1850 Battle Report: Dark Angels vs. Tau

Brother C here with another Battle Report.

This time is my new favorite army, Ravenwing, against the new Tau. This is my first game against the new Tau book and I'm hoping to learn much about how the army works and what they are really bringing to the table as well as hopefully learn what NOT to do against them, heh. 

Game was 1850, The Scouring, Diagonal deployment. 

My list looked something like this:  (a version of my 2k list without the Eldar Allies)

Sammael
Command squad with dakka pole in land raider
9 man Black Knight squad with 2 nade launchers
2x plasma bikers with attack bike with multi-melta
2x flamer bikers with attack bike with multi-melta
dark shroud
dark talon

Very elite army, very fast army, lots of dakka. The dark talon usually zooms in the turn it comes on from reserve and hovers near the raider/dark shroud to pick up the pole and the cover saves

Tau list: (this will be a close estimate from what I remember)

commander and unit with like 8 marker drones
ethereal
6 fire warrior squads
3x 2 man crisis suit teams
2 man broadside squad
squad of armor drones
6 man path finder squad
2x hammerheads

He will roll, deploys in the corner, I deploy as far forward as I can get. No night fight.

I scout up, move the black knights around the side where his suits and broadsides are and away from the fire warrior barrage.  Plan is to shove the raider into those and flank with the attack bikes and the black knights.  I do not steal.

Turn 1: My blackknight squad gets mowed down from missiles salvos from just about everything. He takes down all but one biker and Sammy. Ouch. Picks off a biker here or there with fire warriors but most are out of range. He throws his command marker lights at the raider, and fails to hit with one hammerhead. Go go rolling 2, 1s in a row, and fails to pen with the other.

I retaliate and take down 4 marker drones and put 2 wounds on the commander from sammys plasma cannon (too far out to get a good assault into the suits)  raider moves up and removes a suit squad, bikes remove path finders and 2 fire warrior squads. Some other deaths here and there, everyone passes leadership thanks to ethereal bubble.

turn 2. More of the same.  Finishes off the lone black knight and puts 2 wounds on Sammy. (completely out of los I might add behind a bastion). He takes down some bikers here or there, fails to do anything to the raider again.

Dark Talon comes in for me. Sammy moves up to assault the broad side squad, shoots into it but scatters off. Storm bolter does nothing. He loses too more squads of fire warriors and commander has no more drones and just a single would left.  Sammy charges into the broad sides, everything over watches and kills him.  Lone flamer bike takes down a fire warrior squad and assaults and finishes off the ethereal. 

Turn 3. He pretty much cleans up most of the rest of the bikers. Starts ignoring the raider and is putting the str 10 shots into the attack bikes.

Raider just stays put with the dark talon and dark shroud hovering behind. Lighting up more fire warriors and suits. He is making saves like crazy and I'm running out of bodies.

Turn 4. More of the same, just some shuffling around. He throws some wounds on the attack bikes, but they are holding strong, I pull one back to capture an objective in my deployment zone.

I manage to take down all the remaining fire warriors.

Turn 5: he takes down all the remaining attack bikes (one was threatening his 4 point objective) save the one in my deployment zone. And finally takes down the raider.

Dark talon moves onto an objective in his area. Dark shroud has line breaker. We finally take down the commander and a few misc. suits but DA just has nothing left in the tank.

Game ends on turn 5 with DA holding a 3 and a 2 point objective. Tau holding zero objectives. We both got warlord, and I have line breaker on him. He took first blood. 

Great game, got to try out the raider/talon/shroud combo. Which worked very nice. My opponent (dan) should have probably tried to knock the shroud out early with marker lights but he didn't really know what they did and he had some many more threatening targets. I was very surprised how easily he took down the black knights. I think I will play with their formation. I tried to run them as a larger unit to hopefully absorb some shots, but still get there, and boy did they not do anything but drop. I need to get them in a few more games at that squad size to really know what I want to do with them. I'm rethinking the eldar allies as well. I could have had a full 2 squads of bikes (minus the attack bikes). And taking plasma bikes was a mistake. I should just take melta and flamers as most of the time, they will be just using the bolters, and the black knights really have all the plasma I need.

