NoVA Report: Part the Third

And now we come to the third NoVA post, and the last one detailing my tactical ineptitude during my sortie to the Americas.  Well, one America, anyway.

This hefty dose of Bad Strategy was brought to you by the Blood Angels and the letter F.  This guy was running a heavy mech list.  Two Stormravens, two Landraiders, a couple of bare-bones assault squads for the transport discount and a big-ol’ hammer unit in the form of Dante, a 10-man assault squad and Sanguinary priest, all unpleasantly inserted deep into my backfield.

The game was Dawn of War.  It was kill points and I got my arse handed to me, all because of Dawn of War.  I got first turn and set up in my usual way for this setup, my Haemonculus with his Wrack buddies in a Venom in the middle of the board.  The Hellions were all in non-deep striking reserve and all my remaining vehicles were speeding onto the board in turn 1.  My opponent reserved everything.  I find this disconcerting most of the time, because there’s no clear focus for my forces in the early game.  Also with the NoVA mission setup, all the objective markers are evenly distributed (one in the middle of each quarter, one in the middle of the board).  The upshot is that I am very unsure where to put the Webway Portal.  In a sense, it doesn’t matter, as with an all-reserve list, wherever I put the portal, the enemy will just scoot round and appear on the other side of the table.  Or I could lay the portal in the middle and take my chances.  But then again, that’s not the mistake I made this game.  The mistake I made that lost me the game was one of caution.

Now, normally, caution is something I recommend in Dark Eldar players.  The army’s aggressive, but too brittle to be blindly so.  As an army, if you can squeeze a little more survivability out of your units it tends to really help you survive to the endgame.  And that’s what I was trying to do.  My vehicles sped onto the board, flat out; my Haemonculus planted the portal and, when nothing turned up next turn, got back on his ride and pootled around the board for a bit.  With no targets to aim at in the first turn, the rest of my vehicles just sped around my backfield, never venturing over the halfway line.  I didn’t want to be caught by his reserves when they trundled onto the board and I wanted to limit the amount of viable targets for his big guns.  This caution was what killed me though.

Dante and his goons Deep-struck in, totalling a Ravager with their meltaguns and inferno-pistols.  That zero-deviation deep-strike is one hell of a scary proposition!  My army was well placed to take the squad down though, as I was packing so many lace and blaster shots that the Sanguinary priest provided no protection for his squad and everyone was reduced to toasty giblets in short order.  Unfortunately, they were just a distraction.  And they did their job excellently.

The heavy armour rolled onto the board and started to bring down my vehicles left right and centre and I was soon left with no ravagers to return fire and my Blaster Trueborn were too far away to respond.  They would make their way across half the board and then be stranded by the anti-tank fire coming from the Ravens and Raiders.  The Blood Angels were playing it cagey for the rest of the game, with all of his vehicles hanging back on his board edge, the Landraiders advancing just far enough so the squads inside could claim objectives, but then adamantly refusing to move.  There was no way I could get my tank-busting equipment anywhere near where they needed to be, and the assault squad were not obliging and refused to leave their vehicles, no matter how nicely I asked.  That was about turn 3 or 4, and that’s pretty much how it remained for the rest of the game.  He didn’t have the anti-personnel fire to take down my Hellions, but he didn’t need to.  They were no threat to him.  They could contest objectives if they wanted, but that wouldn’t help the kill point issue.  After taking down all my vehicles, he was quids in for a win, provided he didn’t do anything stupid.  And he didn’t.  You can never rely on you opponent being an idiot.  He went on to win the bracket, and deserved to, in my opinion, because he was a sharp and canny player, not just because his final round opponent were Grey Knights!

End of line.

NoVA Report: Part The Second

So, from Bad Matchup and Bad Dice to Bad Strategy.

These games were more useful and less frustrating to me than the other two.  Of course, it’s always annoying to realise that you could’ve won but for one thing you were too much of an idiot not to spot but it’s simultaneously a bit of a relief when the mistake comes to you and you file it away for later.  Both my losses were attributable to single mistake in each game, and the snowball effect they started.  I’ll start with the first game.

Versus Tyranids.

I got so much flak for losing this one.  Nids versus Dark Eldar is a bad matchup for the gribblies most of the time.  DE are one of the few armies that can gain an Initiative advantage without cover tricks and are packing so many poisoned weapons that Monstrous Creatures have a very hard time staying upright.  Add to that the sheer manoeuvrability of the DE and you’d expect me to win.  But you didn’t count on my tactical ineptitude.  You should know better.

Part of the problem for me stemmed from the fact that I don’t know the Codex that well.  I knew the old codex well-ish and I know a bit about most of the new book.  That really wasn’t enough.  I knew the units, but I didn’t know the Psychic Powers and I didn’t know the weaponry.  There was one moment when I ignored a big squad of Termagants because I didn’t think Devourers were much better than Fleshborers.  That was dumb.  My army simply doesn’t have the resilience to survive mistakes like that and my Hellion were made to pay for that mistake.  But these weren’t the big mistakes.  The big mistake was using a tactic that I’d fallen into using all the time.  My list centres around Hellions.  Anyone who knows me in 40k will know this.  It’s a recurring joke at my expense. I <3 Hellions; as Dean (from the Overlords) put it.

