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To view the previous report in this series, click here. To view the next game 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.

***


The mighty Leman Russ crunched over the remains of an enemy strong point. The barbed wire easily gave to the grinding treads, along with the support struts of hastily-assembled trenches. To its left, a steam of smoke rose lazily into the air from the burning mass of what had once been a storage shed.

The lumbering behemoth clattered loudly as it slowly, but implacably advanced.

Lord Taiaphas Vask kept a keen watch over the area ahead of him, holding a pair of magnoculars. His hole-filled cap peaked out the top of the hatch, adorning the all but grotesque-looking head of the tank commander. He had already escaped death by a very, very narrow margin before. Only vigilance would prevent the fates from finishing what they had started.

To his right trundled four more battle tanks. Interspersed between them were a handful of chimera transports. It had been nearly eight hours since they had moved out. Privately, Taiaphas was a little bit surprised that they had managed to last this long.

Marshal Melchoir had ordered what was left of his forces to affect a breakout. There were only seven Leman Russ tanks, and just over a dozen chimeras. It would be a stretch to say that there was a company of fighting men left. The extra transports were given to holding extra fuel and packing up those wounded who had any real chance of survival. They had set out not long before dawn and had engaged in a single, armored thrust straight into the enemy. Resistance against them was surprised and disoriented, and the small Foleran force had managed to punch through, with minimal casualties. After a few hours of relative peace, they had hit the second main line of defence. Surprisingly, they had found it mostly abandoned. Resistance was minimal, and the tanks had managed to sweep the defenders aside with ease.

Taiaphas knew better, though. The enemy would have its defense in depth. They had managed to overwhelm a static position with local superiority, but undoubtedly the enemy would have reserves.

The armored group continued their slow advance forward. Melchoir had gone from fury, to pleading, to cajoling, but there was nothing that could be done. While chimeras were able to make pretty good movement over open ground, Leman Russes could barely clear speeds faster than a person could run. Speed was of the essence, but Melchoir simply needed the heavy firepower of the tanks to have any hope of survival. The breakout may have been painfully slow, but it was also dead tough. That would have to do.

As the vehicles approached the bottom of a hill, they found even more enemy defenseworks.



And then Taiaphas spotted it - scouts. The enemy had a few soldiers on bikes. Things were undoubtedly going to get serious soon. Whether the bikes would call in reinforcements, or transmit their intelligence and run away, he couldn't say.

That is, until the bikes suddenly started their engines and charged in.

The tank commander changed the channel on his vox set. He swallowed a few times to lubricate his ruined vocal chords.

"This is Vask to all units," he painfully managed to scratch, "Be advised, enemy scouts approaching, prepare for enemy action."

He released the button on his communicator and coughed a few times. When he recovered, he looked off to the right and saw it - a vehicle even bigger than his own. The enemy space marines had brought a mighty land raider, which had somehow managed to hid out of sight behind a ruined building. When the bikes moved forwards, the titanic war engine spurred to life and slowly, but impressively, removed itself from its position of cover and began to move forward.

Taiaphas prepared his tank hunters to address this new threat, when suddenly the vox system broke open with cries of alarm.

Off to the right, the bikes had activated their teleport beacons. The enemy was suddenly upon them, and in force.







The tank commander guided his turret over to engage the land raider and gave his gunner the signal to open fire. He looked over towards the right again to see some sort of enemy shooting impact into the side of the far right chimera, causing it to wreck catastrophically. The guardsmen inside piled out as best they could and began shooting back at point blank range.

Then the bikes rode around the ruin on the right. A multimelta screeched into the front of one of his tanks. Vask gave a brief order for his tanks to focus on the most pertinent threat.

Meanwhile, the other bikes rode into the guardsmen, chainswords prepped for combat.



He looked back at the land raider only to see that one of the shots that had been fired at it had immobilized the monstrosity. This gave him the break he needed.

"All units," he scratched into the vox, "form up and prepare to engage the enemy."

The tanks at his command quickly responded to his orders, confirming their actions on the vox, and then slowly forming up into a line, facing the enemy. Taiaphas took a glimmer of satisfaction at how quickly they set up their murder zone.



Taiaphas could only hold and watch the carnage. One of the chimeras had been crippled by enemy fire, and the guardsmen inside were desperately firing out of the hatches trying to keep the enemy at bay. Meanwhile, the bikes slowly began to make their way through their guardsmen in close combat. With the last few triumphant slashes, they broke through.

Immediately, they saw the wall of steel facing them. They gunned it forwards, hoping to do anything to the tanks.

The Russes fired back, but the bikes were very fast, quickly making it up to the armor.



As they made it in, they tried to affix anti-tank grenades to the hulls. The slightly staggered formation of the tanks, though, was well prepared. Turret and hull weapons covered the front arcs, while the sponsons formed interlocking fire zones, the sides of one tank covering the sides of the tank to its left and right. The bikes fell right in among them, funneled into the gaps where they met murderous multimelta fire, the anti-tank cannons disintegrating bike and biker alike.

