Went down to the local comic store today for a 40K tourney. They called it on fairly short notice, and Sunday's not their regular tourney day, but ten guys still showed up with a thousand points and a few dozen dice. Three games later, I, uh... I won!

I'd like to say "well, it's because I read my Clausewitz," or something pretentious like that, but there was a lot of luck involved. (I mean, I did read my Clausewitz. I actually enjoy military history. But Clausewitz had very little to say on the subject of orbital insertion as a factor in squad-level combat...)

If anyone's interested, blow-by-blow is below the fold. Sums up easy, though - I had a great time, I won about $60 in store credit (spent, heh), and I'm definitely coming to the next one.

First guy I went up against had a solid army of mechanized Space Marine infantry - not something orks have a lot of options in countering, since they're the worst shots in the game and there's no real way to field enough anti-tank rockets to reliably hit (much less kill) anything. Literally I was left with no option but to charge infantry through the middle of the map and rip tanks apart with power klaws in hand-to-hand. This is not a good place to be, if you're practically unarmored and your opponent is using rapid-fire guns and artillery. I ended up lucking out, though, as my opponent made a tactical mistake. He had two 5-man squads of Marines in the area of each objective, and one of his Marine squads was upstairs in cover; ordinarily a good idea to prevent losing Marines from powerful, armor-piercing weaponry. However, I don't, uh, have powerful armor-piercing weaponry, so they were better off relying on their armor (negates a wound on a roll of 3-6) than their cover (same thing on 4-6). The five guys he had at one of the objectives weren't enough to hold off my surviving infantry; the other five could have gotten closer and "contested" the objective. If both guys have units around an objective, nobody gets to score it, meaning he would have one and I would have one, and the tiebreaker would go to kill points, of which he had a lot more than I had. Squeaked out victory by the skin of my too-big pointy teef.

The second battle was against the son of the guy in the first battle, who was game for a fight but hadn't read his Clausewitz. His Imperial Guard (cheap laser-armed infantry) had no armor support at all, but a lot of anti-armor weapon teams. I, uh, hardly had any armor, just a couple of thrown-together trukks (one of which he turned into a smoking crater in the first shot of the game). I camped the survivors of that unit on my objective and sent everyone else forward, and he came out to meet me - really bad idea, as my units were stronger, tougher, AND more numerous, since he'd spent lots of points on all those high-power tank-killers. He still could have concentrated his forces and tried to punch through a flank and hook around, but instead he tried to meet me on the left, right, and center, and folded up. He also had bad luck - his artillery spotter couldn't land the pie-plate blast marker on my units, and his psyker almost died as freaky things crawled out of the Warp to munch him in response to a double six.

The final fight was against Jubei, one of the employees at the comic shop, and his Demons. These guys play a little weird - they teleport onto the field, which makes it harder to fight them, as they're really nasty in close combat. The teleport scatters like artillery, and Jubei's scatter dice were out to get him. One of his demon princes simply never came out of the teleport (scattered on top of another unit, triggering a roll on the "mishap" table, result "destroyed".) The rest of them scattered all over, so they came in piecemeal. Demons are powerful against heavy armor-piercing weaponry, which doesn't pierce their "invulnerable" save... but they don't do as well against, say, large units full of cheap and inaccurate smoothbores that double as clubs. Even if everything had gone right, it would be a tough army for Jubei to have beat. Unlike the first game (where most of the casualties were mine) and the second (conceded by the Guards player as soon as my orks reached his objective), Jubei's demons were completely exterminated.

I had fun and learned a few things. Next time I'd like to vary the force composition some, as not all my units were effective - the bikers drew a lot of fire, the copters never did anything useful, and my Warboss never even got into combat. ("I have two trukks... this one has the Warboss and the other has regular orks." "I'm shooting at the Warboss trukk." "I've heard that before...") On the flip side, I won, so I can't have messed up too badly...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 10:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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