Tournament Report: Offence 6th

Warning: Long post lol despite saying it's not too detailed... :)

So I've finally decided to share the tournament results with you guys... Won't be too detailed but will cover all 3 of us to an extent hopefully. It was to be 3 rounds 1500 pts... Round 1 missions 1/2 from the rulebook (on a d3), round 2 missions 3/4 and round 3 missions 5/6. Mysterious objectives and terrain were meant to be in play but we generally forgot/ignored that ...

My army for the tournament had to be changed a bit as counting up my army just in case before it, I realised that the excel spreadsheet which I use, I had been using had a slight mistake (!!!) and I was 10 points over, hence the slight change in my list:

Company Command Squad with 2x plasmagun, medic

Veteran Squad with 3x plasmagun, grenadiers, power sword, chimera with multi-laser and heavy flamer
Veteran Squad with 3x meltagun, demolitions, chimera with multi-laser and heavy flamer

Platoon Command Squad with 3x flamer, power sword and plasma pistol
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon and commissar with power swrod and plasma pistol
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon
Infantry Squad Squad with grenade launcher and autocannon

Vendetta (had a hard choice between this or a hellhound or an aegis defence line)

Leman Russ Vanquisher with heavy flamer
Leman Russ Executioner with heavy bolter and plasma cannon sponsons
Leman Russ Eradicator with heavy flamer

Looking around before the match after I had set up my army on a tray (2 actually) that was (were?) given to me, I found that there were some interesting armies in sight. 3/4 grey knights, 4/5 space marines (various), no imperial guard apart from me, no dark eldar, 2 tyranids, 2 orks (1 Ilya), 2 Sisters of battle (1 with gk allies, one with guard), 2 chaos space marines (1 with daemon allies), a chaos daemons player, a tau player (with some forgeworld) and an eldar player (with just grav-tanks - forgeworld I think). Not sure if that was everyone but that was roughly it, there were roughly 14 tables so you can do the maths...

Round 1 I was paired up against grey knights, so I was a little scared, but I thought what the heck at least I get to see what they're all about. He had a stormraven, a dreadknight, 15 purifiers/interceptors (? troops anyway), a dreadnought with multi-melta, 5 grey knight terminators, a terminator librarian with some powers and a sprinkling of psycannons and maybe a flamer thing.

Mission we rolled for was objectives and we got 3 of them... deployment was pitched battle. Having determined the sides we placed objectives (He got first turn and decided to go first or maybe i was first but in any case he had first turn). One objective ended up in the open and 2 in opposite corners. Night fight didn't happen. His librarian + 10 troops + dreadnought went in the stormraven which he started on the table as he said he was scout moving + starting in skimmer mode (which you're not allowed but he was so confident about it I let it go at the time). His termies went central for the objective and a small purifier squad sat in a building on his side with their objective.

I deploy my blob in my building with the objective, the static ccs behind it to give orders and the executioner to the side to help out. The rest of my force (all meched up) presents a wall of A14 or gets cover saves on the other side of my deployment zone. Vendetta and pcs with flamers went in reserve. Plan: Get first blood, hope to hold home obj., drive up to middle obj and then contest/capture his objective if necessary.

Basically turn one he flew up and deposited his guys and shot me up a little, mainly knocking off the turret of the executioner. I responded driving up on the right and using first rank fire second rank fire on the blob to get first blood, take out his poorly placed librarian and kill about half the purifiers that were with him. (Btw when he saw how many dice I had to roll he suggested using an app he had on his ipad to roll all 60 or of them and it was actually quite useful allowing us to resolve the number of dead without any dice rolling at all) Also my executioner, unable to shoot next turn and with it's turret blown off decided to ram the dreadnought without much success, however in the centre I killed a terminator or two from long range shooting and did a little damage to the razorback.

It boiled down to me managing to kill his dreadknight and termies in the centre (but not before damage had been done) and taking out his remaining purifiers on the left while when the dread charged the blob in combat I just kept using my commissar's leadership and taking off 1-3 guys a turn. I got so engrossed with doing so well that I even forgot to bring on my reserves until turn 5... (facepalm) In the end my veterans in the middle managed to get to the objective on turn 6 after some back and forth running and I secured victory. I had first blood, slay the warlord and 2 objectives worth 3 points, while he had one objective slay the warlord and linebreaker, giving me and 8-5 win, however the difference in the score on vps wasnt enough to give me extra points in additional points to my 15.

Oh and btw in this tourny you could give your opponent a sportsmanship score of 1-3 (with 3 being best) but you could only give each number once (a bit of a silly system). In any case I gave my first opponent 3 and he gave me 3 too.

Round 2

Going into round 2 I was quite happy but I knew it was going to get tougher now that I was going to go up against someone who had also won their first game. At this point Ilya had beaten another ork player and Paul had lost to a chaos + daemons army.

At first I was matched up against Paul, but then they reset the system and changed some stuff around...

So I was matched up against sisters of battle and was a little worried. He had 2 exorcists, 3 squads of sisters with meltas in rhinos, a squad of dominions (?) in rhino, Coteaz, Celestine, 3 squads of acolytes with some sword thing and storm shield (perhaps some with rhinos), a storm raven, and some squads with loads of heavy bolters.

Mission was the scouring, deployment same as last game. I may have placed my objectives a little foolishly being a little put off by my win from the previous round... anyway. To cut things short basically this guy thrashed me. After claiming he did not know how to play 6th edition (which got me thinking "Why the hell are you playing in 6th ed tournament then?") he did some magic stuff and all his sisters got rerolls, rending, etc. I let it past.

