Wow, I placed third. What an upset! My first
40k tournament in ten years, first time up north, shunned by everyone as a 'square-baser' and i'm on the podium. Booya.
With that out of the way, i'm gonna kick off my usual tournament coverage. Links to my normal youtube-style batreps featuring audio commentary and a big slideshow of pics are available next to each game entry below. Or you can just go to www.youtube.com/user/vaulsc
Special shoutout to George for taking such great care of me - road directions, accomodation, food etc. Event was run fairly smoothly, pretty good bunch of guys. First and second placers were Hayden K and Henare respectively. Best painting went to a guy called Andre. Best sports to Hayden H? Andre got two prizes, can't remember the other one.
As for my good result, it really came down to three things.
- Paint score; even though I didn't actually consistently 'finish' painting my army, heaps of people were swooning over it all weekend because they thought the defiler and oblits were cool, and in general there were a lot of very simple, but effective conversions in the army. Plus, i've painted so many armies now that it just sticks in my head that the brighter, bolder armies generally catch the most attention. Hence the mad white/yellow edging highlights on everything. It works! The models really pop out.
- Sweet draw. Only played one guy that I thought plays
40k at a decent level (bartosh), the rest of the guys weren't really up to par in terms making lots of consistently good tactical and strategic decisions (great guys though, don't get me wrong). So dodging all the tough matchups and good players, it was essentially 5 games against marines and 1 against guard. Plenty of easy matchups while the top of the field bashed each other out of the runnings. Lucky me.
- I'm finding it pretty easy to play my army correctly, it's a very simple army to play and
40k is a simpler system than say, fantasy (yeah, yeah). A lot of the time I was either able to just leave it to luck when I was outclassed, or capitalize straight away when I saw the other guy make a mistake. Also my army was relatively soft, so I got a decent comp score I think.
For info about the army I took, check here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IJ-iHywsPQ
And as for the other armies and the tournament overall:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsYvtckG7cU
On to the games. During the commentaries I talk about fictitious events such as my opponent rolling for feel no pain despite being struck by power weapons/ap2 shots etc, and terminators striking last due to cover after assaulting from a redeemer... in the actual games we played correctly, its my faulty memory that's all. Bear with me.
#1 vs Bartosh (Blood Angels) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_rWmwrPtmo
Mission turned out to be kill points, but you get an extra 3 points if you get a messenger (a secretly nominated non-
hq/non-vehicle model) into your opponents deployment zone. Bartosh deployed some assault marines and speeders in a corner behind a big bit of terrain while I surged forward along one half of the field. His furioso came down without hurting anything and I destroyed it. My defiler exchanged shots with his speeders but they came out worse off. Then his vanguards deep struck, but he scattered exactly the wrong way and rolled a 6, mis-happing them and losing the squad!!!
Bartosh was showing a great deal of dissapointment here but hung in there. When his land raider showed up to confront mine, I made a fairly ballsy play, unloading two rhino's worth of
CSM in front of it to try and take it down with 4 meltas, which would force him to commit the terminators/
HQ's inside to the grunts, allowing me to counter-attack with my own terminators and
HQ's. It didn't work. My meltas didn't kill his tank, so he disembarked and used a lot of shooting and psychic stuff to smash my
CSM, and when I counter-attacked anyway, his stuff started beating mine even though I went in first. Being a complete noob, I hadn't done my homework and didn't know about some of the tricks in the book. He'd left some kind of priest dude in his landraider which was giving feel no pain to everyone within 6" of the raider.. I had no idea.
The game graciously ended after the 5th turn, leaving me with a minor loss. Had it not, things would have been worse. My messenger had been a terminator with a chainfist, who died, while his had been an assault marine, who ended up completing the mission (and wiping out the oblits in combat, too). We had drawn on kill points, so the mission completion put things in his favour.
p.s voted Bartosh's guys best painted. Not the most memorable army in terms of painting, but I felt it was the most consistently well-painted in terms of technical ability shown.
#2 vs Chris (Black Hands: Generic space marine chapter) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ya5kH6F1hM
This time the mission was random objectives and spearhead deployment, three objectives coming down at random in turns 2 ,3 & 4, 6d6 from the centre (halved if the scatter comes up a hit). If the objective hits you, it's str9 ap2. I didn't particularly like the mission mechanics (although they were fun), I felt this would have been fairer had the damage been lower, and if players were forced to re-roll the location if the final objective came within 12" of another one.
