[Mastershake]

Took the Blackhawk Down IG list to its first showing with all models painted and assembled. It was a local 4 round Tournament. The list is:

HQ-
Company Command
-Straken
-Medic
-Bodyguard
-Regimental Standard

Troops-
3x Veteran Squads
-3x Plasmas and Demolitions

2x Veteran Squads
-3x Meltas and Demolitins

Elites-
2x Stormtrooper Squads
-2x Meltas and Sarge has Plasma Pistol

Fast Attack-
3x Vendetta Squadrons (2x ea
-Heavy Bolters all around

Assessment going in: I think I stand a fair chance from previous runs with the army. First turn is usually a sizeable factor and my opponent rolling even a little better than average with vehicle damage can change the flow of the game, but I’ve also noticed some armies simply aren’t equipped to handle this build.

The field: 24 players and every army but Dark Angels and Blood Angels made an appearance. There was a traditionally high number of SM and CSM with some Orks mixed in. Also 3-4 more standard IG mech builds. Should be interesting.


Round 1-

I get paired against some vanilla flavored marines with fleeting TH/SS termies (could hurt)

Shrike
Lysander

2x scout squads (Snipers and Missiles)

3x TH/SS termie squads (a 6x man, a 5x mand and a 9x man for a total of 20)

Land Raider
Land Raider Redeemer (multi-melta)


Scenario: Dawn of war ish, the objective is modified Kill Points (1 for troops and Ded Trans, 2 for FA, Elite and Heavy, 3 for HQ) and you have to win by 7. Secondary is scoring umits in the middle of the table and not in transports, Can’t recall Tertiary.

Assessment: Both of us are pretty light on KP even with the modifications, 18 for both. The center of the table and quarters are both doable, but will heavily depend on how invincible the termies are feeling (I’m sure we’ve all been there). Fleeting Lysander is a problem and a half.

He gets first turn

Turn 1
He moves on with everything fleeting the foot termies.

Deciding that trying to shoot through night fight is an iffy proposition, I moved all of my vendettas on Flat Out keeping them near the table edge.

Turn 2
As it turns out this was the right move, out of the 6x long range weapons in his army capable of hurting me 5 scored pen hits, I shrugged off 3 and lost and vendetta to 1. Really hope this isn’t a pattern.

The vendettas respond harshly killing both raiders and knocking the 6x man down to 2. The stormies don’t feel like coming out yet.

Turn 3
He advances where possible, but Lysander and his unit, through an 18” charge manage to just barely hit a Vendetta Squadron dropping both of them. There is a special place in hell for fleeting Lysander, this could dramatically change this game.

Both Stormies come in and I drop them next to Lysander, I’m going to need all I can get to stop this monster’s rampage. Through combined fire of a vet squad and two stormtrooper squads, all of Lysander’s buddies are killed and he is wounded with Straken standing next to him. Might as well charge, may get lucky. At the very least Lysander doesn’t have enough attacks to polish the unit off in 1 round and Straken is fearless. Straken and his Furiosly Charging command squad put two wounds on Lysander while Lysander scores two wounds as well, but I use the bodyguards special rule to have him eat both causing Lysander to only deal 1 wound to the unit. I’ve got 1 wound over him and the Regimental Standard and Lysander rolls for his leadership…it’s a 9, Lysander breaks and I don’t catch him. He spends the rest of the game being escorted by the stormtroopers and eventually eats a heavy bolter round for his final wound. Shrike’s squad get’s whittled down to 2 models and the man himself.

Turn 4
Shrike and his 2 buddies are still capable of dropping 2 vet squads in melee (shocking), and the 2 remaining termies from the 6x man fleet far enough to hit the victorious Straken. Unfortunately Straken has burned through all his tricks to beat Lysander and these guys are feeling invincible. They finally drop the man of adamantium after 2 rounds.

Vendettas handle Shrike and his buddies and a Shaken one flat outs to the middle of the table with a vet squad.


