Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

To view the previous report in this series, click here. To view the next report in this series, click here. To view more battle reports in The Hand of the King series, click here.

To view the tactical overview for this report, click here.

***

Rain pattered down on the plastic coating of the map.

"I think we're here, sir," the spotter replied.

"Are you sure?" Melchoir replied.

The spotter gave the officer a slightly incredulous look. The entire area was blanketed in a heavy fog.

"No," he replied, deliberately.

Melchoir frowned. Careful planning required good intelligence. He had virtually none. He weighed his options carefully.

Around him were gathered a half a hundred soldiers. As he had advanced through the freezing rain turned freezing mist, he occasionally ran across stragglers who were completely lost. A handful at a time, Melchoir's army began to grow as they picked their way across the rocky ground. The mist got thicker and thicker, smothering them in the scent of wet grass and pine.

Their intrepid band had managed across an artillery spotter. The officer had given a very public display of thanksgiving when he found that he still had his maps and a long-wave vox set. Finally being able to communicate with anybody, he had gotten an appraisal of the situation, and after a few minutes of haggling, got somebody on the line who could give him orders. As best the spotter could guess, they were on grid C-19. They were given new coordinates to move to.

Melchoir knew that the city was on his left somewhere, and the low thud of thundering artillery and the occasional flashes that pierced the mist told him that they weren't too far off either. As best he could tell, he was going to be a part of some big move to encircle the city, or at least to keep the flank of the attackers safe.

"This is hopeless," Melchoir muttered, waving his gloved hand at the fog.

"We've got to keep going, Melchoir," Sanario intoned. "We must advance to crush the enemy."

"Advance where?" the officer asked, bordering on sarcasm.

The priest didn't like his done.

"Look, save it," Melchoir interrupted before the priest got a chance to speak. This just made the clergyman slightly more enraged.

"Sorry," he corrected himself. This was not going well.

The rest of his men had started to mull about and chat with each other. Some went into the nearby ruin to try and get some protection from the dripping rain. It didn't do much to help.

Melchoir put his hand on his forehead as he thought.

"But we can't stay here," the priest insisted, "We've got to keep moving until we encounter the enemy."

"Or they encounter us," the spotter replied in a muted tone.

Melchoir tried to block them out for a second. He needed a plan. There just wasn't enough information for him to really work with here. He might as well be guessing, not commanding.

"Yes, but-"

A booming crack of a lascannon snapped through the mist. All three of them looked over in surprise.

"Who fired that?" Melchoir demanded.

"I did, sir," one of the lascannon gunners replied, "I thought I saw something."

"In this?" one of the guarsmen asked.

"I did too," the gunner replied in a vaguely insulted tone.

"Be calm now, soldiers," Sanario replied, a droplet of water falling from his mustache.

Someone above them gave out a grunt and fired his lasgun into the heavy fog.

"Hold your fire!" Melchoir ordered. He sighed heavily. "Look, we can't send out a bunch of jumpy guardsmen out into this. They're just going to all accidentally kill each other before we find things for them to shoot on purpose."

The priest frowned.

"I may be a commander marshal, but I can't control the weather."

"You can only control how you react to it," the priest replied. The officer couldn't tell if Sanario was agreeing with him or reprimanding him.

Melchoir avoided the priest's gaze by looking back at his soldiers. A general fidgetiness was starting to spread amongst them. Nervous soldiers and poor visibility rarely led to anything good.



"You heard the priest," Melchoir spoke up, "Let's all just be calm here. You all know the story of the mouse and the hawk."

"Yes, but the mouse gets eaten in the end," one of the guardsmen protested.

"Yeah, I'm not sure that that's the best analogy to use here, sir," another one agreed.

"Fine," the officer retorted, "Then the story of the mouse and the hawk, except its foggy everywhere, and the mouse doesn't get eaten in the end."

"But then the story wouldn't really make sense. I mean, it would, as for the moral of the story, but if the mouse doesn't get eaten then there really isn't much incentive to follow it."

"Your incentives is that you would be obeying orders, guardsman," Sanario interjected.

"Well, yes, but then we need to have a second mouse to give the first one orders. And then we'd have to have a second hawk, and then they'd both still get eaten in the end."

