Monday, December 28, 2009

Merry Chistmas . . . To Me!

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas out there. I know I certainly did. And to top it all off with a week off work is even better!

I did get the best Christmas present ever this year! My wife surprised me with tickets to Austin come the end of July, and registration for BoLSCon 2010!!! I am still nearly speechless. She has always been supportive of me being a nerdy gamer, but this goes above and beyond. I have the best wife ever!

Enough gushy for now, that can wait till later. I am looking for a doubles partner for the Friday doubles tourny. If anyone is interested then drop me a line.

Now its time to finish mechanising my army, and start praying for the new Blood Angels codex to drop in time and be the best ever!

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Battle Reports-condensed versions

So I had the chance to get some games in recently down at the local store. I'd love to do some detailed batreps, but I always forget a camera, and I don't make notes of the game in progress. Suffice it to say, it makes remembering the pertinent details difficult. But there were some salient points that I remembered from each of the games that I think are worth sharing. Hopefully none of these things are earth-shatteringly new to the people reading this, but they sure would have been to the people I was playing. Anyways, let's get into the games.

Game 1 was against an ork player. Mistake number one was to bring orks. Just kidding (mostly). I think orks are underpowered personally. I know a lot of people like them, and can do well with them. I just haven't seen too much of it personally.
My army list was my standard blood angels list.

Corbulo in a rhino with the Death Company
Mephiston with Assault Termies in a LR Crusader
2x Death Company Dreads with HF
2x 5-man Assault squads in Rhinos
2x attack bikes with Multimeltas
Baal pred, or dakka pred as points allow
And sometimes another LR crusader, points willing. I go back and forth with this tank, whether to take it or not.

My opponents list was the green horde. 5x 30 boy foot squads with nobs. He had Ghazghul also, and some other named character. Mad doc something or other. He also had a stormboyz squad with the named character in there.

So he won the roll-off and chose to go first. He lined his whole deployment zone with boys with ghazgul in the middle. Poor deployment really, but he had no other choice with that many models. But it set me up to play a denied flank and roll his army one squad of boys at a time. And that is what I did. First turn he advances all the way forward with all squads and then runs at me, putting himself in easy assault range. So my turn I charge him with Mephiston into one squad of boyz and the termies into another with Corbulo supporting them with Furious Charge. It was a slaughter from there on out. The termies wiped the squad bottom of his turn 2, Mephiston soloed the other squad by the top of my next turn, all the while my tanks are whittling his other squads down. His stormboyz drop on one of my LR's and fail big time, then die to the Furiosos flaming them horribly. The furiosos then get into combat with Ghazgul and his flunkies, and hold for a turn for Meph and termies to show up and turn the tide. By that time he had one or two squads still trying to get at me from the other side of the board, so I tank shocked him with my LR and effectively closed off his only lane of assault to me.

It was an all out massacre. I lost one Furioso, one termy, and 3 wounds off Mephiston. That is it, and I tabled his army, all 150 models. The kid was dumbfounded, and had said earlier that no one had ever been able to kill all his army before. Moral of the story here is don't set yourself up to be assaulted on one flank by a better assaulting army. His deployment was forced by his army selection, but he could have set up better. Kept more central, and kept squads closer to each other so they could charge into assault with only one turns' worth of movement. Also, it is entirely possible to table the green tide. I have a subpar blood angels army, and I got the job done pretty easily. Bring a competitive army to the table and it should be even easier.

Side note here, I hope the new dex makes Mephiston even better. Some may say he sucks, costs too much or whatever else they can think up. And it may be true in comparison to other named characters, but I love the guy. Absolute monster in combat. Eternal warrior and an invul save should make him one of the best characters in the game. I don't know what will be done with his psychic powers, but I imagine they will only get better, although I love the ones he has. Denying about 6 attacks per combat with transfixing gaze was way cool vs the orks, and surely saved some wounds. I just hope he gets even better in the new dex ;)

Next game was vs a Tau player. I played a similar list and he brought a static Firewarrior gunline army, with a serious crisis suit squad to deepstrike with O'Shovah, and some deepstriking stealth suits, and a lone piranha. It was a free for all for me. He couldn't harm me with his firewarriors unless I got out of my tanks, so I didn't. I rolled his army in about 4 turns. We called it at that point. I lost my Death Company models and my DC rhino and my 2 attack bikes to his suits, and that was it. Mephiston once again killed 3/4ths the army.

Point here is that mech is way too powerful to not take advantage of. Nothing new here I hope for all of you reading. This should be common knowledge by now. Apparently this kid was limited by his models, but the lesson is still the same. A good portion of his points were tied up in firewarriors that couldn't harm my army if I stayed in my mobile bunkers. I almost felt bad playing the game when I saw his army on the table after deployment. I knew exactly how the game would end, barring me rolling 1's every single time. I tried to talk to the kid afterwards and tell him about what he could have done better and so forth, but he told me he was selling the army and going for 'nids. At least I tried to educate him a bit . . .

I have another batrep to write up. Killer game vs a Nurgle demon army. Tough buggers to kill. I took a vanilla marine force because I forgot my death company dreads at home. And I forgot to put on the table a rifleman dread (2x twin linked AC's) so he was 125 points up on me before the game even began. It was a nail-biter. Granted I list hammered him a little bit, but I was going with the models that I had brought with me combined with a list I had been cooking up in my head for fun. Details to come soon.