The rest of the game is just my opponent trying not to get tabled. The last two termies finally fall to Las and Melta fire from a vet squad and one scout squad gets hammered by a combined volley losing everyone. He ends the game with nothing but a scout squad. I have two Vendettas from different squadrons and 3 vet squads still on the table. I get 17 Kill points to his 11 for…a draw, crap 1 KP away and my opponent only had 1 unit left. An impressive performance form the BHD IG that isn’t born out by the final points. I Easily get the Secondary and I believe we drew on whatever tertiary was. I end on the good side of a draw with 20 out of 35, still not out of the running.


Round 2-

I get paired against a mech guard list, this might be interesting.

Primaris Psyker
Inquisitor Lord with large retinue and chimera

3x vet squads, meltas I think, 1 had Harker, 2 had chimeras

2 PBS in chimeras
Calidus assassin

3x separate russes (1 executioner with plasmas, 1 Vanquisher, 1 LRBT)


Scenario: There is an objective in the middle of the table that will scatter 4D6 immediately before first turn. Can’t recall secondary and Tertiary. There is also a special rule in effect that allows both players to scatter an enemy unit 2D6 before the start of the game.

Assessment: First turn will be kinda important, the vanquisher could be a problem along with the various meltas, but I think I stand a good chance.
He gives me first turn (I’ll give him plenty of rope if he wants to hang himelf)

Before the game starts we spend roughly 20 minutes trying to figure out how my scout moves, his “word in your ear” and the scenarios scatter rules interact. The end result in vendettas yo-yoing before the first turn even starts.

Turn 1
I like doing the Alpha Strike, but all the movement phu has really screwed any plans of most of the going off. The only exception is Harker’s unit which has infiltrated closer to my army. I disembark a vet squad to deal with Harker and start shooting. Vanquisher get stunned (good enough) and a vet chimera blows up taking most of the squad with it. The unit promptly breaks and runs off the table. The vet squad I sent after Harker easily wins the combat thanks to Furious Charge from Straken and wipes them out in the sweeping advance.

Various inconsequential shooting (1 or 2 shaken vendettas). The executioner lands 9 wounds on the vet squad who go to ground in a forest. They still lose 7 guys (can I buy a damn 3+?)

Turn 2
Both stormtrooper squads are in and manage to land next to the executioner and a PBS Chimera thanks to Airborne Assault. The inquisitor’s mystics roll well on their spotting roll, but the troopers just landed too far away. Murder continues as the executioner and PBS Chimera both eat meltas and go up in flames. The PBS loses 6 models to the explosion, but stick around. The vanquisher finally dies and the last vet squad’s chimera loses it’s multilaser.

Callidus isn’t in. The PBS remnants charges and beats a stormtrooper squad (meh). The inquisitor squad fires 3 multi-meltas at a vendetta squadron that strayed too close and downs 1 (won’t make that mistake again). His Primaris Psyker and Vet squad hopped out of their chimera and moved to the objective firing meltaguns at long range against vendettas and doing nothing.

Turn 3
Straken is now on the ground after losing his vendetta and advances towards the middle with the 1 member of the squad that survived the explosion and subsequent shots from the Leman Russ, his loyal Bodyguard. Another Vet squad disembarks and moves towards the middle. Through Furious Charge, they are easily able to take the vet squad with the primaris psyker and run them down. The other stormtrooper squad handles the PBS remnants. The inquisitor’s Chimera is stunned and loses a weapon and the vet Chimera explodes.

Callidus is in. My opponent has a clever plan so deploys her near Straken. He uses the remaining PBS to lower Straken’s leadership and fires the Neural Shredder. Straken then tosses the wound to his bodyguard and says “You’re not getting out of it that easy”. Stormtroopers are polished off by various heavy bolter fire. Callidus charges Straken and whiffs (I’m sure we all know the pain of 4’s to hit and 4’s to wound), straken then punches her for a wound and she passes her “no retreat” save. The Inquisitor hops out of his broken chimera and mows down the squad that wiped out his last scoring unit.

