On Sunday, Paul, Ilya and I all went to a 3000 point doubles tournament. You were allowed to go on your own and Paul and I went as a team with Blood Angels and Imperial Guard and Ilya was on his own with Orks. It wasn't going to be a big tournament with 11 players signed up originally but there were 8 of us altogether on the day.
The tournament would be 3 matches with Game 1 being mission 1/2 from the rulebook (rolled for randomly), game 2 being 2/3 and so on. Possible tournament points were w/d/l for primary missions were 8, secondary were 4 (as in you had to have more of slay the warlord, linebreaker and first blood) and also for point difference with every 500 points giving a point or something. Other scoring opportunities were painting (out of a max 15 or out of 20 if you had a display board - which noone had) and also sportsmanship out of 5 for each game.
There were some great looking armies which you can see throughout this post.
Our list was basically my 1750 point IG list and Paul's 1500 point blood angels minus dante and sanguard which were replaced by terminators, corbulo and some scouts.
Meanwhile Ilya took:
Wazdakka
Ghazghskull
2 or 3 squads of 10 nobs with an assortment of klaws and combi-rokkits
Nob bikers
3/4 squads of 20 boys with a power klaw
10 gretchin with runtherd
4 battlewagons
2 dakkajets
Game 1 - vs Chaos Space Marines and Tau
It should be noted that these were the tournament winners and by a long way. Mission: Purge the Alien, deployment: diagonal. Now this is a mission that neither I nor Paul had played much. Also I at the moment still havent really figured out how to deploy especially at this points level with limited space. Needless to say, mistakes were made.
We start our first turn by advancing down the right and I manage to gain first blood by killing a devilfish. I don't think a lot else happened due to the two aegis defence lines. It is nightfight and Mephiston foolishly strays out into the open, thinking it safe. Return fire instaneously kills mephiston as the whole of the tau force unleashes their markerlights and weapons into him. The lead chimera also dies as does the razorback. Some rhinos advance towards us on the left.
What we should have done here after was retreated back to our base and conserved kps but we foolishly pressed on...
We slightly realign and try to down some stuff. Reserves come in in the form of terminators, a vendetta and a stormraven. It should also be noted that at around this point I realised that I had forgotten to deploy my platoon command squad and stuck them into a vendetta.
Eventually things boil down to us killing keeping our blob as the only thing alive. We lose quite badly on kill points although we did down 4 rhinos, a helldrake, a squad or two of plague marines and the devilfish.
They win secondary too and have a margin of 2000 points or so, so they score 20, we score 0.
Meanwhile on hte other table Ilya was up against grey knights and imperial guard - as you can see things weren't going too well for him either... To cut a long story short... He also lost 20-0.
And so that is how we got paired up for Game 2 - vs Orks (And our two opponents got paired up as well - although our ones won 19-1 against Ilya's opponents probably why they won the whole thing as they basically got 2 tablings in the first two games)
So back to Ilya... Mission was Big Guns Never Tire, deployment... diagonal. Learning from last game that we needed to keep our forces concentrated together we placed our forces accordingly. This time we had a plan. Termies + corbulo help stop the ork horde from getting to our objective (held by the tacticals in the building) whilst getting support from two russes while on the other flank we would make a push for the objective and hopefully shoot off the gretchin off Ilya's. Also of importance was that we wanted to kill as many of his battlewagons as possible to at least win primary.
Everything was according to plan, until Ilya seized the initiative. The orks rumbled forwards but were luckily unable to seize first blood.
In our turn I wasted no time destroying a battlewagon and forcing some orks out. We decided to change our plan and push the left flank while hoping to hold the right.
Meanwhile on the table next to us...
The fliers started arriving pretty early on and helped a lot.
Game ended with us holding one objective and contesting another. We also had destroyed all FOUR heavy support battlewagons while Ilya had only killed one Russ giving us the primary mission victory with a score of 7-1.
We drew on secondary as late game Mephiston had challenged Ghazghskull in a fight who had declined once and then killed a wounded Mephiston. So Ilya had linebreaker and Slay the Warlord and my firepower into Ghaz wasn't enough to kill him so we had first blood and linebreaker. We also got a significant amount of points for point difference making the score 15-5 to us.
Game 3 -vs Daemons and Chaos Space Marines
So this was the matchup that I'd been afraid of as we had very little idea about how to face daemons. Mission was the relic, deployment: hammer and anvil. By the way these 2 came 2nd in the tournament...
Our opponents had roughly
2x Daemon Princes with wings
Large noise marines with blastmaster and all the ignore cover stuff
Havocs with autocannons
Havocs with lascannons
Some cultists
a defence line
Fateweaver
Khorne Juggernaut things
2 units of maybe 6 screamers
2 units of 6 flamers
2 units of 5 plague bearers
We infiltrate the scouts and deploy covering the open in our backfield but trying to stay out of range from the noise marines and in cover. This turned out to be a mistake as we should have just gone with everyone as fast as possible into the midfield to take up the space near the relic. The problem was that they had first turn and we had not managed to seize and so the stuff started dropping.
Some Magic and a hell of lot of shots later and we have give naway first blood and start to progress towards the middle.
We decided to try and take down fateweaver and the flying stuff first but this proved to be quite hard so later on in the game we reverted to what we should have done initially - concentrated on killing troops...
As the game goes on things start to go downhill pretty quick as Mephiston is turned into spawn and screamers manage several multi-charges.
In the end at turn 5 we are left with Paul's stormraven which just manages to kill the plaguebearer holding the relic and we hope for the game to end and give us a draw... Unfortunately it goes on and the stormraven is blown out of the sky... Giving our opponents a 20-0 win as we are tabled.
Meanwhile on the other table Ilya managed to squeeze out a narrow victory against some chaos...
Overall Paul and I came 6th and Ilya came 8th despite his win (out of 8) but it was really fun, there were some great looking armies and it was an interesting points level to play at.
I know I've got some changes coming up in my list and I don't think I've mentioned yet that I've acquired some Dark Eldar which I'll be starting as well as changing my Space Marines in the near future. Oh and one of the best things was that my painting was complimented a lot :) which I'm really happy with!
So things I learnt? :
- Keep forces together and don't split the army up
- In diagonal deployment keep faster elements in reserve to come on on the far side of your table edge near your opponent
- If in doubt, kill the troops (unless it's purge the alien - need to play more of that)
- Chaos Daemons are scary - CSM are not really
- My tau need to get dusted off and join my marines
So all in all we had a great time despite having zero preparation for this tournament (and points level) and basically only using models we had ready. Hopefully I'll get to go to another one before the it's 2013...
Oh and for the full set of results go here - (although it's all basically in russian ;))
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