Round 1

I had been planning on not getting any games in this weekend, just run the tournament, rub my pregnant wife's back, and facilitate some fun happy gaming. It was not meant to be. I lost five people from the tourney somewhere and ended up with an odd number. So I matched players up and asked the odd man out what army he would like to play against. I had eldar, revenant eldar, and a couple of tyranid builds with me. (I had been planning on anybody showing up without an army.)
He wanted to try out the big bad revenant, so that was to be my army for the day. I've tried various four jetbikes base builds and had very little success. So I went with one five man bike squad and a unit of snipers. That way I was able to put more points into the support units. A night wing, fire prism, two scatter walkers and a laughtarch with all the goodies.
He deployed first in a stron center line with his vehicles on different levels.


I deployed on his weakest flank in the corner. Forcing his annihilation barge to move full distance and snap shoot. Necrons shifted forward to bring as much available firepower on my huddled eldar. Blasts from the tesseract arc give him first blood and shakes the hornet. Nothing targets the revenant. (Personally I think this goes a long towards how you handle a Titan, focus on the support units, they still can't score.) my Titan managed to take out the tesseract arc and an annihilation barge right off the bat. Everything else killed a couple of necrons and we moved on. Necrons continued to conentrate on support unit, taking out the hornet and one of my rangers.

Fire power went back and forth and he for the most part ignored the titan except for one turn he attempted to charge it with a destroyer lord squad. They failed the charge and that was a big turning point. The eldar were able to shoot him off of the relic he had briefly controlled, and one surviving jet bike claimed a crusade objective. Win for the eldar, but a tie on the relic.



Imperial fists vs ravenwing seemed like a good starting point for a couple of non-escalation armies. They lined up, maneuvered a bit, then came together in a great crashing of power armor.

Imperial fists bolter drill were able to over power the dark angels high speed bikers.


D weapons versus other titans became apparent in their power right from the get go. The first salvo from the warhound easily smashed even the twelve hull points of the ork titan. The warlord inside and many of the boyz clustered about it's feet were also casualties of that first blow. However the hordes of boys left over still swarmed objectives.


The orks were able to force the game all the way to the end, consistently taking the blasts from the war hound. With small blasts it would have still been effective against the titan, but much less so against the hordes of boyz afterwards. This may have ended up in a draw or even an ork victory if that had been the case.


Silly warhound titan.



This was probably my favorite titan of the day. Painted really well and it always seemed to have the biggest boom or bust potential. The lord of skulls was really pretty cool. It was topped up to the 1018 point incarnation.

However it mostly busted in the tournament. This moment was just before the combined weight of the necron army and air force decimated it. Side note, I do believe he didn't make a single one of his invulnerable saves during the entire tourney.



Round 2
Tobins thunder fire guns was one of my favorite pieces in his army. Here it prepares to unleash upon the Necron C'tan. (It did not go well for the fists.)

What advice can you offer an army that is not bringing its own super strong units. Not really much to say. Hiding with 65 marines is tough and there just isn't much you can do against a toughness 9 model sometimes.



I had been dreaming of this great moment coming to pass, where the stompa and the lord of skulls would collide in an epic battle for the ages. However instead, they played cat and mouse dodging around each other and shooting until eventually the lord of skulls fell apart once more.


Another really cool looking model.



My own second round match was against the war hound titan. I played it terribly wrong thinking that I would be able to withstand that first turn of shooting, sadly, not so much. Revenant died on the first turn, and the psychic powers he had ignored the cover save my laugh tarch was relying on. Eldar were pretty much shot off the table by the end of turn three.

Round 3
One of the silliest titan moment in the tournament. This shot is directly before the first shot of the first turn. A D blast from the titan hits the C'tan, kills it, and causes a 13" explosion. Much to his dismay nearly the entire necron army was within 13 inches of the C'tan, vaporising all but a couple models before even the second primary gun on the titan was fired. Ouch. A six minute game in all.


Such a big explosion there is no template for it.



Ravenwing faced the revenant titan for the final game of saturday and focused a lot of fire power on the first turn due to scout moves. 5 hull points were stripped off of it before the return fire came raining down. Eventually the Dark angels were brought down to a single biker, obtaining a win in the secondary due to being near an emperors will token. After the first salvo at the titan, she had focused on killing off all the eldar troops, leaving me with only a heavy squad to score on the primary, and no way to keep the secondary.


Necron on Necron violence was another battle, the non C'tan didn't have much of a chance though, unable to cause enough damage and being pummeled by all of the apocalypse sized blasts and templates.


C'tan was nearly invincible to normal fire power. I look forward to facing it with my eldar TAC list in the near future.


Round 4
Another amazing moment between titans. The lord of skulls weathered the onslaught of a turn of shooting from the war hound, and made it into close combat with one hull point remaining.


His daemon prince had died to terrible saves and his two squads of chaos marines had failed to come in from reserve. With all of his massive strength D close combat attacks, the Lord of skulls caused 32, that's right THIRTY-TWO hull points of damage on the warhound. Detonating it in spectacular fashion which wiped out half of the Imperial army and that last hull point off of the lord of skulls. Breaths were held for a moment, and both players cracked up. IG won the game due to the turn ending with no chaos models on the board. Having blown himself up. Doh!


Orks played the tesseract necrons to start the day. Even two necron destroyer lords have trouble with a Stompa.


As seemed consistent the close combat titans tended to die. However they often took out enough of the opponents army to pay for their own points. If not in direct damage, in the ensuing explosion when they were beat.