The bike assault brutally rebuffed, it was now the turn of the enemy terminators to try their luck against the invincible wall of steel.





"Break them!" Taiaphas ordered, and his tank wall burst open with an insane torrent of firepower that hit the terminators like a brick wall. Immediately the air became a blinding sea of sparks and ozone as the refractor fields of the terminators desperately attempted to fend off the anti-tank fire.

Guardsmen from their immobilized bunker of a transport continued to pour down their own meltaguns into the fray. With this many enemy in this tight of a space, it was impossible to miss.

One terminator and then another began to fall amidst the cloud of violence, but the terminator armor was strong. The ones nearest to the transport managed to make it in, obliterating the front of the vehicle with chainfists and thunderhammers. As the front of the vehicle began to eviscerate, the guardsmen desperately fled out the back door and out of the top hatch. Those that managed to escape were mercilessly gunned down by the terminators, who were capable, even now, of displaying their own fearsome weight of fire.

The energy fields surrounding the terminators were not, however, infallible, something that Taiaphas had needed to learn the hard way long ago. They could only deflect so much killing power, and over only so much time. One after another, they began to wink out, exposing the tactical dreadnought armor beneath. They may have been clad in armor as thick as a tank, but he was Lord Vask, commander of a fine group of anti-tank warriors. His Russes pounded into the enemy. One blew apart with a direct hit from a vanquisher shell, while another bubbled and melted in the face of a tide of sponson weapon fire.

The remaining chimera pulled through, and unloaded its cargo. The guardsmen rushed out and formed ranks. Those few enemy who were still attempting to stagger through the awesome display of the tank wall's firepower were shot into by disciplined lasgun and meltagun alike.

After a few horrific moments of pure carnage, the enemy was all but completely wiped out.



The last of the enemy terminators lurched forward and with one last, desperate charge, managed to make it up to the squad of guardsmen lined up in front of him.



With incredible force, the terminator swung his hammer into the guardsmen. With a concussive blast and flash of light, the guardsmen in front of him literally exploded, spraying everybody with gore, even splashing some small flecks on to the front of the tanks. With a second stroke and then another, the mighty hammer bashed apart the guardsmen before him.

Powerless against the enemy, the guardsmen broke and ran. Taiaphas looked on in irritation. Just where did they think they were going to go?

With the guardsmen out of the way, it left the last terminator against the might of Taiaphas Vask.




***


Melchoir jostled back and forth in his seat as his transport made its way over uneven ground. It had been a long time since he had seen the inside of a chimera. He started to remember why he preferred to fight it out on foot.

He looked up through the chain-link hatch above him, a mesh of steel X's screening out the sky above. He could easily get up on his seat and look out, or use one of the viewfinders, but, in a way, he didn't WANT to know what was out there. He had to preserve whatever tiny shreds of focus and brain power he had left to him.

And so he sat in the back of the chimera, ear pressed up against the cabin's vox set, waiting for news. He wished he could take a nap, or at least get something to eat, but his body wouldn't allow for either.

The speed of their advance across terrain was agonizing. This was supposed to be a high-speed breakout, not a long, slow, nerve-wracking crawl. Hopefully, it was going to be almost over.

Melchoir thought back to the ruins of the hilltop fort he had occupied a few hours ago. No doubt by now the enemy wound find the position abandoned, and would be looking for him. No doubt someone from the defensive position that they had broken through would have asked for reinforcements. Whatever had happened, there would certainly be the enemy scouring the countryside looking for him. Sooner or later they would attack.

And find him and his tanks moving scarcely faster than a walk.

"This is Vask to all units," came a voice over the vox. Vask was difficult to understand usually, but over the vox set, his words were almost impossible to decipher. "Be advised, enemy scouts approaching, prepare for enemy action."

Well, this was it after all, then.

He was over on the right, leading most of the chimeras, while Vask was on the left, leading most of the Russes. Melchoir was glad that the enemy had attacked the tanks first, rather than the much more fragile transports. He had to be careful with how he replied, though. If this was a giant enemy ambush, he would be better served allowing the Russes to hold them down so that he could escape with the chimeras. If it wasn't, he still had to be careful. Amongst his transports were badly needed supplies, and wounded soldiers. He didn't want to abandon them, just to have them ripped apart while he was helping out to his left.

Melchoir was exhausted. He tried his hardest to focus his racing mind.

He turned and pushed the button on the vox behind him.

"Everybody, just stay put," he ordered, "I'm going to go check things out."

He switched the vox set over to internal and ordered the driver to break over to the left. This time, the chimera got its engines up to full and floored it. The transport careened over the broken ground at startling speed. The troops inside slammed around the cabin as the treads found a shell crater and then ran up and over some trenchworks at full speed.

Within moments, the transport began to slow down and the turret weapon began to light up, the dull half-crack of the multilaser sounding muffled through the thin walls of the vehicle.

"What's going on up there?" the officer asked thought the vox.

"Enemy in the ruins up ahead, sir."

