Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Tau and 'Nids vs. Imperial Guard - The unfinished Game

Russell ('Nids), Max (iGuard), and I had our usual Tuesday 40k Matchup, this time without out illustrious Space Marine Biker Captain friend. The typical tuesday army smash is 1500pt per person 2v2, but since Matt wasn't going to be coming, Max boosted his to 2000pts, and both Russell and I took 1000pt lists.

I took the 1000pt list I posted earlier (check under '1000pt', or 'Army List'), thinking I'd give the Kroot one more shot at being relevant to my general army tactics. Heh.

Max's iGuard army consisted of a confusing platoon of mortar squads, infantry squads with laz-mortar-things, at least 2 chimeras, 3 Armored Sentinels, 3 Leman Russes, and a command squad with a Master of the Fleet and a Mortar Commander-thingy. I'm not entirely sure what was going on there, I just knew that I had a target rich environment, and to be happy with that.

My ally Russell's Tyranid force consisted of his 1000pt usual - 2 squads of warriors, 2 big squads of some kind of gaunts, 2 Carnifex - nicknamed Jake (a Sniper-Fex, notably the only close-to-WYSIWYG model on the table other than 1 of my fire warriors - you know, the only one with arms) and Jimmy (a horrendously potent Devo-Fex) - and 2 squads of outflanking Genestealers.


Rather than do another annihalation mission (we were all pretty much sick of those recently), we re-rolled, and ended up with standard deployment and 4 objectives (2 on his side, 2 on ours). The most interesting of the 7 pieces of terrain was the "warp field" - a big chunk of purple cloth that we decided gave a random, dice-rolled cover save each turn to anyone being shot through it, and did funky-random stuff to anything stupid/daring enough to chance going through it (which none of us were brave enough to try). Max won the roll and let us deploy first, fortunately failing his 'seize the iniciative' roll.

The first 3 rounds were brutal - EVERY army was a 'shooty' army, so mostly we just all slowly advanced and shot a ludicrous amount of shots at each other so we could displace the enemy off of a bunker enough for a chimera/devilfish to sweep in a and claim/contest it. Confusing.

What was more confusing was when we were told the store would be closing in 7 minutes - right in the middle of turn 3. Since our illustrious aforementioned friend works at said game store, we were used to just staying later and having him lock up when we were done. However, this was not the case, and turn 3 progressed in the span of give or take 4 minutes, with only the important shooting/moving/whatsits happening.

End Result - we controlled 1 uncontested bunker to the other 3 contested ones. There was a LOT of this game that hadn't been played, and had it actually gone another hour through turn 6, his slightly superior tank force would have probably wiped most of our tanks/the last fex out of existence. Despite some early victories with railguns, my Hammerhead was already imobilized by turn 3, and the broadside barely surviving the abusive treatment of 3 tanks per turn thanks to a 2+ save and nothing higher than AP3 with line of sight to it. The sheer quantity of template weapons Max was dropping each turn was astounding.

None of us considered this game finished, and as such I'm not even counting it for a win. At best, this was a Draw for me, as I'm sure that, the way things were going, I wasn't going to last much longer. Russell's army wasn't unscathed (he lost 3 gaunts and Jake), but mine was taking a brutal beating, even in the first 2 turns.

It did give me more good experience on how Guard tend to operate, though, which will go a long way towards the development of my Anti-Guard list. Hopefully I'll be able to finish a game soon :D


Also - Kroot are still worthless.

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