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After missing the August tournament due to scheduling conflicts (I had tickets to an NFL game), and not really playing much 40k at all for the last two months, this weekend was the next in the AWC series.

This event was also being used as a test platform for the mission structure that they want to use at Adepticon this year (and that I think was the one used at the Nova Open), where there are three objectives for each mission, all of equal weight, and to 'win' a game, you had to win more of the objectives than your opponent.


I brought a really bad footdar list. To be honest, I wasn't really feeling it, and just grabbed some models that I hadn't used in a long time. You're all welcome to tell me how awful my list was, because it really was. And, that's okay. I'm somewhat limited in what models I have for eldar - I don't have any with actual guardians - so no weapon platform guardian squads, no war-walkers, and my jetbikes were conversions with harlequin bikes. I'm sure that having some guardian squads with longer range capability would have been better, but oh well, that's what you get for letting the civilians stay home.


HQ: Eldrad
HQ: Maugan Ra
Elite: Harlequins: Death Jester, Shadowseer w/ fusion pistol, Kiss, six harlies, six kisses, 1 fusion pistol.
Elite: six scorpions, exarch w/ stalker, claw
Troops: 10 Wraithguard, Shadowseer w/ Enhance
Troops: 4 Harkequin Jetbikes, 1 cannon, 1 warlock w/ destructor & spear
Troops: 9 Dire Avengers, Exarch w/ 2 guns and bladestorm
Heavy: Wraithlord w/ Sword & Missile Launcher
Heavy: Wraithlord w/ Sword & Scatter Laser
Heavy: Wraithlord w/ Missile & Brightlance


The Wraithguard don't have conceal, because they're supposed to hide behind the harlequins and get a better cover save that way. I'm sure there are a million problems with the list - not the least of which is that I've got very minimal long-range firepower, and no good way to advance at a shooty army easily.

Oh well. It looked good. (The models, not the list)


Game One

Versus Dave's Ultramar Guard (Mechanized)

I played Dave in a game 3 for all the marbles a couple months ago, when I was running my orks, and squeaked out a win. He's added a Manticore to his army since then, and without ranged firepower, I need to be sneaky to pull this off.

Dave's army:

HQ: Company Command: 4 plasma guns, plasma pistol, officer of the fleet, Chimera (All chimeras are Multi-laser/Heavy Flamer, unless otherwise noted)
Troops: Infantry Platoon
Command Squad, 4 flamers, chimera
Infantry Squad, autocannon, flamer, chimera
Infantry Squad, Autocannon, flamer
Infantry Squad, Autocannon, Meltagun
Speacial Weapons, 3 flamers

Troops: Vets w/ 3 meltas, demo charges
Troops: Vets w/ 3 meltas, demo charges

Elites: Psyker Battle Squad, 9, Chimera (plus heavy stubber)

Fast: Vendetta
Fast: Vendetta

Heavy: Manticore
Heavy: Leman Russ Executioner w/ Plasma Sponsons
Heavy: 2 Hydras


Mission Objectives:
1) Kill Points
2) Objectives, one in each deployment zone, one in the middle of the table
3) Kill the most expensive enemy unit

Deployment Style: Pitched Battle

I win the roll for deployment and figure that if Eldrad's divination is to be of any use, I need to go first and set up a feint. I know I can move two units, at least. My home-zone objective is in a wood clump on the right side, so I put the wraithlords over there, the dire avengers in the middle of the table, able to run up and hide behind a nice line-of-sight blocking building to take the center objective, and have the wraithguard, with eldrad joined to them, on the left side, with the harlequins + maugan ra behind them. I'll redeploy either the wraithlords, or the harlequins, or the wraithguard based on what Dave does. Jetbikes and Scorpions reserve, with the scorpions outflanking.



Dave deploys with his long-range shooting to the left, and most of his troops to the right, with the vendettas also helping support the right.



I roll, and get to redeploy two units. I figure that I'll move the wraithguard over to the woods to give those wraithlords some nearby psykers, putting half the squad into the woods for the cover save, and move the harlequins up to the line on the left, counting on the the Shadowseer to keep them, and Maugan Ra, safe.

