Death and Ruin

Played a pick up game with Damon down at the shop last night (check out Kettil's keep fine selection of war of the ring rule books on that shelf!).  We were playing another one of those tournament missions again, this time the one with an objective in each quarter.  The mission was pretty secondary to my stupidity however.  Victory after victory has lead to Pardak (read as me) being over confident and I sat in my deployment zone pill boxing for too many turns.

Damon played a solid game and kick my head in.  A valuable lesson learned.  Yes the squats can really pump out the fire power, but they're a mostly close range army and I can't afford to stay still so long.  Mobility is key.   

Played Zach (spelling confirmed) this last Wednesday using our tournament lists.  He had finished third in the tournament with his foot Wolves.  His listed featured three big squads of grey hunters, one of them might have been blood claws but I don't think so, a runepriest, a multimelta dreadnaught in a pod, and a long fang pack with three rockets and a plasma cannon.  We rolled randomly to determine which of the tournament missions we'd play and got the final one, kill points battle line.  He picked table edge and deployed first.  I refused the left flank and set up in a huddle on the right.  Once again Pardak seized the initiative and the engineers all shot lascannons at his rune priest, killing him instantly with a double out.  On his first turn in dreadnaught did a suicide drop and missed.

My brotherhoods rolled forward, one deploying and vaporized the dread and the pod, secure in the knowledge that the majority of Zach's army was well out of position to threaten them.  The only squad that did have a good fire lane was the long fangs, but their only target was a smoked chimera.  The long fangs did little more than shake it.

The shaken chimera moved up to block fire from the dismounted brotherhood squad while the squats focused their fire on the right most grey hunter squads.  Six were killed, including the wolf guard leader in terminator armor who died tanking a storm bolter wound.  They Grey Hunters broke and began to hoof it towards the board edge.

The shaken chimera was close enough to the broken Grey Hunters to chase them off the board, to complete Zach's misery the Long Fangs once again failed to do anything to the forward chimera but shake it.  Finally in the middle Zach's infantry got close enough to take a few shots at my brotherhoods.  Thanks to my engineers, who had mostly rolled armor enhancements changing my carapace armor to powered, I lost only two space dorfs.

My heroic lead chimera rolled forward and actually tank shocked the Long Fangs off the board, while in midfield my brotherhoods massed firepower on yet another Grey Hunter squad, reducing it to four marines.  Pardak and the Slayers dismounted in preparation for a counter assault.  The heroic tank shocking Chimera finally met its end from a few melta gun shots..  They Grey Hunters assault faltered a little as the ground rippled from Pardak's sanctuary ability and one of their number died.  The Space Wolves only managed to kill on Squat, and the little blighters passed their morale test. 

The final turn had the two unengaged brotherhood squads mass fire on the final Grey Hunter squad, killing it to a man.  The counter assault of the slayers killed the last three space wolves on the board before they could swing.

Zach had some pretty horrible luck in this game which lent to the scale of the Squat victory, but had his rolls been more average while the Squat losses might have been higher I doubt the game could have gone many different ways.  The relative slowness of his force and how spread out they were, combined with the maneuverability of my force and the line of sight blocking terrain pretty much spelled victory for the space dwarfs.

You can always tell a quality opponent by how they take a drubbing, and Zach handled it with aplomb.  I can certainly see why he earned best sport at the tournament.

Tournament Wrap Up

So the result was.....

Best General!

Ben took overall with just a smidgen more points than me thanks to his painting scores which were slightly higher than mine.  Space Wolf Zach (or is it Zack?!) took best sport, and Taxi Cab Jason got best painted with his demons of khorne army.

Overall it was a wicked fun tournament and I'm very pleased with the showing the squats put in.  I believe the Grey Knights codex to be very strong, especially the acolyte list so it's not terribly surprising they did well, but it's still nice not to get thumped.  I certainly could have made the list much rougher with another slayer squad or a psybolt dreadnought but I think there was enough starch in the list as is.

