For a local 1750
RTT, I wanted to try, for the first time, the totally unaltered Stelek “best of” space marines list.
http://www.yesthetruthhurts.com/2009/01/best-of-tournament-space-marines-gt/
So I assembled and primed a couple of
MM/
HF speeders and a master of the forge to make this list:
Master of the forge, conversion beamer
3X
MM/
DCCW Dreads
3X 10
Tac marines in rhinos with
MM/Flamer (2 with dozer, 1 sarg with meltabombs)
6 Sniper scouts,
HB and Telion
2X2
MM/
HF speeders
3X Dakka Preds
1748 points
I’ve been playing variations of this list for a couple of years now and have learned that, although it doesn’t typically devastate opponents, it’s very forgiving and hard to lose a game. You may not win, but the army is very hard to beat.
The tournament system at this particular store where I often play is really good. Each scenario has primary, secondary and tertiary objectives. The win/loss is determined by the primary, and the other two objectives are used as tie breakers, along with strength of schedule. The number of objectives and the placement of some of them is always specified in the scenario, and there are always an odd number of objectives (at least three).
I don’t remember the secondary and tertiary victory conditions for any of the rounds since I didn’t get any of them. I just went for the win in every case.
Round 1
The scenario was Dawn of War, Kill points primary.
At 1750, my opponent had tweaked the bike council list I had seen him play before--Doom & Fortune seer with both runes, plus 5 warlocks (3 destructor, 1 each embolden and enhance) all with witch blades. Then he had 3 fire dragons in serpents and 2
DAs in serpents, all with shuriken cannons only, and some spirit stones mixed in there somewhere, and 3 fire prisms.
KP games are historically the weakness of my mech marines, so when I won the toss, I chose second, planning to reserve. He deployed mostly center with the prisms on my left and zoomed around for two turns, got fortune up.
I had really bad reserves luck all game long, with units straggling in. Turn 2 I got 1 dread, 1 speeder squadron, the MoF and the combat squad he'd joined, and the outflanking scouts. I took some pot shots and, I think, shook one tank. The scouts couldn't manage to combi-charge two prisms (and they had moved fast anyway, I wish the scouts had stayed out another turn to catch the prisms moving slowly), so total whiff over there.
Then my opponent started doing suicide runs with fire dragons, spinning his serpents around and disembarking for shots. So when the dragons whiffed, I got shots at the backs of serpents with my multimeltas. Even though I was turning up 1s on the damage rolls, I did manage to knock down and stun a few things, plus I was able to heavy-flame the dragons. My die-rolling was so abysmal that after two turns of shooting at an immobilized serpent with its back door toward me, I finally had to take it out by charging it with a dread.
I knew that, in order to win, I’d have to hold the bike council to as few
KPs as possible. If they get in among the vehicles of a mech army and start making star assaults, they can take out tons of vehicles and rack up a lot of
KPs in a single turn. I wanted to try to bog them with
tac marines, overwhelming the witchblades with 3+ saves, but with my
tac marines straggling in one unit per turn, I never had sufficient mass to do it. So I wound up using Tau delaying tactics, feeding them one unit at a time. In one key lucky piece a dread actually survived 2 whole rounds of melee with the council, holding them through the end of the game.
But what actually helped me the most is that I kept having really bad reserve rolls, only getting one or two units in turns 2-4. So about half army didn't arrive on the table until after the seer council was already committed. So my units were able to come in on far corners and take potshots at the grav tanks that were standing off in the distance, while being out of effective range of the council in the time remaining.
Also because he had shuriken cannons instead of scatterlasers on his serpents, he had to close to multimelta range, which meant I was trading Str8, AP1 shots with his Str6 shots. Str8 is plenty to kill an AR12 tank, even without the extra die of penetration that the energy field denies. He had already done a lot of ineffective shooting at my speeders (one of the two squadrons survived the game) so the remaining targets were rhinos, which are tougher to crack than you think with str6, especially when they’re shooting back at you.
His prisms fired all game, but the three of them with lots of linking were only able to kill one predator (with a linked front shot) and six marines (caught in the open with the linked AP3 shot, but the remaining marines in the unit survived, so no
KP). I was completely unimpressed.
Also the conversion beamer shook a prism twice, and that's it. I never got a str10 shot.
I was ahead by a couple of
KPs for the whole game, but when my whole army finally arrived on turn 5 I had a flurry of good melta shots on his grav tanks and pulled even further ahead. At the end of turn 6 when the game wrapped, I won 8KPs to 5.
Round 2
Pitched Battle, 5 Objectives Primary
My opponent tweaked his space wolves army to a level of really extreme effectiveness that isn't a netlist as far as I know:
4X Rune Priests with living lightning riding in rhinos with
4X9 Gray Hunters w/ meltagun in rhinos
2X10 Gray Hunters w/ 2 meltagun in rhinos
3X Dakka preds
60 wolves in 6 rhinos with predator fire support. Dang.
Three objectives ran down the center of the board, with the other two placed by players. I put my objective opposite my opponent's on my left to concentrate the fight on that side and leave one straggly objective out there on my right for later. The table had a big piece of impassible, opaque terrain at the center, so I chose second turn and deployed mostly out of
LoS behind the massive terrain. As I hoped, he went heavy to my left where the most objectives were, so I infiltrated the scouts behind some woods to the right, ready to make that last turn objective grab on that end. I reserved my speeders in the hopes of protecting them from living lightning until they could be useful. So that actually worked out, as both squadrons survived and one speeder contested the center objective at the end.