"Look," Melchoir exasperated, "It's not important who eats who here. What's important is that everybody just remains calm and-"

Another lascannon blast broke out next to them.

"I said-" began the officer before another basilist team took alarm and fired.

There was something out there in the mist.



The officer ran forward and peered forward into the sifting clouds. He could barely make out something moving in front of him. A large, slightly-off-grey blotch trundled forward. It was a vehicle.

The officer tried as best he could to make out if it was friendly or not. He was pretty sure it was coming straight at him.

The men, however, lacked the discipline of their commander. One of the junior officers targeted the shape from behind a fence and shot its lascannon into the obscurity. The shot hit, and a bright flash followed by a sizzling crack filled the air as the shot penetrated armor, instantly catching the vehicle into flames.

After a few moments, a series of small explosions rocked the vehicle, blowing the thing apart.

The shock of it all scattered the mist in front of them. The vehicle wasn't friendly. There were survivors.



"Hey, that's the enemy," the artillery spotter observed, face glowing slightly in the flickering flames slowly engulfing the wreck.

"Hopefully just a scouting party, or perhaps they're lost, like us," Melchoir replied.

"But what if they're not? What if there's more of them?"

"If there are more of them, they are never going to find us in this soup," the officer replied confidently, "We'd be lucky enough to find OURSELVES in this."

They looked at the flaming wreck as lasgunners fired in its general direction, hoping to hit some of the barely-visible survivors clambering for cover.

"Hello?" came a shout from behind them.

Melchoir whipped around, but couldn't see anything in the fog.

"The Emperor protects!" the priest shouted out the call.

"Now and forever!" came the countersign.

Melchoir could see shapes starting to appear behind him, and hear the tramping of boots underneath the sporadic gunfire. Shortly, a few dozen guardsmen rushed up to meet them.



"Who are you?" Melchoir asked the officer who appeared to be in charge.

"Officer Marshal Damien Vogel, formerly of the Bruchos Line."

"I'm Commander Marshal Melchoir, of Sefrin's."

The junior officer looked at him for a moment.

"Well, sir," he began, "I'm pretty sure neither of us is where we're supposed to be right now."

"Where do you think we are?" asked the spotter.

"I don't know. D12? E15? It's tough to say."

"We thought we were at C-19," Melchoir replied.

"I don't know if we're that far out, but it's hard to tell in this. We heard your gunfire, though, and thought we'd make our way over and see if anybody knew anything."

"Not much more than you, I'm afraid."

The officer watched as the "reinforcements" moved up and took positions next to his own men.

"Do you have orders?" Melchoir asked.

"Not anymore."

"Well congratulations, you're part of the Theleos Group now."

"Yes, sir."

"Incoming!" someone shouted from the ruins.



A pair of shifting shapes dashed forward from the wreckage. Evil looking blades glinted in the light of the fires behind them.

The guardsmen quickly drew fire down on them, but were caught by surprise. One of them managed to make it up to the first guardsman and viciously stab him in the throat. The other soldiers shouted and moved in to counterattack.

Within a few moments, the remaining enemy was beaten down.

"Is that all of them?" the junior officer asked.

"So far," Melchoir replied. "We don't know if they were probing, or if they were as lost as we are. There could be twenty enemy regiments in front of us, or absolutely nothing. We just don't know."

The junior officer nodded. "I'll start setting up some positions."

"Don't get out of line of sight. I don't want any accidents here. Not while there are so few of us."

The junior officer nodded again and turned to organize his men into work detail.

"Digging in," Sanario scoffed, "How courageous."

"Sometimes the hand of the king must grasp the royal spade."

The priest rolled his eyes.


***

Nice to see your battle reports again. The fluff is as fun as ever, and I appreciate the tactical analyasis. I'm looking forward to seeing more of the Foleran 1st!

Wow, from the luck of the other player I had to check to make sure that you guys didn't have an army swap day and you were playing the GK! That was pretty terrible rolling, like it wasn't even a game. Regardless, congrats on the win, you seemed like you had the stronger list anyway.