Melchoir had to resist the urge to jump out of his ride and take command of the situation himself. Instead, he sat impatiently in his seat, doing nothing, as the sounds of combat raged around him. He could hear the booming of vanquisher cannons nearby. He could hear the chatter of heavy bolter chimeras. There he was, in the relative darkness, doing nothing. Neither was anyone else in the cramped space. Some of the soldiers had been part of armored fist units, and so were accustomed to mechanized warfare. Others were not. Some of them replied to their new situation with claustrophobic fear, desperate to escape the metal coffin they now sat in. Some had the opposite reaction, clinging desperately to the armored walls, and to the ignorance of the carnage transpiring on the other side of them.

Suddenly, the vehicle jerked violently on its suspension. They'd been hit. The first was followed a moment later by a second and a third in quick succession. The vehicle bucked against the sudden weight of high-caliber weapons fire thrown into it at alarming speed. The vehicle began to groan under the thundering barrage.

Melchoir turned and pushed the button on the vox set. In the faintest blink of an eye an autocannon shell punched through the chimera's hull, bounced off the floor of the cabin with a horrific shriek and ricocheted up and punched through the wire-mesh hatch, exiting the vehicle. Melchoir looked, stunned. A half a breath earlier, and that round would have taken his head off.

He blinked for a moment, before regaining his composure. This was it.

"Come on!" he shouted hoarsely to his soldiers, "I don't want to die in here any more than you do."

The officer started up his power fist and reached for the handle. With a jerk, he opened up the back door and ran out. He flipped on the switch for his refractor field as the rest of his men poured out behind him. There above them was the source of the incoming gunfire, a mighty dreadnought.

They barely had time to react before it charged in.



Thankfully, all of his guardsmen were armed with krak grenades. Thankfully, the dreadnought didn't have a close combat weapon.

As the vehicular hulk attempted to swat at the guardsmen with its autocannon array, the guardsmen in return primed their anti-tank grenades and chucked them up at the dreadnought. With a series of loud pops, the grenades began to crumple the armor. Enraged, the vehicle continued to sweep its autocannons in broad arcs like a scythe against wheat. A few guardsmen weren't as agile as the others, and got picked up and thrown around.

This had to end. Melchoir watched the dreadnought's movements. He found his opening.

With a great lunge, the officer launched up into the air. He reached up with his right arm and caught one of the autocannons. Bracing his foot against the vehicle's mechanical leg, he came forward with a sweeping left hook with his powerfist. The shot landed square on the front of the vehicle's command viewport. The armor plate buckled under the blow, and the dreadnought staggered backwards before falling down onto its power plant.

Melchoir jumped off the vehicle as it lay prone on the ground. Whatever he had done appeared to have stuck, as the dreadnought wasn't making any effort to right itself.

He didn't have time to gloat, or even consider his surroundings before he and his squad started taking fire. The officer turned to the ruins in front of him. There were some space marines hiding on the upper floors.

"Come on!" he ordered, pointing at the ruins. The guardsmen began to rush forward, shooting into the marines above. Melchoir split off and began to climb up onto the second floor.



The ruins proved difficult to advance up, crumbling slightly under the force of his power fist as he climbed.

Eventually he made it to the top. The surprised marine fired a spray of bolter shots into his refractor field. Melchoir raised his fist to attack.


***


The situation had turned into a tank battle. The vanquisher cannons pounded into the impossibly thick frontal armor of the land raider. The land raider, on the other hand, was built to handle infantry, and was armed with a single multimelta as its only serious anti-tank weapon.

The two sides, five Leman Russ vanquishers, and one land raider fired at each other in a titanic display of firepower.

"Vask," came the voice of Melchoir over the vox.

"This is Vask actual," the tank commander replied over the thundering of the guns.

"Are you in serious danger?" Melchoir asked.

"No," Vask replied painfully, "The situation is under control."

"Then get out of there," Melchoir ordered, "We're trying to escape, not wipe the enemy out. If you can break contact and continue to advance, then do so."

"Yes, sir," Vask replied.

He relayed the orders to the rest of his squadron. Slowly, they began to lumber by the land raider, their turret and sponson weapons continuing to open up in a broadside as the line of tanks rolled past the mighty land raider. As they slowly passed, the mighty enemy machine didn't turn to follow. Perhaps it was immobilized. Perhaps there were other reasons.

Regardless, Lord Taiaphas' armored column continued to move forward.


***

His Bikes used Scout and then charged on Turn 1. This isn't allowed.

Also, it was only lost a few rolls of the dice. The few rolls only came at the end. There were dozens and dozens of rolls throughout the game that factored into those rolls at the end. Don't view it as only a few rolls, it's bad perspective and makes you focus on the wrong things.

As for the point of not moving your infantry, your opponent put 1000 points in your deployment zone on Turn 1. Your infantry stayed to fight them, it did not get involved in a static-gunline fight. Where else was it supposed to go in this game that would have mattered? All of their targets delivered themselves to them.