Thoughts on the new tau:

Simply put, they are absolute brutality. They had to do nothing but sit there and just unload everything they had, over and over and over. Dan could have used his ignore cover marker lights to better effect in my opinion but it simply does not matter, there is so much shooting taking place that I don't even know where to begin. I thought I could roll up and sit back at 24" and just trade shots for shots, but he was winning that fight hands down.  If he did not have the high point objectives in his deployment area, I could have made him come out of hiding and probably been more competitive. Take him down piece meal.  The strategy worked though, bum rush up the middle, park at range and unload with the dakka pole and capture objectives late. Looking forward to facing dan again when he has some of the new toys and knows what is coming. Great game man, finally got to play ya! Looking forward to the next one.

Brother C out

Absolution Campaign Starting this Saturday

LWG Presents - 40k Story Driven Absolution Campaign 2013

Hey guys! We are coming to it! less than a week left until the War of Absolution kicks off! Get ready for the event of the summer! In preparation for this coming Saturday and the kick-off to the campaign we just wanted to make sure you had all the info you need to get started.

First off, as a reminder here is what you need to get registered and ready to fight on Saturday!

* 2,000 Point painted army - 3 colors minimum and something on the base!

* Your entry free! We have spoken to a bunch of you about getting it in as we go etc. You know who you are and what we have talked about. The main this is we want people to participate. We greatly appreciate all of you and we will go over the details of payment on Saturday - but remember... its $60 and $20 off if you did the terrain entry.

* Your terrain entry if you did one!

* Your Strike Cruiser Army List! *** This is the big one! I have included in this post my Strike Cruiser, properly formatted for your viewing pleasure! It is an example of the way you should be formatting your Strike Cruiser list that will help us out immensely. Feel free to use mine and edit it if you want to! If you don't know how to use excel don't worry we can format it for you, but at the very least you need to bring a list of everything you are bringing in your Strike Cruiser, please have it typed up at least! Refer to the Strike Cruiser rules for more detailed info about this and don't hesitate to ask questions!

Come Saturday, war is upon us... let the war begin!

Berks Spring Assault 4 Review

Berks Spring Assault 4 Review:

Brother C here with another tourney review. We made the trek up to Reading, PA for Berks Spring Assault 4, which is marketed as a Warhammer party with a tourney. Usually this event is marked but crazy missions, crazy lists, good friends and tons and tons of raffle prizes.

The venue:

This is by FAR my biggest gripe. We were in a large ballroom with an elevated dining area and bar. The main ball room was filled, absolutely filled with tables.  When everyone arrived, since the room was so packed, we all migrated into the dining area with all our carrying cases, display boards, and just general stuff. About 30 mins or so before the rounds were supposed to start, after everyone had gotten out their armies and were settling in, we were informed that we would have to move all of the stuff back into the main room and clear the dining area for eating. Needless to say, the main ballroom was now STUFFED to the gills. There was hardly room to move in that place. If you had to go to your oppponents side of the table, you had to squeeze past 4-5 bulky bodies on each side. All the display boards had to go onto the ground unless you were using a shoebox (yes at 1k, you can actually do that) which is also very annoying and frustrating. There is no room for dice, templates, lists, mission papers, anything.

Secondly, the food at the place was meh, but whatever, I'm not going to nitpick food, we should just order pizzas and sodas and call it done, but I'm sure there is some deal with the venue that includes meals, etc.  supposedly there were drink specials that were not announced. But the service of the place was really poor. Any time I went to buy an opponent or a friend a drink, the bartender was nowhere to be found. Talking like 5-10 minutes to even take my order. And there was always some gripe about asking for free water or something. Just overall such a downer.

It was sad because last year we were in the larger ballroom, which had tons and tons of space to spread out and this year was the completely opposite, everything seemed so stuffed.