Why would you aggressively deep strike a pair of squads with psycannons and stormbolters? Dropping them at 18 to 20 inches lets them blast away with their 24" range guns without having to risk eating buckets of FRFSRF lasgun fire at short range.

He didn't have the attacks to successfully assault your blobs, or the resilience to shoot it out at point blank range so the only thing he could accomplish by dropping that aggressively would be dying faster so he can get to dinner faster.

So you have good experiences with the lascannon in the PCS? To me it seems like they are almost as fragile as HWTs (3 men and a weapon team instead of 3 weapon teams, pretty close). Don't they get wiped by pretty much anything very quickly?

I mean, you opponent gets a chance to try and kill the lascannon PIS, or the lascannon PCS, why wouldn't you hit the PCS and almost guarantee a kill?

DaddyWarcrimes wrote:Why would you aggressively deep strike a pair of squads with psycannons and stormbolters?

I don't know, actually.

My guess is that it had something to do with the fact that we both had the same number of kill points, but I got started earlier on killing his. Honestly, if he had been more conservative with them, he probably would have taken my KP really slowly, what with trying for bolter shots against ruins cover. Meanwhile, I would have been shooting back at him with lascannons. I don't know how much he was really going to win that fight, and with me already having a KP advantage, and also having first blood, he probably figured that his only real chance was to double down and try to take out as much stuff as possible with a mix of shooting AND assault.

At least, that's why I would have made that decision in that particular way, I guess. Can't say why he did, though.

motyak wrote:So you have good experiences with the lascannon in the PCS? To me it seems like they are almost as fragile as HWTs (3 men and a weapon team instead of 3 weapon teams, pretty close). Don't they get wiped by pretty much anything very quickly?

Not really, actually. I found this to be true in the last rules edition as well.

I think that, unlike a 3x lascannon HWS, a 1x lascannon PCS is just SO low of a target priority. Most people are going to shunt a single BS3 lascannon pretty far down their list of target priorities when there's other stuff to shoot at. Not to say that they don't get shot at and killed, but it's nowhere near the same kind of maniacally obsessive amounts of gunfire that instantly get poured into HWSs at the top of the game.

And, in a way, my opponent is right to slightly ignore them, as it IS only a BS3 lascannon. If you wonder why I'm taking them if they're ignorable, it kind of misses the point. It's not that it's just one lascannon, but instead is another brick in a WALL of lascannon fire that I can put out. With 8 of them shooting, even at BS4, they're pretty likely to do something, and I just need to get my numbers high enough to roll enough dice to make this whole idea work.

Nono, I don't think I explained it right. I mean in the sense of your list, there are 8 units (in this list) with lascannons. I don't get how the 2 5 man units which a) have a lascannon and b) give orders are lower target priority than a 10 man unit which is harder to wipe and make sure is dead in a turn.

I'm trying to say, why kill off 1 lascannon and 8 peons (one of your PIS') when a similar amount of shooting (which can kill 10 guys) could technically kill two 5 man units (so 2 lascannons, 4 peons and 2 officers). It just seems like your opponents have odd target priority to me?

Did that explain my position better?

I guess if you didn't take the lascannons you would have 40 points, and not much you can do with that...apart from putting 2 lascannons in the PCS's, but at higher point levels there may be a few points left for a marbo or something? I dunno, just food for thought

Oh, I get what you're saying.

To be fair, when his reserves came up, I only had a single lascannon PCS on the board. It was blocked on one side by a LOS-denying fence, and anywhere he could have landed next to it that would have had a great shot would have been PERILOUSLY close to a board edge, or would have been right in front of my deployment zone where a bunch of guys were about to entrap them.

I think I did a pretty good job of hiding my guys. My opponent wouldn't have been able to do any serious damage without some real risk.

As for taking the lascannons out, what else would I put there instead? If I put in special weapons, the squad is basically guaranteed to get killed off before I have a chance to use them...

 Ailaros wrote:

As for taking the lascannons out, what else would I put there instead? If I put in special weapons, the squad is basically guaranteed to get killed off before I have a chance to use them...

Yeah I get this, but that is only an issue at this points level I think, at 1500/1850 you may be able to find something else to do with them and a few other points.

Love the story line mate !

And wow... That GK player had cursed dice. His rolls were just sad to read...