Harlies on the left...


Wraith constructs on the right...


Dave scouts the vendettas, and doesn't steal the initiative, and it's on. Turn one, I fortune up the wraithguard and guide some stuff. His left vendetta makes its save, but the right one gets shot by Maugan "crack shot" Ra, who takes out one of the lascannons. Dave's shooting kills a wraithguard, and one of my wraithlords. Lascannons, and amazing rolling on the hydra's knocked him out.

Turn 2: I keep the harlies dancing, this time they explode the leftmost vendetta, pinning the squad inside. I conga-line the wraithguard out (keeping a cover save), and get a few in range of the other vendetta, that I manage to stun. My scorpions show up and run in to assault the manticore, but won't get there this turn. Meanwhile, my dire avengers are hiding behind the big clock tower building.

Dave's shooting this turn is largely ineffective. With the lascannons out of the picture, I get saves on everything, and while he kills four scorpions, that's diverted the manticore and executioner's fire for the turn. He had moved up a bunch of men too - his plasma command squad, and his flamer team, and one unit of melta vets - all in hope of downing the wraithguard who had advanced, but even with his 'on my target' orders, my cover saves (and trickery) are good enough to lose only a couple of guard. (Trickery - when forced to allocate wounds, put them on the warlock or eldrad with re-rollable invul saves, instead of on the wraithguard). His flamer squad targeted the dire avengers, but they were spread out, and between poor wounding rolls and good armour saves, they only lose a couple of men.

Turn 3: With him out of his transports, I get the opportunity to get some points. Dire avengers mow down the flamer team, and wraithguard assault the vets and the command squad. I kill some, the vets run for it, the command squad sticks. I think maugan and crew took out the psycher's chimera this turn, the wraithlords knock a couple of guns off the remaining vendetta, and the scorpions pull the gun off the manticore.

In return, Dave's options are dwindling. He takes some hydra shots at wraithlords, but they make their saves. He starts to make a run for it with one of his troop chimeras, moving towards my objective that I had to move off for the wraithguard to assault. The wraithguard cut down the remains of the command squad.

Turn 4: One wraithlord diverts to stop the chimera from going to the objective. He stuns it. Wraithguard shoot at the vendetta, landing some results, but not killing it. Dire avengers poke their heads out of cover to shoot the psyker squad. The scatterlaser wraithlord and wraithguard assault the vendetta, immobilizing it, and leaving it in position to grant me some cover.

Dave's last melta squad tries to take out the wraithguard in cover, and gets a couple. The executioner has had very few worthwhile shots all game, but tries again against a wraithlord but there's so much clutter it makes a save. His manticore tank-shocks my last two scorpions who start to run. In assaults, the free hits from wraithlords kill the vendetta and the chimera.

Turn 5: My jetbikes show up, and move to hold the objective in my corner. The wraithguard shoot the melta vets, who run. Dave's hydras kill one jetbike, which causes the others to run, and that's game - time is called.


I've got the kill points easily - I lost a wraithlord, scorpions and bikes, and killed a number of things. We tie on objective markers - my dire avengers hold the center, his platoon is still on his, and my jetbikes ran. We tie on killing the other costly unit. My wraithguard survive pretty well, and his russ is unharmed.

That goes down as a 'win' under the new scoring style.


Game 2

Versus Matt's Tau:

HQ: Commander w/ some drones.
Elites: Some suits
Troops: 6 Firewarriors
Troops: 6 Firewarriors
Troops: 10 Kroot
Troops: 10 Kroot
Troops: 10 Kroot
Fast: 2 Piranah
Fast: 4 Pathfinders in Devilfish
Fast: 4 Pathfinders in Devilfish
Heavy: Hammerhead
Heavy: 3 broadsides, drones
Heavy: 3 broadsides, drones

Deployment Style: Spearhead

Mission Objectives:
1) Kill points, but troop units don't count
2) Table Quarters
3) Have the only HQ model within 3" of table center.

I win the roll for table quarter choice and pick the one with a big building in the corner. I initially deploy as though I'm going to play aggressively, with everything up on the line, scorpions and avengers in reserve.