Nope, my bikes used scout, shot chimeras and his behind a building turn one... Turn 2 they charged, or at least the ones who survived... Attack bike rolled forward, shot and missed... Then died. So craptastic dice to start the game, but the last of the Deathwing got the really good rolls at the end to live...

DarknessEternal wrote:There were dozens and dozens of rolls throughout the game that factored into those rolls at the end.

Certainly. They were, of course, determined in the end by die rolls.

If my opponent had failed an invul save earlier in the game, then it wouldn't have mattered that there was going to be luck involved at the end, but failing said invul save would be, itself, a matter of random chance. I suppose if what you're doing is taking the more nuanced stand that it was a series of die rolls leading up to the last ones that made the last ones matter, rather than it being merely a matter of the last ones having the biggest impact, then I suppose I could agree.

In any case, there are a limited number of chances for any one thing to happen in a game, and what's important is that they happen. When you get to the end of the game, though, you have fewer chances, and those results of the die rolls will therefore have more impact, as they can't be diluted over more rolls. As it's only at the end of the game that determines winners and losers, the rolling at the end has the ability to be artificially weighted.

However, I'd argue that in this case, the luck was actually worse. I suppose I'd concede that it wouldn't matter that much that it happened at the end except for what I just said above. Furthermore, not all events are equally important. For example, my opponent took longer than usual to get his land raider un-immobilized. It really only had one target in the entire game, though, which it made it up to in order to kill before the game was out. This made it less of a big deal that it remained stuck. The impact of roughly the same small number of dice that resulted in successful invul saves, on the other hand, had a much bigger impact on the actual outcome.

If you want to filter out time, that's fine, but certain die rolls are still more important than others, whether they are the result of an amalgom of random events or are, in themselves important regardless of what came before.

DarknessEternal wrote:As for the point of not moving your infantry, your opponent put 1000 points in your deployment zone on Turn 1. Your infantry stayed to fight them, it did not get involved in a static-gunline fight. Where else was it supposed to go in this game that would have mattered? All of their targets delivered themselves to them.

I suppose.

And I guess I can't blame a mech list for failing to do what a foot list could patently not have accomplished either.

One thing I don't like is that the fluff for this report makes it seem like your forces won the battle, which didn't happen. It's cool fluff and all, but it feels somehow dishonest to me.

 Ailaros wrote:

DarknessEternal wrote:There were dozens and dozens of rolls throughout the game that factored into those rolls at the end.

Certainly. They were, of course, determined in the end by die rolls.

If my opponent had failed an invul save earlier in the game, then it wouldn't have mattered that there was going to be luck involved at the end, but failing said invul save would be, itself, a matter of random chance. I suppose if what you're doing is taking the more nuanced stand that it was a series of die rolls leading up to the last ones that made the last ones matter, rather than it being merely a matter of the last ones having the biggest impact, then I suppose I could agree.

You cut out the text about bad perspective, which was the crux of my paragraph, not the die rolls. The thing to glean from some bad half a dozen dice at the end of the game isn't about dice at all. It's about what you could have done differently earlier so those dice were less likely to matter.

That Terminator had to pass 5 saves. What could you have done differently that would have made that number more? Your report even indicates you noticed at least one of those things that could have added weight of numbers (Pask couldn't see them on the last turn, he had plenty of turns to move into LoS of them).

There's an old axiom I like to apply whenever someone starts blaming dice. Will 30 Boyz beat 10 Marines? Maybe. Will 100? Almost certainly. It's our job as good players to make sure the 100 Boyz are where it matters.

But 40k is, after all, a game with a pretty low tactical ceiling. Certainly player skill exists, and it exists, as you say, for us to play the best odds we can. In the end, though, it's about playing odds.

The only transmission system for player skill onto the outcome of the game is through six sided random cubes.

I mean, really look at this game strategically. My opponent put everything in front of me, and I turned all of my guns on his stuff and shot him. It was about as tactically complex as a game of yahtzee. The only thing that was a serious variable in play was my outflanking squad, and there wasn't a whole lot more I could have done with them.

Sure, very bad players will blame their dice for everything, but once you start taking 40k seriously, you very quickly start to delude yourself into thinking that it's a strategy game and that working on player skill will make you win more particular games. If anything, my frustration is a sign that I fell into this trap for this game.

This sentiment is just arrogant. It assumes that your tactics are flawless therefore any serious game you play has to be determined by the random nature of rolling dice. Sorry, but from list building through deployment though the movement phases you had plenty of opportunity to make decisions that are not random but you simply sat where you were in a static formation.

Is the game random in certain areas? Sure, but this means you need to adapt to dynamic changes on the fly which requires more strategy and sometimes less strategy at times.

For me what wins games of 40k is the movement phase primarily, which is the least random phase of the game. Its only random based on risks you chose to take. In this game, you didn't capitalize at all in the movement phase aside from one outflanking unit.

It's not that my tactics are perfect, it's that improvement in tactics for me has long since crossed the threshold where it doesn't make an impact on the game relative to the results of the die rolls. I'm not saying that I'm a tactical genius, I'm saying that 40k is a tactically shallow game.

