Big Game report. Nids V Marines

It has been a while since I last posted here. My marines have slowly being expanding. Since the last time I have painted:

• Assault terminators (lightening claws)
• Void Shield generator (started)
• Tactical terminators (heavy flamer)
• 5 man close combat scout squad
• Played some games
• New kitchen

Now I am in the process of buying a house so more time being used up doing no geekery stuff.

Anyway last weekend my local mates and i played a large game. we had been discussing it for a while as with any large games things can get complicated, time consuming, unbalanced and all of the above!

First of all to try and keep it simple we said the marines would defend a fortress in the centre of the table. The nids would come in from both sides (like a mission in Horus Heresy Book 1). The marines would set up and the nids would have turn 1 in which the moved on from the board edge. This would save time in not having to set the nids up then move them. When we setting the board up we decided that it would be best not to have any terrain between the base and the table edge. While this would not give the nids cover it would also not slow them down getting to the marines. The nids aim was to wipe out the marines (not flyers).

We agreed on a time limit for moving and shooting of 30mins (timer paused for the psychic phase). We didn’t time assault as it was felt you could not do an assault for an advantage, so all would have to be done, where if you forgot to move or shoot it is generally to your own detriment. Rather than play APOC we just played a big game of 40K. APOC has even more rules and situations to remember and to be honest we just wanted to roll dice and play!

I’m not going to give a turn by turn report or anything like that, but overall the game played well with very little that needed changing. We ran out of time (as usual) but managed to complete 4 turns, which isn’t bad for 21k points on the board. The marines held out and had a little over 2k left… the nids still had a lot left! The nids did start with 25% more models and could respawn stuff each turn. Their entry point also crept closer to the base each turn. I think it was a balanced game, maybe swinging to the easier side for marines. I think we still would have held out for 1 more turn, after that not so sure!

Here are a few pictures of the game.

More can be seen in my photobucket account here:

http://s856.photobucket.com/user/toonboy78/library/Big%20Game%20Sept%2015

Lessons learned:

• Big games are hard to plan. This took the best part of 2 months of chat to get a rule set we all liked (or at least compromised on!)
• Time: no matter how much time you give you will always run out
• Space: hosting is hard and we needed space for an 8*6 table (no deployment zone for nids) and plenty of space to walk around and put models out of the way. We were lucky and could hire a local room that allowed us to be there until after 11pm.
• Game rules: it was a little one dimensional and as the marine player I didn’t have to think about too much, no choosing between a run for an objective or shoot the nearest enemy. Not this scenario needed it but other games I would like to have a 3 tiered set of objective, turn based (maelstrom), game based (eternal war), secret (special one made up for that specific game, like kill all HQ’s, or hold any 6 objectives at the end of the game). each one worth more than the other so it would be hard to know how is going to win

So that is now over I am cracking on with finishing off my first load of Centurions and I have started the storm raven. That should keep me busy until my house move is complete!

Battle Report: Marines V Tyranids

This should be my final one for a while. 4 games in 2 weeks, and now my wife is starting to give me the look.....

 

This time I am taking on Alex_H and his NIds. It has been a while since we had played and this is our first 7^th game.

We played 1500 points. I am a big fan of this value.

1.       It allows plenty of chat throughout the game and still be finished at a sensible time. This game took 5 hours!

2.       Choices have to be made. At 1750 you can generally get everything you want in your list, and 2000 you can take an extra something a bit special that you have not used to see how it plays without affecting your army too much. 1500 something has to give. You can’t have all your fancy units and toys to play with. Some have to stay in the box

3.       There is so many rules to remember in 7^th and trying to keep track of what is going on you need to keep it as simple as possible.

I had chosen 3 lists initially so I could choose which to take at the time. The first was based on my unbound terminator list from a few games back. This time I used the Dark Angels codex with Belial, a librarian, 5 DW Knights, 2*5 DW and 1*10 DW. It looked good and if I was playing the emperors will missions then I think would have had a chance, but playing Maelstrom I did not have enough units or manoeuvrability to cover the board. Also I had no flyer protection (in hindsight I may have worried about that too much).

