Friday, April 15, 2011

Friday Night Tabletop Fight: SandWyrm vs. Dethtron At Adepticon

by SandWyrm


Most of the 40K blogging elite at Adepticon were busy on Saturday with the Team Tourney. But I managed to get a pick-up game in with Dethtron of Dick Move (part of the Ego of Tasty network). He'd brought along his Elysian Drop Troops. Which were aptly named, as he dropped a box of them on the way to the open gaming hall. Knocking quite a few bits off of one of his Vendettas. Fortunately I brought along some superglue. :)

As I mentioned in my earlier post of my game with Chambers (which happened after this one),  we had a heck of a time finding a place to play that actually had terrain we could use. After much searching, we settled on the LoTR/Epic 40K room, where there was an extra 4x4 table on hand.



Determined to try and play a 6x4 battlefield regardless, we scooted the board over a bit and tried to disguise the edge with terrain. But then we pretty much just played on the 4x4 anyhow.

There's too much terrain on the table really, but I wanted to give Dethron some advantage, as he doesn't get to play that often. So the extra stuff would slow down my tanks and make things more interesting. Besides, the terrain was very well done and easy on the eye.

Here's my IG list, which was the same one I took to the Adepticon championships on Friday.

    HQ
150    Company Command Squad w/3 x Melta, Regimental Standard, Chimera
70    Primaris Psyker
    Troops
155    Veteran Squad w/3 x Melta, Chimera
155    Veteran Squad w/3 x Melta, Chimera
155    Veteran Squad w/3 x Melta, Chimera
170    Veteran Squad w/3 x Plasma, Chimera
145    Veteran Squad w/3 x Flamer, Doctrines (Demolitions, Grenadiers)
145    Veteran Squad w/3 x Flamer, Doctrines (Demolitions, Grenadiers)
   
    Fast Attack
130    Vendetta Gunship
130    Vendetta Gunship
130    Hellhound w/Hull Heavy Flamer

    Heavy Support
165    Leman Russ Demolisher w/Hull Heavy Flamer
150    Leman Russ Battle Tank w/Hull Heavy Flamer

Total: 1850

Dethtron was running his IG using the Elysian rules from Imperial Armor 8. Which I'm not intimately familiar with. but it was something like the following:

    HQ
Company Command Squad w/Missile Launcher, Other Stuff

    Elites
3 Drop Sentinels w/Multi-Meltas
2 Drop Sentinels w/Multi-Meltas
2 Drop Sentinels w/Multi-Meltas
    Troops
Veteran Squad w/2 x Melta, Flamer
Platoon Command Squad (plain), Valkyrie
+ Infantry Squad w/Flamer, Melta, Valkyrie
+ Infantry Squad w/Flamer, Melta, Valkyrie
+ Infantry Squad w/Grenade Launcher
+ Infantry Squad w/Grenade Launcher
+ Infantry Squad w/Grenade Launcher
+ Heavy Weapon Squad w/3 x Missile Launcher
+ Heavy Weapon Squad w/3 x Missile Launcher
+ Special Weapon Squad w/3 x Sniper Rifle

    Fast Attack
Vendetta Gunship
Vendetta Gunship

Total:
1850

The Drop Sentinels are nice. Heck, having them in Elites is a godsend. If only the regular IG codex was smart enough to do that. There's nothing "Fast" about a Sentinel at all. The only reason they're still in that overcrowded FOC slot is dumb tradition. Now if only Rough Riders were troops...

I'm not crazy about the Elysian infantry options though. No lascannons or autocannons are allowed in the army anywhere, so that leaves missile launchers, which are not the best at popping armor. You also can't take more than one special weapon in your Platoon Command Squads.

But it's hard to cry when you can take Valks as dedicated transports. You can even take those Tauros dune buggy things and buy THEM a Valkyrie as a dedicated transport. But on to the game...


Setup

We roll up Sieze Ground with 3 objectives. Deployment is Pitched Battle.


The moonshine-barrel objective is over on his line next to the blob in the top-center of this pic (PARTY!). The sheep objective is near the middle of the table, and the 2nd Edition IG assault cannon (sniff...) objective is to the left of the trees at the bottom-left of the pic above.



I won first turn and set up my army. With the Demolisher closer to the center, the Vanilla Russ up on the hill, and a ring of Carapace Vets all around to keep deep striking meltas further than 6" from my tanks (not that he had any, it turned out). The Vendetta are both over on my far left. While the Primaris + Plasma unit and the Hellhound are in reserve.


Dethron then put down 3 Valkyries and 2 Vendettas. With a blob underneath them to the right, the CCS just to the left, and two missile squads in the trees to the near and far left. The snipers took up position in the far left corner, while the multi-melta drop Sentinels went into reserve to deep-strike onto the table.


Turn 1


I shuffle around a bit and move everything forward a bit.  I figure that if a mutli-melta Sentinel squad wants to drop in behind me, I'll let them risk a mishap. My right-most Chimera full of melta vets immobilizes itself, forcing them to disembark to move forward.