Certainly there are a few areas that don't have much to do with randomness. List building, as you mention, has none. Deployment has little, but is effected by mission, deployment type, terrain density, how many objectives there are, and who got to place the first one, and who gets first turn, all of which are determined randomly (and, I'd note, what your opponent's list is, which is likewise outside of your control). Movement is also important, and doesn't have very much randomness (outside of moving through terrain).

But this game isn't chess, where movement is the only thing that mattered. I could be a complete master of maneuver in this game, but it simply wouldn't have mattered even a tiny bit. In the end of this game, the winner was determined by who had which surviving models where. The where was a matter of very rudimentary movement skills (anybody can move onto an objective), the what was controlled entirely by the die rolls.

 Ailaros wrote:
It's not that my tactics are perfect, it's that improvement in tactics for me has long since crossed the threshold where it doesn't make an impact on the game relative to the results of the die rolls. I'm not saying that I'm a tactical genius, I'm saying that 40k is a tactically shallow game.

I love your battle reports but have never gone in for this particular line of reasoning. I'm not trying to bash you here, but I think that this game was not wholly dice rolls.

I think in this game things could have been a lot different based on deployment. He has two long range weapons (the autocannon dread and the missile launcher). All of his attacks are short range melta and deep strike. He deployed first and you outrange him with practically everything in your army. You knew exactly where his scouting bikers were and what their range for melta was and yet you still deployed directly across from him. In addition, you deployed units close to the right ruin which allows his guys to land or creep around it free from return fire.



You could have refused his flank cut him apart as he came across the board. He has no blast weapons and few long range weapons. I would have castled on either the left or right corner with as much as possible and ripped him apart as he came across the board. The land raider is hard to kill but ulitmately useless against your vehicles. In addition, you left your two chimeras out on the side where their side armor could get chewed up by deep strikers, you could have used the LR hulls to your advantage here (especially since he has no melta on the drop).

A lot of 40k is deployment and I think you could have done a better job here. Again, I love your reports and think you're a great general but saying that this game was only dice rolls and only could have been better based on luck is a little incorrect.

Well, if I had just deployed way over to the left, then I would have had the same problems, but with less space for even the little bit of maneuvering that I did. Instead of his terminators being shielded by the ruin on the right, he would have been shielded by the ruins on the left.

Except then I would have been much more vulnerable to multi-assaulting with chainfists and thunderhammers. By having something over on the right (namely, my cheapest stuff that's also the best against close combat), my opponent attacked far enough to the right that I was able to retreat my tanks out of CC range.

If I had been more conservative with my troops, I probably could have held the 2-point objective on the right, but then I would have lost the 200-point tanks, rather than the 50-point transports, and would have had less killing power over all, which means even more terminators would have survived.

Could I have deployed better? Sure. Would it have had a serious impact on this game? I don't really see how.

 Ailaros wrote:

Could I have deployed better? Sure. Would it have had a serious impact on this game? I don't really see how.

It is hard to tell from the pic, but I imagine either the left or the right would have been fine. The right looks more open but the left has a much smaller ruin. Either way, you wouldn't have gotten melta'd turn one from the bikes and could have taken them as they crossed the field. As well, the termies would have had less space to hide.

You seem to be pretty set on the whole luck > skill thing at a certain level, so I'll leave it at that. Just logging my disagreement.

Either way, love the report.

This really did define bad deployment. I'd argue that it was only the disjointed DA list coupled with some really dubious decisions (like getting aggressive with a Rifleman dread) that even let you get close after essentially drawing a big red circle telling your opponent where to attack your army from.

Even so, he hugged the homers on the bikes to drop aggressively rather than do the smart thing and drop more conservatively, which would have given him better angles to fire down your lines with, and given him the wrecks of your IFVs to shield his advance from your Russes.

Careful pretre your tactics are showing

Seriously though I mirror pretre's points and just wanted to log my disagreement on the luck>tactics issue as well.

Your tanks are looking great btw, when did you pick up the extra chimera chassis? Making great time painting them all up, still strange seeing so much armor in your army ha ha

Thanks for the rep.

pretre wrote:Either way, you wouldn't have gotten melta'd turn one from the bikes and could have taken them as they crossed the field. As well, the termies would have had less space to hide.

I wasn't actually melta'd in this game either, even with my deployment. There were only two meltaguns that were in range. Two shots yielded a pair of hits for a pair of pens for little damage (well within average - BS4 doesn't always hit, and S8 melta doesn't always pen AV14). Put another way, meltaguns weren't the issue here.

It's hard to see, but the right side also had a ruin in it. I really don't see how it would be possible to prevent my opponent from scouting/moving bikes up and getting the terminators in my face right away (with ruins cover to boot).

pretre wrote:You seem to be pretty set on the whole luck > skill thing at a certain level, so I'll leave it at that.

Well, it's part of a more systematic theory, rather than just a knee-jerk reaction to this game.

Red Corsair wrote:Your tanks are looking great btw, when did you pick up the extra chimera chassis? Making great time painting them all up, still strange seeing so much armor in your army ha ha

Thanks. Now that I've figured out how washes work, I'm surprised myself at how quickly the armor is going.

