First Battle and 6th ed Thoughts

I played my first game of 6th last night:

1500 points Orks vs Blood Angels
Orks
Ghazgul
Warboss on Bike
6 meganobs
5ish ork bikes
two trukk squads
battle wagon with deff rolla
2 3-man copta squads with missiles


Blood Angels
Meph
5 sanguinary guard
1 sanguinary priest
10 man assault squad with power sword
10 man assault squad no packs, power sword
Land Raider (godhammer pattern)
Baal Pred w/ heavy bolters/assault cannon
Storm Raven; plasma/melta

So I didn't take any photos so I won't bore anyone with a full on battle report but I'll explain some of the things that happened and what I took away from the game.

Terrain/table set up:
I really think this is a great way to set up tables.  It takes a bit longer but there's no more complaining about one sided matches.  I've had people whine before about not enough terrain or not the right kind as they weren't the one to set up the table.  Facing the ork player he kept putting large LoS blocking terrain down while I put down short low barricades which wouldn't obstruct my shooting.  Win win.

Deployment:
Knowing which side you're going to end up on before placing terrain and objectives is also good.  The randomness that came up before was not cool.  Knowing that he was more mobile than I, I forced all of my objectives into his end of the table.  Also helped with that extra secondary objective for being in his deployment.

Fliers:
These were mediocre before but with the survivability they are now granted with the 6's to hit they're pretty good.  My storm raven was pretty awesome.  His coptas took two hull points and a missile on the second turn but it wasn't hit again.  After jinking (and failing) I just flew off the board and waited for the jink to disappear so I could reposition and come back.  The TL-plasma cannon was invaluable with the high manoeuvrability of the plane.

Challenges:
Sergeants with power swords should not be challenging nobs.  I can't see many scenarios where a challenge won't occur as if the assaulting player refuses the defender will just issue it as it is likely in his favour.  Either way the power sword guy can't be depended on to do two wounds to the nob who will be hiding in the back waiting to swap places after the challenge is issued.  Cool cinematic but not sure it should have been brought into the game.  When I read 40k stories the two characters always are involved in an epic duel.  In challenges one character dies round one while the squads are all still around.  I'll have to warm up to this one.  I think it made mepheston better though since he can run into a squad and challenge the guy with a fist, one shot him and be safe for a round. 

Power Weapons:
Meph and sanguinary guard sporting power swords got hit a bit.  No more AP 2 isn't cool.  I tried running 3 guard with power axes but the initiative 1 really hurts them as there's no more furious charge I5 AP2 attacks coming (like in 5th).  So these guys that I painted up in a hurry might see even less play than before as they're even more worse (didn't think that was possible).

Movement:
The new movement rules are awesome.  Everything is more mobile and that's my favourite part of the game.  The table seems really small now and deployment is both more and less important.

Overwatch:
I heard a lot of bellyaching over this but it's pretty bad.  I can see 30 ork shootaboys being assaulted as a nice buff with overwatch, but my 10 man assault squad was pretty crap with it.

Hull points:
I feel like vehicles are better now.  I've heard they die faster but my tanks always died or were stun locked anyway.   Now they're more dependable.  Sure they may die turn 2 or 3 but at least they were fully effective the entire time.  No more choosing the battle cannon to explode or immobilising a land raider with a missile launcher.  I think this was a win win.

Wound allocation:
This goes way faster than it used to and seems far more intuitive. 

So at the end of the game this is what I noticed:
The 2+ saves were hard to ignore.  My old staple of mephiston/powerswords won't be good anymore.  I think hammer terminators got even better and will be in my next list.
Fliers are great and I think will start to replace tanks.  Where before there were 3 predators there will now be 3 storm talons.
End game I won 9 to 2 having two objectives and completing all 3 secondaries by turn seven.  I was holding 1 objective with 2 jump marines and the other with 4 marines.

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