Turn 1 my opponent drove his army straight out onto the table and cut loose with living lightning. His turn 1 was mostly ineffective because of terrain, but he scored some damaging hits. I moved the dreads up behind the center terrain planning to hide and pounce when he came around the sides. Because his troop squads had no fists, I could bog any number of
GH squads indefinitely each with a single dread. I sent half my speeders, hugging cover, into the middle to get shots on his rhinos, and the other pair way out on the right, both to threaten predator side armor and to line up in case I needed them for last turn objective contesting.
So there was a slugfest in the center-left of the table. I was unable to score any damaging hits on any of his vehicles except a few immobilized rhinos, while living lightning was popping my vehicles all over the place. I got one dread in with a full squad of
GH, taking them out of the game, but he meltad my other two dreads at short range.
So at the top of turn 3 there's like an hour left, and at the speed we’re playing I can see this will be a 3-turn game. My opponent has nothing near the objective way out on the right, and my scouts are within move-run distance of it, so I can see that’s going to be the key to the game. If I can claim that objective and contest the rest, I win.
At the bottom of turn 3 we have a discussion about time remaining, about 20 minutes, and agree that it’s the last turn. I moved a speeder and a couple of other units on my left to contest, ran my scouts up to claim the one objective, and got the win. This is how mech vanilla marines win games: one kill point (a rhino), zero table quarters held, half my army destroyed, and the win.
Round 3
Spearhead, Table Quarters Primary
In this tournament, you claim a table quarter by having more
VPs worth of units in the quarter than your opponent.
My opponent’s ork list was
Warboss on bike
3 Biker bullet-catchers
2X30 ork boyz with big shootas
1X25 ork boyz with big shootas
2X15 kommandoes
Battlewagon with kannon and big shootas
12 lootas
I could see from the start that this was going to be another 3-turn game, with all those models to move around. Also I knew from experience that this opponent puts his lootas in the battlewagon and leaves it parked at the back of the table. Since they couldn’t move to see around terrain and still shoot, and could only engage one target at range 48, plus a BS2 krak missile, so that's like 300+ points I could pretty much ignore.
I lost the toss, but he gave me second turn anyway—not a problem since the lootas were really the only shooting, so I’d lose at most one vehicle even if I put everything in the open. I could see it would be a game of flamers and tank shocking, but I blanked on the outflanking kommandoes and set my Forgemaster in my back corner and my dakka preds in elevated firing positions back there--I shoulda put them right up at the front edge of deployment with their AR13 toward the lootas and the rhinos, dreads and speeders in cover behind. I conga-lined my rhinos, dreads and speeders at the front of the deployment zone.
In turn 1 the lootas immobed a rhino and I drove rhinos up, picked off some boyz with dakka preds. I sent my speeders out long to my right behind some
LoS blocking terrain from the loota wagon, planning to have them maybe flame some orks on that side and start accumulating points in that quarter. His turn 2 a unit of kommandoes came in and assaulted my Forgemaster's unit, and I forgot to use combat tactics to break so I could shoot him up, and the forgemaster held all by himself.
My turn 2 I managed to lure some orks into bunching up for assaults and lay down some flame templates, but still wasn't taking them out in swaths the way I needed to. I remembered to use combat tactics in key spots—basically let him assault a small combat squad or whatever, then fall back after losing combat, leaving his boyz bunched up for the flamer shot in my turn--and played aggressive with the rhinos. All in all my two and a half
tac squads managed to get two of the boyz mobs down to below half while only losing one unit themselves (a second unit had only the flamer guy left). I blocked off warboss biker movement with rhinos.
In turn 3 there were only 40 minutes left, so we agreed he'd get 20 of them. In a key roll, his second unit of kommandoes failed to come in, so they were out of the game. My opponent moved stuff around into table quarters and did some last-minute ineffective shooting with lootas. I think he actually waaghed this turn too, but kept rolling 1s on his run rolls.
At this point, it was more like a math puzzle than a
40K game. I actually started adding up numbers during my opponent’s turn so that, when he was done, I had about 15 minutes to do the math and figure out what needed to move where for me to win.
He clearly held the far right quarter with his overpriced loota bunker and a mob of boyz, so I didn’t bother to put anything over there.
My preds and one of my dreads were just a little too far back to get into my near right quarter, but last-turn shooting from my speeders out there killed the last biker grunt and brought his total points down to 375 versus my 390.
In the far left quarter I was looking at two full mobs of boyz at 440. I managed to scrape up the two below-half
tac squads (one consisting of a single flamer guy), an immobilized predator, my Telion scout unit, and a single dread for 465 points.
My own near left quarter was held by my leftover units--a dread, two preds and an immmobilized rhino.
So when the dust cleared I had zero kill points, zero objectives, and three table quarters for the win.
Results
So I won first place, with my opponents taking second, third and fourth places respectively.
Speed of play was the biggest determining factor in rounds 2 and 3. I seldom have trouble finishing a 1750 game in 2 hours, especially with a mechanized army, as in my round 1 game. But my opponents in rounds 2-3 weren’t playing at tournament speed, and I think it cost them. In both cases, if they’d had another turn or two, the game would have turned against me. I was able to eke out those wins only because I was going second and knew for certain that the game would be ending after my third turn. So I was able to do only what was necessary to pull the win, and to get the win in spite of the fact that I was objectively losing the shooting/assaulting game.
I felt disadvantaged in most every game, but the
MSU principles bailed me out of tight spots. The fact that my opponents never got more than 3 shooting phases to try to kill me (in round 1, my opponent actually got a 4th shooting phase) meant I still always had enough units left over to maneuver with. My die rolling felt pretty below average in every round, but where the dice mattered in round 1, I had enough dice/units to eventually score the kills I needed, and my poor reserves rolls helped me avoid the seer council. In rounds 2 and 3, my bad dice didn't matter because those games were won on maneuvering rather than shooting/assault--and on having some units available at the end of the game to maneuver with.
-and for something silly below-