I was a little disappointed to loose the tournament based on painting but Sam Cromwell's painting rubric was very fair and so were the scenarios.  So yes technically Ben's tiger stripes won him the tournament, but you can't just argue that one of the winning points was the one that cost me.  Immobilizing my chimera in the second game also lost me the tournament, or not killing Suitcase Dave's final marine.  Regardless I had three excellent games of warhammer 40k against three excellent opponents.  Kudos to Sam for running a good event and to all the players.  I didn't see or hear a single heated word the entire day. which isn't too shabby considered eighteen games of 40k were played.  The only thing I'd like to see is the painting rubric posted before hand so you know what will get you points.  Admittedly these monthly tournaments are pretty laid back affairs and it was Sam's first time running one so that's certainly not a real complaint.  Just an observation for aspiring TO's.

The Emberg League will be set aside for the bit as far as further growth as there will be a bit of a blitz to get some other projects done, but I plan on returning to them in January and building them up to 1850.  Add in some Chickenhawk gunships, maybe some counts as dreadknights, and if I can get a few more a squad of counts as paladin Exo-armor squats.

3rd tournament game

Suitcase Dave's odd odd Black Templars Army.  He had a five man terminator squad with two cyclones and the squad had tank hunters.  One of the landspeeders was a typhoon and the other one I think had a multimelta.  His dread, which was venerable, had twin linked lascannons and a missile launcher.  His two crusader squads between the two of them had a lascannon, plasma cannon, melta gun, and a plasma gun.  This mission was basically annihilation but instead of getting just one kill point per unit you received a number of kill points based on the total points value of the unit.  Realizing his long range firepower outweighed my qualitatively I decided to rush his lines  He'd split his infantry into two groups, and I figured if I could down the landspeeders I could just ignore the weaker group and try and burst down the other.  Of course I failed every single smoke save and Suitcase managed to blow up my most import chimera (the one carring the Slayers and Pardak).  All my brother hood squads managed to roll up either power armor, a 5+  invulnerable save, or both.  I'm usually pretty good at wound allocation but there was a shooting phase which saw me deal something like 13 heavy flamer wounds, 3 melta,  and 6 stormbolter wounds to one of the big complicated crusader squads with the scouts in it. Allocating the monster out took about twenty minutes and by the end of it I have to say I just took Suitcase Dave's word for it.

The emperor's champion's ability to move where ever he wants after assault moves have been made saw Pardak dead for the first time, and his complete lack of an invulnerable save or space marine toughness really explained his marginal point cost.  He is a great model, so long as no one swings at him.

In the end it was a major victory for me; all Suitcase Dave had left was his venerable and a marine from the smaller crusader squad.  I had two of my botherhood squads left, and three out of the four chimeras.

2nd tournament game

Ben Blythe and I were the only ones to score max points in the first round do we squared off in round two in a tactically interesting but mostly uneventful game.  His army had a couple of melta vet squads in chimeras with a lord commissar, a squadron of devil dog melta tanks, and even some outflanking scout sentinels.  This battle had four objectives, one in each quarter, and used spearhead-like deployment.  The two objectives NOT in deployment zones were worth double.  Knowing we were at the top of the heap battle points wise made both of us play super cagey, because game two at a thousand point twelve person 40k tournament is a big gorram deal.  Niether of us wanted to rush into the other's melta guns so we took some pot shots at each other for the first couple turns until his sentinels showed up.  Ben wisely kept them out of range of Pardak's response bubble (Inquisitor Coteaz grants him and his squad an out of sequence shooting attack at anything that arrives from reserve within a foot of him.)  The sentinels shot some hunter killer missiles and a krak missile at the side of the slayers chimera and blue off the turret.  After confirming they were armor ten scout sentinels I gleefully charged my slayers into them, and those two squads proceed to ineffectively battle each other until the end of the game with no real winner.

Best thing that happened this game was the next turn when the slayers' chimera got all squirrely and tried to ram one of  Ben's vet squads, but the strength seven hit it managed to get was insufficient.  Nothing much interesting happened besides me spreading out to grab some objectives and one of Ben's squads failing a leadership test from 25% shooting casualties and fleeing off the board...and consequently the objective that would have made the game a tie.  In the end it was a minor victory for me, it would have been a major but one of my chimera's immobilized itself trying to get to an objective that I'd just vacated to shoot Ben's squad off the board.

