Doubles Tournament Game 3

Epic Assault

  So Michael had to leave after game two, so I played both armies for the last game.  Getting tabled quickly in the last game at least gave me an hour or so to relax before the last game.  I was definately tired and starting to drag a little after the beating in the second game.  The good part was I was no firmly in the losers bracket and playing against other less experienced players and less nasty lists.

  I played a space marine and blood angel team played by Chris and Joe.  The space marines had a 10 man TH/SS terminator squad with Marneus Calgar attached that took up most of his points.  He had a lascannon predator, a tactical squad in a rhino, and small scout squad.

  We had a nice relaxed game and we agreed we needed something "awesome" to happen.  I deployed first and had first turn and pulled the Eldrad trickery redeploying essentially the entire Eldar army.  That gave me a nice alpha strike on his predator which was immobilized and couldn't move or shoot.  I also unloaded with the war walkers on the scout squad with 20 guided hits.  I then rolled to wound and all 20 wounded!  That was probably the highlight of the tournament for me as I had been rolling poorly for most of the tournament.  Joe then got to have a great moment when he rolled 19 of the 20 3+ saves!  Crazy dice on both sides there.

  On the next turn the Blood Angels dropped a death company dreadnought in my back lines and heavy flamered a couple assault marines and stunned one of the War Walkers.  The rest of their rhinos moved up, and popped smoke and went to my turn.  My baal predator got the right side on the outflank and came in behind his rhinos and immobilized one.  The assault marines moved up together with the storm raven full of terminators and got ready for the assaults on the next turn.  The other squad dumped some melta guns into the DC dread and blew it up.  The wave serpents stunned the predator again and started to flank to one side to be ready to pick up objectives on the other side.

  His next turn the terminators came in off the scouts teleport homers.  The blood angels had a tooled out death company with Dante come down and infernus pistoled the wave serpent with the fire dragons to death.  Everything else moved up.  That was when I decided that we were going to do something awesome.  I dropped my terminators out of the storm raven, and took both full assault squads and assaulted the giant blob of terminators.  There were going to be a lot of dice on this assault.  20 Lightning claw/Power Weapon attacks and 29 Strength 5 normal attacks.  That was enough to wipe the terminators out  completely and put one would on Calgar.  My powerfists and TH/SS didn't get to swing.  Calgar killed one of the sanguinary priests and two or three of the assault marines.  It was a ton of fun rolling that many dice and seeing that giant mob.

The rest was mostly just cleanup at that point.  The tooled out death company did manage to bring down Eldrad's falcon and kill everyone inside and the vanilla tacticals destroyed the Baal predator with a meltagun shot.  So I ended the tournament with  1-2 record for 5th place.  I learned a lot playing in a more competitive environment than I'm used to, though I still prefer friendly games and unique missions to tournament play.

WIP: Custom Mephiston

 So I have made some more progress on my custom Mephiston.  I really don't like the correct miniature for this so I put some pieces together to make up a version for the Lamenters.  Not sure on his fluff name or story yet, but I will be figuring something out as I'm on the finishing touches for him. The banner was a lot of fun to do, though it needs some more cleanup still.

Doubles Tournament Game 2

An assault squad in a lot of trouble

 After our first defeat we were hoping to get paired up with other losers to play someone more our experience level, but with only 6 teams one winning team would play one losing team in the second round.  We were the highest scoring losing team, so we got paired up against one of the winning teams. 

We played a Chaos Marine and Space Wolf team and we got to learn how nasty Thunderwolf Cavalry can be.  There were 9 of them on the board and I could not believe how crazy fast they are.  There was no where to run from and they ate both our armies alive.  Things started out poorly from the start when they ceased the initiative from us and blew my Storm Raven out of the sky with a single lascannon shot.  To add insult to injury the explosion killed two terminators, with Feel no Pain, and pinned them as well.  The Lamenters where all dead by turn 3 and they then finished off the  Eldar on turn 4.  They went on to win the tournament in the last round.

One problem at this points level is board size.  The Eldar couldn't hide anywhere, because with 2500 points they were able to flood the entire board.  I dislike anything above 2000 points in general and really think the game is the best at around 1500-1750.  I would love to do another team tournament, but limit the number of points to 1000 per team.

Double Tournament Game 1

So we showed up for the doubles tournament (first tournament either Michael or me had ever played in) and got to play three games.  There were six teams and the first army we got put against was Imperial Guard and Orks.  This was a great game and I really enjoyed both players.  The Ork player was Mark from the Overlords Podcast and the IG player was his brother Mike.    They were real fun to play against and were very patient with our rustyness with the rules (generally we play about once every 2-3 months).