The extra chassis come from the war store. With both russes and chimeras, they buy the kits and then sell off the high-margin goods (like sponson and turret weapons, etc.), but are then left with the chassis. They sell them at a roughly 50% discount, depending on demand. In this case, I had purchased a pair of chimeras long ago that I turned into my artillery blanks. I still had all the top bitz from back then, so I just needed the wheel wells and the main part of the vehicle.

The only annoying part is that I don't have extra top hatches or hull heavy bolters. The latter is okay to get away with (I can just use heavy flamers on artillery), but the former is kind of annoying. I dread to think of how much in shipping I'm going to have to pay for just a couple of hatches...

DaddyWarcrimes wrote:This really did define bad deployment.

Ah?

DaddyWarcrimes wrote:Even so, he hugged the homers on the bikes to drop aggressively rather than do the smart thing and drop more conservatively, which would have given him better angles to fire down your lines with, and given him the wrecks of your IFVs to shield his advance from your Russes.

You think he would have won a shootout with a few cyclones against my list? That's an interesting viewpoint.

And he did wreck the chimeras. I just pulled back with my russes. There was no way to charge at them without going over open ground, I question his ability to win a shootout against my russes, and even if he was in cover from the dead transports, the 5+ cover from them wouldn't have been any better than his invul save.

Plus, if he hadn't have gotten in my face, then my infantry would have survived a lot better, and he wouldn't have contested/claimed any of my objectives. Running a deathwing as a gunline seems like a quick path to a resounding defeat, at least in this case.

 Ailaros wrote:
Well, it's part of a more systematic theory, rather than just a knee-jerk reaction to this game.

Oh, I know. I remember the thread and start of all that business. I just disagree with it.

He doesn't need to kill your Russes to win. He needs to wreck your Chimeras and murder the vets as they spill out. Cover saves don't matter when you don't have a line of sight, particularly since he's getting a minimum of a 5+ invulnerable against all your shooting anyway.

He doesn't need to walk down the line and flip all your tanks. He needs to wreck out the 3 tracks that you deploy, let the Land Raider erase an infantry squad every turn, and then pillar hump the rest of your army.

I'm not saying it's a guarantee either way, but what he did was the best possible thing for you, which let you get away with deploying with your fragile and valuable vehicles screening your expendable and durable ones rather than the other way around.

Thanks to the piece of terrain anchoring your left flank, you should have been able to put a pair of Russes at right angles to each other, with the one closer to your baseline facing right (presenting a 14 armor front to shooting attacks at the squadron from the flank while the other is pointed straight across the table, leaving his Rifleman, missile launcher, and Land Raider with an AV14 to batter through.

To the left of that, you can stash the pair of Chimeras, with the Russes shielding them from enfilade fire. I like hanging Pask out on the far end of your line to get to the middle of the left edge and firing back down the table, though.

All in all, changing how your work your IFVs and MBTs together will see you get better results than just hoping you get lucky and not recognizing that you didn't make effective use of something that's brand new to your playstyle is what's really going to hold you back as a player.

I'll gladly admit that I picked up a lot of tricks for running large infantry armies from your reports, since 6th was really the first time I put a lot of boots on the ground with my Wolves or my IG.

Very well, I'll hear arguments that I didn't play to the mission well enough.

Firstly, though, it seems a little strange to consider 400 point tank squads "expendable", and secondly, I still would have to have dealt with a deathwing on my face. Furthermore, I'd still have had to deal with the land raider at the end of the game with my infantry. That still would have required failed saves.

I don't know if there was a way to avoid the fate of a late game luck streak like that.

First off, I'm a huge fan of these reports, and I too admit to trying out new units and tactics because of them.

I have two points to make, the first, is that you are, statistically speaking correct about how tiny variations in player skill quickly stop amounting to anything. However, I feel you are grossly underestimating the difference in player skill you can have. I've watched players duck behind cover instead of charging because they want to make sure as many of their men survive the next shooting phase, only to have the same problem the next turn. I've seen people hold scoring units in reserve in the hopes that they can grab a late game objective, only to end up with too little firepower on the table because they split their force. If you can really look at a game and objectively say, I could have done nothing better, but still lost. Well, that's luck. I have NEVER seen a game like that.

When two master players face off I think that the realistic odds favor whoever happens to have the more point efficient codex. I also think that you will find that these amazing tacticians end up on the tops of the tournaments over and over, even against other "very good" players. It's not because of luck, but because those other players weren't that good to begin with they are just better than your average casual player.

The second is a just basic tactical one. I play a lot of guard, and the first thing I do every game is figure out what units I need to be alive at the end of the game (and ones which my opponent needs). Everything else is expendable. Just because it's expendable doesn't mean you should be reckless with it, but when it comes down to it and you need a scoring unit a very valuable tank squadron is worth literally nothing. This is one of the fallacies of 40K. You aren't trying to win a war, you only need to win this one battle.