Matt deploys as far back in his corner as possible. With those railguns, he's going to drop my wraithlords in short order, and probably everything else too.



So, I decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and Eldrad redeploys the Wraithguard and lords behind the big building. I've got my harlies and jetbikes near the table center, and he's packed in a corner.



It's going to one of those dance games....


Turn 1:
Jetbikes move to a building to hide behind and play jump&fire. Harlies are fortuned and guided and kill a pathfinder - they don't break.

He moves up a little, and fails to see the harlequins. One wound on a wraithlord that was sticking out just a touch.

Turn 2:
I hide the wraithlord again. No reserves. Harlies knock an advancing devilfish from the sky.

He advances and deploys firewarriors from the devilfish. Kroot come in, one set on each table edge. The firewarriors see the harlies, and after the saves, two died.

Turn 3:
Scorps appear on the right, and kill the kroot that just came in there. Dire Avengers show up, and walk on and shoot, and then assault the kroot who had come on that side. Harlies assault and kill those fire warriors, consolidate back towards my side.

His army moves up, fails to see the harlies. Piranahs show and move flat out to the table center.

Turn 4:
Harlies move back, shoot and kill the piranahs. Dire avengers open up on the rear of the devilfish but only stun it.

His army moves up, and gets a couple of potshots off on the harlies, that go on fortuned Maugan Ra.

Turn 5:
He's getting close now, so I figure I need to split up his fire if I'm to keep an HQ at the center. I move out the wraithlords. Turbo-boost the jetbikes (after fortuning them) into the abandoned quarter.

He kills the dire avengers, moves his kroot between the two left-side quarters. Splits his fire up, and kills a wraithlord, but doesn't unload 24 smart missiles at the harlies.

We roll a '1' and game over.

We both managed to kill one enemy non-troop unit
He rolls off for his kroot, to see which quarter they count as holding, and it's the same one that his fire warriors are in. I win two quarters to one.
I've got eldrad within 3" of the table center.

So, I win the game 2 objectives to 1.

Game Three

Sorry, no pictures of this one, got distracted.

And so now we get the Space Wolf game...

Logan
3x Rune Priests
3x Wolf Guards, 1 Cyclone Guy each, 3 razorbacks, 2 Las/plas, 1 assault cannon
Long fangs: 3x multimeltas, drop pod
Long Fangs, 4 missiles, 1 lascannon
Long Fangs, 3 missiles, 2 lascannons, assault cannon razorback.


We've got a weird table with two deep pits.

Objectives:

5 objectives
Kill points
Kill enemy Commander (Highest point HQ model)

Deployment: Pitched Battle

He wins first turn, so no redeployment tricks. He lines up as a gunline, for the most part. I deploy my wraithlords back behind a cluster of trees to at least give them cover from the incoming fire. I put my avengers in one of the pits with an objective.

Turn by turn is kind of wasted here. He drops his pod next to the pit. I shoot my army at Logan's unit, and kill 4 multi-melta guys. He shoots my stuff, I try to make saves where I can. I cannot come close to matching his firepower, and he's got hot dice - I shoot up Logan's unit several turns in a row to no avail - he simply cannot roll a single 1 for any save.

He kills my scoring units. I kill some of his stuff. Neither of us touch the other's HQ. I end up with more kill points, he ends up with more objective markers, and we tie the assassination goal. He's got me by 249 victory points, and the tie breaker is 10%, so he gets the win.

Conclusion

I don't know if I'll try to refine the army. Eldrad+Maugan+Harlies is a good unit, but there's so much firepower on the table these days that it felt, in the last two games, that spending even the one turn out in the open out of Veil of Tears range would get them all killed - even through fortune. Maugan Ra shot stuff, and Eldrad cast spells - I wonder if a smaller harlequin unit would have the same ability to scare opponents from advancing on me though. As far as kill-point denial works, the list was excellent, I think I lost all of 3 kill points in any game. But I had no real ability to take control of the game or set the tempo. I think replacing the scorpions with spiders might be a good place to start, and using guardians with a long-range platform instead of dire avengers as the scoring threat would help out a little too, but I don't own any of them.

