Thursday 22 August 2013

Invasion II Game 2 - Tournament Report

In the last post I may have alluded to our list's inability to deal with vehicles, well, when you have 3 AV13 vehicles facing you across the battlefield, you definitely can't deal with vehicles. We were playing against a Chaos Marine and Necron List, comprising of a Black Mace Lord, a 5 man Nurgle squad, a 10 man standard squad, a Vindicator, 10 Immortals with Tesla, 10 Warriors, a Lord and 2 Annihilation Barges. The mission was Crusade with Dawn of War.


They chose where to place the objectives, and they ended behind a big ass ruin in our deployment zone, behind an even bigger ass ruin in their deployment zone, and some trees to the right. They also chose who got the first turn, and gave it to us. I set up the Guard blob to push on the right most objective, and to avoid a refused flank my opponent set up on the other side opposite their enormous ruin. There are some shenanigans to come from this later. I then reserved a pack of Grey Hunters to wander onto our objective.

They then essentially deployed opposite, the Chaos on the side opposite our Chaos and the Necrons opposite me. This game was always going to be tough for us. The objectives were mainly on their side and their army was extrememly durable.

Despite getting my invulnerable save up, the first turn did not go well for my poor Guardsmen. In the first 2 turns a massive 36 Guardsmen fell to Tesla and Gauss fire, however all I could do was keeping push before eventually in turn 3 I ended up in the trees next to the objective. Able to go to ground and making it much tougher for him to shift me. A couple of Immortals went down but that was about it.

On the left, the Chaos Marines made a stinted assault. The first phase of this was to turbo boost the Rhino a full 18" straight into the massive ruin near their objective. There were no windows on the bottom floor, giving the Chaos Marines a safe way to disembark as it would be difficult for the enemy to shoot or charge them due to being pushed right up against the walls to prevent the enemy walking in.

Essentially the game came down to these 2 sections of the board. They had First Blood, but we had an objective guarenteed in our deployment zone. If the held more objectives than us in their deployment zone, they won the game, if we drew on objectives in their deployment zone, we would win the game.

On the right, a squad of Grey Hunters popped out of a Ruin and charged a squad of Necron Warriors, who stayed in only losing 1 guy after Reanimation. The Overlord then charged in and killed 4/5 Grey Hunters with his Warscythe, before the Platoon Commander and his remaining cronie jumped in, taking the Challenge and somehow survived 2 player turns of combat with the Overlord. Locking down the Warriors. Now it came down to the Guard Blob (or what was left of it) vs the Immortals. I split off the Primaris Psyker and the Rune Priest, this was in an attempt to go for Linebreaker to nullify First Blood, charge the Immortals to pull them off the objective with pile in moves and attempt to relive the pressure from the remaining Guardsmen as they went for the claim.

The Primaris Psyker went down pretty quickly, although the Rune Priest went for the charge he was killed on the overwatch leaving the Immortals simply with the task of finishing off the Gone to Ground Guardsmen with the help of the 2 Annihilation Barges to claim that objective.

So now it came down to the left hand side, and whether we could claim it. Essentially this devolved into one massive mash up between the Word Bearers and the Iron Warriors, 15 Marines and a Lord on each side. The opposing Lord however got wrapped up in a challenge with an Aspiring Champion, who kept passing his saves. This left the Word Bearer Lord to continue slaughtering his way through Marines, until only the Lord was left. Because of this, the Word Bearers kept piling into combat further and further on the left hand side of it, due to where the Lord was, and once all of the enemy Marines were dead the Word Bearers were now within 3" of the objective, without it being contested. In addition, because the Chaos Lord was still stuck in the challenge, the Vindicator was denied the prime opportunity to drop a Large Blast on their collective heads.

The game ended turn 5 with us holding 2 objectives, without secondaries, and them holding 1, with Slay the Warlord and First Blood. This was one of the most enjoyable games that I've played in a long time and to be honest I really wouldn't have cared personally had we lost this game. To pull it out of the bag at the end was the icing on the cake really and commiserations to our opponents and thanks for a great game.

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