They managed to quite soundly defeat us in all three of the mission goals, but I think we could have done a lot better had we matched up with them later in the tournament when we knew how to play the army a little better.  The primary was victory points and had we played point denial we could have stood a chance at winning.

They managed to wipe out most of the Lamenters, but hardly touched the Eldar  at all.  A little better juding of distances on my part (18" is a really hard distance for me to judge) would have helped out on getting charges off.  If there is one thing I've learned with Assault Marines is that they must get the charge to survive.

Also for the Eldar positioning is huge, especially for the psychic powers.  We needed to focus fire a little better and the assault squads need to operate together to do any real damage.

All in all this was a really fun game and I would love to get a rematch.

Preparation for doubles tournament

So a friend and I are heading up to MuGu Games tomorrow for a doubles tournament.  We are bringing my Eldar and Blood Angels.  You share a single force org slot and each army is 1250 points.  The codices must also be different.  So here are our lists.  This is greatly influenced by what we have built as we would not take the weapon upgrades that are on the Wave Serpents as they are so expensive.

Eldar:

HQ: Eldrad Ulthran (1#, 210 pts)
   1 Eldrad Ulthran

Troops: Dire Avengers (6#, 205 pts)
   5 Dire Avengers
      1 Wave Serpent - Spirit Stones; TL Bright Lances

Troops: Dire Avengers (6#, 205 pts)
   5 Dire Avengers
      1 Wave Serpent - Spirit Stones; TL Bright Lances

Troops: Dire Avengers (6#, 190 pts)
   5 Dire Avengers
      1 Wave Serpent - Spirit Stones; TL Missile Launchers

Heavy Support: War Walker Squadron (3#, 180 pts)
   1 War Walker Squadron
      3 War Walker - Scatter Laser; Scatter Laser
   
Heavy Support: Falcon (6#, 257 pts)
   4 Fire Dragons
      1 Fire Dragon Exarch
   1 Falcon - Holo-Field; Scatter Laser



Blood Angels

Troops: Assault Squad (10#, 235 pts)
   7 Assault Squad, 235 pts
      2 Assault Marine with Meltagun
      1 Sergeant - Power Fist x1

Troops: Assault Squad (10#, 235 pts)
   7 Assault Squad, 235 pts
      2 Assault Marine with Meltagun
      1 Sergeant - Power Fist x1

Elite: Sanguinary Priest (2#, 180 pts)
       2 Sanguinary Priest in Power Armour - Jump Pack; Power Sword;

Elite: Terminator Assault Squad (5#, 210 pts)
   1 Terminator Assault Squad, 210 pts
      3 Terminator with Lightning Claws
      2 Terminator with Thunder Hammer & Storm Shield (Terminator Armour; Thunder Hammer & Storm Shield)

Heavy Support: Stormraven Gunship (1#, 245 pts)
   1 Stormraven Gunship - Extra Armor; Twin-Linked Multi-melta; Twin-Linked Lascannon; Hurricane Bolters

Fast Attack: Baal Predator (1#, 145 pts)
   1 Baal Predator - Twin-Linked Assault Cannon; Heavy Bolter

More airbrush basecoating on two dreadnoughts.

An update.  After some errand running in the late afternoon I was able to get the dreadnoughts base-coated with the airbrush.  I have the Blood Angels Furioso kit here as well as the AoBR dreadnought.  They are both magnetized to accept any of the arms (also have assault cannon, multi-melta, and two more normal DCC arms that still need some work).  The sarcophagus on the Furioso is magnetized to accept any of the three sarcophagi.  Also the normal arms are magnetized to allow the blood talons or fists.

There is a team tournament at a semi-local game store later this month, and I'm hoping to make some nice progress on the army so that it looks semi respectable. 

Airbrushing Land Raider and Drop Pod

I broke the airbrush out today to get some base-coating done.  Finished the land raider and drop pod exteriors.  The whiter spots on the land raider will not be yellow in the end so tried to miss them.  I've already done the interior of the drop pod and magnetized the weapons on the land raider.  I'm probably not going to spray these down with the wash that I did the predators in as I'm not super happy with the look.  Might just go with a cleaner look on these guys.  We'll see how they turn out.

I'm getting better with the airbrush and the coat went on much smoother this time.  I'm using Vallejo paint which I love (mainly the dropper bottles).  They took some adjusting to get them thinned correctly as I'm using the heavy pigment line of colors to get a nice coat with the yellow colors.