It was a fun tactical game, if not overly exciting.  This marked the first game Ben and I have played of a miniature war game in like eight years, and it was pleasant.  Really the only reason I think this game went my way instead of Ben's was because he fielded the devil dogs in a squadron instead of as singletons.  It let me just mass my firepower on one unit and let the hits carry over.  In fact of the six vehicles of his I killed during the game I believe three or four of them were due to immobilization kills.  I realize he had six fast attack vehicles so some squadroning was needed, but as it always has, squadroning seems like too big of a disadvantage to me.

1st tournament game

My first game of the tournament were against Clayton's new Flesh Tearers army.  Hands down to Clayton for really stepping up his painting on this army.  He had some really nice hand painted squad markings and insignia.  Also up front in the picture he made some nice functional objective markers.  Clayton is easily one of my favorite opponents, as we always have competitive games, and he doesn't get to upset when I make fun of anything blood angel shaped.  He is a good sport.

Sam Cromwell, the TO, had designed some special missions for us to play the first of which in this game against Clayton was called "Point of the spear", basically there was one objective center of the board, and the player with the most VPs worth of models next to it and the end of the games the big winner.  Clayton deployed first halfway across the table with his land raider redeemer with a ten man assault squad inside along with his HQ choice, a blood angels chaplain in terminator armor.  I decided to roll onto the board on my turn one.

Living Ancestor Pardak Unworthe showed is tactical brilliance by seizing the initiative (with the help of Coteaz's reroll).  This scenario used dawn of war, but I proudly announced that I'd purchased search lights for my chimera's and promptly spotted the land raider redeemer.  My ingenious engineers had gifted my melta gun squads with 12'' of extra range so I plunked a few shots at land raider for no effect. Clayton's turn on saw his other tactical squad in rhino roll onto the board along with his double plasma cannon devastator squad who hoofed it on.  Evidently Clayton has read the rulebook and explained that he auto spotted my chimeras as they'd used search lights; suddenly I felt less proud about my search lights.  The assault cannons stripped the turret of on of my chimeras and the machine spirit multi-melta wrecked another one; the squad inside decided to be pinned.   In my turn two I drove up with the chimera with the wrecked turret and slightly behind it, another chimera with Pardak and the Slayers who dismounted ready for a counter assualt.  I was still out of double dice melta range and the few engineer lascannon shots failed to do anything meaningful to the land raider.  On his turn two Clayton drove his land raider into the teeth of my army and dismounted.  His land raider attempted to kill the chimera in front of it but failed to do so.

The squad's two melta guns however got the job down and destroyed the chimera in an impressively large explosion that killed three of the space dwarfs within.  The ten man assault squad and chaplain lord then charged the survivor and predictably murder the squats entirely.  I wasn't too displeased however as Clayton had fallen into my deadly trap!  Well fallen into is the wrong word since as Clayton was committing I believe he said something like, "Well this is a bad idea".  So he more jumped into my deadly trap.

The squad who chimera had been wrecked moved up to shoot the land raider, the still mounted plasma gun squad wheeled over and dismounted to put fire into the dismounted flesh tearers and Pardak and slayers moved up to guarantee a successful assault move.  The engineers unleashed heavy flamers from their fabricator arrays while their squad mates sprayed and prayed with plasma guns and rotary boltguns; killing five of the 11 marines and putting a wound on the chaplain.  The melta squad succeeded in blowing up the land raider despite only one of the three meltas hitting it.  Living Ancestor Unworthe rolled an 11 for both hammerhand and activating his force weapon.  Despite my pyschic failure the slayers killed the remaining marines for a loss of only one of their number to the chaplain.  In clayton's next turn Unworthe would fail again on hammerhand but the slayers killed the chaplain regardless.  

My army mostly intact moved on to tank shock the devastators off the objective, take a bit of fire from the other tactical squad before mowing them down as well.  At the end of the game I had everything but one the one dead squad and two dead chimeras parked on the objective; I scored 15 battle points to Clayton's 3.

Slayers...in space!

These Avatars of war slayer models served as my death cult assassins.  The slayer cult was never officially part of the squat back story in warhammer 40k as far as I know, but given the similarities between squats and warhammer fantasy dwarfs it seemed reasonable that a squat who had dishonored stronghold or league would dye his beard and seek an honorable death against terminators and carnifexes.