Then during the game he kept commenting on things I'd do and how I wasn't playing them right. E.g. making my ccs to get back in the fight after it had gone to ground and if I decided to protest/say I could show him in my codex he would say no then run over to another table and ask questions or something and then come back and state I was wrong. When I finally got pissed off at this when he said that only 1 "special weapon" can shoot out of a chimera and he went over to his friends, I went with him. He asked his question, the guy answered that he thinks that all 5 people can shoot out and he was about to turn and say that I was wrong (despite his friend saying otherwise) but he noticed me standing there right next to him and was going to tell me that we could replay it but I decided to just let it continue and wait for the game to end. (I had done as he said as I'm 15 and he was a lot older than me so I wasn't really comfortable with arguing...)

Anyway basically I split my army sort of in deployment going left with the tanks and taking an obj. with the blob. It ended up with some high value objs on my side but by the end it didn't matter. He proceeded to move in with a rhino and blow up some of my stuff. Then blew up some more after rolling d6 multi-melta type hits with each exorcist at my tanks (anyone know if these are how they're actually played?). Celestine eventually pole vaulted into my blob and through challenges I was able to keep her at bay for a few turns. I managed to kill the rhino and sisters who had driven at me, but my chimeras got blown quite early on and didn't manage to do much because of the aforementioned debate. My CCS got pinned and then ran away eventually and even my vendetta didn't manage to do much when it came on. Oh and also he didn't roll for his reserves until my vendetta came on and then promptly moved on his stormraven and blasted it out of the sky... My only hope was my surviving pcs who tried to dodge around out of line of sight but on turn 6/7 they were killed and I lost by some 1000 vps and the main mission. Doubtless the sportsmanship score I gave this guy was a 1. I don't know what he gave me because I made a point of going up to say mine after he had said his but from the sly look on his face I don't think he gave me a good one either.

Problem is I'm not sure if he was cheating or not but this game was pretty damn annoying and probably one of the only games of 40k I haven't enjoyed. I didn't even get to learn anything as basically it was him blasting my entire army apart while special rules and his "knowledge" kept my army from killing basically anything.

Round 3

Good news was that Ilya and Paul had lost too. I got to watch Ilya as he was beaten by some space marine player who apparently was also cheating... (e.g. moving models when Ilya wasn't looking and making up rules for stuff without bothering to check the codex and Ilya only noticed this at the end of the game when his nobz and ghazghskull were beaten up by tigurius).

Anyway round 3 I sorta wanted to win but sorta didnt care after my experience in the previous round. At least I got to smile when I realised that I would be versing a very nicely painted Imperial Fists army that I had noticed before the start.

I forgot to take photos at the start... but anyway mission was the relic and deployment was hammer and anvil. This was also the first table where terrain was bit sparse. I made a key mistake at the beginning and that basically lost me the game. Problem was that against ANY OTHER army, my deployment would have been perfect. Wall of AV14 with a covered wall of AV12 pushing aggressively behind it. Tbh I wasn't helped by the fact I was given first turn. At least I caused my opponent to think a little (i.e. about 20 mins to half an hour not even exaggerating) but then he just infiltrated some scouts.

I moved forward and things looked good as I killed scouts and the thunderfire. Then we realised we should have played night fight and so we re-played this part and his thunderfire returned with one wound. After this things went downhill with me getting several melatguns to the back and getting grilled. Then when Lysander passed 38 3+ invuln saves without taking a wound things started looking bleak for me. After the bloodbath in the middle and a bombing of my blob neither of us managed to take the obj. and the game ended something like 3-1 in his favour (secondaries). He gave me a 3 sportsmanship and I gave him 2 since that was all I had left (although I could re-assign at the end since the judges realised that the system was stupid). This was actually a game a learnt a fair bit from. Oh and his list was something like :

Lysander
Command Squad with 3x meltas and apothecary
Assault Terminators
3x drop pod
10x scout squad with snipers + telion + missile launcher and camo cloaks
5x snipers with camo cloaks
2x stormtalon with typhoon missile and assault cannon
Thunderfire cannon
Dreadnought with multi-melta? and heavy flamer

I actually really liked this list and will probably come up with something similar for my sm in the near future.

Anyway Ilya went the same as me 1 win, 2 losses and paul lost all 3 although his first opponent came 2nd and his 3rd game he played against the judge because someone left. Also Paul got cheated out of a game because in the scouring they ruled that his storm raven couldn't score despite there being no mention of this in the rules... Also both Ilya and Paul lost to a space wolves/biker sm army who's owner was a bit drunk and didn't really know what he was doing...

Anyway... positives were that it was a nice experience, great to test our skills, try playing against new opponents and armies and also there were some pretty nice armies out there. The terrain was generally quite good and I like that the tables were all covered by a nice texture/print out.

Only thing is that they didn't have a very good scoring system despite what they had advertised and we didn't even get to know our placings (unless you had won something). Although this was probably because this was meant to have been the Russian Open Tournament but it got moved back and they should have screens in place for scoring and pairings, etc by next time probably.

So not too bad a result and I'll/we'll probably go down there again. Apologies for the blurry pics and note that some of the pictures are of the stuff that was going on around. Oh and I did actually get my IG fully painted in time for it - too bad I didn't get the points I had worked so hard to get... Anyway I'll leave you with some of the armies from the event. PS: almost forgot paul and ilya's armies:

BA:

Dante
Mephiston
Sanguinary guard
Tactical squad with flamer and lascannon in razorback with heavy bolters
Stormraven with multi-melta and plasmacannon
Furiosio dreadnought
Sniper scouts

Orks:

Ghazghskull
Wazdakka
7(?) Nobs with klaws and big choppas
8 Warbikers
20 shoota boys 2x rokkit launcher
10 shoota boys rokkit launcher and nob with power klaw
20 choppa boys with 2x rokkit launcher and nob with power klaw
Battlewagon with deathrolla
Wartrukk
10 Gretchin with runtherd