The Omnissiah's Wrath

Today the legions of the Omnissiah went into battle against the foul traitors of Khorne and their Daemonic allies. Due to the scale of the daemonic incursion a mighty War Convocation was mustered for battle.

The followers of Khorne prepare for battle

The Chaos had 2 units of Raptors, a unit of Warp Talons, a unit of Cultists, 2 units of Bloodletters, a unit of Possessed, a Helldrake, a Chaos Lord and a Bloodthirster with the S:D axe taken from the Daemonkin book.

My Mechanicus was built using the War Convocation formation from White Dwarf. The Skitarii consisted of 10 Rangers, 10 Vanguard, 5 Ruststalkers, 5 Infiltrators, an Ironstrider and a Dunecrawler. The Cult Mechanicus consisted of 1 unit of Kataphron Breachers, 1 unit of Destroyers and lead by a Tech Priest Dominus with the army backed up by a Knight Errant.

The Mechanicus stand ready

Playing with tactical objectives, we got the mission where you get a number of objectives equal to the turn number (not that it mattered in the end).

Turn 1 - Khorne: Khorne moved forwards. Then ran forwards.
Turn 1 - Mechanicus: Moved up with most units. Activated the +3 WS Doctrina for the Skitarii and then Canticle for +3 Strength. Despite my hindered shooting from the Doctrina I still managed to put some hurt into many of the chaos units. My assassins then charged into the Bloodthirster and annihilated it completely before it could even think about retaliating. Well the ones with the mini-uzi's and cattle prods did at least. The butter knives and DA CLLAAAAAWWWW's failed the charge. Still didn't stop me just 1 shotting the only threat to my Knight though :)

After that things kept going down hill for the Chaos. Yes 2 additional Bloodthirsters were able to be summoned but at the end of the game all that was left was a Helldrake on a single hull point that wasn't even on the table at this point.

As for how the Mechanicus played the 3 smaller forces work fantastically together, especially in the formation which makes them both affordable (points wise) and allows rules to cross over. The combination of Canticles and Imperatives is also extremely brutal, especially in combat. When the tasers went into that Bloodthirster they went in at WS7 and S9 with 4 attacks each (5 on the sarge). That's just crazy! I can't wait for more games using Skitarii and Cult together, although I doubt I'll get to use this formation for a while as I still need a Knight of my own as well as most of the Skitarii units (about 2/3 of the units I used were borrowed from my local store manager).