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I just got back from Austin and, although weary from sleep deprevation, I thought Id post my battle reports from the individual 40k tournament. It was 18 hours of driving to get to the con and 18 back, but it was well worth it. The tournament had a very fun atmosphere, with whacky team tourney scenerios on Fri. as well as open gaming on thursday night. A few friends and I took advantage of both as well as the hosting hotels bar. The hotel, by the way, was enjoyable to say the least. The room we stayed in was on a patio overlooking the pool and a courtyard. Rates were extremely reasonable for a luxury hotel, $90 a night, and restaurants were all within walking distance.

The judges were constantly circling the floor answering questions within seconds, and everything flowed extremely smoothly. If anyone had inklings to go you should definately look into going next year. All my games were against great opponents, personality and gamemanship.

On to the battle reports. The rules were you play 4 games and after the four games the top 50 would move on to the championship bracket with the rest of the players having their scores reset for the Sunday rounds. I will give a breif discription of the first four games and write up full battle reports for my final three sunday games.

Also, I believe there were 170 or so participants. I dont know any hard numbers but my guess would be 30 Guard, 25 Blood Angels, 25 Tyranid, 25 Wolf, 25 Marine, with 40 slots being held by all other armies. SO maybe 3-7 of chaos, orks, eldar, tau, WH, Deamons. I even saw a couple DE and Cron players.

My list
Great Unclean One
Herald of Tzeen. on chariot with shooting powers
Herald of Tzeen (same)

6 Crushers (all goodies)
6 fiends
6 fiends

12 deamonettes
7 horrors
5 Plaguebearers with icon

5 screamers
5 screamers

2 x soulgrinders
1 DP of Tzeentch with shooting powers.

Game 1 Blood Angels
He had Mephiston
Libby Dred
Assault marines w/ corbulo in a crusader
30 assault marines with jump packs melta.

He set up in the corner. I dropped in and surrounded him. He killed the GUO with meph and the dred. I counter assulted putting 4 wounds on meph and immobolizing the libby dred. He threw things at me and I chased him down killing his stuff. I could not get that last wound on Mephiston and he flew around the board killing the GUO, 6 fiends, a DP, 2 heralds, and the pink horrors. It was grab the most objectives and my deamonettes held 2, with him having an assault squad on another. (meph and that squad was all he had left besides the immobile dred.)

19 points for me out of 47

Game 2 was against Tyranids
His list
Hive tyrant with preferred enemy and guard
6 x hive guard
3 x zoanthropes
2 x trygons
2 x tervigons
5 x shooting warriors
I got my wrong wave. We sort of played a cat and mouse game of balling up our armies shooting a little at each other and once my crushers and fiends were down I went at him. We killed a lot of each others stuff (which was most of the mission.) Secondary and terrtiary were kill all the HQs and elites. I accomplished those and grabbed some objectives.

I scored 42 of 47

Game three was against a guy I saw at the Ard Boyz finals named Bill. He was a good opponent and it was as close a game as I could make it.

His list
Swarmlord
2 x tervigon
1 trygon
1 tyranofex
20 gargoyles
4 Shrike warriors
6 hive guard
19 termigaunts

It is capture three seperate objectives adn kill your opponents stuff. I get the wrong wave (my shooty wave) and with all his speed he runs down and kills a lot of my units. I roll for reserves and get.....1 unit of screamers. He kills more. I roll another round for reserves and get .......the other unit of screamers and the pink horrors. Crushers, fiends and GUO all sit watching. Finally they start showing up, and luckily I still ave the PB and my reserves on the table. I start killing some gaunts, kill the tervigon, contst a few objectives, but it came down to 1 gaunt with FNP to survive for him to get the win, he rolled 4 dice.....2 6's. Ok so now the FNP roll and ......two 4+'s. Oh well. It was still a gret game and I had fun so what else can you ask for in an ass kicking.

I score 13 of 47.

Final game was agianst Blood Angels. I was on table 24 so I knew I would have to win fairly big to get in the top 50.

His list
About 4 razorback varianst with assault marines
3 rhinos full of marines and priests.
2 Baal preds
another las auto pred
land speeder.
vindi
I got primary and proceeded to land agressively and just try cracking tanks. He shot a lot of guns but luckily it was at crushers and GUO. I killed all but 1 immobile rhino, 6 marines and his honor guard and librarian who were down a few men. I held the most terrain features and got some of the other bonus'.

I end with 37 points.

I am in the championship bracket but that was a tough fight to get there. There were a lot of great opponents and I had had a lot of fun up to this point. I was excited for the next days action to see If I could work my way to the front of the room and the top tables.