The next 2 lists were basically the same. The main change was terminators for stern guard. Here is the list I settled on:

Chapter Tactics: Imperial Fists

• Librarian level 1 Telepathy
• 9 Sternguard in a pod with PF and 4 combi-grav guns
• 10 tacts in rhino flamer missile
• 10 tacts in rhino flamer missile and veteran
• 10 scouts with Camo Cloaks and sniper rifles and missile
• Whirlwind
• Landspeeder typhoon
• Stormtalon with skyhammer missiles
• Thunderfire
• 10 devastators with 3 missile and 1 lascannon

I initially wanted 3 typhoons and was going to drop a talon. I am worried about Nig flying monstrous creatures as they can vector strike and shoot good weapons, as I found out. The grounding test now is definitely may FMC a solid choice for armies

 His list (CAD)

Winged Hive Tyrant

Winged Hive Tyrant
Venomthrope
Exotrine
Harpy
Mawloc
4 Zonethropes with a Nuerothrope (sp?)
4 Zonethropes
2 Spores

As you can see the basic minimal troop choices, and they don’t even have objective secured! I was not really expecting such a small force. When I think of nids I normally think loads of gribbly stuff supported by some fancy big stuff.

As Alex and I had played a few game recently we decided on a mission neither of us had played, Maelstrom 4. This had an interesting twist where both you and your opponent can claim tactical objective “secure objective X” when they are in your hand! The newer codexes will be at a slight advantage here as they only have 12 of those and 24 other ones where using the one from the books there rae 18 “Secure Object X” cards. As we both have an older codex  it levelled out.

Again I am not going to give a turn by turn report, but here are some of the main highlights.

·         I set up with the heavy stuff at the back. The idea was for the scouts to infiltrate up field and the 2 tactical squads (the assault half) would get forward for objectives on the other side.

·         I was interested to see how the whirlwind would perform as I had not used one. It would have been ok against a horde list but against this high armour/inv save list it was pretty poor. Will I still get the model.....probably

·         Initially forgetting about the sternguard! But when they came on they were OK. Helped kill a squad of zonethropes for first blood. There second round of shooting against the Exotrine with only 2 wounds left....5 grav gun wound and he made all 5 of his 5+ cover saves!

·         The librarian was poor but a cheap HQ choice. I am not sure what other option a marine player has. The others are more points, and a captain needs even more points to make him useful. The librarian did get shrouding off once but failed a perils test, and eventually died. He is a bit of a soft VP for slay the warlord and also some of the tactical objectives require you to kill the warlord and offer D3. In the turn he died he gave up 3VPs.

·         I worried too much about the spores. They couldn’t get objectives and worst of all they didn’t give up any VP’s killing it first did not get me first blood.

·         Again the lack of solid mobile units, objective secured or not, was my opponent’s downfall. He bunched in one corner and all I had to do was bombard him. He could not go and get the other 4-5 objectives. I had enough stuff to cover lots of area and on turn 4 I controlled every objective on the board. I was picking up objectives on both of our turns. It could be said I had reasonable luck  in getting the objectives, but I generally covered 4-5 of them in most turns.

·         The legendary deathstar units are a thing of the past at 1500pts. I can’t see how you can justify 450pts, for something like a land raider and a squad of assault terminators (about a 1/3^rd of your army) and still have enough stuff to get everywhere. Edit: my sternguard and librarian were 372pts!

·         The internet whinge about a lot of things! I was out gunned 8-1 in psychic phase. Did anything horrible happen in the psychic phase, no it didn’t? Power went off, powers failed, powers were nullified. Even rolling 3 dice for a warp charge one was failing. Additionally he got half of the charges from the zonethopes who used up a lot of points that could have been spent on other things.

