Guest Editorial by Edwin: Sisters of Battle: Paper Tigers of a Thousand Paper Cuts

A guest editorial on Sisters of Battle by Edwin.

Watch for those paper cuts

So after my first five games with my Sisters of Battle I have decided that I am going to go off to a tournament. I have had great success with them. The results for the army have been rather surprising. I have dominated the Relic in the one game where I chose to go for objectives. The other four games I have come really close to tabling my opponent, or the games ended really early. I noticed a few things that seemed strange. When I first looked at these girls on paper, they looked good, but there were several things I noticed that really set the Sisters apart from everyone else.  I want to talk about a few of these advantages that I have found.

Good luck with Target Saturation

Sisters of Battle have one of the strangest and most difficult choices for target saturation. The tournament army I am running at 1850 has all but 2 units  of 10 units costing 175 points. Each and every unit is a particularly nasty threat to everything. The game usually opens with 2 squads of 2 melta, a combi melta, and a twin linked multimelta scouting forward. You can kill them, but than the rending heavy bolters are gonna go to town on you from behind an aegis line. Kill the rending sisters and you have to worry about Celestine and her friends running up, assaulting, then Hit-and-Run jumping from combat to combat surgically gutting your army. Celestine is immortal, so good luck keeping her down. While you are trying to kill all of this, the forty power armor Sisters in Rhinos are running around the field clogging the place up and scoring.

Often the only clear target is the Exorcist battle tank. I only run one, so shooting it often hurts you more than helps. AV 13 is hard to kill behind an aegis defense line.  This presents the problem of what to actually kill first.  To make this problem ever harder, a lot of people have rarely seen Sisters of Battle. I have seen two other people play them in five years. The only way to solve this problem is to play against Sisters and most people can’t.

It’s power armor but better!

Sisters of Battle are power armor soldiers, but better in an odd way. They are reduced in cost and things like toughness, initiative, and strength to show they are regular humans. They are better because they have something called the Shield of Faith.  It is a six plus invul save. Doesn’t sound like much, but it really helps. Most weapons that kill marines in bulk are ap3-1. At the same time, most of these weapons are str 6 or higher. This means that such weapons like plasma guns and battle cannons kill less sisters than they do regular marines. Also, Sisters of Battle vehicles die less often then their Marine counterparts. I have had plenty of vehicles actually survive an extra round because they saved a lucky pen or glance that would have killed them. It is random enough that you can’t rely on it. Strangely, it is quite encouraging to make a save like this every once in a while. This also means that Sisters are better adapted at handling things like Monstrous Creatures and anything with a power fist. Also, things like Mawlocs and the Doom of Malanti are not as effective.

Killing them all with fire

Sisters of Battle are incredible at overwatch. Logan Grimnar has fallen to the flamers of Sisters of Battle. They are a medium to short range army. I run my units to fight specific unit types. The basic Battle Sister squads have two flamers for their heavy weapons because they have so many bolters that go for infantry, so add in more anti infantry to those squads. This also means that while 16 bolter shots go at the enemy for overwatch, 2d3 flamer Hits go to the enemy just for declaring a charge. This gets even worse when you add in vehicles as they usually end up charging the rhino (2d3 overwatch hits), destroy it, see the whole squad get out, get rapid fired by bolters and than templated by two flamers.

This wouldn’t be so bad if you could consolidate against vehicles, but because you can’t you are left bunched up in a great formation for max template hits. Than, they get to attempt to finish off the squad charging again.That is just the basic Sister squads. Seraphim that I  run get 2 Hand Flamers per models. I run two, so that is 4d3 flamers per charge against them. Add in Celestine’s d3 heavy flamer hits, and you have a ton of hits before a charge. The Wall of Death special rule has made Sisters very tough.

Conclusions?

So, to conclude this article, I want to talk of the future. Five games isn’t enough to really talk about definites,  but this army is by far the my favorite army to play. I am attending the Brawler Bash in April with my Sisters. The tournament has forge world, so I expect flyers to be kept at a minimum because there will be so much Anti Air units. Rending quad gun is all my AA for this event. I will be running 70 armored battle sisters in vehicles. It is a tough list. It is a beautiful army too. I have a good chance to win any of the accolades the event offers. Everything is painted well, so best painted is good, I have never had a problem with sportsmanship (won sportsmen from my first tourney) , I have never done worse than 2-1 at a 3 game tournament and that was with a list that was both weaker and less diverse than this army. I think I can do this.