The next day would start at 8 AM with yet another Blood Angel list..... more detailed battle reports to follow.

Nice report and cool to hear that you had so much fun over there. Most important of course!

Gameswise, a lot of Tyranid-players. Nice! And some close games to boot. Too bad Mephiston had a lucky day and rolls were not too great for you against the 2nd Tyranid-player. Still, your list is good and we know you are, so those thing just happen.

How did your Soulgrinders perform? I find myself going for DPs over SGs most of the time because of perceived increase in survivability. Still, I could be very wrong about the relative weakness of SGs. Maybe Im misusing them ;-)

Looking forward to the review of day two.

Greetings, Cilithan

How do you like the GUO compared to another two Tzeentch Heralds? Why did you split and go with 2 grinders/1 prince? Do you feel you'd have been better served going with 3 of either?

In any case I really appreciate the batrep

anyone seen any pics from the event posted online?

The GUO isagreat fire magnet and he is tough to bring down. I had him in melee with the swarmlord for a couple rounds, killing drednaughts, killing tervigons, and he shrugs off the missile spam of the wolves. I took 2 grinders because the enemy usually only has specific units that can deal with them. Small arms fire is shrugged off. I usually run 2 princes but I thought I would see lots of dreds with talons, that was not the case. Overall the grinders did fine. I should have put shootng attacks on them, but even without the attacks they are a huge threat that the enemy does not want to get into their squads.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
When the day began,between drop outs and the previous days score I was on table 10. You could always tell where you were by your table as the top scores were always towards the front. Well somewere around 20 Ill take it.

Game 1 Mission Take as many objectives as possible (4 on the board) and the difference between you and your opponent was how many primary points you had.
2ndry have a unit in every table quarter, terrtiary 1 point for every unit you kill up to 9.

Opponents list
Blood Angels
Librarian
Corbulo in land raider GH with assault squad.
2 x razorbacks w/assault can. Each had 5 or 6 assaultmarines
Land raider rdeemer with 8 death company w/ chaplain
1 Baal pred w/ h blters
2 x auto cannon las cannon preds.

Dawn of war. I win and have himgo first.

Turn 1 he rolls on in the center of the board with his army and has Baal outflank.

Turn 1 I get primary and land screemers aggressively near his tanks. Fiends and Crushers 18" or so away, GUO on one flank.

Top 2 He doesnt move a L Raider to get max shots at the screemers. He unloads Godhammer LR and a pred into the screemers but 3 live. The rest of his army shoots and kills the GUO. His Baal showed up.

Bottom 2 I get a grinder and some of my shooting elements. My screemers in the back turbo boost up for a screen for my crushers. Fiends and screemers hit the stationary LR and blow it up. Other fiends asault a razorback and whiff.

Top 3 He unloads 2 squads with his libby and corbulo and kills all my screemers and the one squad of fiends.

Bottom 3 I counter with the crushers and wipe out all in those squads. My shooting elements begin to start shutting down his tanks with stunns, immobilizing, and wrecking.

Top 4 Death company LR begins starting to burn some of my deamonettes but he stays in his ride. Baal pred without turret starts pushing towards my back objective full of plaguebearers. Assault cannon pops a grinder. Shooting finishes off another fiend squad.

Bottom 4. Crushers hit a pred and kill it. Shooting finishes an empty Razorback. Shooting kills his baal.

Top 5 He flats out his razor full of troops and finally gets his Death Company out of the raider to kill my horrors. They wipe them out and make a consolidation move 6" towards the plaguebearers that just had a razorback flat out up to their position.

Bottom 5 My last grinder and herald show up. I have my DP running over to help the P bearers. I stun the razorback with the bolt. My deamonettes make a move to an objective but stagger so they cant all be flamestromed to death.

Top 6. His lannd raider tries killing the grinder but fails. Death company kills the plague bearers and consolidates to block the deamon prince. His troops get out the ride to score the objective.

Bottom 6 My deamonettes double back to the center objective(which is worth 2) and hold it. He blocked my DP in such a way I couldnt kill his troops but instead of fighting I run and use the move ment to bypass the squad and contest his obective.

The game ends and I have 39 out of 47 points and off to table 7. I think my opponent did a lot right that game and he certainly knew what he was doing, he just played a couple target priority things wrong and that was due to little experience with deamon lists. The next mission would be a scrap for one objective in te center of the board. Perfect for my army. I draw .......wolves. Hmmm could be better, could be worse. Ill have to see his list. I hope to get the battle report up tomorrow.

