters, missile launchers, and autocannons are great choices.  A heavy bolter squad can focus their fire or reliably bring a model down a round of shooting each.  You can give one split fire to shoot at two different models.  I would recommend this for a model with higher ballistic skill though *cough*harker*cough*.  Honestly if you are going for a platoon, just go all in and bring one and max your points out, you won't have a whole lot to spend any ways as a base platoon is 130ish points so you have enough to bring maybe one heavy weapon squad or special weapon squad.  I would rather spend points on the organic squads and put weapons and make your PL a decent CC character as he will be targeted.  A power fist is a decent choice as you will most likely be going last in combat anyways and the double S makes a huge difference for IG. 

Vet squads are great and you can easily take two if you want to and have plenty to spend on goodies.  I would probably only get one doctrine as two will max you out and you will have nothing to spend on gear.  Weapons make a huge difference.  Storm troopers do have potential here, you can take a full squad, but you will have issues taking anything else due to their points cost.  They aren't a bad choice with AP3 weapons and no 2+ saves being around.  Also infiltrate is awesome in this since you place each model individually, so you can take up some nice positions to fire and with pinning weapons first round, you can possibly pin multi wound models that you don't kill,  but admittedly pinning isn't so useful in kill team. 

All in all the IG have great choices, and some units you rarely see can make some good appearances.  If you are wondering why no psyker battle squad, well since they are individuals, you will unfortunately have a lot of S 1 large blasts, though lowering leadership is very useful in kill team.  Most of the units that you can take will be pretty useful, even ogryns.  So have fun and model up your special forces and get hunting :).

GG