Tournament Summary

Last night I arrived home from a party at 3:00 AM, baked out of my mind. Of course, this is not exactly the best way to prepare for a tournament.

The tourney started at 10:00. So I wake up and arrive and I was basically a zombie. In my first game I was half-asleep with a nasty weed hangover. I played against Tau and all I remember is that I phased out. Can't really comment since I have no idea what happened.

Lunch break I have a coffee and an Advil which seemed to fix my brain.

Second round I was against mech Marines with 2 vindicators. The primary was 4-objective seize ground and the secondary was to kill more units than your opponent in CC. I had great rolls against his vehicles, destroying almost all of them, while his Vindicators were simply unable to penetrate my Monoliths. Ended up with a major victory for me.

Third round was against a fluff-oriented foot Daemonhunters army. Primary was table quarters and I can't remember what the secondary was. Almost killed everything but finished with a major win.

All three of my opponents were great and I had a blast. Of course, small tournaments don't really matter but I've got to remember to not go partying the night before the GTs.

Quick Half-assed Update

^Get it?^

O hai everyone.

I haven't really been posting very much these days. No excuses, I just don't really feel like posting. I've got plenty of ideas for things to post though. : P

You probably noticed I added a poll feature. The results were very interesting. Perfect spread between 2000, 1850-1750 and 1500 was not what I was expecting. I thought 1500 would be favoured less.

I'm going to a 1500 point tournament on Sunday, bringing the usual Necrons. Here's my list:

Deceiver
2x 10 Warriors
2x 3 Destroyers
5 Scarabs
2 Monoliths

At 1500 I think I'd prefer a Destroyer Lord over the Deceiver so I could get more Scarabs and Destroyers, but I don't have a Destroyer Lord model, so I'll be running this.

EDIT: Just found this site; it's a cool mathhammer type thing for various 40k weapons. Worth taking a look at if you haven't before.

Battle Report: Necrons vs. Space Marines

Pre-game Thoughts
This will be a quick and succint battle report of a game I played yesterday on Vassal. It was my second test game with the 2000 points Necron list. The first game was against Space Wolves where I got pretty lucky and tabled him. My opponent this game was running an odd but powerful Space Marines list. He had:

Vulkan
Pedro
5 scouts w/ cloaks and sniper rifles
5 scouts w/ cloaks and sniper rifles
10 sternguard, all with combi-meltas in a pod w/ locator beacon
10 sternguard, all with combi-meltas in a pod w/ locator beacon
10 sternguard, all with combi-meltas in a pod w/ locator beacon

2 speeders vulkan-style MM/HF
2 speeders MM/HF
2 speeders MM/HF

Mission was sieze ground (5 objectives); deployment was Dawn of War. The objectives were crammed together in the centre of the table.

One look and it's pretty clear to an experienced player how the list works. I suppose it could catch someone off guard if they hadn't played against this style of list. It's pretty tough and it can dish out a strong alpha strike with 36 twin-linked melta shots. I knew I couldn't let those hit my warriors.

Deployment
With this in mind I won the roll for first turn and gave it to my opponent. It meant he would get the side with more objectives but it was worth it because denying him the drop melta alpha strike was critical. He placed his scouts in cover on an objective on the left side of the board (from my perspective) with the speeders rolling on turn 1.

I deployed nothing. Scarabs would zip on turn 1 (as a bait), monoliths deep strike. Everything else in reserve.

Turn 1
He drops 2 pods, one with Vulkan + sternguard and one with Pedro + sternguard in the centre of the table, on the objectives. Notably, he didn't combat squad them. I meant to ask him why after the game but forgot. Speeders zoom in behind them.

I put my scarabs behind a hill on my right as a bait. Everything else is in reserve.

Turn 2
He plays it smart and doesn't take the bait. He drops his third pod in the middle. Vulkan's squad is on the left, pedro's is on the right and the regular sternguard are behind them. He zooms one speeder squadron down my left flank while the others stay with his vanguard.

I get both monoliths, both warrior squads, both tomb spyders, one destroyer and one immortal squad. My Monoliths deepstriked onto 2 objectives, pushing his guys out of the way. I put the destroyers and spyders in the middle of my deployment zone, and immortals on the left. Scarabs turbo-boosted forward with warriors behind them on the right. Everything had cover. Destroyers killed a speeder on the left after he passes 11 out of 12 cover saves.

