Whats big, armored, and shoots a strength 10 large template? You guessed it, a space marine Vindicator. But since I play Blood Angels, I get a speed bonus as well. After losing to a regular mech space marine army by four kill points, I came to the conclusion that I need something big and angry, and capable of flattening a land raider with ease.
My response, as I'm sure you already guessed, is a Vindicator. However, nobody in my club has ever played a vindicator while I was there to see it. So, naturally, I looked online and found some good tips on youtube. The general consensus was that vindicators are NOT linebreaker units like the fluff would have us believe. Most vindicator tactics involved luring enemies within range of your wicked demolisher cannon, and hiding behind rocks.
However, I would like to challenge this line of thinking. First of all, I would like to point out that a large pile of rocks confers the same cover-save on your vindicator (or any other soldier for that matter) as does a group of soldiers. The biggest pros of terrain are that you can A) hide out of sight, and B) not confer a cover save on the enemy. The biggest pro of using a "meat-shield" is, of course, movement.
Personally, I don't think a vindicator hiding on the back of the board would be all that effective against shooty armor, like preds, that aren't going to be on the forefront of the battle. My solution is to use a meat-shield. Now, the first thing I'm going to want to look at is the speed of the unit I want to choose. I want quick units because with the extra six inches of movement that my vindicator enjoys, I don't want to waste them. The second requirement is that my fast unit must take up enough space to actually confer a cover save. Finally, they must be a cheap unit that I don't much care about.
Therefore, bikers make the PERFECT vindicator meat-shield. Plus, once I get in range, I can run my bikers out of the way, giving me a clear shot on the enemy target of my choice. However, I wouldn't run these guys too far ahead of the vindicator, as scatter could end up working against you.
The way I am thinking about running this set up is to run about 6 scout bikers, and upgrade a few of them with the grenade launcher. This would be about 160 points of scout bikers, which could do some template damage of their own on the way in.
Please let me know what you think! Have you tried this before? Does this sound absolutely crazy?
Ashamedly, I haven't even begun to consider writing my army list for my Blood Angels... How come there are no Sanguinory Guard??? And what about standard Assault squads? Still, what I do like is that you haven't gone for the typical "cut'n'paste" mech/nipplewing style army...
ReplyDeleteI'll be interested to see how this meat-shield fares, although the thought of sacrificing any good son of Sanguinius pointlessly makes me uncomfortable...
Ave Imperator!