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My eldest and I got lined up for the third game of our epic test of my Adepticon list vs. his evil Necrons. Since I'd just gotten my hands on the primer... I thought we'd work our way through them.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time giving you the run-up like usual for reasons that will become all too obvious soon enough. In short...


The Armies
Mantis Warriors (run as DA):
HQ: Ezekiel (mind worm, prescience, perfect timing)
TP: 10x Tac marines, plasma cannon, flamer, srg/w PS & MB, rhino w/ d-blade
TP: 10x Tac marines, plasma cannon, flamer, srg/w PS & MB, rhino w/ d-blade
FA: 2x LS Typhoons
Hvy: 5x Devs, 2 LC, 2 ML, 2x flak
FT: Aegis wall + quad gun

Steamcrons:
HQ: Overlord with gadgets in CCB
TP: 5x tesla immortals w/ cryptek in NS
TP: 5x tesla immortals w/ cryptek in NS
FA: 3x scarabs
HV: Annihilation Barge

Looking at this he just had to be short on points... but that's neither here nor there for the purposes of this bat rep (trust me).


The Game (as per the Primer)
Deployment: Hammer and Anvil
Primary: Kill Points
Secondary: d3+2 objectives (which I reduced to just a d3 since we were playing with only half the armies in the real tournament)
First Turn: Steamcrons
Night Fight T1? No


Game Set Up
Following the rules in the primer, I laid down my Aegis wall first in my deployment zone. The we took turns putting out each of the six terrain pieces which had to be mostly, if not completely... in our own deployment zones. I had 2 LOS blocking pieces, 2 ruins, a woods (not LOS blocking) and a wall. I... really being thankful that for the first time he wouldn't be so close he could just cruise in with a plane and wipe out my devs for a 3rd game in a row... used my wall and terrain to make a solid fortification about half way through my deployment zone. I also wanted to leave a nice open space in front of me for all my long ranged shooting. My son decided to do the same thing, and the table ended up like this.



We mistakenly thought that we could only put terrain in our deployment zones... not our table halves. I was reading the instructions.. for some reason what I read didn't translate into what I told him we had to do. That being said... I had no intention of giving him any cover in the middle of the table.


At this point, I'm figuring that there's probably no way I'm not going to be able to kill more things than he can given my longer range and psychic support spells. So I intent to sit tight and blast him at range. I'm willing to conceed the secondary in order to win the primary.


Deployment

We deploy behind our lines on either side of no man's land.




Turn 1

The steamcrons, not wanting to ge ther asses shot off, sit tight. During my half of the turn... I twiddle my thumbs, no reason to move.

Turn 2

One Night Scythe arrives. It Kamakaziis forward... primarily because he things he has to bring it straight on to the board. Quad gun stuns the flyer.



I woodgie my devs with prescience and perfect timing. They unload on the Night Scythe providing 3 more pens, toasting it.



Game over: I have primary & first blood, he's got secondary and neither of us is going to cross no-man's-land. We get something to drink and talk about how unsatisfying the game was. He could have forced me to come a little closer by bringing his flyers in on the diagonal (if he'd realized that he could) & keeping them out of 48" range. I'd have to scoot forward a turn and then shoot things. I don't think this would have changed the final outcome. Let's hope the next game goes beyond turn 2 before we toss it in.

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I must admit to not being fond of the terrain deployment rules... just makes it too easy to generate stupid situations like this. For a one-off game in my den it's fine. Not fun but fine. At a major tournament involving travel and lots of $ and effort... it would be a major disappointment.

Playing and end-to-end game where there may be 10 tables lined up end-to-end, with teammates are on different sides of the table that can't communicate privately over the course of the game is going to be very problematic. I foresee many LOS arguments too as there are certain angles where no one will really have a good view of what the figures are "seeing". Loads of fun...

Hmm... This one definitely looked a bit of a bummer... :( Thanks for posting though. I hope the tournament doesn't spit one of these games on you - that really would be horrible...

Well, if you look at the terrain deployment rules on paper... they seem quite reasonable. However, in practice... when you have two people vying for every advantage they can get, they kind of fall apart.