Still top table, dug in deep…what do we find approaching? Battlewagon Orks: simples right? Well, we’ll see… Tom who we were playing did not have a partner…but made up for this by being a massively charismatic and awesome opponent.
He took his pounding extremely well and actually came out the victor…knocking Atreides and I from the top table for the first time in 2 days.
How did this travesty happen? Let’s have a look…(remind yourselves of Game 1-4 here)
Tom was running:
Warboss
Big Mek - KFF
Nobz troops x10 - Battlewagon with Deff Rolla
Nobz Elites x 10 - Bwagon with Deff Rolla
Shoota Boyz x20 - Bwagon with Deff Rolla
6/7 Warbikes I’m not sure now…
It was spearhead deployment and the mission was annihilation…
Straight off we have a problem, Tom has a whopping 9 KP’s compared to our 18! So, unless we table him, we are going to struggle to win this one…
If only it was seize ground!!!
This whole game can pretty much be summed up in 3 Vassal shots.
We go first and this is Tom’s deployment. 
What essentially happened was that we drew the Ork advance in with plenty of juicy kill points in the middle of our deployment zone whilst at the same time splitting our effective autocannon fire out in 2 pincers, getting side shots all day long into the Wagons…
Ultimately, we couldn’t finish off the last wagon full of Nobz and Warboss…the Big Mek with Kustom Force Field was following behind their Wagon, having been forcibly disembarked from his own ride.
Now, I know what you are thinking…there are only so many 4+ cover saves that can be made right? And Twin Linked Autocannons tear side armour of transports apart?
Well. Yes.
And no. On that day…Not so much. Although this was pretty fair considering Tom’s awful first 2 turns….he was almost ready to throw in the towel at one point before gritting his teeth and ploughing on…
The final few turns of the game looked something like this:
We ended up tied in combat with his Warboss and Nobz who just about made it into combat… they ate 3 infantry units and at least a pair of chimeras.
What is missing here is the Long Fangs and Autocannon Vet chimera units that are in the bottom right of our deployment zone in ruins…I just don’t do Vassal that well and wanted to pump these bad boys out.
Whilst it looks like we have very little left on the board, we do have just under 900 points from 1500 left.
Tom had about 300 points of Orks left.
It was annihilation though. So whilst in pure violence terms…we had ‘annihilated’ far more than he had…we still lost 8 – 6 on kill points….Warboss, 2 Nobz and 4 Boyz in the backfield were all that was left…
Don’t you love Kill Points!! It was a fantastic game and all of us involved in playing – me, Atreides and Tom had a great game. Tense and action packed till the end.
Where did we go wrong? As in my new series on Deployment, I think it all stemmed from our deployment.
We could tell what Tom was going to do, but we did not counter in a classic way.
Due to spearhead deployment we could not deploy in 2 firebases split across the board corners. We could only deploy in one corner and sweep out to create the pincers.
With hindsight, it might have been better to reserve almost half the army and bring it on it the left hand corner, meaning that if the wagons did come straight for one firebase, the other could stop it. If it then split up? We would be facing vastly reduced combat effectiveness.
But hey ho, mistakes are made and I for one certainly wont be making the same error again…not that I consider it to a major flaw….that final 4+ Wagon just should have died, or even be stopped from moving!
Agh….we live and die by the dice…
So final game….can we still get second?
lol, i do seem to remember advocating a lot of reserves ;) also, you forgot the hilarious sight of a deffrolla battlewagon bouncing off a rhino :P
ReplyDeleteactually though, i dont think it would have been any more successful. our mistake was underestimating the assault range on the nobs in the final battlewagon on turn 4. had we just moved back 3 or 4 inches with all of our gunline we would have had this game in the bag. instead we pumped a few futile shots at random targets and stayed still, allowing the multicharge.
its worth noting that this game ended on turn 5, paying us back for the lucky escape afforded to us by getting to turn 7 in the previous game.
Ha Ha...I remember you wanting to always put a meltavets unit in reserve...every pissing game!
ReplyDeleteYeah, a little shift backwards would have sealed it. Was a good game though...as I said, I think we'll be learning from it...I will certainly..
Two bases of fire may have helped...but who knows...
April next tournie? I think they have one in Feb too, but not sure if its an official one or one of the guys running it...
i almost always DO put a unit of meltavets in reserve :P ironic that it may have helped us in every game except the one where we actually did it... you are right though, this being the first decent ork list i have EVER played, i learned a lot in this game.
ReplyDeletei'll certainly be going to the singles in April, with two converted Vendettas and a few Medusas i hope. not sure about Feb, think its player run with no special characters. i'll keep an eye on the forums in any case