Giving The Company Of Hunters A Try

Hello battle brethren! I decided to try something new over the weekend. I've had an idea in the back of my head since some time before the recent Munitorum Field Manual update, and there were a few points changes that made it a little more tempting, so I decided to give it a try. 

My goofy idea is that the Company of Hunters may actually have some play. I've previously written an article about how Pariah Nexus may have breathed some life into the CoH, so I decided to give that a test. And what a test it was - I played it for the first time at The Portal Fall GT, which was not a big event, but the people who showed up came to play. The event winner was LVO winner Sam Pope, and the upper end of the rankings are all people who can give him a challenging game. Maybe not the best event to try a list for the first time, but it was an opportunity to play 5 games in two days. You can check out my list on BCP, and I'll post the short version below.

Secret Missions Are Fun!

Sammael
Ravenwing Command Squad: Master of Manoeuvre

Ravenwing Command Squad: Recon Hunter
Ravenwing Command Squad (Warlord)
Outrider Squad: 3 chonky biker boys
Outrider Squad: 3 chonky biker boys
Outrider Squad: 3 chonky biker boys
Infiltrator Squad: 5 sneaky boys
Ravenwing Black Knights: 6 awesome plasma biker boys
Ravenwing Black Kngihts: 6 awesome plasma biker boys
Ravenwing Darkshroud
Redemptor Dreadnought
Redemptor Dreadnought
Storm Speeder Thunderstrike
Callidus Assassin

The idea behind the list was to exploit the Company of Hunters giving Outriders the Battleline keyword to get them into my opponents' deployment zone by putting a squad of them in Strategic Reserve with Rapid Reappraisal and popping them out of Stat Reserve at the last moment to score the War of Attrition Secret Mission. The job of the rest of the list is to score a little on Primary, hold down my opponent's Primary, clear his Battleline (if any), and score secondaries. 

I chose the non-enhanced Ravenwing Command Squad as my Warlord so I could also potentially employ similar shenanigans to score Command Insertion. It's attached to an Outrider Squad just to give it some ablative bodies so it can go around and pick up opponents' utility pieces. Same deal with Sammael. I attached Sammael to a unit of Outriders to act as a delivery vehicle with their auto-advance 6" datasheet ability. The last unit of Outriders doesn't get anything attached to them. Their job was supposed to be to sit in the backfield till I wanted to Rapid Reappraisal them into my opponent's backfield. 

The list has two Ravenwing Knights+Command Squad bricks. The one with Recon Hunters gets Scouts 9", while the one with Master of Manoeuvre can pop out of Strategic Reserve a turn earlier than normal. They were put in there to bomb out and cause problems for my opponent. The Thunderstrike is in the list to help the Knights punch up into tougher targets with their plasma talons. The Redemptors are in the list to stomp out onto objectives, be a pain to remove, and to throw some supporting fire downrange. The Darkshroud's primary job is to make the Redemptors harder to remove. The Infiltrators are there to hold my backfield objective and tell opponents with 3" Deep Strike shenanigans to stay off my lawn, and the Callidus is there for uppy-downy secondary scoring. 

My initial foray into competitive play with this list did not go great. I scored 1-4, and the only reason I got the 1 was that my 3rd round opponent wasn't coming back for Day 2 and gave me the win. I don't feel bad about that though because he was a new player and I coached him on how to use his list, including giving him a last turn play that handed him the win instead of a draw. 

1st round my opponent was Alex Karosas, who played a Tyranid Synaptic Nexus list with a bunch of big bugs. I had a bad first turn where I put everything I had into one of Alex' Norn Emissaries and almost completely whiffed. At the time I made the observation that probably cost me the game, but then I deliberately made a point not to keep whinging about it so I wouldn't spoil Alex's fun. It wasn't his fault the dice rolled they way they did.  To make matters worse, 2nd turn Alex popped Shadow In The Warp, and the only units that passed the Battleshock test were my Infiltrators and the Outriders I had chilling in the backfield. As you might imagine, I didn't really make much headway against the list, though I did manage to score War of Attrition. The final score was 97-58 in Alex' favor. 

My 2nd round opponent was Jason Matthewson, who brought an Orks Green Tide list to the table. His list had 80 boys in it with character support, Ghaz, a Warboss, some Nobz and Meganobz, and a few other assorted units. This was likely my most enjoyable game of the weekend. Jason and I had a competitive yet easygoing game. We actually had a pretty good back-and-forth, but Jason managed to pull ahead. I selected War of Attrition after the 3rd turn, forgetting Jason still had a unit of 20 boys on the table. 5th turn I tried to dispatch that last unit of boys, and got it down to 3 models, but couldn't quite get it off the table. Command Insertion would have been a better Secret Mission to attempt. Jason won 86-55.

3rd game I went up against Riley, who sort of got dragooned into playing with a friend's Thunderwolf Stormlance. Consequently, I think I actually knew more about Riley's list than Riley did, on account of having written an article comparing the ThunderLance to our Company of Hunters with Black Knights. Subsequently I coached Riley pretty heavily, culminating in me suggesting a bottom-of-5th play that pushed his score 3 points over mine instead of what he was about to do which would have just got him the draw. What the heck, I was already 0-2. Since Riley wasn't returning on Sunday, he gave me the win, and I just flipped our scores. The final score was 78-75.