Round 5
The battle for second place was between two friends who get to play each other often. This turned out to be one of the Necrons stiffest challenges.


The stompa spent a couple of turns chasing the C'tan about, but settled instead on attempting to crush the Necron warlord. Frustratingly the warlord got back up after being killed 4 times.


Another pair familiar with each other, the ravenwing squared off against the Lord of Skulls army. Would this be her first true victory of the tournament?


As titans became a part of the tourney, I did my best to keep larger pieces of terrain providing line of sight blocking. It also provided cool moments where flying daemon princes hung out three stories above the battlefield.


Ravenwing turned the tide here after the lord of skulls failed an attempted charge. Fast skimmers and bikes shifted around behind and took advantage of his weaker armor. Ravenwing would continue on to table to remaining chaos marines.


Our late arrival for sunday games was another imperial fist player. His army revolved around drop pods and it turned out was a great challenge for the titans. His final game for the tournament was against the seemingly unbeatable war hound titan.


However as the drop pods crashed in, surrounding the titan and preventing it from moving very far. Lysander came into his own.


Being so close to the titans feet it couldn't damage him, the Imperial fist hero charged in and over two turns ripped the ankle off of the warhound.

There to finish off the beleaguered platoon of imperial guardsmen, Death watch marines dropped in with flamers galore.

Well first off, there was an even split of who brought escalation super heavy type units, and those who brought totally natural armies. The Imperial warhound titan being the obviously most powerful and eventual winner. Stronghold assault wise, the warhound army had a void shield generator, and nobody else even brought so much as an aegis line. No formations showed up either, so while I will give opinions on them in the grand scheme of things, I did not gain the experience I was hoping for with them. So most of this will be about escalation, and in particular D weapons.

In the first day the warhound managed to kill in it's first turn a stompa, a transcendent C'tan (and army), and a revenant. I did my best throughout the tournament to poll those playing and get opinions on how the games were going, and what effect the supplement had on the tournament at large. Really the only stand out terrible models were the expected suspects. My guest revenant, the transcendent C'tan, and the warhound. We have been trying to figure out a way to lessen the impact of these three devastating units without limiting the various other options. The first option of course is just banning the three respective models, however there are ways to utilize them without outright banning them. A revenant with sonic lances is almost as comical as a warhound with vulcan mega bolters. The C'tan had a problem all its own. Without banning the respective models we had to change something about them that would limit their over arching destructive power. One of the popular options has been changing D weapons to str10 ap 1 etc, etc, etc... The reason I'm not a fan of this is it effects all those other expensive one shot D weapons out there that are balanced. For me personally, I've argued that D weapons are good for the meta, as they will shift tournament results away from the insane 2+++ super saves that have dominated lately. What we came up with was reducing the size of the blasts they had. As I mentally walked through the games I had with the revenant, against the non titan armies. Small blasts versus large blasts would have had a pretty large impact on the game. My game against the necron player he would have not only wiped out my troops and supporting units, he would have had a handful of models left over to claim objectives. I would have lost that one straight up. Against the ravenwing player, instead of destroying two units in a single salvo, I would have damaged my primary target and not even killed sammael. Against the titan I just played it badly, and the smaller blasts would still have hit the void shield generator, or the titan just as easily. So I challenged the warhound player on the second day to use it with small blasts instead of large blasts on the turbo lasers. While the first game against a super heavy had almost no effect on the game, it had an impact in the final game of the day, and ultimately was the difference between a dominating game and a close loss. (More thoughts to come.) Another issue for the warhound in that final game was the deep strike basis of the attack force. Without the opportunity to knock out the deadliest threats before they had a chance to close, The list wasn't optimized with meltas or close combat terminators, all it ended up taking was Lysander really, dropping so close to the titans feet it couldn't shoot at him.

As to the revenants three games once again the drain on resources left me with so few scoring units that I only outright Ine. Single game, and that against a new player. If her turn of great firing had instead taken out the support units, she could have scattered and waited for the end of the game.

While the C'tan did not take the strength D weapon, it still caused massive headaches to the natural lists. It's so tough it takes dedicated heavy weapons to kill it, which in turn become the primary target for the C'tan. I plan on trying out my own TAC list against the C'tan to get a bit more perspective on how to fight it.

STRONGHOLD ASSAULT
Well that was a lot about escalation. Going to move on into stronghold. While I still haven't seen the feared macro cannon in use there are inherent drawbacks to massive fortifications. They have to be placed per deployment. Even if you are deploying first, you know where that building is going to be. A unit has to be manning it to choose who your firing at. Armies with firtifications tend to play more static be they tau or eldar. The standard counters to heavy armor still work. A cheap D weapon, lances, deep strike melta, multiple flyers, and hordes all counter the buildings real quick. If your sneaky it's even possible to take control and use that weapon against them. I still plan on running some play testing to put some facts to what I believe. I'll pass those on as I complete them.

FORMATIONS
I feels like the solution to the formations and in particular the big scary tau one has already been discussed as nauseum. Change the formation including codex inquisition to count as an ally. Tau still can't get beyond the scary four riptide list, and they still are overloading their armies with mostly non scoring units.

FORGEWORLD
It seems like since forge world has begun to be allowed in tournaments it has become less and less of an issue. GW official releases are more often tougher to swallow then the newest land raider with bigger guns on it. For many armies, if your including escalation, forge world is the only place to get the models. There are of course a couple of minor imbalances and obvious points mistakes. (I'm looking at you hornet with pulse lasers.) Again I don't think there is a reason to put too much time into that discussion.