I'll just start with adding to the chorus of voices saying: Keep up the good work!

It is a fact that I somtimes find myself polling your site for a new battle report!

I thought some about the philosophical arguments here about what die rolls are important and not and how much skill influences the outcome of a game.

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When it comes to luck early or late in the game my rational self is convinced that having poor luck in the first turn is far worse than having it in the last turn. At the same time it feels worse to have poor luck late in the game. Like the victory was stolen from you by pure chance.

The reasoning goes that if you loose that key unit early, not only do you loose victory points, but you also loose the firepower/distraction etc for the entire game. Interestingly enough it often doesn't feel that bad early on. You have the feeling it will "even out" during the game, even though you know that rationally it is not so. Once an die roll has occured its outcome is known and it will not influence the future die rolls of the game.

Could the key be that during the first turns it is almost impossible to understand the impact a poor roll will have on the final result, whereas in the last turn the impact is obvious?

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Player skill clearly matters in 40k when you average over several games as tournament records would attest. Predicting the outcome of a single game however is very difficult. Could it be that you are comparing apples and pears?

Note that this is not unique to 40k. This is common for complex games (as opposed to simplified abstract games like chess). Low scoring sports like soccer or hockey would be prime examples where fluke results occur frequently, yet no one would argue that player skill is irrelevant in those games.

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Tanks are just toys, right Ailaros. Surely they must be expendable?

EmperorForearm wrote:If you can really look at a game and objectively say, I could have done nothing better, but still lost. Well, that's luck. I have NEVER seen a game like that.

Certainly, but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that as player skill becomes more even, it becomes a control variable until eventually it doesn't have any impact on the game (in a hypothetical world of exactly equal player skill). As such, having a slightly better player skill will only have a slight impact.

It's not about people playing perfect games, it's about people playing well enough that the impact of their skill is less than that of the importance that individual die rolls play. Put another way, playing better does not change the fact that 40k is a dice game.

zoat wrote:Tanks are just toys, right Ailaros. Surely they must be expendable?

EmperorForearm wrote:Everything else is expendable.

Certainly, and I will admit I may have been overcautious this time.

That said, if keeping a squad of infantry alive for a turn meant losing a vanquisher squad, I don't see how that would have helped me over all. I'd have more troops, by my opponent would have had more terminators. Having 400 points (the price of my vanquishers) of terminators on the table compared to 185 points of mechvets still on the table doesn't seem like a good deal to me, especially if it means that those terminators then just get to run over the vets in later turns anyways, possibly with more of the terminators left on the board at the end of the game than just one.

zoat wrote:Could the key be that during the first turns it is almost impossible to understand the impact a poor roll will have on the final result, whereas in the last turn the impact is obvious?

Sure.

That said, I'm a little iffy about where bad luck happens being worse. On the one hand, yeah, having bad luck early trickles down through the entirety of the game. On the other hand, you only determine the winner of the game at the end, which means that late game bad luck can undo everything that good luck earlier in the game managed to achieve.

zoat wrote:Player skill clearly matters in 40k when you average over several games as tournament records would attest.

I've never bought this.

Tournaments are saturated with events that a player can't control. There's luck with die rolls. There's luck with who draws which player in what order. The TO could come down on your side of an important ruling, or he could not. Furthermore, winning a tournament is usually nothing more than winning a couple of games of 40k. There aren't THAT many important luck events.

And that's part of the problem. People think about luck as if it's a controlled variable because it can be expressed in statistics. The problem, of course, is that statistics require LARGE numbers. Millions, trillions, infinity. Actually large. A game of 40k may be ultimately determined by a dozen key die rolls (or fewer). Over the course of a tournament, you could have less than 50. That is a very, very tiny number. Not in the scope of the law of large numbers.

As such, I very much hold that it's possible to win a few games of 40k, and certainly a few sets of games of 40k with a bit of serious player skill and a healthy dallop of good luck, or even a lot of player skill and just regular good luck.

People like to think of 40k tournaments as if they were basketball tournaments - the best players win, and the best players consistently win tournaments consistently. Instead, people should think of a 40k tournament winner like a blackjack tournament winner. Perhaps more skilled (though how much skill REALLY is there to the game?), but certainly dealt better cards than everyone else.

You're really implying that people who consecutively win tournaments are just luckier than everyone else?

It has nothing to do with the fact that they've refined their list every single day, run hundreds of practice games, refined it some more, studied every codex, thought of every matchup, and read every batrep they might need to?

This notion is fascinating to me (and outright false, frankly. 40k has far more dimension to it than "I roll a die, then you roll a die, then we compare, and one of us wins.")

Luck is enough to garner a Tournament-Winning player second place, due to a lost battle point or two, but aside from 500 points games, I've never found "bad luck" to affect any single game I've played. If you can't adapt to a few poor rolls, you aren't comfortable enough with your list, or your list doesn't have enough redundancy. Once these problems are remedied, luck will affect your games much less.

The most luck-influenced parts of 40k are:
-First Turn
-"Does the game go on?"
-Night Fight

And honestly, if those things are what is losing you games, well...