·         The final score was 17-4 at the end of turn 4 where Alex conceded. His flyers were bombing around causing problems but nothing else was on the board. The flyers would have had to land to get the objectives when my fire power should have been enough to sort them out

·         Net lists are they any good. Alex played a strong net list that is doing the rounds. I think it would have been ok in the emperors will games. KP wise at the end I was 5-5. If we had carried on playing I had a lot of easy KPs that his flyers could have dealt with, but his venomthrope was about to go splay and his mawloc had one wound left.

 In review of my last few games. A solid core of marines is a hard army to beat. They have survivability and can manoeuvre very well. Boss Bludtoof has been playing something similar since 4^th but the older rules set and missions didn’t suit “balanced” armies. Now they do and we all have to adapt (apart from Boss Bludtoof!)

The aim of the game should not be to build a list that will be rock to your opponent’s scissors. I think the missions have produced a good levelling effect for this. Will we see the deathstar unit again? Yes, but not at 1500 and maybe not even 1750.

 

Pictures:

 

Setup-

Turn 2:

The End: 

 

 

 

January Over!

HOBBY OBJECTIVE UPDATE

So we are at the end of the First Month, and my hobby objectives received both a boost, and a massive hit this month. My Wife and Daughter have been away for the past 3 weeks, which has given me the opportunity to try and play catch-up as the SVA Organisers threw us the curve ball that we could bring up to FIVE different lists to their Campaign weekend this year! (FIVE!)

(In Fact, you can just about see in some of the corner of the shots of my grot tanks, and some of the upcoming Tyranid pictures Confirmation that when the Wife’s away, the Geek will play!)

Naturally, I am instantly inclined to want to do all of them differently, however, this does mean that my 2000 Point army objective has… grown somewhat! So a Big Thanks to LukoDakka, as without the assistance of his Airbrush I would have been knackered!

I am now fairly confident of getting done on time, but it will still be a tight squeeze, but I’ll get some progress up next week to show you all how it’s going (and to see my take on the Harpy and the Tervigon!)

GAMING OBJECTIVE UPDATE

Well, the fact that I currently have a permanent game table set up on my Dining room and the fact that I’ve wanted to keep myself busy has meant that I have pretty much *NAILED* my 40k Non-Tournament objectives already!
(and I even got a game of Fantasy in too!)

This Month I’ve played… (In No particular Order)
(and almost exclusively with exact, or rough variants of the Following List)

HQ - Hive Tyrant, Wings/Hive Commander/Old Adversary
Troop 1 – 30 x Termagants
Troop 2 – Tervigon, Glands/Sacs
Troop 3 – 15 x Genestealers, Sacs/Broodlord
Elite 1 – 3 x Hive Guard
Elite 2 – 3 x Zoanthrope
Fast 1 – 20 x Gargoyles, Glands/Sacs
Fast 2 – Harpy
Heavy 1 - Mawloc

Tyranids vs Black Templar. – 1750 Campaign
Against an always Tough opponent I was already about 150 points down in this game (due to campaign rules we are running) so it was going to be tough, but I thought I’d have a realistic chance at survival with the possibility of a sneaky win. Not-A-Chance. The Big Kahuna played a clever game, setting up as far away as possible and tailoring his list (only slightly) with lots of Big and little bug shooting. Getting into combat was hardly fun either as his army wide preferred enemy can be a big deciding factor!
GAME LOST

Tyranids vs Imperial Guard – 3500 (ish) Casual
A Casual non-campaign game that finished at 3am (ON A SCHOOL NIGHT?!) I’m not sure we got to decide a winner, but it was bloody and brutal, massive outflanking blob squads of Guard traded blows with Stealers and MC’s alike whilst Chimera’s attempted to dodge a hail of Zoanthrope and Hive Guard fire. In the end, we had to call it quits and head to bed, but it was great fun (and a real lesson that foot Guard can be very nasty!)

GAME DRAWN?

