A good six months ago, Skkipper put a message out on
th DCM forum, looking for people to be on an Adepticon team. I pm'ed him back then, and we started the rotating selection process of finding other people.
The third member of the crew was Sean from Toledo. And when our fourth had to drop out the week before the event, Skkipper somehow managed to get us a celebrity ringer, Brent, from
BolS/Strictly Average fame.
Our team was named the Greg Sparks Five, in spite of there being only four of us, and Greg Sparks not being on the team. The explanation for this has something to do with there being space for him to join us in the future.
We were playing orks, because they're the best. We all had slightly different approaches though.
I was playing mostly a subset of my championship army:
Warboss on a bike
Six different nob bikers
19 slugga boyz w/ nob
rokkit buggy
battlewagon with da fixins.
7 lootas
All my teammates had big meks, so I knew my wagon could get some protection - and I left a transport space open so their meks could ride in comfort when we were paired up.
Brent, joining late, used a quickly whipped up list with some of my other models:
KFF mek (w/ burna)
30 shoota boyz, 3 rokkits, nob
30 shoota boyz, 3 rokkits, nob
7 lootas
8 lootas
rokkit buggy
3 kans w/ grotzookas
Skkipper was running a shooty list:
kff mek
30 shoota boyz, 3 rokkits, nob
30 shoota boyz, 3 rokkits, nob
10 grots
15 lootas
3 koptas w/ some buzzsaws (not sure how many)
3 kannons
And Sean was running a battlewagon force:
KFF mek
12 lootas
19 sluggas w/ nob
19 shootas w/ nob
12 slugga boyz (inc. nob) in a trukk
2 battlewagons w/ fixins
Our display board consisted of parts of the gaming table I use in my basement at home, along with some of the terrain pieces. I have no pictures of any of this.
The day starts with the quiz. One of the questions is 'which space wolf special character automatically will fulfill the conditions of his oath.' We got this one wrong - already screwed by Space Wolves and we haven't played a game yet
(P.S. - It's Bjorn)
Much of what I write below is likely to be wrong. I don't have all the packets or information, and it's been a long time (a week) since the event.
Round One:
In round one, we faced a team of four identical chaos lists.
Lash Sorcerer
Khorne Berserkers
Plague Marines w/ meltas in a rhino
Dual combi-melta + heavy flamer terminator unit
Possessed Land Raider (in which the berserkers and sorcerer ride).
Sean and I are paired together, so we've got the full battlewagon blitz going on.
The mission objectives here are Hold the Center, and Capture and Control (one objective in each deployment zone). Deployment is Pitched Battle. We have some 'command counters', which in this mission, can be used to give any unit one of several
USRs.
We get the first turn, and Sean starts by giving his lootas tank hunters. He proceeds to immobilize one of the land raiders back in its deployment zone. I figure that's good use of the counter. Other shooting exploded one of the two rhinos, and we were half way to crippling their mobility.
On their turn, they moved very little, and shot very little. Back to us. Now, our battlewagons are just a short jaunt through a wood away from wrecking the rest of the transports... Alas, it is not to be. My battlewagon immobilizes itself in the terrain (even with the re-roll, beginning a series of poor rolling that will continue all day). His wagon that hit the rhino predictable explodes it, but the one that hit the landraider managed to explode itself in the collision, while doing nothing more than removing one lascannon from the raider. But this allows him to charge the plague marines who were inside, and we start getting stuck in. Combined efforts from his mek and my riggers get my wagon moving again though.
On their turn, they bring in the terminator units, and opt to go for the big loota unit with heavy flamers, rather than risk landing near enough to the wagons to zap them. They kill some lootas. One unit of berserkers charges in to save the plague marines in combat, while the other unit lashes my nobs closer and assaults them. Due to some poor attack rolling on their part, they put two wounds on my nobs, and end up losing the combat by one when my klaws hit. The other khorne unit does much better and clears out that unit.
Sean counter-charges his sluggas into the combat that the nobs are fighting - we win that one easily. My wagon rams the land raider again, but doesn't achieve much. We shoot terminators, and Sean's trukk boyz assault one of the units to clear them out. In assault, one unit of terminators goes away, and my nob hanging off his boarding plank explodes the last land raider.
