In round 2 I drew Austin, running a nicely painted Dark Angels
army - as vanilla marines
. I was soon to find out why...This scenario was based on victory points (not kill points, mind you!). Whoever came out 201 kill points ahead was declared the winner. We were lucky to be on a board with a medium amount of terrain.
I forget the exact details of Austin's list but it contained a librarian
attached to a tactical squad, all deployed in a drop pod, another drop pod containing an AC dreadnought, two rhinos with tactical squads, and a land raider crusader with a chapter master and 7 terminators (if memory serves, 4 with thunderhammer and storm shield and 3 with twin lightning claws).There isn't much to tell about this game; Austin and I took turns beating each other in the face through turn 7. The high point for me was watching his terminators fail their invuln saves against 3 dangerous terrain wounds, but other than that we did extensive damage to one another throughout the game. When the game ended on turn 7, Austin came out 300 victory points ahead.After the fact, we realized the game had a fixed length of 6 turns, but I don't expect that the result would have been any different.
I don't really have any complaints here. It was a tough game based on actual points value of units destroyed instead of kill points and we both gave it our best shot. It was a good game and I don't know if I'd change anything if we were to repeat it.
Round 3 I drew Ian, whom I'd played against at Kublacon in 2010.
I was NOT happy with the scenario. Basically, we would roll for objectives as in Seize Ground, but in order to gain points, we had to have a scoring unit sitting on an objective at the end of our opponent's turns. This is bad for Eldar, since it involves sitting still for basically an entire round, a tactic that doesn't lend itself well to an army with low numbers, low toughness and medium armor.
Ian brought another vanilla space marine list; two drop pod dreadnoughts, an LRC full of termies, a rhino with a tactical squad and another drop pod containing a Master of the Forge and a bunch of sternguard.
We both kept most of our armies in reserve, though I started my dire avengers on the table. On my first turn, I ran my dire avengers into some trenches near which I'd placed my objectives. On his turn, the first of his drop pod dreads came down, disembarked and roasted an entire unit of dire avengers while managing to contest the other. No points for me!
Later on he put another heavy flamer on my other dire avenger unit and toasted them too. At this point my only hope was to stop him from claiming, but it was already too late. My army stalled out a bit in turn 2, preventing me from putting enough pressure on any of his scoring units to keep them off of objectives. It wasn't until turn 5 that I was able to pop a rhino sitting on one of his objectives, after I'd already tried to pop it with a night spinner. Oops.
We had a pretty good, crazy game, but after my Troops were fried I was unable to respond quickly enough to keep the game a draw. I believe Ian finished with 7 loot counters to my zero. Ouch!
Mistake One.
Like the Cajun says in Apocalypse Now: "Never get off the boat." I could have left my dire avengers inside of their transports for at least the first turn, allowing me to rack up 2 loot counters a round. I could have also done the "Turbo Dance" between the two nearer objectives, possibly buying me even more time and loot counters. This would have at least slowed the dreadnoughts down, preventing them from hitting me in close combat on anything but a 6 and granting me cover saves against his weapons fire on a 4+.
Mistake Two.
After losing my Troops choices, I should have prioritized taking out Ian's tactical squads FIRST, ignoring the dreadnought and other apparent threats. I lost focus and started picking off units that were simply targets of opportunity instead of working toward the scenario.
Overall, I had a good time (y'know, as good as it gets with three losses anyway) and it definitely gave me some useful information overall. No more "soft" lists for me! I'll definitely be bringing something less fluffy to Kublacon in May!
Wondering what I have in mind? Well you'll have to wait for my next post!
Fonkin out!
army (Keith went on to win the best painted category for the tournament).
and got plenty of rest. Everything was smooth sailing...