Turn 4
Vendettas close the noose wiping out the PBS chimera, the squad inside loses 6 models in the explosion and runs off the table. The inquisitor’s retinue also takes some hits. The Callidus whiffs again and Straken caves her head in.

He moves the inquisitor’s Chimera near the middle to contest and his last units shoot inconsequentially.

Turn 5
A vet squad hops out on the objective and triple plasmas the last chimera into oblivion. The inquisitor and his retinue all fall to concentrated vendetta fire.

The Russ desperately tries to do something useful.

Turn 6
The russ gets blown the hell up for the table


Max points wohoo, I may still be in the running. This is part of the reason why I don’t remember what the secondary and tertiary were. Losses were surprisingly light, 1 vet squad and 2 stormtrooper squads. Every other unit had models left on the table.


Round 3

Get pared against 6x Ironclad marine list (One I assembled and painted for contract ironically enough). I’d be more optimistic if the scenario wasn’t so heinous for me.

Master of the Forge W/ 2 Servitors
Libby

3x 5x man tac squads W/ Lascannon Razorback

8x man assault squad W/ PF sarge and Rhino

6x Ironclads, Heavy Flamers, Assault Launchers and 2x H/K missiles each


Scenario: Victory Points (not kill points) and win by 500. First turn is night fight (annoying), second turn is night fight on 2+ (problem) third turn is night fight on 4+ (good game)

Assessment: If there was a perfect scenario for him to beat me at this is it, VP instead of KP and lots of night fight is a serious problem.


The game doesn’t really warrant a play-by-play as it went by too fast. We had all 3 possible night fight turns and he smoked at the bottom of 3 so turn 4 was no better. Outside of some amusing moments (Straken crushing Ironclads, Libby and assault squad Fleeing from a demo charge and an Ironclad failing to kill an immobile vendetta on the charge) the game was pretty much a rock throwing fest for me. He managed to eek out a victory winning by 515 points (so close). Not much to be done here, sometimes you just get good/bad scenarios for your army. I’m not sure a regular IG would’ve faired any better with 4 turns of crippled shooting. I only manage 1 BP out this entire mess.


Round 4

Get paired with mech Orks (interesting)

Gazghull
Mekboy W/ KFF

3x Battlewagons (2x W/ 20 Boys 1 W/ 10 mobs)

2x 12x man Boyz in Trukks

15x man Loota squad


Scenario: two objectives, control both for the win

Assessment: My opponent is anti-confident about his chances, but he’s got more than enough speed to be threatening. Could be rough.

I get first turn (Hmm…maybe not as rough, I use my scouts move to set up a meltabomb charge on all 3 Battlewagons first turn)

He didn’t seize the initiative, do I really have to go into how 20 meltabombs did against battlewagons that hadn’t moved? At the end of my first turn he had 1 trukk with no weapons that was stunned, the army walking across the table against a hail of Heavy Bolter and Lascannon fire. He conceded at 4. Almost feel bad, but it’s really is far too amusing to inflict the alpha strike on someone.

Max battle points again, not enough for a top three finish, but I still ended in 6th place out of 24.


Since this was the first time out for the BHD guard in a tournament, I’d also like to run through the units.

Vendettas- Not much to say, for the points these things are maddeningly good. Heavy bolters on them just add to the awesomeness because they cost almost nothing and allow you to handle infantry and armor alike.

Straken- While originally thrown in the army on a whim, he’s proved decisive in enough games that I have a hard time taking him out. He made Lysander flee, murdered a callidus, dropped an Ironclad like a bad habit and Furious Charge proved decisive against the other guard army. He won’t beat a fierce melee unit, but he’s an unpleasant surprise against everything else.

Vets- Up to their usual selves, using and abusing demo charges and meltabombs. Demo charges have been such a high casualty producing weapon that I’m not sure what I could put in to make up for it if I removed them. The meltabombs have also proven pretty decisive. In general I’m happy with the performance of the units and their incarnations. It’s likely they’ll stay this way for the foreseeable future.