The rest of the game sees one unit of khorne berserkers taking a whole lot of fire, and eventually dying. If the game had ended on turn 5, they'd have scored one of the objectives as they'd lashed my bikes away from the table center, but once it went to turn six, we finished them off and ended up scoring near max points in the tabling.
On the other table, Skkipper and Brent had done just about the same, so we were going into round two with two wins.
Round Two:
In round two, Brent and I are facing MVBrandt and his friend Dave, while Sean and Skkipper are playing versus Tony (
40k championship winner) Kopach, and Kevin. These guys appear to have been unable to decide whether guard or space wolves are more powerful, so they made a team that was half guard, and half space wolves. We faced the guard half.
They had lots of guard shootyness, including 2 vendettas, and 2 manticores. They had some guardsmen, but they didn't do much except fire the occasional shot. Also, Straken is in there somewhere, but I don't think he ever came up.
Deployment was a weird triangle thing that gets us starting over 24" away from our opponents. Not good when half the team is running footslogging. We're going to be battling uphill here anyway, because we're in the situation that's best for guard, and worst for orks, where we're half fast and half slow. So if they focus on the fast stuff early, they'll still have time to focus on the slow stuff later. And based on who we're playing, that's exactly what we're expecting them to do. (and they don't disappoint).
Objectives for this one are:
Primary: control table quarters - requiring one scoring unit from each coalition in the quarter to do this.
Secondary: Kill Points
Tertiary: kill the most expensive unit - That's Straken's command for them, and my nob bikers for us.
They win the all-important roll for first turn, and this is beginning to look like a non-starter.
First turn, they shoot some stuff. But they don't kill much. Maybe we do have a chance. I think they killed one nob biker, and not much more than that really. Possibly some boyz, but no one broke. Forcefield saves have worked well this turn.
Our first turn, I turbo boost the nobs for a 3+ cover (and to get them closer), and we shoot stuff. We explode one vendetta, and cut a gun off the other with our lootas.
Their second turn, my dice turn on me. The manticores hit my nobs, and in spite of a 3+ cover save, (and only one save to take per model), I lose all but two of them, including the warboss and the bosspole. Ordnance barrage means I'm testing
Ld on a 6 and these guys don't move for the rest of the game (or at least until they're dead). Meanwhile, their other shooting takes a boy or two here and there, but is not really significant.
Turn two, we keep shooting, downing the other airplane, and getting a couple of other results. My wagon boys get into a multi-charge with two units, killing one and sticking to the other. This fight continues for another two turns, and they absorb charges from two additional units in this time before they're finally ground down.
Much of the rest of the game kind of blurs together. I know that the kans eventually charged, and exploded two chimeras. I don't think we got into any other assaults than that though. Brent's
Ld tests on his lootas were excellent, as they lost a guy or two each turn and survived. He charged the crew of a vendetta with them too, which is always kind of cool...
At the end of the game, they've got their starting table quarter, but all my troops are dead, so we don't have any. But, we end up winning the secondary (kill points), as much of our stuff managed to survive, while they lost a lot of small units. We never saw Straken so he survived, my nobs died, so they won Tertiary.
I think we got 8 points from this game. Skkipper and Sean fared better though, (if I recall correctly), possibly handing Tony his only loss of the weekend (but I don't know that, because I have no idea how his other team games went).
Round Three:
In round three, we faced a couple of guys from a team. <-- this is what happens when you don't get a copy of the sheets.
Yeah...
It's Skkipper and me against another guard/marine mix. From memory:
The Guard player had:
Commissar Lord
Chimeras w/ dudes.
Banewolf (poison tank)
Two Medusas
The Marine player had:
Chaplain in Terminator Armour
Drop Pod w/ Dreadnought (
MM/
CCW)
Drop Pod w/
Tac Squad (melta/missile/
PF sgt)
Drop Pod w/
Tac Squad (melta/missile/
PF sgt)
Assault Terminators (1
LC, 4
TH/
SS)
MM landspeeder
Objectives:
Primary: Control 4 objective markers, two on each side of the table. Ones on your opponent's side are worth six points each, ones on your side are worth two.
