THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE RAVENWING By Jay Winton |
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LANDSPEEDERS - Our Friends in the Skies Ah, landspeeders. The graceful, sleek, flying guardians of the skies. Or in the words of Ork Warboss Bigskull, right before he was blown to a bloody pulp, "Look! It's da oomies with more dakka! run! run!" The proper use of landspeeders is an essential part of playing a ravenwing army. Without landspeeders, your bikers would be quickly overrun by close combat troops or mowed down by far-reaching heavy weapon squads. So for today's lesson in ravenwingy wisdom, I present: Lanspeeders. As I explained before, there is a concept of Optimum distance which bikes should observe. However, when an enemy presents itself that totally negates any sort of optimum distance (I.E. A situation where the bikers can not safely move in range to shoot the enemy without taking heavy losses), then landspeeders become necessary. Landspeeders are made to fill the "gaps" in your army, places where your more numerous bikes cannot safely fight. Examples include a rhino filled with Death Company (18 inch movement due to cheese angel rule + 2 for deployment + 6 for charge = no optimum distance), A squad of grotesques (useless to go at with anything except an assault cannon), or Zoanthropes (instant death for a bike squad!!!!). In situations like this, a unit that has no need for optimum distance becomes necessary, i.e., Landspeeders! Yay! (applause) First thing, always give your speeders assault cannons. I cannot stress enough how important these are, if simply for the 6 strength. It's especially useful vs dark eldar. Mow down grotesques, instantly kill the mighty 3 wound Archon, and best of all, KILL INCUBI! In fact, I will spend the later half of this article telling you how to WHUP DARK ELDAR ASS! Ravenwing, if used properly, can reduce the mightiest dark eldar army to a bloody pulp with little nutty bits floating in it. Anyway, back to the subject. Landspeeders are also especially good at cutting down heavy weapon squads that might be hiding up on a hill. Your 12 inch move plus the 36 inch range on the heavy bolter = 48 inches. Utilize cover until you're ready to pounce, as lascannons, missle launchers, and reaper guns can hit from this far. Yet another sick sad lesson that optimum distance can't always come to you. You have to use caution, but then again there is always an element of risk in anything you do in this game. your best bet is pump them full of as much dakka as you can and hope they fall back. If it's only a 5 man squad, or even better a 3 man squad with dark reapers, only 2 landspeeder's worth of dakka should be necessary. So just zoom in and throw everything you got at em!!! Speeder Squad Size and the Rule of One One common mistake players make is to put all 3 of their landspeeders into one squad. This is totally foolish. It means that you will only be able to "plug" one hole at a time, and sadly there's that rule that you can't put all of your penetrating or glancing hits onto one vehicle. It is better to use each landspeeder as a separate squad, so you can keep mobile and ensure that you'll be able to take out multiple threats. The only exception to the rule of one is the MASTER OF THE RAVENWING who you will hear more about later in this article. Confucius say, "He who lets his landspeeders roam separate shall have his army flow like slick battery acid across the field, while he who puts all landspeeders in one squad shall flow like bananna pudding, clumped in one big squishy bananna-ey glob while the enemy quickly smears it across the cruel paper towel of life." At least, I think he said that. Ok so I made it up, but it's true. Of course, if you're playing a friggin huge game (And you have 7+ landspeeders), then I guess it's ok to put them in squads. I however only have 4 speeders, and one of them is da masta's possie (I plan to get one more so I can have a squad of 3 for my command, the master and his two buddies). Remember, The Master ignores the rule of one because otherwise you might lose 255 points of pure whup-ass to one bolter shot. On that topic... HOW TO USE DA MASTA UH DA RAVENWING TO HIS FULLEST WHUP ASS POTENTIAL! We are all undoubtedly impressed by the Master of the Ravenwing. Those big beefy guns that only miss on double 1's, those tecky special rules, and that nifty sword attack. But, as many have said, he is very vulnerable to getting shot down. He costs lots of points, so if he dies you're screwed out of 1/4 of your army in a 1000 point game (Scary, huh?). I have a little concept I like to call "point advantage". This is similar to the idea of card advantage for any of you who have played magic:tg, but instead it's warhammery! Yay! Anyway, the idea goes like this: If your 150 point squad of space marines takes down 200 points worth of Khorne Berzerkers before the rest of the squad charges and totally kills the entire squad, then you have still "won". If 5 normal guys beat up 3 pro wrestlers in a barfight, but the normal guys all get concussions and have to go to the ER, then they've won anyway, assuming the pro wrestlers would cost more points than them (Ok, am I making any sense at all here?). Anyway, if your master dies to a few space marines, you've lost point advantage. Therefore you have to make sure your master takes down more than 255 poins worth of guys before he dies, or at least gets you a major advantage in the battle (i.e., killing a whore devastator squad single handedly and removing the enemy's long range oomph). However, you can get totally around this by giving the master a command squad of at least one speeder then you can totally get around the problem of the master being easy to kill. Use him to spearhead your assault on the enemies rear elements. Use all the tactics you would for landspeeders on him, except you can afford to take a few more risks and you can definitely hit harder. He is almost guaranteed to hit with every shot he fires (92% chance of hitting with each shot.) Of course, when you deploy the master you'll want to keep him under cover. All in all he follows the same strategies as a normal landspeeder, except that he's harder to kill and can do more damage. However, his special abilities deserve mention. The All-Seeing Eye: This is an immensely useful gizmo. It's best used when you have a squad that HAS to take out an objective, such as an attack bike squad going at a rhino full of berzerkers. Whenever there is a squad that just HAS to take out a target or die trying, this is where you direct the all-seeing eye. If no such urgency presents itself, bestow it on a landspeeder that is near the thick of the fighting. Don't usually give it to bikes unless you're in a situation where that meltagun HAS to hit etc, since the bikes bolters are already twin-linked. The Raven Sword: Ah, the ability to fly by and lob off somebody's head. The Raven Sword is more like a surgical scalpel, however. Since you can chose which model you attack with it, you can fly by and kill a heavy weapon's user, or instant-death kill an HQ with toughness 3 (Even the mighty Dark Eldar Archon dies instantly from a hit from the raven sword!). Seeing as how a Dark Eldar Lord will shred your bikers in close combat, it's very nice to just fly by and kill him, no questions asked. Who cares if he has 3 wounds, he'll get fried just like a lascannon hit him dead on. You shouldn't just use the sword to hack down a random infantryman. Go after the important targets. Heck, once when my chaplain was fighting a losing combat versus Abbadon the Despoiler, da masta flew by and hacked the mighty Abbadon in half. Think of the raven sword as the hand of death. Instead of it being like charging into close combat and lobbing a few heads, think of it as picking one model and saying "he's dead". it's also a nice way of dealing with genestealers :-) "dakka dakka dakka, aw, there go some genestealers, SMACK, oh, there's a dead genestealer, dakka dakka etc etc etc" The one safe way to deal with genestealers: landspeeders |
TACTICA RAVENWING |