My Vendettas pop one of his Valks on the left and blow up a Vendetta on the right. Killing 11 or 13 guys in the blob squad and CCS beneath it.  I whittle down a few other squads.


Dethtron move his birds up, and I start taking fire from the missile squads in the trees.


Down goes a Vendetta. The other is shaken.

Dethtron's Vendetta over on the right manages to immobilize my Vanilla Russ!


Turn 2


The Primaris's Plasma Vet unit come on and secures the assault cannon objective.

My Vendetta zooms forward to get a cover save.

I move up the tanks some more (Damn the Sentinels! Full speed ahead!). The Valk that moved up to the center gets immobilized by long range meltas and I chew up more enemy infantry with my cannons.


Over on my right, the first Sentinel squadron comes down. The scatter was pretty wide. He's less than half an inch from the table edge with the primary model.


The other Sentinel squadron (the largest) comes down right behind my Demolisher. They stun it with their multi-meltas.


The squad that was in the immobilized Valk gets out and assaults my blocking infantry.


The Sentinel squadron over on the right takes the turret off of my Vanilla Russ. The Valks keep pounding away at my infantry, killing the Vet squad on the right that was walking.


THOSE BASTARDS! THEY'RE FLAMING THE SHEEP!!! They're baa-a-a-a-a-d men! "I-i-i-i-ce Cream! I-i-i-i-ce Cream!"


My second Vendetta goes boom. Eat it Spangy!


Turn 3


The Vet squad in this immobilized Chimera gets out to shoot its meltas at the Sentinels nearby. They explode one and wreck another. Losing four or five guys to the explosion.

My Primaris finishes the last Sentinel off with some lightning.


There's not much left on this side to kill those annoying Sentinels with. I shake one with a Chimera multi-laser.


Turn 3


These drop-guys are giving me a harder fight than I anticipated. We each have our home objective pretty well secured. While the sheep in the center are up for grabs.

Down comes the last Sentinel squadron to try and contest the center objective. They blow up the immobilized Chimera. I guess to try and get some wounds on the Vet squad nearby.

I finally lose the combat in the center. Dethtron's guys spread out a bit afterward.


Turn 4

In comes the Hellhound to the party.  It erases that small unit of Dethtron's that was sneaking up on the objective.

The Demolisher mauls the center squad that won the combat and they run. My squad gets out of it's Chimera to the right of the Demolisher and hoofs it for the objective. While Dethtron's Sentinels move toward me and wreck that Chimera.

Dethtron makes his move and scoots a Valkyrie 20 inches right on top of the objective. There's a bare-bones PCS squad inside, so it's scoring.


Turn 5


I melta the Valk and wreck it. Which means that the guys inside are dead too. Since you can't disembark from a transport that's moving flat out.

Note that Sentinel on the right of this pic. The squad I have claiming the objective started his turn all strung out. With a guy just to the right of the CCS squad by the building. The game tie-ing move here would have been to assault that Sentinel into the squad, pulling it towards him and away from the objective.


Instead, Dethtron does his best to kill my squad that's now claiming the sheep objective with shooting. But he comes up a couple of models short. I remove all my models from the center, leaving a melta gunner by the sheep and the Sergeant on the other end with nobody in-between. They fail their moral check, but pass the re-roll from the Regimental standard. Whew!

I roll a die and it comes up a '2'. Game over. I win 2 objectives to 1.


Conclusion

It was a fun, relaxed game and we had a lot of the Epic guys coming over to check out the action as the battle went along. I don't know how much money was on the table in models, scenery, and the battle board itself. But it was a lot.


I like the Elysians quite a bit. They give up a lot of options to be able to take more Valks and those awesome multi-melta drop Sentinels. I think that if Dethtron had more practice with them, he could have really rolled me up by dropping them all on one flank and walking them in just out of my own melta range. With the Valks mopping up my troops as they were popped out of their transports. Mean stuff!

Dethtron was, of course, a hoot. So were the guys from his band that hung around to watch. I also have to give Chambers a lot of credit for hanging around and fetching my beer for me when he could have been off doing other things. Thanks man!

Oh, and Dethtron... Feel free to snowmobile any part of this. :)

19 comments:

  1. "The Drop Sentinels are nice. Heck, having them in Elites is a godsend. If only the regular IG codex was smart enough to do that. There's nothing "Fast" about a Sentinel at all. The only reason they're still in that overcrowded FOC slot is dumb tradition. Now if only Rough Riders were troops..."

    So true. Been thinking about RR a lot lately, about how to rescue them from the dustbin of history, and making them troops is the obvious answer.

    SandWyrm, tell me about this Primaris you run. Why?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice to see you actually got to finish a game. I gotta make a quick note though:

    "I melta the Valk and wreck it. Which means that the guys inside are dead too. Since you can't disembark from a transport that's moving flat out."