Secondary: Kill Points
It's Dawn of War, and we won to take the first turn.
We string out one of Skkipper's shoota boy units to push them back, and my nobs+warboss deploy somewhat near the middle to create a large threat range for them. Everything else rolls on with his mek in my battlewagon, and have our deployment zone objectives covered, while lootas run to get into position.
They roll on, and the medusa kills one of my nobs and several of Skkipper's shoota boyz. Drop-pods see his dreadnought kill my battlewagon, and a tactical squad put some wounds on my lootas, who stick.
On our turn two, we had a great turn and probably saw the game decided right there. Deathkoptas killed one medusa, while the other was rendered useless. The banewolf was taken out and we were in position to crash their lines, with little more than lasguns to stop us. Meanwhile, the dreadnought was immobilized, and my sluuga boys who had fallen out of the wagon killed the tactical squad that had fallen from the sky.
With the rest of their units coming in piecemeal, and their big guns taken out, there was little they could do but go for delaying actions. Their terminators came in late though, and they'd given them a command counter, allowing them to hold one objective, while the remnants of a last guard squad were able to get in position to contest another. But we held the other two, and had a significant lead in kill points.
I'm not really sure how our other contingent fared in round three.
Round Four:
For round four, it was Captain's Choice for team divisions, and that put Sean and I back together, as we figured having ane all-mounted force and one all-foot force would be best.
We faced Team High Rollers, from Toledo, which was kind of funny as Sean knew them, and so they were all trash talking through the game.
They had all foot-slogging orks:
1:
Warboss
2x 30 shoota boyz w/ rokkits & nobs
5 kommandos + snikrot
15 lootas
2:
Ghazghkull
2x 30 shootas w/ big shootas & nobs
15 lootas
3 lobbas
Objectives:
Kill points* - Only kill points from one force counted.
Get scoring units in enemy deployment zone
Control objective markers in neutral deployment zones
Deployment is Spearhead.
They decide to go for my scoring units, while we go for the non-Ghaz force.
They won the roll to go first. Knowing that ork vs ork is based on charges, we opted to reserve, and see if they'd advance. If they did, we could charge from our wagons as we showed up. We also didn't want to let their 30 lootas start going after us.
In retrospect, I'm not sure that we couldn't have been more tricky though. Thinking about it after the fact, we could have put our lootas in our battlewagons, giving us shots that they had no answer for, and simply reserving/walking on our boyz later.
But whatever.
They advanced some. Turn two, we get my wagon, one of Sean's, and his trukk boyz, as well as a couple of minor units. We call the waaagh, combi-charge 60 boyz + ghaz, win by 34... but Ghaz called his waaagh too (I wasn't sure he could do that on our turn, not really using him much). Somehow, through all the no-retreat saves, one of their nobs survives (he had 'eavy armour). They counter-charge with 15 lootas and a shoota-boy squad using the extra 6" to get there. We fare better than they did, but still lose - and that means I'd down one kill point. They back off with their consolidation move, and it seems that the big engagement of the game is over. Victory-Point-wise, I think we came out ahead, but they had not lost a kill point.
They act very unorky and hide. We advance as much as we can, and shoot, hoping that someone will fail a
Ld check, but to no avail. By turn 5, all the reserves are in, and my nobs are in position to charge a shoota boy unit on turn six, which will equalize the
KP tally, and net us the objective they're on. But, random game length comes up short, and so we're stuck.
We ended up winning the secondary and tying the teritary, but losing the primary. I'd like to play this one again with the change in opening strategy, and see if we couldn't force them to come to us (putting lootas, lootas, and shootas in the three wagons, and just shooting until they came to us).
I'm not at all sure how Brent and Skkipper fared this round either. I know their opponents had similar lists to the two guys we faced, with lots of lootas and shootas.
All said, we finished in 25th place (of 106), fairly respectable for never having played together, or even met each other, before the weekend.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Ooops, can a mod move this to the battle report forum please.