Tyranids vs Blood Angels – 1750 Campaign
A Campaign Game against LukoDakka, and one of those rare, fabulous games where the result is always in doubt and never certain right up until the end. Danté is still a beast and I yet again failed to nail him, that said I was very pleased with the performance of a lot of my bugs in this game, sadly with the exception of the Mawloc, who looks like he has such great potential on paper, but has let me down this month a little. Don’t get me wrong, he is great, and if he burrows underneath something (especially with the amount of Hits I’ve been getting recently!) he can cause some serious damage, HOWEVER, I believe he may suffer from ‘Vindicator Syndrome’ Great on paper, but if you take one, take multiple copies as one doesn’t necessarily cut the mustard.
GAME LOST

Tyranids vs Dark Eldar – 1750 Campaign
A Sly and accomplished Archon who had an extra 250 points on me… it was sheer Butchery. I got stomped flat claiming only 3 Kill points in the entire game as I was mercilessly gunned down and outmanoeuvred.
GAME LOST

Tyranids vs Dark Eldar – 1750 Casual
The Same general as above along with another Dark Eldar General, this game was closer, though I ultimately frustratingly had too much distance to cover, and failed to realise that Dawn of War is really *really* bad for a Tyranid list with a decent shooting loadout, and that perhaps the better option would have been to start completely off the board all rolling in on turn 1. (though even then, it’s still bad news against the dextrous Dark Eldar as they have enough long range weaponry to hurt your MC’s at distance, and Nail you with poison when you close)
GAME LOST

Tyranids vs Dark Eldar – 1500 Casual
Yes, Yes, I am a sucker for punishment! This game was closer than the previous 2 against Dark Eldar, and resulted ultimately in me running out of Troops in order to claim or contest an objective. I could possibly have still snuck a draw as the Mawloc had gone under on turn 5, but alas, there was no turn 6! Still a good game and against an opponent I don’t play against with particular frequency!
GAME LOST

Tyranids vs Necrons – 1750 Campaign
Ahh…. My first game against Doc’s mindless Horde!
Lesson number 1 : If you attack a Necron Unit.. KILL IT DEAD!
Lesson Number 2: Don’t split up your Tyranids! Focus fire, support each other, and overwhelm the enemy!
In the end this game was a draw, though potentially a losing draw from my perspective as I feel I was on the back foot and was finding the surviving Monolith (One lost to deep-strike) was proving to be a proper pain in the derriere!

GAME DRAWN

The annoying thing is that I knew Lesson 2 well beforehand, I just got carried away, a good learning experience though, and I think Necrons may turn out to be an incredibly tough opponent for many armies in the future.

Tyranids Vs Orks – 1750 Campaign
My Nids Vs Big Boss Bludtoof’s Orks, and he had 150 extra points!
I set up incredibly defensively (Learning my lesson from the Necron Game) and my Shooters were star’s in this game. The Hive Guard took a truck per turn, as did the Zoanthropes (When they weren’t instant killing Boss Bludtoof himself! In the end defense turned to attack as the Nids swarmed forward once the majority of the Boyz were transportless and carnage ensued. A Solid Victory, and Boss Bludtoof’s Bug Blindspot continues! (apparently, he has never beaten Nids…. And this may be an interesting topic to discuss in the future, our army blind-spots!)

GAME WON!



Finally, I got my first Fantasy game in as well!

Beastmen vs The Flower of Brettonia – 2000 – Casual
A Second game with Big Boss Bludtoof, this time Fantasy!

I used most of my Beastmen COlleciton for this, which involved some Minotaurs, a Great Bray Shaman, 2 other Bray Shaman’s, a borrowed Gorebull, and then a block each of Ungor, Gor and Bestigor.

It was a learning experience for both of us, but I knew it was going to be funny when the first turn the frenzied Minotaurs declared their mandatory charge against the Pegasus Knights (I was forced to as they were in range) and then, lo and behold, Mister Double 6 Turned up to the party and it all got messy from there! (Minotaurs who get themselves on a roll are N.A.S.T.Y.!)

There’s nothing much else left to say here really apart from what a lot of fun, I think I love Beastmen, their magic, and their almost complete lack of Armour, and I’m going to enjoy getting all those other Fantasy games in over the course of the Next 11 Months!

