Caledonian Day 2 (Brads report)

Game 4 Vs Neil Gibbons' Chaos Deamons!

Mission:- Dawn Raid, Primary Kills Points, secondary seize ground.

Skulltaker on a Jugger
2 x 6 Blood Crushers, Icon etc
6 Fiends with Upgrade
2 x 5 Plague Bearers
A massive unit of Flesh hounds (20 I think)
3 x Soul Grinders with Phlegm

Blood Crusher heavy Deamons Vs Foot Slogging Marines, you do the math!

In all seriousness though if I had to choose an army to not play this weekend out of all the armies in attendance this would be it. Everything in this army loves to chew marines on foot up and boy do I have a lot of marines on foot. After I had jokingly congratulated Neil on his victory I set about thinking how the hell I would beat him. Area terrain was very minimal and we had three large LoS blocking buildings in the middle. I would have deployed as much as possible in area terrain but it was too dangerous with three Phlegm chuckers knocking around so I was forced to castle up and layer my squads without bunching up too close together.

I was given some breathing space when Neil got the wrong wave down first turn and had to deploy a unit of Blood Crushers without Skulltaker, so down came a unit of Crushers, Fiends and Plague Bearers. Neil deployed cautiously and managed to conceal most of his army from my rockets so I began to light up those Blood Crushers and threw everything I could at them.

 I would have gone for the Fiends but they were out of sight of probably 90% of my firing....

The damage I inflicted was pretty poor, I think I inflicted about 5 wounds in total on the Crushers. This is where it went tits up, I thought I had moved a 5 man Wolf Guard unit out of charge range of the Fiends but this was not the case, and so began the dance of death as the Fiends spent the rest of the game hitting and running my small units to death. The crushers then got to work and decimated my centre whilst the huge Bloodhound unit mopped up although I did manage to hold this unit up eventually with a Lone Wolf.

It was all too much for my poor boys and pretty soon Neil had racked up loads of Kill points and I was now fighting to not get tabled which I eventually managed. There wasn’t much I could do this game it was bad enough playing Deamons but playing for Kill points was just crazy.
Lesson learned? My foot marines suck Vs Deamons.

Game 5 Vs Blood Angels

Mission:- Primary mission was to capture 12” from centre of board, secondary was Capture and Control.
Mephiston
Dante
5 Sanguinary Guard
3 x Priests
10 Assault Marines
10 Assault Marines
5 Death Company, Drop Pod
5 Scouts, Snipers, Missile Launcher, Camo cloaks
5 Devastator marines, Missile Launchers

Firstly I’ll start by apologising to my opponent as I cannot for the life of me remember your name even after checking the final results, so if your reading this....sorry. If your not reading this then rock on!

This game was going to be interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly Logan hates fighting Dante as he always get gimped by his Death mask thingy which never ends well. Secondly my army in General struggles against Mephiston as I have bugger all that can deal with him at long range. Thirdly having to play for the centre meant the Blood Angels would be able to concentrate their numbers and maximise the Priest bubbles.

I ended up deploying everything as far forward as I could and spread out which would deny the Blood Angels a lot of landing space thus forcing them to land where I wanted them to. My opponent deployed his scouts and Devs on his objective with a single priest and then Mephiston on the back line out of line of sight, everything else went into DoA reserve.

My first turn consisted of an empty pod landing on his objective and my hail of Rockets blasting his Devs and Priest off the board, he was being really cautious with Mephiston and kept him hidden from my Multi Meltas. His drop pod came down turn one with the Death Company in and they met the same fate as their heavy weapon toting counterparts. By this time I’ve advanced three Wolf Guard units, Logan and the Lone Wolves into the centre of the board, he was going to have to dig me out now.
Turn two and most of his reserves come down landing as close as possible to my Wolf Guard, Meph breaks cover but instead of going for the brawl he looks like he’s going to cause havoc with my rear guard.

The next few turns ended up being quite tasty for action, my shooting took a turn for the worst and didn’t cause as much damage as I would have hoped for which allowed him to get the charge off on my centre. What followed was a huge combat involving multiple units from either side and which last three turns. Mean while my scouts had come on from reserve and set about chopping up his sniper scouts thus losing him his secondary objective, the problem here was that I was about to lose my own as Mephiston was bounding over and I had nothing to stop him.

