Mantis Warriors Update

Hipster filter! I liked Mantis Warriors before they were cool.

We’re in Week 2 of Scott’s campaign at Gamers Sanctuary and I’ve painted some models, purchased some hobby upgrades for the army, and come to an epiphany.

I decided to paint my sniper scouts first because I imagine I’ll be using them in every game. I like scouts a ton, I like how they can infiltrate and they can get a 3+ cover save. Mantis Warriors are also known for their stealth skills so they’ll be one of the main elements of my army most of the time. They have performed admirably in most of the games I’ve played so far.

Shots of the two units (2x sergeant with sniper rifle, 3 scouts with sniper rifles, missile launcher). I have to finish painting their bases black.

I also purchased some custom dice for my Mantis Warrior army from Chessex. You may recall that I had these done for Tyranids as well. I think having sweet dice that tie into your army and a nice display board just makes everything really cool package that impresses people.

My Tyranid dice design

The last thing that happened this week with Mantis Warriors was that I had an epiphany. I’ve been a grognard for a while about special characters. I hated how they changed the game, introduced dozens of special rules that I had to learn, and encouraged players to be as non-creative as possible.

This pretty well illustrates how I view myself in my mind’s eye

It is pretty clear with 5th Edition coming to a close that in 6th Edition special characters will be even bigger than they were in 5th. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I feel like special characters have been created to encourage you to use them and their dozens of special rules and the codexes are built with them as the centerpiece.

The other thing is that I always always always encourage people to play their game differently than they usually do, and special characters open up those differences everywhere. I was being a hypocrite!

The first special character I’ll be using will be Telion. He’ll be the dude with the scope in hand in my scout sniper squad. He’ll be sweet for making a missile launcher BS 6 or picking out sergeants. After that, I’m looking at Captain Muggario Khan with a command squad on bikes with storm shields and thunder hammers depending on the points limit for week 3. I’ll write up some fluff for Muggario to protect my wounded pride.

Keep watching the blog for more news on FOODHAMMER!

Trials of the Mantis Warriors: First Blood

I played my first game with my Mantis Warriors last night against Tau4Eva’s Blood Angels. I haven’t painted a single model yet, mostly just trying things out. I’ve not played as Codex Space Marines before.

My whole idea with this Mantis Warrior force is to present them after the Badab War. They don’t have a lot of anything – no spam, really, except a few tac squads in rhinos. The chapter has always been focused on stealth tactics and lightning strikes, so I’ll include sniper scouts, land speeders, and bikes.

I was pretty limited to what I could take last night. My list:

Captain, storm bolter relic blade
Librarian, terminator armor
Terminators with storm bolter and powerfist (plan to get cyclone launchers)
Venerable Dread with Plasma Cannon (BS5 whuuuuuuut)
Sternguard squad with 2x combi plasma, 1 combi melta, 1 combi flamer, 1 powerfist, rhino
Tac squad with ML, Pfist, Flamer, Rhino
Tac squad with ML, Pfist, Flamer, Rhino
Scout squad, snipers, ML, camo cloaks
Scout squad, snipers, ML, camo cloaks
Scout squad, bolters, heavy bolter
Land speeder storm
Bike squad x6, pfist and meltagun

My general idea was to use the scouts to shoot at stuff and hold objectives while the tac squads reinforced where needed. The sternguard zipped to the area of need and the terminators were a fire magnet. The Speeder Storm went forward with its scout move, got assaulted first turn (he had first turn) and was wrecked.

I had to use my Chaos rhinos for now. I had an extra Rhino on the table at the beginning by accident.

We rolled the Chaos Space Marine battle mission where the world is on fire. This cut LOS a LOT on the table! the fire lanes were pretty narrow.

The tac marines in rhinos are backing up my right flank, the terminators and sternguard hold the middle, and the bikes and scouts hold my left flank.

Luckiest scout missile in the world.

On turn 1 Adam wrecked my speeder and killed the scouts inside. He moved up on my right flank and I realized I was probably outmatched there. The LOS blocking terrain made it tough.

In the bottom of turn 1 my scout on the left flank used a missile to blow up one stormraven. So awesome. I then got another lucky shot from a missile on his razorback on my left flank.

From there it was extremely bloody. He moved in on my right flank, I shot him up, he destroyed my scouts. I managed to drive off an entire 5 man assault squad with power weapon with 1 terminator late in the game to contest an objective. I then managed to kill his other stormraven with my PFist sergeant (needing a 6 to hit, glance, a 6 on the damage chart since his flyer went all-out).

It was a super close game, probably the closest I’ve played in 40k in a year. Props to Adam for the great game. We tied 1-1 on objectives with 5 down on the field!

My terminator broke the assault marines off of the objective.

My librarian. Two handed force sword.