At any rate Chris had four
tac squads in rhinos, a big squad of terminators teleporting around with the libby ability, and a master of the forge with 3x autocannon dreads. I basically headed right for him, and by turn 4, one objective had come down right behind his lines near his corner, while the other 2 had landed in almost exactly the same position very near to my start location.
Early in the game, Chris 'ported his big payload of terminators over to take out my oblits, but I had a daemon prince and
CSM squad near enough to counter-attack, wiping out the terminators and scaring the libby away. This gave me some very good control of the field, and as the autocannon dreads weren't achieving a lot, it really was a matter of me getting back across the table in time to hold the two objectives that were on my side.
My land raider was hooning around, ramming his rhinos, which was a ball. Turns out that a raider going full bore at a rhino hits it at str9. The raider itself ended up on his objective, destroying the rhino worth of guys he had back there, and allowing Zhufor and his cronies to murder them and basically contest that objective.
Later, I managed to pile nearly 25
CSM/zerkers + a defiler into the other two objectives, and the game went on long enough for me to really hold on to them with some flair. Pretty big win to me.
#3 vs Dean (Blood Angels) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtar5oNLyhc
Another game vs Blood angels, again i'm feeling outclassed, my opponent seemed to have a lot of things in his list that enjoyed advantages that my codex didn't really have. It was a straight fight for 3 objectives spaced apart on the centre line (pitched battle deployment).
In turn two, Dean's shooting killed my land raider, defiler, and wounded my Daemon Prince 3 times. Ow. Ow. At that point I told myself that i'd really just try to get through it, wasn't going to be a particularly fun game after that round of bad luck, the best I could do was to just avoid a bad sports score as a result of feeling that way.
However, when he committed his payload of combat terminators & craplain into Zhufor & co, I managed to hold on, and counter-attack into that combat with a
CSM squad. At one point the game look like it could be clawed back as my chainfist ripped into his craplain, forcing him to take 2x invulnerable rosarius saves or die, allowing me to get into a very good position in the following turn.
He made both, and after that there was nothing I could do against all of those arsecannons, assault marines, flame cannons etc. Significant loss with him on 2 objectives to my zero.
#4 vs Jed (Fire Falcons - generic space marines... or, wannabe salamanders?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oODSRSb7ksU
I got told that Jed gets a bit of flak on the Whangarei forums, and I could see why. His list has vulkan in it, plus the usual vulkan synergies - meltas, flamers, and more meltas. Oh and the thunder hammers. Yeah, yeah. I had to laugh, my army was so badly out-classed for this one, it was even a night fighting mission where the night fighting doesn't go away until you make a reserve roll!
However, my opponent began to play in a way that I found I was able to take advantage of. He sent his melta/flamer speeders ahead of his army full bore, allowing me to bring them down early on without retaliation. I was completely deployed in one half of my base line, and he moved forward on the corner diagonal to me. My oblits were in the center and as he headed for them, I had to wonder just whether he would take some bait if I put it out for him, or whether he would do the smart thing, and move everything carefully into a range where I couldn't commit forces without really getting crushed in terms of threat-range positioning.
I moved everything into lay-trap position, and poor Jed couldn't resist moving right in to assault those nice, juicy oblits with his librarian, terminators, an V-man. After all, the rude buggers were firing their jazz at his land raider! Jed had to interrupt our game to recieve a phone call from his mum. I joked to the
TO that I should take a picture of it to include in the batrep, and the
TO actually egged me on to do it! People must be made of fairly low calibre moral fibre up north. I resisted that temptation and politely waited for the young lad to return.
The oblits got smashed, but in my turn I counter-attacked with the Daemon prince, Zhufor, his boys, and a full squad of
CSM. The pre-shooting knocked out a couple of thunder-hammer terminators (thank GOD) and in a few rounds of combat after that I had finally nailed everything (thanks, warptime). Phew.
Rest of the game was a mop-up mission, since it was kill points with extra points awarded for stuff like
HQ's, elites etc, it was a really, really big win for me.