The game ended with me eventually winning the massive brawl in the centre killing off all his troops and claiming the primary objective whilst Mephiston killed my deck chair unit and cost me the secondary objective. The game ended turn five which was a shame as I would have been able to divert some troops to tackle Mephiston and perhaps claim back my objective but alas the Wyrd had other ideas.
Lessons learned:- Not much really the plan was executed well and I suffered to what I knew I would suffer against, that being Mephiston and Dante. I could have perhaps placed my objective close to the centre which would have made contesting it back a bit easier but that didn’t factor into things. Overall it was a good game and I had some good banter with my opponent, whoever you may be!

Game 6 Vs Rob Edwards AKA Embolden (Eldar)

Mission:-Primary was Kill points, Pitched battle, secondary was three objectives along the centre line.

Robs list was:-
2 Autarchs
2x 6 Fire Dragons in wave serpents with scatter laser & shuriken cannons
2x 5 Dire Avengrs in wave serpent with missile launchers & shuriken cannons
10 Storm Guardians with 2xfusion guns in wave serpent with scatter laser & shuriken cannon
5 Rangers
2 Vypers scatter laser & shuriken cannon x2
2x 2 War Walkers with scatter laser & star cannon
1x 2 War Walkers with 2x scatter lasers
(Taken from his blog http://embolden40k.blogspot.com/ )

I quite fancied my chances here, lots of kill points and armour my Strength 8 spam can punch through. The problem was it was not going to be that easy, I saw the double Autarch and knew straight away if I got first turn Rob would reserve, If I got second Rob would bring the pain. Rob won the roll off and gave me first turn, I would have taken first anyway as I wanted the board edge with the most area terrain as the other was quite sparse, I knew I’d lose the ability to Logan bomb effectively but shit happens.

So my first two turns I spent running like a mad wolf towards the centre of the board where I could circle the wagons. I had a nice ruin fairly central which housed my Wolf Guard nicely and gave me a dominating firing position. Logan dropped in the centre with his Melta fangs and waited.

In Robs turn two he got most of his Army on except a couple of units and raked my lines with Strength 6 goodness although the damage was acceptable for me. I did however realise a FUBAR on my part when one of his Walker Squadrons outflanked and came on besides my Long Fangs and a Wolf Guard unit, charged them and essentially tied up 7 missile shots a turn up for the majority of the game. Despite this my counter attack was pretty effective with the scouts coming on right behind some Skimmers, wrecked one and then charged the Fire Dragons inside. Logan and the two Lone Wolves set about he other skimmers and Logan managed to charge into another unit of Fire Dragons killing them off.

Poor old Logan couldn’t celebrate for long as in the following turn he was gunned down by mass Starcannon fire. The game was pretty close at this point with a kill point here and there being chipped away each turn right until I think about turn four. Rob had a Wave Serpant full of Storm Guardians and two Autarchs on my right flank lurking in cover quite menacingly. A volley of Krak knocked the Wave Serpant out and forced the Squad inside to disembark, I then assaulted them with a 5 man Wolf Guard unit knowing that they would probably die but it would pull them out of position. As expected they did die and it was in Robs next move that he lost the game.

Instead of moving back into cover Rob advanced the unit towards two Long Fangs nearby, charged and killed them and then rolled something like 1 or 2 inch for his consolidation move. This was all well and good but he had now left the unit in charge range of my 10 man Wolf Guard pack so in my following turn they broke cover and ploughed into the Storm Guardians. The Guardians were wiped out and the Autarchs were wounded slightly and caused a few wounds back but the combat was clearly a Wolf Victory and the two commanders fled, and in that final big action of the game I claimed 3 kill points.

The game ended that turn but Robs closing gambit was to turbo his remaining Skimmers to contest the secondary objectives. This tactic worked for him as he contested my central objective and then tank shocked my Long Fangs on the right hand objective who broke and fled handing back a kill point. However despite this the game ended and it was 10-9 to me, both Lone Wolves were still alive and gave away a kill point each. The problem for me, which weakened my victory was the secondary mission was a draw thanks to Robs nifty last minute tank shocking meaning that overall my points for winning the game were not that impressive.

So all in all I was pretty disappointed with my performance although I didn't really get hammered I didn't really win big to rake in those vital points. The -10 for changing my list was a huge penalty which as already stated cost me 20 places! I definitely won't be doing that again anytime soon.

As for the Logan wing I will be sticking to my Hybrid Logan list in the future, its far more reliable and doesn’t rely on foot slogging and mass rockets to win the day. The Logan Bomb? When it worked it worked good but it suffered big style when it didn't work, those boys are going to get shelved too me thinks.

My next tourney is probably going to be the 40K UK GT in March all being well and I can snurkel a ticket if someone drops out. Fingers crossed.