The arrival of the blessings of Papa Nurgle mean that I’ve not played in person for over a year, but I have been playing a bit on Tabletop Simulator. It’s not the same, but it does mean you can try various lists before buying and painting the models.
The list I’ve run a few times lately is 2 company commanders, a tank commander with demolisher cannon, 6 infantry squads, 3 squads of seven bullgryns with slabshields, 2 Ministorum priests, 2 full payload Manticores, 2 Chimeras, and a Vindicare assassin.
I think the core of the list – lots of squads, lots of bullgryns, lots of Manticores – works. I do quite well on primary objectives, and can effectively prevent deepstrikes, by virtue of just having so many bodies. The Manticores provide somewhat unpredictable amounts of damage, but at effectively unlimited range and without needing line of sight.
The issue I’ve had is with secondary objectives. I’m generally going for engage on all fronts and raise the banners high, and then picking another one. The assassin is there to try, obviously, to get the assassinate secondary objective. I suspect I’m not playing the assassin effectively, but combined with another problem with the list, it leads me to rethink things a little. The tank commander is generally destroyed on turn one or two. That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing – it’s soaking up an awful lot of damage – but it does mean that it’s not worth investing points in sponson weapons or, indeed, making it a tank commander instead of a regular Leman Russ. I’m thinking I might be better off ditching the tank commander and the assassin, and running two Leman Russes instead. That would provide more high toughness wounds, and hopefully divert attention away from everything else.
An alternative variation is to drop the tanks altogether along with two of the squads and have Scions and Valkyries flying around.
I’m going to keep playing around with different lists and I don’t want to buy loads of models yet, but it does seem that I’m going to be running 60+ infantry, a lot of bullgryns, and a couple of Manticores as the core of my army.