Impressive game on your end! Daemons are told to be impotent against mech, let alone Land Raiders. I guess you showed that that doesnt have to be true. :-)

Nice use of the Screamers, using them as mobile cover for the Crushers. I feel theyre well worth their points if only considering their turboboost-option (last turn contests for instance). Now you add the coverbonus which I didnt think of yet. Their tankbusting option is just gravy.

Im also a bit surprised that in a 2000 point tournament, you seem to be doing just fine with 3 not very sturdy troopchoices. Would you change the list in retrospect, and if so, what would you change?

Looking forward to the report of the game vs the Wolves.

Cilithan

Norbu knows how to play his Daemons and Daemons are one list that doesn't need a lot of troops. Since the troops drop in where you want they can be hidden and more importantly the rest of the list is so potent that to ignore them for troops would invite a tabling

Oh Im very aware Norbu is a great General. I follow his posts zealously (both on Daemons and Necrons) in the hope some of the Tactical Genious rubs off ;-)

Thanks for the report. Looking forward to the finale.

- Blackbone

Thanks for the kind words guys.

On to game 2. The mission was to grab a center objective and every OPPONENT turn that ends with you holding the objective gains you a tally point. At the end of the game you add up your tally points and compare to see how many victory points you have. Whoever holds the objective at the end of the game gets 2 tally points.

I thought this would be perfect for my deamons as they could just drop on the center objective and wait for the enemy to come to me.

I was going to play Dakka's own Augustus for this battle. His list was something like this:

Wolf lord termy with TH SS and some tricky wolf stuff (necklace eternal warrioir)
Priest w/ jaws
preist with jaws

3 squads of fangs all with 4 ML and 1 LC
2 dreds with plasma cannons
5 rhinos and razorbacks all with 5 Grey hunterswith power weapons and melta or plasma.
drop pod with 7 grey hunters

Its table quarters, we roll off and .........he wins and chooses to go first.

He sets all his fangs and dreds in a piece of terrain in the corner of his deployment zone. His drop pod hits on the objective and the lord, priest, and 7 hunters waltz onto the objective. The vehicles all zoom up and castle around the objective.

I really thought my best approach at this point would be to cripple this army and ignore that objective for the time being and see if I can pull it out in the end. I drop my crushers and fiends behind the center hill where the objective is. I couldnt let all that fire power sit and cripple my army so I had a long talk with my GUO and sent him over to my opponents board edge. He needed some help and I found that Pink horrors are a nice answer to long fangs. I can shoot them with lots of shots and I have 4+ invul. if he shoots back. Also, the changeling might get lucky and get a squad to unload on a friendly. The GUO was my dred. insurance. Screemers land in the back for some turbo boosting in future turns.

He gets a tally point.

Top 2. He drives up a rhino and a razorback and unloads the squads to fire at the crushers as well as jaws them. The unit in the center of the board also fires and jaws' them. All 3 long fang squads fire on the crushers as well. When all was said and done I had 2 wounded crushers and no icon left in the squad. GUO and fiends were nearly unscathed.

Bottom 2. I needed to keep him from getting that tally so I turbo bost the screemers to contest the objective for now. Hororrs shoot and kill a couple long fangs. DP and Grinder drop in and put pressure on long fangs as well. DP fires and kills two fangs from another squad.GUO wades forward and threatens fangs as well as a rhino near the center. Crushers go after the squad that unloaded with the preist. I kill the preist and 3 marines and he rolls insane heroism to stay locked. Both fiends crash into his lord, priest unit. He swung first and dropped 3 fiends. I returned with killing all the long fangs. We stayed locked but the troops were dead.

Top 3. He loads up one of the squads that shot the crushers and zooms back to the center. His fangs all try killing the GUO and he manages a wound due to the FNP on the missiles. He does manage to kill my DP. Melee continues in the center and I kill both his preist and lord.

Bottom 3. I finish off his 2 last grey hunters with crushers. Deamonettes land near the crushers to start driving to the center. The other grinder lands near the GUO. Screemers kill the drop pod on the objective. Fiends only manage to kill a rhino. Horrors finish off a fang squad.

Top 4 He fires everything at GUO and charges a dred into it to keep his fangs alive. I immobilize it. All his vehicles move to the center and he shoots up a unit of fiends and kills it down to 2 models.

