To kill a Baneblade

[Halollet]

Just had a solo game against myself, pitching my Nids against my guard. Trying out different things, getting used to this game, etc.

My guard has a baneblade and I just ended the Nids with it. Bubble wrapping it with conscripts with a Commissar to keep them there, it was pretty untouchable.

My Nids had swarmy, broodlord, 20 pack of stealers, haruspex, 5 carnifexes, rippers, guard, and lictors.

My guard was a baneblade, 2 sentinels, RoughRiders, vindicator assassin, and the rest infantry.

The baneblade just erased things every turn, it one shotted the haurspex with it's main gun alone. I hit it with 2 Fexes and the haruspex and got a whole 9 wounds off of it.

What do we have that can deal with one of those when it can one shot an exocrine from across the table?

[yoritomo]

First off, a baneblade is a significant investment. Your opponent won't have too much left in his army after taking that.

I'd do a two pronged attack with two units of stealers, Swarmy, and a trygon. The first part is to use Swarmy to catapult a unit of stealers into his meat shield. The goal here isn't to kill conscripts (though it helps). The goal is to lock them up and hopefully consolidate a few stealers into the baneblade. If you can consolidate into the baneblade your opponent has a tough choice. He can remain in combat (which is what you want), or he can fall back.

Keep in mind that if the baneblade falls back he can't move through the conscripts. If you've locked up the conscripts then they can't move away from your stealers. This means that he will have to ditch his meat shield if he wants to fall back. That is the opportunity for your second prong to attack. The turn after your stealers assault you bring Mr. Trygon and his stealer pals onto the table.

Is this the best way to deal with a baneblade? Probably not. But with your army comp I think you could make this work.

[able]

If you are T8, you generally hide from it if you can't outburst it (we can't). 3 exocrine might win a fire fight if they get first shot and both sides stay still, but they are either going to deploy before it or shoot second. Either way you can cannot expect a straight slug fest, because the baneblade can move or set up to make the fight more preferable, and your crines can't (this type of scenario is why I am not a fan of them). Even taking the -1 to hit it is still probably going to splat one of your bugs if it is undamaged. If you can get it into trouble, or out of position, then your heavy hitters can come out of hiding. Having them safely in cysts is one of our options that we pay for.

If you can limit the main gun fire to 100pts a shot you should do ok. That means no giving it shots at T8 targets, and no shots at tyrants. It would expect to rip through about 4-5 warriors per shot, so unless you have fodderwarriors or minimal squads you probably want to avoid it shooting at them. A carnifex is not ideal to put in front of it, but I would not be upset at it shooting fexes. Unless we have brought a full gant and character army that is about as good as we can expect.

It will delete many units, but 500+pts of heavy weapons always will, and it is forced to concentrate all the main gun fire at one unit. It looks like it has a lot of wounds, but at 20 pts a wound it doesn't really for the cost. Broodlord stealers will make their points in a fight phase if they can get into combat, and even faster if they have toxin sacs. Biovores will make their points in 3 turns, as well as drawing some fire to the fail mines. The broodlord does double duty, because the horror is fantastic against it. If we have a magus or 2 in our army (which we probably should given the rule of 1) then all of the powers are great. Catalyst is absolutely fantastic if it is going to be firing at warriors, because it knocks almost 40% of their casualties. Even a 3 warrior squad has a decent chance of surviving a shot from the main gun, which would be a massive win.

Of course, the cheeky response is blood brothers cheese, and just take your own baneblade It compliments exocrine nicely.


Edit: was misremembering my numbers, and thought the main gun was heavy 3D6, so the casualty figures are slightly wrong. Also, you could just take a shadowsword instead, and if armour is what you are worried about it might be smarter.

[Halollet]

Jul 9, 2017 5:29:01 GMT yoritomo said:

First off, a baneblade is a significant investment. Your opponent won't have too much left in his army after taking that.

I'd do a two pronged attack with two units of stealers, Swarmy, and a trygon. The first part is to use Swarmy to catapult a unit of stealers into his meat shield. The goal here isn't to kill conscripts (though it helps). The goal is to lock them up and hopefully consolidate a few stealers into the baneblade. If you can consolidate into the baneblade your opponent has a tough choice. He can remain in combat (which is what you want), or he can fall back.

Keep in mind that if the baneblade falls back he can't move through the conscripts. If you've locked up the conscripts then they can't move away from your stealers. This means that he will have to ditch his meat shield if he wants to fall back. That is the opportunity for your second prong to attack. The turn after your stealers assault you bring Mr. Trygon and his stealer pals onto the table.

Is this the best way to deal with a baneblade? Probably not. But with your army comp I think you could make this work.

Actually, the guard had 113 models on the table.

You can't actually lock the baneblade in combat, it don't care.  Steel Behemoth rule just says it can only fire its heavy bolters/flamers at enemies in combat with it, the other guns MUST fire at other units.  And I would just leave my conscripts in combat with the stealers.  I had a priest near by and with 'Fix Bayonets', each conscript can punch back 4 times a turn.  And the dudes are still doing their job of keeping bigger stuff out of combat with the baneblade on top of keeping the remaining stealers in place.

Probably run in with bullgryns to finish off the stealers if I wanted them gone!

So no, that wouldn't work against my guard. 

able

Not taking things for it to shoot at would work, techically.  Or hoping to get enough cover to hide the big stuff, but hide it for the whole game?  

