Tourney Battle Reports

The 1750 tournament at the Redmond game store has come and gone, and I am overdue for my reports. There was a good turnout but the game started late.

Here's the army I brought:

HQ
Heroic Senior Oficer (power weapon, bolt pistol)
2 plasma guns
Medic
Commissar (power weapon, bolt pistol)

Anti-Tank Squad (2 lascannon, missile launcher)

Inquisitor Lord (power weapon, storm bolter, carapace armor)
2 Heavy Bolter Servitors
2 Acolytes (bolt pistol, carapace armor)

Elites
10 Ratlings

Callidus Assassin

5 Ogryn in Chimera(multi-laser, heavy bolter)

Troops
Platoon 1
Junior Officer(bolt pistol, power weapon)
Infantry Squad 1 (autocannon)
Infantry Squad 2(autocannon)

9 Storm Troopers
Veteran Sargeant (bolt pistol, power weapon)
2 meltaguns
Chimera(multi-laser, heavy bolter)

Heavy Support

Leman Russ Battle Tank (3 heavy bolters)

Leman Russ Battle Tank (3 heavy bolters)

Leman Russ Demolisher (lascannon, 2 plasma cannons)

On to the battles. On to glory

Battle 1 - Mechanized Chaos Marines

Patrick brought three squads of plague marines kitted with plasma guns and mounted in rhinos, and a land raider with Kharn and a squad of berserkers. The mission was hostage rescue. I was defending and had to prevent Patrick from getting to the prisoner and then leading him out of my deployment zone. He deployed fairly uniformly across his starting line, while I assigned the ogryn and storm troopers to hold my left and right flanks respectively, while the rest of my army was tasked with holding the center and protecting the hostage.

The game started pretty well for me. I immediately immobilized his land raider and most of his rhinos, but if I was expecting the rest of the game to continue this way I was in for a rude surprise.

The plague marines made an inexorable advance towards my center line. The imperial guard can usually wear down power armored troops through sheer volume of fire, but Plague Marines with their toughness of five and Feel No Pain simply ignored all my efforts to bring their numbers to a manageable level. In the end I had killed a fair number of the enemy, but my army was killed to a man. Here are some lessons I learned:
1. Careful with your battle cannons. I pulled my assassin off the board after a stray round from a Russ landed on her. Battle cannons are not close fire support weapons.
2. My Ogryn got caught by the berserkers after they fired on the assault target that was supposed to get them away from them. So rather than acting as bait to draw the berserkers closer to my battle cannons, they ended up getting caught by the berserkers while they were high-fiving each other after killing a rhino. Rather than shooting at the rhino they should have held up for the assault phase and used the extra six inches to get themselves to safety.
3. My army needs more counterassault. I think maybe a priest instead of a commissar, and replace the plasma guns and medic with some meltaguns.
4. I was too concerned about the hostage. Instead of clustering my armor in the center I should have set them up on a flank (probably the left where there was lighter resistance). Since the only thing that could harm my armor at range was his land raider. A concentration of fire here would have let me hold down that flank in a couple of turns, while the hostage could have been protected by an infantry picket.

It was a good game, and seeing the plague marines in action was frustrating. They definitely seemed like a unit that basically played themselves. MVP on my army was the inquisitor lord who on the last turn held up the squad escorting the hostage and kept it from leaving my deployment zone.

Battle 2 - Lashing Chaos Army

Ross brought a lash chaos army. There was a demon prince, a sorceror on bike, some noise marines, some chaos marines, a couple of obliterators, a land raider and a couple of spawn squads. The mission was Emissary Escort, where Russ had to get a special character into my deployment zone. He set up a long line with his heavy stuff on my right flank and his lashers and emissary on my left. I piled my armor onto my right flank and lightly held the center. There was a large piece of terrain in the very center of the board that made for very poor diagonal sight lines.

Since the chaos codex came out everyone has been kicking and screaming about Lash of Submission. And I definitely think that it is a powerful, but to really do a lash army you are committing an awful lot of your points to just lashing.

My armor spent a good portion of the game moving up my left flank. I think they were able to start picking targets on turn three. The callidus popped out early, pasted the emissary and spent the rest of the game holding up most of his right flank. The battle tanks had a field day lobbing shells the length of the long table edge and the storm troopers managed to microwave the land raider on the last turn. As I recall, the game was a draw in the end.

Here's my thoughts on Lash having played against it now:
1. Lash allowed my opponent to have a first turn charge with his spawn. Since spawn basically move 2d6 inches with a twelve inch assault, the extra 2d6 from the lash are almost guaranteed to get someone into their assault range on the first turn.
2. Lash could move my units, but moving a sixty point guard squad doesn't hurt me that much. What I think actually hurt me more was that the lash would pin me.
3. His sorceror and demon prince spent most of the game pussyfooting around lashing stuff closer to his spawn. He could have charged his casters into combat also, but then he risks having them tied up and not able to lash.

Game 3 - Imperial Guard Vostroyans

Aaron B brought a beautifully painted Vostroyan army. I won this game, but I'm not interested in a retelling. The mission used escalation rules and Aaron had lost his first two games which made him not care about the game we were playing. It was basically a miserable game. My opponent didn't care about being there, he kept wandering away from the table and bullshitting with his friend who was playing on the table next to us. As it was I spent quite a bit of time just sitting around waiting for him and we were only able to make it to turn four (which is a real problem in an escalation game where a majority of your army is in reserves). It's the first tournament game I haven't been able to play to completion because of time.

The tournament was fun and I definitely got a kick out of my first two games. There's a tournament this Saturday at the Bellevue Bunker but I'll be out of town, so I'm not sure when I'll next be able to play in a tournament. Maybe I'll have my Chaos in order.