Turn 3
He blasts my monoliths with melta fire, destroying one and putting 4 weapon destroyed results on the other (which hardly make a difference) and stunning it.

I get the rest of my reserves. My shooty Necrons (immortals and destroyers) are all on my left flank. My assault units (monstrous creatures) go up the middle straight for the objectives but they're still out of charge range. Scarabs move in for the assault while the warriors remain on my right flank (I'm waiting to teleport them onto the objectives). In shooting I reduce Vulkan's squad to 4 models and the Deceiver makes the regular sternguard squad run away. I also immobilize his lone speeder on the left. Scarabs assault Vulkan's squad.

Turn 4
His Sternguard squad can't regroup because my Monolith is within 6" so they keep running but not off the board. His units are out of range of my Necrons so he kills a Tomb Spyder.

I turbo-boost one Destroyer squadron towards his scouts to contest the objective next turn. I shoot Pedro's squad down to two models and they flee. The Tomb Spyder joins the Vulkan vs Scarabs assault (scarabs are almost wiped out by now). One Warrior squad on the right moves forward to capture an objective while the other moves closer to the Monolith.

Turn 5
All of his dudes regroup. One speeder squadron moves in to contest my objective, while Pedro and a Sternguard vet capture another. He shoots at the turbo-boosting destroyers, killing them. In the assault he wipes out both the Scarab squad and the Tomb Spyder.

It's the bottom of five and he has 2 objectives while I have zero. I move my Monolith towards Pedro's objective, contesting it. One Warrior squad portals through the Monolith and captures another objective. Destroyers move forward to contest the scouts' objective next turn. I shoot everything at the Speeder squadron contesting my right objective, killing both. In the assault the Deceiver wipes out Vulkan's squad but Vulkan stays alive.

I have 2 objectives and he has 1. The game continues.

Turn 6
He zooms another speeder squadron to contest my objective on the right. He has very few units left at this point. In the assault the Deceiver whiffs and misses Vulkan with all four attacks.

In shooting I kill one of his speeders but he makes tons of cover saves so the other one survives. I assault his scouts with my destroyers and tie them up.

I have 1 objective, he has 0. Game ends.

Postgame
There are several ways to defeat a Deep Striking army and reserving a large portion of your army is one method. It takes their best strength away from them (alpha strike). Going second really helps as well. In the case of sternguard, they are slow and vulnerable after they've been dropped.

My opponent played well, dropping in the middle of the board. It meant he would be out of range of my Necrons, but that's better than being slaughtered on the turn I rolled onto the board. There really wasn't much he could do without transports for his Sternguard. Drop Pod armies are not flexible so they can't adapt if faced with someone who knows how to beat them. Podding Sternguard is great on paper but doesn't hold up that well in real games.

At the end of the game I had lost:
-Scarabs
-Tomb Spyders
- Monolith
-3 Destroyers

He had lost:
-4 speeders + 1 immobilized
-about 25 Sternguard
-Vulkan

Conquest GT & 2000 pts Necrons list!

Okay so two pieces of news to start off with.

1) I have decided to take my Necrons to both summer GTs. If I'm going to convince people that Necrons can win, I have to practice what I preach. I'll still be working on my Orks though.

2) I have found the Conquest GT rules. I was pleasantly surprised that there is no Comp and it's 2000 points (both of these are unusual for my area). Rules can be found here. Battle is worth 100, sports is worth 55 and appearance is worth 50.

So that means I have to make a 2000 point Necron list, a points value that I'm not familiar with. My 1500 and 1750 lists are already set in stone, but at 2000 there are several different ways I could go. I've decided to run a more MSU-style list using Immortals (conversion time) and Warp Spyders. Here's what I'm going to be playtesting for now.

HQ
[300] The Deceiver

Elites
[168] 6 Immortals
[168] 6 Immortals

Troops
[180] 10 Warriors
[180] 10 Warriors

Fast Attack
[150] 3 Destroyers
[150] 3 Destroyers
[120] 10 Scarab Swarms

Heavy Support
[235] Monolith
[235] Monolith
[110] 2 Tomb Spyders

Total: 1996 Points

What is Chuck Norris' Statline & Rules?