Still don't have a good way to stop destroy it though.  Nothing I can think of that you would take in a normal all comers list.  3-4 units of hive guard podded in to cover where they can't be seen and just pelt it for turns could work, but not so much against another balanced army... kinda... maybe...

Yeah, playing around it is alright, but if you need to take it out, what can we do?  Take our own baneblade, yes, the thought had already crossed my mind, but other then that...  

[mule]

Please get it out of your head that we need to deal with everything by killing it. Because we don't, our army is mobile, fields a lot of of wounds, is cheap, has access to a disgusting amount of tools (not only being able to do nid stuff but GSC+AM stuff.)

Tournaments are going to be swapping to progressive points scoring it's just a matter of time before everyone gets used to 8th edition and the book missions become boring or not fit for competitive play. Yeah nid's might get tabled but after 3-5 turns of doing all the objectives and gathering progressive points, the guard won't be able to win by sitting in the corner and bubble wrapping, they have to contest objectives which is how the game should be. Also look at how much terrain you're using, because cover isn't really a thing anymore, 8th edition compensates that with adding more terrain, if they're able to target your important things turn 1 then you either set up poorly, or you're not playing with enough terrain/los blockers, feel free to watch Frontline's streams to see how much they're using because it's quite a bit which play in our favour.

Armies that sit in a corner and kill everything will not win competitive tournament games, TO's will change the rule set if that becomes the meta, because it's not fun and it's not competitive.

Lastly, this is the main reason why I hate taking exocrine over 2 units of Hive Guard. They're a single big unit that has turn 1 threat, they're going to get shots dumped into them. Putting an exocrine on the board is basically saying "Shoot this thing here" which we do not want. Because it's effective and because its a big point investment. MSU of hiveguard force the player to make another decision (which they can make mistakes on) additionally we can hide them out of LOS and still be a turn 1 threat, which can force someone to use a deepstrike, which lets us deal with it, just put them between your genestealers and the rest of your blob and they will have to wait til turn 2 or even 3 before they drop something down to deal with them (else the genestealers will just go over and rip them to shreds, or they'll get bogged down by our tarpit.)

[rroach]

A Baneblade surrounded by Conscripts is going to lack targets if it gets surrounded. A blob will only have one direction to get out of CC: towards the Nids and away from the Blade. It won't be able to shoot any units tying up the blob and the blob won't be able to shoot either.

Like when cops kettle protestors and pull them away one by one.

[mule]

Jul 9, 2017 18:33:03 GMT rroach said:

A Baneblade surrounded by Conscripts is going to lack targets if it gets surrounded. A blob will only have one direction to get out of CC: towards the Nids and away from the Blade. It won't be able to shoot any units tying up the blob and the blob won't be able to shoot either.

Like when cops kettle protestors and pull them away one by one.

Yeah but you're talking about conscripts who can disengage and still shoot, with a hundred models on the board you can take up as much space as you want early on, then disengage them back later on, all whilst maintaining a proper screen so no deepstrike can touch your tank.

[gigasnail]

Make sure you have enough LoS blocking terrain. One model should not be abe to range the entire board unchallenged (indirect fire aside).

[tophla]

Can you cast Horror on it?

[malkyn76]

Sort of dragging this back up since I played against someone with a baneblade just the other day. Sure, it has a lot of firepower, but in the end it only took me three turns to take it out once I got close enough. Between two Stonecrusher Fexes, it was down to 2 wounds left after two rounds of combat (my turn, then his). Once my Fexen died, the last two wounds were removed by a unit of ... termagants in shooting. Lol

[killercroc]

I dunno, a moderate sized hammer should do the job fairly well.

[kazetanade]

We're having some random small sized tournaments for 1k points in august period. I'll be borrowing a friends Baneblade and Pask Executioner to just go there and shoot stuff for fun, not expecting a win out of this. Will let you guys know how many hammers make it to the BaneBlade. =P

[mrleonard]

Yeah i mess around with the baneblade ass an ally to my GSC, and i can say. It's pretty cool, but the damage output kind of isn't thier for the points you drop. It's mostly just tough and hard to kill. It's kind of like an anti tabling paper weight. I actually think baneblades combo best with conscripts and lots of rough riders. the conscript bubble wrap the bane blade and the rough riders try to steal objective points where possible. Then everything, but the baneblade eventualy dies, and you hope you scored enough points before that happens to win lol.

As many have said before just ignore it for the most part it's kind of not worth your time to go after.

[lordoftheflyrants]

This is expensive I know but would it work? Drop in Mawlocs, Lictors or Raveners to pose a credible charge threat that's hard to ignore. Then 9 Hive Guard wth Shock Cannons drop in within 24 inches via 3 Cytes. Behind this is a Trygon Prime, Swarmlord or CC Flyrant. The Cytes put 45 deathspitter shots into the bubblewrap and the Shockcannons take about 12 wounds off the Baneblade.

The next turn you obviously have less to work with but Cytes open like a curtain to allow your CC Monster through and then the blast away any remaining bubblewrap. Surviving Shock Cannons apply a few more wounds and then your Monster charges hopefully for the kill. With a Mawloc or Lictor behind it can't move back so can only fire its weaker guns at you in CC.

I know probably all sorts of problems but it was fun to think about.

[kazetanade]

The problem presented isnt really with the baneblade itself, but with the immovable conscript wall blocking your way to it. Kill the conscripts, kill the baneblade.

Some shooters degrading it to half health is wnough to make it a nonfactor. You dont care as much when hes firing 4 lascannons when only 1/3 will hit.