Purging the unclean

My Knights got their first outing of the new year up against Al's Genestealer Cult.

I am enjoying the CA 2017, many of the Admech units got cheaper so I am now getting more bang for the buck.

We played one of the new missions from chapter approved 2017, which turned out to be very like one of the variants of the old cleanse mission. We had quarter deployments. Al chose the quarters. We played the woods as blocking LOS if you were shooting through them but providing cover if you were in them and troops inside could be shot at and shoot troops outside.
The Genestealer Cult deployed a couple of tanks a squad of autcannon teams and a sentinel hiding behind the forest. All the scary monsters were hiding in ambush.










I deployed with the knights clustered together and bubble wrapped the Knights with the Admech infantry. This was in case I lost the roll of for the first turn. In the end this didnt matter, I won the first turn.










The Knights set off on their patrol. The first turn was a cautious advance allowing the skitarii to maintain the protective coverage of the knights













The first shot of the game proved to be eventful, the Red Errant blew up a Leman Russ, the White Errant inflicted six wounds on the other and the Black Paladin inflicted another 3 wounds. We also sprayed stubber fire around and the Skitarii added further firepower with their rifles. This reduced the squad hiding in the crater.

Thermal cannons are great against vehicles (usually)




Al used the Cult ambush to bring on a unit of cultists with Shotguns. unfortunately the cult ambush rolls were not that great so they had to walk on from the side. These guys would turn out to be a real pain holding up a unit of Skitarii before the survivors got stepped on by a knight.

In the second turn the knights moved forwards after some out of the box rolling, the Leman Russ tank is still standing, I think it was about 4 5+ saves in a row to keep it alive. In advancing, I left a small gap in the protection of the Skittarii and this allowed Al to somehow infiltrate a horde of genestealers and their Patriarch out of a small forest I had just advanced through. My phone battery quailed at photographing the cloud of claws and talons at this point and I ran out of pictures.


You can see the forest, where the Genestealers emerged from at the bottom of this picture.



Here is Al's scout sentinel hiding behind the forest his plan was to hide there most of the game and then make an end run for the objective towards the right of the picture.

This worked fine right up until the white Errant set the thermal cannon onto cook rather than defrost and vaporised it







The Genestealers and patriarch emerged from the forest and then moved up. Al used the new strategem to roll 2 dice for the cult ambush and got a 4 and then rolled a 1 for their move, deciding that wasn't very good he spent a command point and rerolled it into a 5 so was only 4 inches away from my red knight.

Al then used the psychic powers to smite the knight and then to hypnotise him so he cant shoot. The Magus, then cast Strength from Beyond onto the Genestealers. However I have chosen Graia Forgeworld and used the Logic over Magic strategem which cancelled the psychic power on a 4+. To add insult to injury my Enginseer switched on his warlord trait and got back the command point.

There was then a big fight in the middle of the table the patriarch and Genestealers hacked holes in the red knight taking him down to half wounds and left the enginseer on one wound and then pinned him so he could not fall back. In the counterattack the black knight crashed into the Patriarch and sliced him into pieces with his reaper chainsword and the two others trampled 10 Genestealers into paste.

When the Aberants came out of ambush and then failed their charge the black knight took care of them and the knights mopped up the rest of the Genestealer infestation.

So a fun game that was a lot closer than it appeared at the end.