Vendors:

I was a little sad that I did not see terrain for sale this year. I also try to throw my raffle tickets and money into terrain for the club. I made the mistake last year of not purchasing any which I was hoping to do this year. Even something small. There was a store open selling mostly GW stuff, which was nice and even a 10% discount at lunch. Not bad. I would have done a 10% discount after the raffles, so people can see what they didn't win and go over and drop some cash, specially since we had a large vat of empty time between the raffles and the presentation of the final awards.

Missions:

I was nervous about the mission. Last year, I got boned hard in one of the missions because it was not fully though through. The mission was about traitors. There was a traitor in your troops section and your opponent go to choose which model was the traitor. I had to give up a terminator apothecary while my opponent gave up a DE warrior. Lame. But its fine, I can deal with a handicap, the issue I had was the mission objectives. There were 2. Kill the traitor, and kill the unit that the traitor is in (had to be in the unit it was taken from originally) which is just BAD BAD mission writing. Its basically the exact same objective. Kill specific unit, win the mission. How about throwing in objectives or quarters or something that if my opponent decides to completely hide in a corner, he can't win. But oh no, that's exactly what he did. There was a no window building with only one tiny entrance facing my opponents side of the board, off in one of the corners, guess where he put the unit and the traitor. I could not even get line of sight to the unit the entire game.

End rant

This year, the missions were fantastic. One was just straight up victory points. Love it. One was WE got to choose which of the categories was scoring (heavy, Fast Attack, or Elites), one had to do with warlords and getting line breaker, homeland security (basically reverse of line breaker), a couple missions with multiple objectives including a nova format one.  Very nice, nothing crazy and wonky just simple, good times. Excellent mission writing. I would have thrown a relic in too, but can't complain.

Boards:

As always, amazing boards. Just great. It would be cool to make it a requirement for club's supplying boards to have their name or logo on it somewhere, would have liked to give credit where credit is due.

Prize Support:

Very nice as always, not as great as last year, but can't always repeat when companies give you hundreds of dollars of free transports for prizes. Heck, I was the last person to go up to claim a prize and there was still quite a selection to choose from.

Raffles were equally as great, would have loved to know how much Brandon T dropped on those raffles as he came home with probably 6 or 7 of them including a titan. Great job of splitting the drawings up into 2 parts.

Time:

Rounds were good, plenty of time for the most part, although I didn't play any orks and tyranids. Heh. My only suggestion is to get a projector that we can project the matchups and the time remaining in the round on the wall. They did this up at BFS and it was great.

And the elephant in the room… the HUGE delay between the final round and the results. According to the schedule we were supposed to be finishing up around 7 and I bet we didn't get out until after 10pm. And 80% of that time was just spent sitting around waiting for tabulations. Not gonna rant too much about that, software malfunction, whatever. You guys have to work that out, but you already know that.  Would be nice to be able to let the wives know what time to expect us home is all.

Comp and Competition:

I thought the level of competition this year was better than last year. Which is a compliment to both the comp rules for the event and 6th edition. There seems to be a balance across the board. Yes, there were some strong builds but I did not hear anyone complaining like we heard last year. No one took draigo and paladins at 1k, no one took flaying monstrous creatures, no one took an unkillable seer council. And you know what, I think everyone had a better time because of it.

I think young bloods needs to be increased to 16 years old. I think only one 14 year old or under was at the event.  Maybe next year will be different though.

In closing, it was a fantastic event, we had a bunch of first timers from our club at the event and they all seemed to have a blast. Where else can you spend an entire day, getting 4 quality games in with great people, without an entire weekend commitment? Great great event, and I just want to give a shout out to the guys because I came in 3rd place for appearance, but the judges ruled that the other guy had won. They later informed me that it was so close in voting, that they didn't feel it was right to snub me on a judges call at this event and they let me pick from the table scraps at the prize table. You guys didn't have to do that, but it is MUCH appreciated. There wasn't much on the table left that I wanted so I picked up a coupon for the new Tau flyer for DantheMan.

Looking forward to next year's event. 

A full battle summary of my games is coming in the near future.

Brother C