    This isn't true. You only can't disembark from a transport that moved flat out in the same turn - and in 40k turn means PLAYER turn, not GAME turn.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wouldn't it be nice if Al'Rahem unlocked a FoC move for his saddlesore pals? I thought so too...

    Two fine, fine looking armies there, and a fitting tribute to the power of practice.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mogul Khamir should be an HQ upgrade for the CCS to make them all mounted, and he should make RRs troops. Most defiantly.

    I think you were wrong about that PCS dying due to the Valk moving flat out. They are only casualties if it dies in that "turn" but turn always means player turn unless otherwise stated. Since it was the next player turn when it went down they should be able to disembark as normal.
    I see that there was a hellhound next to them though, so it's pretty much a moot point.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Spy Smasher

    I'll do a proper post on the Primaris sometime. But here's a thread from Librarium where we discuss it in detail.

    http://www.librarium-online.com/forums/imperial-guard/209788-overlooked-units-primaris-psyker.html

    Basically he was there because the Adepticon championship missions encouraged you to bring a 2nd HQ along to make a certain objective easier to get.

    He's stayed in my lists since because he turned out to be the MVP of my army during the tourney. He's a great little torrent unit. Especially if you give his squad Grenade Launchers to help him out. That unit will put out an average out 10 S6 shots at BS3 all game long. Which along with the multilasers from surrounding Chimeras just murders elite units with 2+/3+ armor or units in cover by making them roll until they get ones and die.

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  6. Crap. I wish I'd known about the turn thing during the tourney. It happened to one of my Vendettas with troops aboard and helped lose me the game. :(

    ReplyDelete
  7. wow, no worries about that rule- I've been playing it wrong forever as well, apparently. Thanks for a fun game and being understanding when i showed up with a non-codex army :) Wanted to bring something normal, but only had transport for these guys at the moment.

    great pics btw, thanks for taking these.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Fun report, I love seeing different IG armies go at it.

    Pretty much every section in the IG list is overcrowded.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I've got no problem with Forge World stuff in a non-tourney game. It keeps things interesting.

    Thanks for getting the game in with me. Hulksmash ran away rather than face the might of my IG. ;)

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  10. Elites isn't. Most of the time I don't run any elites at all. If I could take some Sentinels in that slot they'd be in every army I make.

    ReplyDelete
  11. YEEHAW...Elysians for the win!

    That's the army that I play the most, having started with them back in IA3 and now upgraded to IA8.

    The thing you need to keep in mind about Elysians is that like a lot of the FW armies, they are built around a theme within a story. In this case, the Elysians represent an air transportable/deep striking IG army (remember the old IG codex that allowed this?). So within the context of their story they give up stuff, like access the HW that aren't man portable...which makes sense when you think about it. So missile launchers and mortars are your big guns, presenting the Elysian player with some interesting tactical problems.

    However, they do have their own set of tricks and toys that force opponents to stay on their toes.

    I think as Dethron fiddles more with his list (not that his was bad by any means), things like demo charges in every squad, Vulture heavy support (including the TL-Punisher cannon version), Iron Discipline, adding Armored cockpits and Flares/Chaff (they toughen up the Valks/Vendies) may find their way in and give you even more to think about.

    The last big battle my Elysians were in:

    http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?showtopic=215015

    I hope it's Ok to post that link. Apologies if not.

    Anyway, great batrep! I always learn a lot about general IG stuff from your posts, which I try to leverage to become a better Elysian player.

    Keep up the battle reports, you do a very good job on them.

    Cheers,

    ReplyDelete
  12. It's ok to post links non-gratuitously.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Do you think the small table helped or hurt one of you more?

    ReplyDelete
  14. I love the Elysian list, I've been trying to find someone to lend me some more birds so I can give it a try. Guards that drop from the sky is so sweet.
    Thanks for posting the batrep, it's great to see how it works in practice!

    ReplyDelete
  15. @nike: we technically were playing on a full table, but wound up not using 1/3 of it much due to our playstyle more than anything. we both wound up sort of castling up.

    and for the record, here is my approximate list (has snipers and an extra sentinel because my Tauros aren't assembled yet...)

    HQ

    CCS Missile, Grenade launcher, Officer of the Fleet

    Elite

    2x MM sentinels

    2x MM sentinels

    Troops

    PCS

    3x squads with GL + commissar

    HWS missiles

    HWS missiles

    SWS sniper rifles

    3x sentinels MM

    3x vet squads w/ 2x melta, flamer, and Valkyrie w/ MRP

    Fast Attack

    2x Vendetta w/ heavy bolters

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  16. WOW! The second Vendetta blew up!!!! Great job Dethron!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  17. Yeah, Spangy can never seem to kill the second one.

    ReplyDelete
  18. you can still disembark from a Valkyrie or Vendetta if they moved flat out anyway, so I think they may well have been able to jump ship after all!!!

    ReplyDelete

out dang bot!

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