Stormraven?

Shameless plug for Brent! You can check out the rest of his Stormraven here on his blog. Anyway, I've had a lot of requests over the weeks (well months) for a good Stormraven list. You can't really go wrong with Stelek's 'ard Boyz list here but most of the requests have been based around Terminators. We covered how terminators don't really work like they do in the Vanilla codex here (lot of links :S), it's just a different army. So what can we do to make this work now and at 2k? Well let's see if we can come up with something.

First off, we want 3 Storm Ravens. Why? Because they are only AV12 and outside of speeders, we don't want any other armor (except the Dreads hopping out). We want each of them to have a TL-MM, TL-PC and Hurricane Sponsons + a Loc Beacon @ 245 pts each. I don't think we have room for EA but if we can squeeze it in at the end...well lovely. Next we want 2 libbies w/Shield & lance; nearly at out 1000 mark already and we don't even have Terminators! So squad of 10 (yay combat squading) is 400 and we want at least 6 TH/SS so 30 more points there. 1365 and we need 2 FNP/FC bubbles at a minimum plus some Dreads to hold in the Stormravens, otherwise, why Stormravens?

We can only take 1 Furioso w/Grapple & talons @ 140 pts and 2 Priests are a further 100. Only 395 left. 3 Stormravens simply isn't going to work at 2k, let's up it to 2.5k and see what we can get still. Let's drop in 2 MM Dreads for the other Ravens (getting access to DC Dreads is just too expensive) for 210 pts. Time for some Pods in which our ASM can arrive. 125 pts gets us a meltagun, infernous pistol & Pod. 3 please for some half-way decent scoring leaving us with 280 pts, 3x1 Typhoons speeders & 2x meltagun ISTs and we are done. Let's review:

2x Libbys w/Shield & lance
10x Terminators, 6 w/TH/SS
2x Sang Priest
Furioso w/Grapple & Talons
3x 5x ASM w/Pod, meltagun, infernous pistol
5x IST w/2x meltagun
3x Land Speeder Typhoon
3x Storm Raven w/TL-PC, TL-MM, LocBeacon, Hurricane sponsons

Eh not really what we're looking for is it? It has potential but it's really all over the place in terms of potential and at 2.5k, 3 Ravens can be brought down. So let's try something a bit different (just realised I did termie points wrong before but oh well). We'll try one squad of Termies (ew, I know) and see if we can't utilise Vanguard.

So 3 Ravens again with same setup is 735 but we're giving the Terminator one EA so 750. One Furioso Dread & 2 normals leaves us with 900 pts to go, 225 for terminators (all TH/SS) & 300 for Priests/Libbys puts us @ 1625 and 3 ASM caps us at 2000. No real points for VV unless we hit 2500 and again, 3 AV12 w/o Speeder support won't last long. And let's see what we have this time:

2x Libbys w/Shield & lance

5x TH/SS Termies
2x Sang Priest
Furioso w/Grapple & Talons
3x 5x ASM w/Pod, meltagun, infernous pistol
3x Storm Raven w/TL-PC, TL-MM, LocBeacon, Hurricane sponsons (1 w/EA)

So, this could work at 2000 but it's got one hammer unit, never good and is pretty light on infantry just like before. Whilst 3x Raven is more survivable @ 2k there isn't that much firepower to what we would normally expect and when we drop it to 2 Ravens for the double hammer unit, you have the same problem as the double raider list for BA, there is little support outside of those units. We'll look at that later tonight or tomorrow but if anyone has some ideas about Ravens @ 2k or 2.5k, drop a comment.