Bottom of 4. Fiends hit two transports and blow both up. Deamonettes hit another transport and blow that up. Grinder gets into one unit of long fangs and wipes them out. GUO kills the dred. At this point my dice are on fire. I am nothing but 5's and 6's for hits and pen rolls. My horrors fire and put 10 saves on the long fang squad. My dice are so ggod he asks if he could ue them for his saves. I say fine and he rolls his 10 saves and gets about 7 - 1's and 2's. I can tell my opponent is frustrated at my luck because I have been there when your opponent is rolling awesome and it just sucks. Especially deamons as when they roll well there is very little you can do to stop them.

Top 5 He charges a soul grinder with a dred and drops the soul grinder. He plasmas my GUO out of desperation and finishes it off. His last couple squads try to pile in the center.

Bottom 5. Crushers, deamonettes and fiends hit the center and wipe out the squads. Deamonettes are now on the objective.

Top 6. He moves up his dred to contest, fires at my fiends, kills one, and I pull the only one in charge range keeping him away. Fangs kill nothing.

Bottom 6 There are less than 5 minutes left and I just call it as I am on the objective and he has a dred and 2 fangs left.

Game ends with me getting 39/47.

My opponent was a great sport during the game and his not knowing the deamon codex did not help. I was relly worried about the GUO getting jawsed into oblivion, but the crushers are such a scary threat he had to hit them. I took 6 jaws tests with the crushers and failed only 1. The scenerio was not good for any army to fight demaons as they love it when they dont have to chase you down.

I am off to table 4 at this point for the last round of this 170 person tournament, not knowing who my opponent would be...

Wow man. That mission was made for Daemons! The way you played was perfect for the mission, congratulations on a decisive win in that game.

Congratulations on a job well done so far. You are making me reconsider adding Fiends as well as Screamers to my army. I'm also beginning to see that not all competitive daemon army has to have Fateweaver.

Norbu the Destroyer wrote:
Bottom 2 I get a grinder and some of my shooting elements. My screemers in the back turbo boost up for a screen for my crushers. Fiends and screemers hit the stationary LR and blow it up. Other fiends asault a razorback and whiff.

I'm slightly confused here. Was it a different screamer unit that assaulted the LR? Because a unit cannot assault after turbo-boosting.


I also feel that the SW player, despite great rolling on your part, could have probably done better. I'm not sure if he utilized this tactic, but what I would have done against Daemons (I play Rune Priest/Long Fang-spam SW) is tank shock the bloodcrushers/fiends to set them up for multiple Jaws on lined-up units. It's one of the few times that you don't want to roll well (that is, 5's and 6's). But his unfamiliarity with daemons, your great rolling and favorable mission objective (to daemons) just did him in.

Looking forwards to the next batrep.

One squad of screemers turboboosted to make a screen for the crushers. The other unit that took all the shots that turn was close enough to just hit the land raider and chew through the hull. I hit it with the fiends as well to block all the exits in case I just wrecked it and didnt get it to explode. I blew it up so the squad was allowed to live another turn until the crushers closed.

Very impressive victory over the SW. Looks like he played right into your claws...

The Sanguinor Version 2.7 wrote:Very impressive victory over the SW. Looks like he played right into your claws...

The former comment is seconded, the latter given a chuckle

Happy to see the forces of chaos triumphing. Good luck lad

So out of the 6 games listed you played BA 3 times, SW once, and 2 Nids? You poor bastard

Good job with the Daemons. I'm normally a fan of the DP's over SG's but it's a preference thing

Final game was place 2 objectives and each was worth 10 points. 2ndry was kill VP of your opponent. The more you kill the more you earn. Terrtiary was KP.

My opponent.....Nids

His list
Hive tyrant with wings
Swarmlord with 2 guard
Tervigon
gaunts
10 Poison, scythed genestealers w/ broodlord
5 warrioirs with rending claws and scything talons
3 hive guard
2 zoans
8 ymagrl
tervigon.

I choose to go first. I land in the center of the board. My objective is on my right side and ion my half the board. His objective is same side but on his half.

I get primary and land my crushers, fiends, GUO, screemers near the center. Horrors land on my objective.

He moves everything on near his objective. Night fight so no real shooting yet. He makes gaunts and they hit the GUO and do nothing, I kill 5 or 6.

Top 2 I get most my shooting elements but my herald scatters 10" towards his tervigon. I shoot the zoanthropes dead. I fill my objective terrain piece thinking this is where the ymagrl are hidden. I finish off the gaunts.

