Red Harvest Ascendant - Hordes

[Polaria]

This Red Harvest Ascendant is focused on general tactics against very specific type of enemy... How to Deal With Hordes.

There are many kind of hordes: Orks and Tyranids are, perhaps, the most common ones, but footslogging Imperial Guard most definitely count towards this category, too. The common thing with all hordes in general is that they have a LOT of models in each of their units and, most likely, they also have a staggering number of anti-infantry guns at 12" range... or, at least, enough attacks in assault to make any Necron player weep.

The basic thing is that if the horde catches your unit when in full strenght, your unit will die. No ifs, no buts, no saving throws. There is also the added problem that pouring fire on the horde will rarely make it run since most important horde armies (Orks and Tyranids) are effectively Fearless. However, if a horde is severely damaged before it reaches your units then the tables may well turn around.

So what to do?

My favourite tactic against hordes of all types is to flank with heavy firepower while playing gunline with everyone else. The idea is basically to present the horde with wide front of infantry and Ghost Arks while driving all my Annihilation Barges to either right of left flank and let loose. After a round it would look a bit like this:

----HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH---A--
--------------------------------A---
-------------------------------A----
------------------------------------
----N--N--N--N--N--N--N--N--N-----

H's are the Horde, A's are the Anni Barges and N's are the smaller and more dispersed Necron gunline. The basic idea is that if the Horde ignores the Anni Barges and goes for infantry, then the Anni Barges can hurt them while the other Necrons move away and behind the Barges. Like this:

--------------------------------
--------HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH----
--------------------------A-A---
---------------------------A----
---------N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N----

If the Horde goes for Barges, then the Barges retreat and draw the Horde towards one side and make them run into each other.

-----------HHHHHHHHHHHHH--A
--------------------HHH-----A
-----------------------------A
------------------------------
--N--N--N--N--N--N--N--N--N-

Whatever they do, the basic idea is to keep those nice AV13/13/11 vehicles between their attacks/guns and your Warriors/Immortals and take advantage of the big foot-print of the Horde units, pouring pieplates and Tesla Destructors on them.

Well, that was my introduction to the subject. Lets hear what you have to say:

Do you find yourself struggling against Orks or Tyranids?
How about other "hordeish" armies?
What are you favorite anti-horde units?
How do you use them?

If you are interested in the earlier Red Harvets Ascendant threads, they can be found here. (Red Harvest Ascendant Chronicle)

[Tzeentch Lord]

Tyranids, I've had mixed fortunes against. Won some, lost some. But it's usually come down to whether or not my opponent gets good Fleet rolls or not. If he does, his units get into combat and mine get swept, if he doesn't, I get to rapid fire him to death.

If I'm playing against Tyranids, I do tend to not bother taking Spyders, Scarabs and Command Barges though. Purely because they're all mostly anti-vehicle units. And since Tyranids are one of only two armies that don't have any vehicles, they are next to useless against them. I rely more on as much anti-infantry firepower as I can get. Phaeron-led Warriors, Tesla Immortals, Annihilation Barges, Particle Beamer Tomb Blades, etc. Stuff that can keep fairly mobile while still dishing out the firepower.

Orks though, they're somethin' else. I've never, and I mean never, managed to beat (or even come close to beating) an Ork trukk rush army (which they all are). I just can't stop them. I can't even slow them down, or take out a few trukks. They have battlewagons with front AV14 and a mek with a custom forcefield covering the battlewagon and one or two nearby trukks. And I only get two turns to bounce my sporadic anti-tank fire off them before they screech to a halt right in my 'Crons faces and pile out into close combat. By the end of turn 3, it's all over, bar clearing away the scrap metal.

I'm not ashamed to say it's got to the point where I flat out refuse to play against Orks, because three turns of being trounced just isn't fun anymore. However, once I get my Triarch Stalker and Tomb Blades (and my two new Command Barges), there's a tiny possibility that the advantage might turn in my favour. So I'll give the Orks another go then. I've also thought of using 5-man units of warriors with Lightning Field wielding Stormteks as charge bait, with units of Tesla Immortals some way behind. So once the Orks have wiped the warriors and are standing around in the open and not in combat, the rest of my army can unload on them, hopefully doing enough damage to stop the greenskins.
Unfortunately I'd need at least 1500 points to make my plan work. And I saw a 1500 point Ork army yesterday; it seemed to have twice as many Orks and vehicles in it as the guy's equivalent 1000 point army did... Sigh....

Favourite anti-horde units:
Annihilation Barges (obviously)
Tomb Blades with Particle Beamers and Nebuloscopes (BS5 blasts!)
Tesla Immortals
Triarch Stalkers with Particle Shredders (large blasts! wooo!)