Stormtroopers- Sometimes they do useful things, sometimes they don’t. In either case, most armies can’t let a pair meltas stay in their lines and they have just enough armor that bolter rapid fires won’t reliably kill them. Forcing your opponent to devote a mildly serious unit to bring down a 5x man stormtrooper squad has proven useful enough and they often take out a vehicle on the drop mitigating the loss of a KP.


Overall I’m happy with how the units work together.

 

[EmoJosh]

You had a much better list than all your opponents. I mean, it's a little odd you only got 6th, I know the Night Fight was rough but you brought a list with fewer flaws than everyone you played.

I still don't see how the SM player won. If he Smokes, you can go all out. Now he can shoot a few guns, probably not do much, than you go and take out half his army. I think that game deserves a full write up because it was winnable.

What finished top 3? Don't mean to come across as a jerk but I think you could have done better.

 

[Mastershake]

I didn't think it was unwinable either. My biggest problem was routinely failing to kill Ironclads with 4-5 hits from Vendettas and some slightly higher than average damage rolls for him. night fight and smoke exacerbated this into a total mess as the few shots I got through did little.

Top three were (in order) Dual Lash Chaos, Mech IG (different than the one I played) and my third round opponent (he drew with the 2nd place mech IG in round 4 to eek out 3rd place)

 

[EmoJosh]

You just made it sound like you were completely countered when it was actually just going to be a boring game for 3 turns.

Personally I didn't like many of the scenarios, my biggest problem with competitive 40k right now is tournament organizers. Having scattering objectives and prolonged Night Fight are crap missions. Just do objectives as Primary, VPs as Secondary and a fun, balanced Tertiary but that's to complicated for most to grasp apparently.

 

[moob]

I really liked the twist they did on the last round's capture & control.

Deployment was Spearhead, but instead of placing your objective in your own DZ, you placed yours in your opponent's DZ... so it wasn't both of you placing your own in the very corner and castling. Actually led to people trying to win instead of playing for draws in that mission.

 

[EmoJosh]

I've never had a problem in that mission but people I play do sometimes. The idea of a two objective game is pretty much crap no matter what, it's rarely close.

 

[sirisaacnuton]

Personally I didn't like many of the scenarios, my biggest problem with competitive 40k right now is tournament organizers. Having scattering objectives and prolonged Night Fight are crap missions.

That scattering objective mission was actually pretty good, imo. A key thing that was not at all clear from the explanation that day was that the objective actually scattered only along the center line between the two DZ's. I know I didn't pick up on this until the TO mentioned it right at the beginning of our game, but the "scatter" was just a random movement along the line, so it was supposed to stay equidistant between the two DZ's. So the primary was essentially a Take the Center type deal, with control determined by essentially whomever had more units there (leading to a big scrum in the center, which is usually a fun game...gotta have at least one mission where you have to get in and mix it up). The secondary and tertiary in that mission were essentially Recon from 4th ed (get to the opponent's DZ).

When you get down to it, the tournament's main objectives were KP's, VP's, take the center, and Capture & Control. It's surprising that there wasn't a scenario with 4-5 objectives, but the rest are pretty standard fare. I have to second the awfulness of a multi-turn nightfight game (particularly with it being random...one table could have it end after turn 1 and the next table could have it go through 4 turns...weak). But aside from that, I've certainly seen worse missions.

 

[Mastershake]

I gotta go with the consensus on this one. While the missions had some WTF moments, they were pretty good in general. Both of the objective missions seemed balanced although I would've like to see a 4-5 objective mission as opposed to the 1 objective mission. The KP mission was solid as well except I would probably drop the margin of victory to 5 from 7.

 

[jy2]

Must admit, that nightfight scenario totally favors cc-armies and really neuters shooty ones.

Just curious, but got any pics of your army?