Finally, and as a Last aside, I also picked up a book the month Called "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline.

You will like this book if....

1) You are a Geek

2) You spent some of your Childhood in the 80's

3) You Like Playing Old School Computer Games

4) You like Roleplay

5) You Like playing MMO's

and if, perchance, you like ALL of those things (Hi!) then this book may just about be the best book you've ever read :)

and Finally, a Teaser of some things to come!

(In this picture you can see some of my Video tastes, an under-construction Harpy, an unpainted Tervigon Conversion, the hand of an Imperial Guard General, and the rest of my collection of Tyranids lovingly arranged on the table... )

...and I've got to be done by Mid-March you say!?

Hypa Out.

A Quiet 2011, Roll on 2012

Well,
It's been a genuinely quiet Hobby year for me, despite going to SVA (in March, and being 3rd best player and 2nd best Domain!) and having the Battle for Big Toof part 2 (where yet again Da orks prevailed!)

However, next year I think will need to be busier as my backlog of Work is spiralling out of control, this is a perennial problem for Toy Soldier Enthusiasts... and doubly so for those who like to build and play more than paint... (err that would be me then!)

Therefore as it's appraisal time in the workplace, it's also Objective Time in the Geekplace!


and with that in Mind here are my Hobby and Gaming objectives for 2012!

Mandatory Hobby Objectives.
1) Complete a 2000 Point Tyranid Army for SVA & Carnage
Deadline 17th March 2012
Stretch Target - Complete 3000 Points!

2) Sell the CHaos Space Marine Models I have (with the Exception of the Thousand Sons, which I will build and paint as an optional
Deadline 30th June 2012

3) Complete a 2000 Point Beastmen Army for Fantasy
Deadline 31st August 2012
Stretch Target - Paint every Beastman model I've got! (3000 ish points)

4) Paint Deathwing Army - 3000 Points
Deadline 31st December 2012
Stretch Target - October 31st 2012

Optional Hobby Objectives.
Build aforementioned Thousand Sons Models
Scratchbuild an Ork Stompa (in the same vein as My Dreadmob from IA8)
Scratchbuild Another Ork Stompa (Yes, I really do have plans for 2!)
Build up all remaining Ork Models (approx 60 x Shoota Boys, 10 x Flashgit Conversions, 9 x Nob Bikers + Biker Boss)

It would also be really great to try to do a good enough Job of My Tyranids to get a Best Army Nomination at Either SVA or Carnage, so if this happens I'll consider it a Massive Bonus and I won't mind if I don't (because I appreciate there are much much better Painters out there!


and finally of course... to update this Blog more often, A Prime example of which would be the 12 x Grot Tanks and Fighta Bomm I scratchbuilt/converted for our Big Toof Game in October which I *Still* haven't posted! (See them in the first month of Next year!)

Gaming Objectives
1) Be in Possession of a Positive or Neutral Win/Loss Ratio at SVA.
I know Tyranids are considered to be behind the Curve, but I genuinely believe they can put up a good scrap in most games.

2) Be in Possession of a Positive Win/Loss Ratio at Carnage
However I perform at SVA, a week later, I should be doing better!

3) Play at Least 12 Non-Tournament Games of 40k in 2012.
This is a modest 1 per month total, but only because I hope to try and play more fantasy in 2012

4) Play at Least 12 Games of Fantasy in 2012
Compared to my Zero in 2012, this would also give me the incentive to get the Beastmen done!


So, if I reach all stretch targets (Yeah right!) This should leave me with only a 2000 Point Dark Eldar army to build and paint, 3000 Points of Dark Angels to paint, oh... and about 4000 More points of Tyanids to paint! (and let's not forget the permanent backlog of Orks!)
(and they call it Progress?)

Of course, the main thrust, like any Hobby year, will be to Enjoy it, so if I fall short in some areas, provided I have fun doing it, this will be the most important factor, becaue if you don't enjoy your Hobby...


...Why the Devil are you doing it?


:)

Hypaspist Out!