Kublacon 2011 Recap: Part 2

Still reeling from my grinding battle vs. the Sons of Sanguinius, I drew my second opponent, Chris. I'd met Chris before. Chris was playing orks, lots of orks. Fortunately, this was an army I'd had some practice against fairly recently, so I felt confident that I could handle him.

The second scenario was akin to the old 3rd and 4th ed "Breakthrough" scenarios; each side gains an additional model, a "rogue trader" who must be escorted to the opposite table edge. This rogue trader has a pretty stout profile, but can not enter vehicles; he must walk or run to the opposite table edge. This was not going to play nicely with my meched-up MSU army list.

This game would be decided based on victory points - not kill points but good old fashioned 4th ed victory points! I kind of forgot about that in my worry over the RT.

Chris set up his army spread out across his deployment zone. He stuck his RT into a giant mob of 30 boyz, with covering fire from a group of what looked like a billion Lootas ensconced in terrain on a hill. He had a 2 trukks and a battlewaggon in the middle of the board all loaded up with Thraka and a bunch of boyz, while the killa kans and deff dread brought up the right flank.

(Sorry for the bad pic, my phone was fighting the lighting all day.)

 I decided to start with my entire army on the table, with my seer council hiding behind a line of war walkers. The plan was to use the fire prisms and a volley of Guided walker fire to soften up his army on one side, while the embarked fire dragons would attempt to soften up his vehicles and armor on my left. I hid my RT in terrain in the center of the board, joined by a 5-man dire avenger squad.

This game went very fast. Chris' lootas rolled 3s for number of shots for the first 2 rounds, but one of his trukks got hung up in terrain. I, however, had problems right off the bat, as the opening salvo of his lootas wiped out my war walkers completely. Things fell apart quickly after that.

My recollection of this game is pretty sparse, since I spent the entire game on the defensive. Thraka and his band wiped out my RT and the Seer Council while I made successively worse rolls on the left. The game ended with not a single eldar model still on the table. Chris actually looked a bit surprised that he tabled me; it was a total wipeout! Ouch!


The main mistake I made was so simple as to be pure folly: I focused too much on protecting the Rogue Trader, when I should have used him as a lure or ignored him entirely. I would have benefited more from starting the entire army out in reserve. This mistake led to a cascading series of errors complicated by bad dice rolls, leaving me 2 steps behind for the rest of the game. Good thing Chris was such a sport; it was probably my favorite game of the day.