 

[Mastershake]

http://www.librarium-online.com/forums/painting/181085-rangers-lead-way.html#post1575529

I didn't finish the last batch of models until the day before this event, but I plan on posting pics of the whole shebang a little later.

 

[EmoJosh]

I guess I just prefer multi-objective games. That scattering missions isn't so bad with the line but it's still just one objective. I don't like the game devolving into a slug fest over one small area, it's boring to me.

Your army looks really good.

 

[moob]

Even in the game with just the single marker, there were other objectives. The tournament scoring broke down as follows..

Primary: 15 points (7-7 tie)
Secondary: 10 points (5-5 tie)
Tertiary: 5 points (2-2 tie)


So while the primary was a single marker, you still had other things to be doing - in that mission's case, scoring units in your enemy DZ as well as your own.

 

[EmoJosh]

Ah well he didn't know most of them for the write up so I wasn't aware.

 

[ollieb]

You just made it sound like you were completely countered when it was actually just going to be a boring game for 3 turns.

Personally I didn't like many of the scenarios, my biggest problem with competitive 40k right now is tournament organizers. Having scattering objectives and prolonged Night Fight are crap missions. Just do objectives as Primary, VPs as Secondary and a fun, balanced Tertiary but that's to complicated for most to grasp apparently.

I was the TO for this. Are you saying you would enjoy the same old boring missions every RTT and game? What is so bad about scattering objectives? It makes setup that much more important. Slow moving footsloggers, can't cram their units into one area while gunlines have to be careful and not set up so far away they will never be able to get an objective once they shoot their opponent off the table. While night fight does slightly favor assaulty armies, the other 3 scenarios had no reduced visibility. One could say the RTT was scewed towards those armies with ranged firepower since 75% of the missions favored them.

In addition to primary objectives, each scenario contained a secondary and tertiary one. Additionally there were between 3-8 Battle point modifiers that could be gained and 2-4 that could be lost for each scenario. I designed every mission to make the players think about their moves and actions to keep the games from being the usual I set up, you set up roll die that is so often seen. To me making players think rather than rush forward or sit and shoot makes for competitive 40K play. From the scores I recieved just about every player present won big at least once and lost big at least once. For the armies in the middle of the pack, rankings were mostly determined by those that got secondary/tertiary objectives and BP modifiers.

 

[Mastershake]

Here's a Batrep on Dakka from another attendee: DakkaDakka - Warhammer 40K Forums - Mono-Tzeentch Daemons in 2k tourney, 4 rds

BTW Ollie, don't think I told the day of the event, but I had a good time. Everything went smoothly and (almost as important in a 4 rounder) it started and ended on time. Wouldn't even have to think twice about attending another one. My compliments.

 

[ollieb]

Everyone having fun was my main objective. Glad you had a good time. I all ready have the wheels spinning on scenarios for the next RTT I run. Not sure about you but playing in an RTT on Saturday then running one Sunday had me whipped. You guys that entered both had to be hurting since the locations were almost 100 miles apart. I felt sorry for the guys from Birmingham that did both.

 

[sirisaacnuton]

I have to second the compliments for the tournament, especially it running on time. With a long drive back home on a Sunday night, it was awesome to be able to run that smoothly. For a 4-rounder that was that big, I was expecting it to run at least an hour later than it did.

On a side note, I would like to make an observation that a tournament like that (particularly one with a prize that'll pull that many people in) might benefit from being on a Saturday. Looking at the forums, I saw at least a few people who bowed out when they realized it was on Sunday, and I had one more that could have come down with us if it had been on a Sat (he works 3rd, so Sun night starts his work week). I don't know how the store's availability is on a Saturday, if it's full of computer gamers or anything, but it might be something to consider for a really big one.

All in all though, good stuff. Everyone I talked to really enjoyed it, other than the Tau player. I felt the only thing missing was a multiple (4+) objective mission, in the style of table quarters or Seize ground. Seems the 5th edition trend is to generally have at least one thing that penalizes people for showing up with minimum Troop units.