The next day, in the 4th round I paired into Alex Fennell and his Hello Kitty! themed Necrons. Alex is an LVO winner who so far as I know doesn't make a living off being good at 40K and doesn't really have anything to prove, so he just brings lists that he finds fun and interesting. Unfortunately what he brought last weekend just happened to be a stat-check for my army. 

Alex's list was the Silent King, 3 Tesseract Vaults, and assorted trash units to sit on points and score secondaries. I took one look at that and knew I was going to have a hard time. I didn't get much help from the dice either. Alex went first and blew up one of my Redemptors. The explosion hit 7 of my units and I did not fail to roll maximum damage for any of them. It was so tragic it circled back round to being comical.

I tried to make some headway despite that discouraging start, but I failed to kill a single one of Alex's units. Conversely, the only reason Alex didn't table me is because I put an Outrider Squad in strat reserve to try and pull off War of Attrition. Come Turn 5 though, I couldn't get them on the board in Alex's deployment zone. I don't think he deliberately screened me out, it's just that the Tesseract Vaults have such a big footprint they zoned out the area by default. 

That brings us to the 5th round, where my opponent was Nicholas Kudriavetz, who was playing a Dark Angels Gladius. His list was a little unconventional in that it only had 2 squads of Deathwing Knights, and Nick used Suppressor Squads instead of Jump Intercessors - which I've thought of doing, but Suppressor Squads are actually a little expensive on eBay. He also had a unit of Hellblasters led by Azrael, plus the Eradicator+Harmacist brick. Like Riley, Nick was inexperienced with this list, and it was pretty close to the list I'd been playing for months before that event, so again I knew my opponent's list better than my opponent. That was certainly advantageous for me, but I also made some significant mistakes, and I couldn't help but coach Nick some on the particulars of his list. Nick made less mistakes than I did, and earned the 67-47 win. 

I took a beating over the weekend, but on the upside I got to play 5 games of 40K, all against opponents I'd be happy to play again. If you ever have the opportunity to play a game with any of these gents, I highly recommend it.

Lessons Learned

That wasn't the greatest first effort, but I did learn a lot from the weekend. For starters, I think I was expecting too much from the Ravenwing Knight+CS bricks. They aren't the delete-everything switch I was treating them as. I think their ideal targets are light-to-elite Infantry and Mounted units, and while they have some play into bigger things, they shouldn't be my plan A for dealing with them.

The Redemptors actually performed pretty admirably, at times picking up the slack when my RWBKs whiffed - this happened in the 3rd game when I put both RWBK bricks into a squad of Thunderwolves and only managed to pick off a couple, whereas the pair of Redemptors managed to wipe a squad with their shooting, leaving only the characters alive. That said, the Redemptors don't solve problems that the Black Knights don't solve, so they're getting cut. 

I'm also cutting the Thunderstrike. The buff it gives is fantastic, but I've come to the conclusion it's not worth the opportunity cost of paying near-Lancer points for a platform that doesn't come close to Lancer effectiveness. Rather than paying a premium for something that can help the Black Knight Bricks punch up into tougher targets, I should just be paying those points for something that can punch out the bigger targets, freeing up the Black Knights to go into targets they're better suited for. 

I also decided I need Azrael for the CP generation. Going in, I figured I'd generate extra CP by ruthlessly dropping unfavorable Secondaries, but what I found is there's a world of difference between getting the bonus CP in my Command Phase and getting it at the end of my turn. 

I also have to get better at using the detachment's stratagems. I wasn't making very good use out of them beyond using Rapid Reappraisal to try and score War of Attrition, and I didn't even do that well. I'm not saying the strats are great, and Death on the Wind in particular is pretty weak, but they're the toolkit I have, so I need to learn to make the most of them.

With what I learned over the weekend, here's the next version of the list.

Secret Missions Are Fun! V1.2

Azrael
Sammael
Ravenwing Command Squad: Recon Hunter
Ravenwing Command Squad: Master of Manoeuvre - Warlord
Techmarine
Assault Intercessors: 5 choppy boys

Outrider Squad: 3 chonky biker boys
Outrider Squad: 3 chonky biker boys

Infiltrator Squad: 5 sneaky boys
Ravenwing Black Knights: 6 awesome plasma biker boys
Ravenwing Black Kngihts: 6 awesome plasma biker boys
Ravenwing Darkshroud

Vindicator
Vindicator
Vindicator

Callidus Assassin

I'm hoping the 3 Vindicators will be able to take on the targets I need them to take on, while being on par with the Redemptors for how difficult they are for opponents to pick up. They have the same 2+ save, and T 11 over T 10 seems like it should be significant. The downside is they lack the -1 damage and are actually 1 less wound, but now the list has 3 T 11 2+ save platforms, and I saved enough points to afford a Techmarine to put wounds back on them when they're down but not destroyed. Having the 3 of them in the bubbles of both the Darkshroud and the Techmarine should give opponents problems, and hopefully can tackle the targets I struggled with at the Portal Fall GT. Having the Vindicators to tackle bigger targets should (hopefully) free up the Ravenwing Knights to go after targets more appropriate for them to deal with. 

I'd like to take a moment to shout out Dank List Wargaming. Check it out for Dark Angels content generated by genuine enthusiasts! And if you made it this far, you'd probably like to click the Follow button up on the left. 

Thanks for reading about my first efforts with a Company of Hunters. I'm going to continue messing with it for a bit to see how far I can get with it. Hopefully GW will give it a little love in the next balance datasheet. but in the meantime I'll try and make it work as best I can. Wish me luck!