#5 vs Philip (Imperial guard) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3usqMwqplDU
Phil's imperial guard army looks absolutely awesome, they are all vostroyan's, and on paper it wasn't looking like a good matchup for me at ALL. He has a nice big mix of infantry and mech, and even put an inquisitor in there for the callidus assassin. He had the big squad of psykers and even rough riders. No vendettas though!
Mission was a weird one, similar to game #3 with objectives in the middle line, but every unit killed gets its SOUL sucked out and tallied up to the objective nearest its death location, making that objective more valuable.
What eventually cost Phil was this: His army was so huge that he was forced to spread out in a big long line, due to spacing issues, while I stuck to one half of the board and just zoomed forward. This meant that as the carnage ensued, the two objectives on my side gained all the points, while I could simply ignore the third one on the other side.
I went first, and in his first two turns the dice had favoured me so much that i'd lost practically nothing. His first big score came when he blew my land raider, but in the bigger picture it only meant that he spent a huge amount of firepower dealing with the raider, and later the terminators - but without advancing his position to score.
My
CSM and berzerkers were able to move to his line, get some kills, and then retreat back to the centre to have two objectives held by the end of the game. The one in the centre had about 11 SOULS tallied to it, giving me a huuuuuge win. To add insult to that, my defiler was rampaging through his back line - it definately had a huge amount of fun that game, killing something new every single turn of the game, whether it was at range or up close.
#6 vs Andrew S (Ultramarines) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gta7iMGv_I4
This kid had Sicarius, Cassius AND Cronus in his list, he remarked to me that he'd taken on board heaps of advice on the internet about what to run. He was also explaining how he'd like to have some things in his army but didn't as $ was an issue. Understandable especially for a young player. Certainly won't get easier now that the end times are upon us (eh daemion).
Mission focused on just ONE objective smack in the middle of the table, but you get 1 point for EVERY scoring unit within 9" of it - that has to be the whole squad, not just a daisy chain of termagants touching it. It was also a dawn attack scenario.
This in mind, my plan was just to drive right into the middle, and weather the storm of shooting with my
CSM and zerkers, while ploughing the terminators into his mass of marines (on foot) and kill as many of his scoring units as I could. Although he deployed 3 units, technically that was 6 scoring units as he combat-squaded them. Sicarius let the rhino squad of 10 scout and outflank me, but the daemon prince ran off to deal with them once they had arrived, so that wasn't a part of the main event in centre.
My land raider exploded half way house, preventing my plan from going ahead. Elsewhere, I popped his land raider, and assaulted his special character
HQ's plus terminators with my defiler & oblits. Rather bad move - although I did kill both
HQ's, I lost the oblits and defiler in the process. Might have been better to just feed him one thing at a time while the important objective stuff was raging on.
The centre was mayhem, my zerker's were basically cowering in some ruins as their rhino had been shot early, and my other two rhinos were having a real hard time getting across the field due to the vehicle traffic jam, and a withering hail of fire from cronus, his vindicator, a thunderfire cannon, and
tac squad missile launchers. I had one squad lose its rhino, then 6 of their number from the thunder fire. They were near enough to launch an assault into his fortress (6 squads of 5 marines in a bolstered defence from the tech ruin), desperately hoping to reduce the number of guys that he would move into the centre 9" bubble late game.
Somehow my opponent dropped the ball in his 4th turn though. Although an easy win had been presented to him, he failed to execute the orders necessary: assault my 4
CSM harassing him with all 6 combat squads, consolidate forward, and then just gap it into the centre in turn 5, where all I really had was one more
CSM squad. My terminators were fighting an epic stalemate against one dreadnought, with both sides failing to land a killing blow.
Instead he just keep shooting and inching forward, and before I threw that fateful "end the game" dice, I remarked to him how bad a position I was in and how important this roll was. It came up a 1 - essentially the difference between me coming 3rd and me coming something like 10th. One more turn and his terminators would have hiked over to my cowardly zerkers, and his lazy marines would have finally figured out that there was a mission to accomplish.
Big win to me.
Chaos Space Marines, The Skull Guard: 4500pts 
Fists of Dorn: 1500pts 
Wood Elves, Awakened of Spring: 3425pts