What's useless against hordes:
Scarabs
Spyders
Command Barges (3 swipes isn't going to make much of a dent in a horde...)
Wraiths (horde bucket-of-dice attacks just laugh at invul saves...)

[Rudmed]

Hordes are without a doubt our greatest weakness. They, like Tzeentch said, come at us, hard, fast, and in big numbers. We are the masters of mid range, but that often gets turned against us in these fights. The closer we are the greater risk we are in. Espically with battle wagons, I can't seem to get enough glances from gauss weaponry to ensure they are wrecked or imbolized.

When I fight orks it can be very close, I've won a couple times, but it was too close. I beat him by one killpoint and only had 5 guys on the table, when I had 41 to start with (or so I believe. It came down to my last lord, two lychguard, my overlord, and Szeras, everything else was gone.)

Also, Doomsday barges anyone? They can be devistating to a horde.

[Polaria]

Favourite anti-horde units:
Annihilation Barges (obviously)
Tomb Blades with Particle Beamers and Nebuloscopes (BS5 blasts!)
...
Triarch Stalkers with Particle Shredders (large blasts! wooo!)

My "All Comers List" already sports three Annihilation Barges, but come next saturday I was actually planning to replace my Flayed Ones and Deathmarks with two Triarch Stalkers. I was thinking of using heat rays, though. The flamer really can't miss a horde and after that its twin-linked gauss flayer time from Warriors and Ghost Arks...

[Klajorne]

What's useless against hordes:Command Barges (3 swipes isn't going to make much of a dent in a horde...)

I actually haven't played against any horde armies, so bear with me. But aren't you able to remove the power klawed nob from the horde? This is a lot of my concern when facing boyz mobz, and I feel that if you could remove the klaw, you're effectively taking away the mobz teeth.

My "All Comers List" already sports three Annihilation Barges, but come next saturday I was actually planning to replace my Flayed Ones and Deathmarks with two Triarch Stalkers. I was thinking of using heat rays, though. The flamer really can't miss a horde and after that its twin-linked gauss flayer time from Warriors and Ghost Arks...

Sorry to deviate the thread, but are you still running Flayed Ones regularly in your list? Are they still holding up for you? If you want to keep it to a relevant thread, I'd be curious to hear your experienced opinion of them (and how you use them) in the Flayed One thread. If I remember right, you posted about what you were intending to do with them back then, I'd just be curious to hear how playing them panned out in actuality compared to what you thought prior.

[MightisRight]

If they're taking that much cheese I'd suggest responding with just as much cheese. In this situation, Orikan, a worldscape C'tan and as many transmog crypteks as you can get your hands on (5, in this case). If they have to get close, they have to move, if they move, they die. Also, potentially using a barge to snipe PK nobs and charging a stalker or C'tan in. They can't kill something they can't hurt.

[Tzeentch Lord]

I actually haven't played against any horde armies, so bear with me. But aren't you able to remove the power klawed nob from the horde? This is a lot of my concern when facing boyz mobz, and I feel that if you could remove the klaw, you're effectively taking away the mobz teeth.

Yep, you could indeed do that. I hadn't thought of that. My main concern with doing this, is that the mobs are often never far away from each other. So even if you managed to kill the nob, there's usually another mob nearby with yet another nob! And that's before you consider Warbosses and Meks hiding in the units as well, who could easily catch and wreck the barge. But the only thing powerklaw nobs are for is to destroy vehicles and characters. The rest of the mob is perfectly capapble of wiping out all the infantry by themselves. On a related note, I guess you could also do the same thing to remove the Commissars from Imperial Guard blob squads. Making it much easier to force them to flee from shooting morale tests.

In actual fact, when I said Command Barges were useless against hordes, I really only meant useless against the horde infantry. A list I designed to fight mech-Orks actually has two Command Barges in it to try and deal with the Ork vehicles. So they aren't useless against Orks anyway. I suppose if you fielded them against Tyranids and Daemons, you could use them to target Tyranid monsters and Daemon Princes, etc.

[Polaria]

Sorry to deviate the thread, but are you still running Flayed Ones regularly in your list? Are they still holding up for you? If you want to keep it to a relevant thread, I'd be curious to hear your experienced opinion of them (and how you use them) in the Flayed One thread. If I remember right, you posted about what you were intending to do with them back then, I'd just be curious to hear how playing them panned out in actuality compared to what you thought prior.

You know, I'll make the next Red Harvest Ascendant about FO's. They deserve one and I'd like to give everyone at least a few weeks to play with the new models released on 5th untill I start to make threads about Wraiths, Triarch Stalkers, Spyders and so on.