In the 2,000pts list, I have three squad of hellions, all large.  I keep them all in reserve and set them to work when they turn up, either coming through the Webway or on the table edge.  I use the Webway a lot (I barely ever make a list without it) and I’ll write a brief tactica on it at some point, but it’s not relevant to the point at hand.  It’s the reserving Hellions that were the mistake.  I normally reserve these guys so that my opponent can get closer and I can get them straight into assault from the off and not run the risk of them being shot to death.  Or use them as a counter-assault to enemy tricks in my backfield or as close support to a threatened unit, etc.  Reserving them also gives me a chance to crack some transports early in the game so they’ve got a viable target.  Hellions can crack most transport vehicles in assault, but it’s not always easy, and its rarely ever reliable.  Having them on the table from the beginning just clutters up my deployment and provides the enemy with more targets.

But I was playing against ’Nids.  They don’t have vehicles.  Everything is a viable target for my guys, and the amount of mid-range poison shots they can level will make a mockery of most of the units they look at.  They should have been there, obliterating the alien menace in favour of the slightly different alien menace.  My opponent had two squad of Genestealers infiltrating as close they could around my initial deployment.  Stealers are undeniably represent a threat, but not necessarily a big threat.  That threat is commonly used to detract fire from the bigger threats in the list, and in that capacity, they worked brilliantly, because I flung far too much firepower at the Genestealers instead of using it to take down the guy’s Tervigons, or his Hive Guard (which are utterly brutal when it comes to my army because they rely so much on cover), or his Zoanthropes.  I was unable to do anything about those other threats in Turn 1 and they made their presence felt for the rest of the game.  Had my hellions been set up during deployment, then the ‘Stealers really wouldn’t have mattered.  The Hellions could have taken the squads out in a second, flat, with shooting and assault or (more cunningly)  I would have used my guys to surround the Genestealers, cutting off their movement and forcing them to assault the squad through cover, while I unleashed 30+ poisoned shots at his hive guard (averaging 10 wounds on a 4+ save?  Yeah, they’d be dead sharpish!) or at the spawning Tervigons.

I have more to write about this, but lunchtime’s over now.  Stay tuned for more!

Or, you know, don’t.

That’s good too.

NoVA Report: Part The First

As listeners to the Overlords may well already know (and be healthily bored of hearing about)  I went to the NoVA 40k tournament in August and enjoyed about18 hours of 40k playing in the space of 2 days.  My brain was shredded by the end of it and I’d managed to pick up a cold from somewhere.  I was not worth talking to the next day.

Which was a shame, because I had to podcast then. Episode 63, if you’re interested.  I don’t advise you listen to it.  My brain was oozing out of my ears that day.  And that’s not as much hyperbole as you think.

Anyway.  Out of the 8 games in the tournament, I won 5 and lost 3.  One of those games was a buy due to an absent opponent and the ‘for fun’ game with a top-table Blood Angels player was a dead loss on my part.  So; 4 wins and 4 losses.  You always learn more from analysing your losses than your wins.  Unless you’re really shit at analysis or have a ego the size of Lake Superior.  And I only fit into one of the above categories.

What I said in my previous post (The Loser’s Guide to Losing) about categorising my losses holds true today, and I can class my losses in the tournament into 1 Bad Matchup, 1 Bad Dice and 2 Strategic Mistakes.  The Bad Dice was against the Blood Angel player in my buy game.

He was basically using Stormraven Powerbombs.  Two Ravens, one with Reclusiarch, Death Company and a Furioso Snippy Dread, and the other holding regular assaults, a Sanguinary Priest and a Death Company Snippy Dread.  The Death Company Raven stormed straight into the middle of my army, dropped the bomb and a lot of my guys died.  Being able to assault straight out of that thing with all the vicious filth a BA force can muster is one hell of a frightening ability.  Why did I let the Raven into my lines?  I didn’t.  I mean, I tried not to.  The first two turns of the game, I was pouring darklight into it.  About 21 shots over the two turns.  End result: 1 glance, 1 pen.  Neither of them doing anything to stop it moving.  I don’t like blaming game losses on bad dice, but this one I think is valid.  If we played that game again, my tactics would probably be unchanged.  I’d just need to roll better.  Once the death company were there, I was gone for the game.  I managed to kill them all eventually and down one of the Dreads, but it was all out of spite rather than tactical advantage and I lost handily.

Bad Matchup game was against Stelek from YTTH blog and he was packing far too many twin-linked heavy bolters.  10 Razorbacks, full complement of Long Fangs, some Thunderwolves, scouts and a bucket o’ Grey Hunters.  When I saw the list, I knew that it was not going to do much for my chances at winning.  My only hope was to take down a tonne of armour before he could fire back and gain some level of anti-tank advantage.  But he made good use of cover in deployment and my dice were only average.  So, in keeping with the Loser’s Guide, I set myself a new objective:  I wonder how many Hellions I get into horrendous and complicated assaults.  Banzai!  My guys accounted for themselves reasonably well, but not as well as I may have liked and one of the mobs flunked a multi-assault with his Long Fangs and got run down.  My Hellions should have won that combat (in fact they only lost it by 1 that fateful turn), but there you go.  Win some, etc.  If they had actually managed to crush the long fangs in assault like they were meant to, we could have had a game going, especially if I then went and parked them in cover.  Never mind, eh?

And now we get to the Strategic Mistakes…

Or would, if my lunch break wasn’t over now. 

Oh well. 

At least this gives me a subject for tomorrow’s post!