Heresy Era Traitor Death Guard
I’ve been meaning to get up some shots of the bloated and diseased brothers of my Loyalist Heresy Death guard force and here they are. These guys were designed to allow mix and matching between the loyalists and the traitors without much worry.
I did it by making the traitors much more “Imperial” in appearance and to use standardized equipment like the backpacks. The Loyalists were painted a bit dirty, so there isn’t to much difference from say over 1-2 feet away.
Rather than go over the details of the traitors in detail (that will come later), here is my basic rundown of how I view the CSM Death Guard armylist on the tabletop:
In short here is the skinny on the DG and my advice to you if you ever have to face them on the battlefield.
First things first. In general the most commonly fielded unit in a Death Guard army are Plaguemarines. These guys are point per point one of the best buys in the game. 19pts gets you a T:5, 3+ Armour marine who is fearless. You should count on facing a lot of these terrors. Most enemies being T:3-4 gives you some obvious issues.
The main one being Assault. Here your fanciful weapons are somewhat negated and its down to most of your units wounding on a 5 or 6, while the DG player is wounding you on a 3 or 4+; that is before the armour saves come into play. As you can see, most T:3/S:3 armies aren’t going to hold up very long against that type of math while the T:4/S:4 are still in a world of pain. In fact, it is the very innermost desire of any DG army to wrap up as many units of yours in assault as early as possible and grind them down using that T:5 in combination with the Rot.
So where are these monsters weak? Well the failings of the DG are blatant.
First Disadvantage: No range. The mark of Nurgle precludes the use of infantry held heavy weapons. That means no las-cannons, heavybolters, missle launchers, or autocannons. In general you will be facing bolters and lots of them, backed up with a fair mix of meltas (common), plasma (less common), and flamers (least common). In general this gives the army a max range of 24″. The only way the DG can field long range weapons is on vehicles and Terminators who can field Reaper autocannons (36″ range).
In general most opposing armies should seriously outrange a DG army. Beware of this advantage. I will comment further on this later.
Second Disadvantage: Very low model count. The DG in general are some of the priciest models in the game, and you should heavily outnumber them. This disadvantage is further extended by the unfortunate “magic number” of 7 that is tied to Nurgle. That means that most DG units are of that odd number to gain their army advantages, and making each squad broken upon the death of 4 models.
Final disadvantage: Very low number of scoring units. This one grows out of number 2, but is the achilles heel of many DG lists, especially “maxed out uber” lists put together by newbies, who have to have all the tooled out Nurgle goodies.
How to deal with the Deathguard
As an opposing player, I would emphasize long range shooting, lots of scoring units, and mobility. The DG are defeated by the end of turn 2 or not at all. They will come at you with everything they have. They will take their lumps, trusing in their high T:5 to push on through to your army, and they will usually be on you by turn 3 at the latest. Your job is to do whatever you can to stop it.
An ideal opposing army would have very heavy long range firepower in your back line, protected by cheap expendable picket units well forward to block the DG’s movement into your army’s core troops, and to tie up the weakened DG in time-wasting assaults while the rest of your army re-positions/retrogrades to keep their distance and fire off further volleys. The tactic of fire, retorgrade, repeat is your best bet.
Mobile firepower is much more valuable than static if you can get it. Think about this, there is no army I fear more than the Dark Eldar. They outrange and out move-me. The DG will often never reach the Dark Eldar lines, and be bled white by volleys of mobile dark-lance fire. On the other hand, I love the IG. They often knock me silly on turn one, but are static enough to get caught up in assault by turn 2, and have so many slow models that the army cant escape once ive grabbed onto a flank. DG Units will often hack their way through 4-5 IG units before the game is over, killing them in turn.
Going back to the previous DG disadvantage advice, you can expect to face two broad categories of DG, the newbie all-marine army, and the more subtle marine/daemon mix.
The all marine horde is a cinch to nail. Pick DG units in order of closeness, and kill 4 models. It is broken and no longer scoring. With a low unit count, you can often break every advancing unit easily and throw expendable units to tie them up in assault, and win on victory conditions.
The daemon mix is much more tricky. Plaguebearers exist to be summoned and charge into assault on turn 2-3. They wont live long by themselves, but they tie down firepower units allowing the safe approach of the DG marines, who really do the killing. Nurgling are a similar threat, who exist to do much the same thing. They will fill up your firelanes hoping to draw heavy weapons fire and protect their much more valuable brethren.
DG tanks are a special note. They are irritating, and definately will attempt to get into a slugging match with your vehicles. If you engage them, you are falling into the DG player’s gameplan. Remember that always, the DG goal is to assault you. They will try every trick in the book to draw fire off of their infantry. Play into their plans at your peril.
There are of course hundreds of variations upon this theme, but this should be enough to help folks figure out what the army is about.
More pics and modeling talk later…
-bigred