With two wins and loss, I tied for 3rd of the 20 players attending (small for our events, but we had to cap it because there was also a bloodbowl tournament and a fantasy tournament scheduled for the same day.) I think that at least five of the players there were running space wolves, probably more. I know there were 2 orks (Best overall and Best general were both orks), 2 blood angels, 2 mech guard, 2 tau, 1 vanilla marine, 1 daemon, 1 dark eldar, and 2 chaos marine armies (plus my 1 eldar)

Thanks for the great report
I really enjoyed reading that

Really interesting set of battle reports to read, especially given the unique nature of the list you played.

It seems like your list is much more resilient than immediately apparent.

I know of someone who plays a very similar list. He puts Eldrad and Maugan with the Wraithguard though. That way you're majority t6, 3+, 4+ cover.

Tough list to score KP or VP against, but not very mobile or killy outside of 12".

Was a win/loss indicitive of how the games turned out or would a standard score be a better way to gauge the way the battle went?





Nevermind, I tracked it down on the AWC site. I personally am undecided on this format, I like your points on KP though. I would like to try out this format to see for myself what the latest/ greatest thing in 40k tourney scene is. Also how does the scoring work. Do you get x amount of points for winning one of each of the objectives?, does a tie hurt your score? How does the scoring match you to your next round opponent? Just curious

Cool report as usual. There are days I just want to throw down a mix of models and just see what I can do with them. I think you pulled this off pretty well considering what you faced off against. Great looking army as well.

Thanks again for posting.

Enjoyed the read. Thanks and great play from your part.

Norbu the Destroyer wrote:
Was a win/loss indicitive of how the games turned out or would a standard score be a better way to gauge the way the battle went?

Hard to say. I won the first game - and I'm pretty sure I had that one well in hand. I lost the last game, although barely, but I felt like I'd barely dented his army at all. The middle game, I 'won' but so little happened... I dunno, I had a strange army, probably not the best one to gauge this question.

Nevermind, I tracked it down on the AWC site. I personally am undecided on this format, I like your points on KP though. I would like to try out this format to see for myself what the latest/ greatest thing in 40k tourney scene is. Also how does the scoring work. Do you get x amount of points for winning one of each of the objectives?, does a tie hurt your score? How does the scoring match you to your next round opponent? Just curious

The most important thing was wins. After that, games were matched up as close as possible based on total objectives scored.

Alex - For the last game against the gun line, especially going 2nd, you needed to reserve everything. That would have denied the gunline 2 turns of shooting for the game and give you a better chance of weathering the storm. There were a couple of places to hide on that board as you come in so you wouldn't have been shot up piecemeal. I've found that when I reserve everything, even if only 2 units come in, I can keep those 2 hidden/out of range for one turn until the bulk of the army comes in on turn 3. This is invaluable against those SW gun lines.

I had considered that, but didn't want to be left depending on reserve rolls, and possibly forced from the decent cover.

I think that, had I done that, I'd have been hard-pressed to score the kill points that I did, while he'd have been able to take out something or other, while also getting the objectives, which would have led to the same end result.

I dunno, I think it was a list matchup that was just really not going to go in my favor. If I'd played against a thunderwolf list, maybe, the wraithlords have a play in that game. The gunline just had too many long-range shots that I don't think I could have weathered the fire long enough in cover, nor advanced into it.

(Not to mention, dice are always a problem - on the turns where he had a rune priest in range, he stopped every single psychic power I tried. At the end of turn 5, he said I should roll to see if the game continued. I said if I rolled it, it'd be a '1' and we'd be done, if he rolled iit, we'd keep going. It was, predictably, a '1'.)

You may be right though, this was the first time I've played this sort of army, and have no playtesting to back either approach.

I think that adding Warpspiders will increase your armies damage output. Warpspiders are extremely useful in a footdar army IMHO. Plus, they are my favorite aspect, thus will always be in my foot list...LOL.

Wait, I thought footdar was no good??!?

The mighty Footdar!!

Haha, good to see them in action and at least gong 2 for 3.

I never leave home without the Avatar, but that is just me.

Yeah, some guardians would have really helped you out, but hey, you did great.

Nice report as usual.