 Ailaros wrote:
That said, if keeping a squad of infantry alive for a turn meant losing a vanquisher squad, I don't see how that would have helped me over all. I'd have more troops, by my opponent would have had more terminators.

Depending on positioning, one unit of troops can be a pretty big deal.

People like to think of 40k tournaments as if they were basketball tournaments - the best players win, and the best players consistently win tournaments consistently. Instead, people should think of a 40k tournament winner like a blackjack tournament winner. Perhaps more skilled (though how much skill REALLY is there to the game?), but certainly dealt better cards than everyone else.

But the best players do consistently win 40k tournaments. Sure, luck is a factor, but why else do you see the same names on the top tables again and again?

TheCaptain wrote:You're really implying that people who consecutively win tournaments are just luckier than everyone else?

Yes.

Just because a person puts a lot of energy into improving their skill doesn't mean that improvement in skill is actually meaning anything. I mean, imagine if someone spent hours a day perfecting their player skill at candyland or chutes and ladders. That doesn't change the fact that the game, itself, uses random chance as its core mechanic.

In this case, you can work hard to play the absolute best odds possible, and that may, possibly, have some small amount of impact compared to an opponent playing marginally worse odds. It doesn't change the fact that you're still playing odds. The only transmission system for player skill in 40k is through luck. Working hard on player skill won't change that.

pretre wrote:Depending on positioning, one unit of troops can be a pretty big deal.

Sure, but my point was that if I lost the vanquishers, then my opponent would have had more terminators. More terminators that would have then ran over the extra squad of troops.

Just because something is a sacrifice doesn't necessarily make it a GOOD sacrifice, and just because something is expendable doesn't mean that its horrible demise had any lasting utility.

 Ailaros wrote:
Just because a person puts a lot of energy into improving their skill doesn't mean that improvement in skill is actually meaning anything. I mean, imagine if someone spent hours a day perfecting their player skill at candyland or chutes and ladders. That doesn't change the fact that the game, itself, uses random chance as its core mechanic.

Candyland has no player skill in it, however. You just move your dude. 40k has a significant amount of player skill. The same folks make it to the top tables over and over and win tournaments. I find it hard to believe that they are just consistently lucky.

Which I find strange.

People who win dice games are lucky. People who win dice games consistently are consistently lucky.

Doesn't seem like that shocking of a thing to say. I mean, people don't praise good blackjack players, despite the fact that there is a non-zero amount of skill involved. People don't talk up people who consistently win at backgammon, despite the fact that there is some amount of skill in that game as well.

Games of chance are games of chance. That some people win more than others, and that said winning is random, is a natural conclusion, not some alien idea.

I agree with Aliaros, there is only so much true skill can do in a dice based game. I could have the perfect list, execute my maneuvers perfectly, have all my troops in the perfect fire lines and then fail, thanks to poor dice rolls. There are the 3 key rolls that the Captain pointed out, but there are a bunch of other rolls needed to win. At the end of the match, if your not rolling what needs to be rolled, then skill doesn't matter.

 Ailaros wrote:
I mean, people don't praise good blackjack players, despite the fact that there is a non-zero amount of skill involved.

There is a HUGE industry that largely praises and sells the image of great blackjack and poker players. There is non-zero skill in both and they both rely hugely on luck. And yet the same people make tons of money off it and can beat the house/opponents.

Games of chance are games of chance. That some people win more than others, and that said winning is random, is a natural conclusion, not some alien idea.

The problem is that neither 40k, blackjack or poker (or even backgammon) are wholly up to chance. 40k is probably the least up to chance of any of those (right next to poker).

pretre wrote: poker

Well, hang on, though. Poker is a completely different game. It's a game of psychology that includes a random element, not a random game that includes a bit of skill. If you opponent folds his hand, then it doesn't matter WHAT cards you have in a game of poker. Put another way, it's possible to roll only proverbial 1's, and still win a game of poker. Not so at all in blackjack or 40k.

And yes, there is a world series of blackjack, but it's a total farce. Once you get to the core competency of player skill, anyone who wins consistently at a random card game is just lucky. Just like someone who wins consistently at a random dice game.

 Ailaros wrote:
Well, hang on, though. Poker is a completely different game. It's a game of psychology that includes a random element, not a random game that includes a bit of skill. If you opponent folds his hand, then it doesn't matter WHAT cards you have in a game of poker. Put another way, it's possible to roll only proverbial 1's, and still win a game of poker. Not so at all in blackjack or 40k.

Ha! You fell for my trap and made my point for me.

Of course, Poker is a completely different game from Blackjack. Just as 40k is. 40k is a game of tactical combat, list building and deployment that includes a random element. It is very possible to roll proverbial 1's and still win 40k. Errors in deployment, list building and tactics can turn a 'sure thing' into a loss for a player simply by making poor choices (the equivalent to falling for a bluff in poker).

Just like someone who wins consistently at a random dice game.

40k is not craps. If it was, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble and not have to use these big tables and time consuming models.