Bottom 2. Tervigon hits herald but doesnt quite kill him. That sucks because he will finish him in my turn and start running amuck in my units. Ymagrl appear in the center of the board and charge the Soul grinder hoping to rend it. He rolls about 15 dice and no 6's. I kill one and he takes a break test......box cars. Yikes that is rough luck. Ymagrls fall back. He also moves 4 warriors out of cover and leaves one in, probably to spring a trap on my fiends forcing me to make base to base in cover giving him Initiative.

Top 3 Soulgrinder Hits ymagrl and he rolls another pair of 6's to break and run. Crushers move over to hit the trygon and they wipe it out. Here is where the game took a turn against me. I move my fiends so that I think I have 4 within 12" of his warriors and 1 just out of 12" so it doesnt have to move through cover. I make my initial assault and my opponent says I have to charge into cover to hit the warrior there. I tell him I just have to move the initial model closest to closest. The rest of my 3 close fiends make base to the other 3 warriors out of cover. The last Fiend was about 1/8" away from making base to the warrior in cover. He stares at the board for a minute....and says one of the fiends would have been out of charge range to who it made contact to and that fiend would have had to have made base in cover. We each were not going to give and at this point models had been moved, the measurements were very close so I said lets dice off. He agreed and unfortunately I lost the roll off. Warriors swung first and dropped 4 fiends. I wounded 2 and combat res. left a fiend left with a wound. Now I would be playing catch up to make up for that.

Bottom 3 His flyrant hits a fiend unit kills 2 but takes 2 wounds. I hit and run out of the melee. Genestealers get a good fleet and cover roll to just hit my horrors. Swarmlord hits GUO and wounds him a couple times. Other fiend is wiped out. Things are not going well.

Top 4. Grinder piles into the swarmlord to help GUO. Guo kills one of the guards and wounds the swarmlord. Grinder survives the swarmlord attacks. Crushers are coming for help, but I cant roll a 4 or higher for my assault through cover so they sit idle. Fiends rehit the flyrant and kill it.

Bottom 4 Swarmlord and tervigon kill a grinder. Hive guard shooting kills another grinder. GUO has 1 wound left. Swarmlord makes another invul save. Genestealers kill whats left of the fiends.

Top 5 I am desperate and he is sitting on both objectives. Deamonettes charge the stealers. I lose 5 he loses 3. Crushers hit the swarmlord and kill the guards. Swarmlord makes antoher 2 invul save. My shooting kills most the warriors.

Bottom 5. Swarmlord and tervigon kill a few crushers, swarmlord makes 3/5 invul and has 1 wound left. Stealers and deamonettes are killing each other but he is killing me faster due to FNP.

Top 6, last turn. Both screemer units make a dash for each of the objectives. The one unit barrels into melee to relieve the deamonettes. The deamonettes die but only 2 stealers and a 2 wounded broodlord remain. Herald piles into the swarmlord melee to tie up the swarmlord and tervigon so they cant charge the screemers next turn. Swarmlord makes a final invul and my crushers are all killed. Its up to the screemers to hold.

Bottom 6. Gaunts and hive guard assault my plague bearers and screemers on his objective. When all is said and done I still have 3 screemers on his objective. Swarmlord and tervigon kill my herald and fall back. The 3 genestealers get me to make 6 invul saves and I make 5 of them. The screemers survive and contest the toher objective.

So we each killed about 1500 points of each others armies but he has me in kill points. Neither of us gets any points out of the primary.

I end with 13/47. This drops me down to finish in a tie for 15th place. Not what I was hoping for in placement, but I had 7 really close exciting games, and what else can you ask for. Not only that I wasnt stuck fighting Mech Guard all 7 games. Although for deamons, tyranids is a rough draw as both armies really just kill each other off and whatever staggers out of the melees colapses on objectives.

Looking back I could have used another troop unit. Every mission had some sort of objective grab and it could have been handy. The event was a lot of fun and I would recommend that anyone wo enjoys 40k check out Wargamescon next year, you wont be disappointed.

Thanks for posting your. It was fun to see how you matched up. You have a beautiful army by the way. It's very vibrant on the table top.

I'm kind of jealous you got so many marine players as opponents .

If you ever decide to drop your guo I would really recommend the masque. It helps to counteract the fact that the fiends have no grenades. Pulling stuff out of cover for fiend charges is almost more important than pulling stuff out of cover for the grinder!

I thought that you might end out above me, you were definitly about a row ahead of me for most of the tournament.

Very nice reports, thanks for sharing. That stinks your last opponent tried to 'trap' you and to 'spring the trap' after you had already moved your models. He should have watched each individually as you measured.

Would you break down that assault argument for me one more time?

I don't get it, at all...