So in an effort to create the illusion that I'm actually putting some work into this blog, let's try this:

What would the statline, special rules and wargear of Chuck if he were to be played in 40k?

Hopefully I'll get around to making real posts soon. : D

Codex Ranking--Part I of II

In this post I am going through my choices and explaining why they are ranked where they are.

Imperial Guard
Mech IG has absolutely ludicrous fire power. It can blast half of an enemy army off the board on turn 1. Additionally, it has all the small things that can really help in some games. Part of this is from allied DH inquisitors which will no longer be available a few months from now. There is also the reserve manipulation abilities of the army which make reserving your entire army against an alpha-strike a very risky manouvre. On top of all that, IG has the ability to field rediculous amounts of AV12 vehicles, making it one of the most resilient armies because it can take losses and still deal out the pain.

Space Wolves and Blood Angels
I haven't done enough playtesting yet with the Blood Angels to really know if they are better than Space Wolves. I am planning on doing a comparison between these two excellent codices in a later post. Both armies combine speed, shooting and assault into their game. From the lists I've seen on the interwebz, BA tend to be faster while SW are usually shootier.

Eldar
I may have ranked these guys too high because they are a bit of a one-trick pony. With everyone gearing up to kill the AV12 spam of IG, Eldar mech got caught in the crosshairs. However, mech Eldar still excels at objective games because of their speed and the durability of DAVU Holo-Falcons. They are also a hard counter to assault-based armies because they have the speed to zoom away from most deathstar units. Foot Eldar is similar to Tau: good at killing but awful at moving out and holding objectives.

Orks
Orks have, in my opinion, the most durable troops in the game. They can pack more T4 wounds into an army than anyone else. They basically have two very strong builds: Battlewagon and Foot. I used to play Battlewagons but I sold that army because I didn't like the style of play, and now I'm working on my Foot army. Trukks are easy Kill Points and don't carry enough Boyz to be effective, while bikers are overcosted. Ghazghkull is a beast in CC. People will argue that he is only effective for the one turn where he Waaaghs but my response is that he only needs one turn. Anything else he kills during the game is just gravy.

Space Marines
The Vanilla Marine codex has only a couple advantages over the Wolves and Vampires. First off is Null Zone, which is IMO the best of any Chapter's psychic powers. Then they have combat tactics which is an underrated but extremely useful special rule in the hands of a good player. Combat tactics is what makes foot marines an actually decent army. Not amazing but it can still compete. There are also a couple little things like the Ironclad and thunderfire which are not available to the other codices.

Chaos Space Marines
Like it or not, Lash of Submission is still an excellent psychic power. I'd say it's still the best psychic power in the game. Combine it with Oblits, one of the best (if not the best) long-range unit in the game, and Chaos are a great shooting army with decent CC punch. We all know the list; not much else to say here.

Witch Hunters
Ahh, witch hunters. There are two ways to play them: shooty with 3 exorcists and inducted guard, or Immo/rhino rush. Then you can also do a hybrid army involving exorcists and sisters with rhinos. All are decent builds but all have their weaknesses.

Dark Eldar
DE epitomize the term "glass hammer". They can give a punch but can't take one. The only way for them to survive is to fill up the FOC with 12 vehicles. Lately we have seen Dashofpepper do very well with Dark Eldar, showing that they can still compete with those brand new 3rd and 4th edition codices.

Tyranids
I've never played Nids and never will, but I feel sorry for the die-hard Tyranid fans. They still only have one viable build (Nidzilla), and it got slightly better than the old codex. It retains its classic weakness, lack of long-range anti-tank. Hive Guard are the one exception which means everyone is taking them. So now we are back to where we started with every Nid player running the exact same thing.

Chaos Daemons
Daemons are the best close-combat army in the game, with a variety of tough units. They also have decent support fire to pop tanks for the CC-beast to eat the guys inside. So why am I ranking them so low? You've probably guessed, Daemonic Assault. To be honest it cripples them too badly. Deep striking is a fairly easy tactic to defeat if you have good bubblewrap units, and any shooty army should have them. Others, like Eldar, can just fly away because they're too fast for most Daemons to catch them.

Black Templars
Ahh, the good old Black Templars. The codex is still held afloat by their Furious Charging, Prefered Enemy assault terminators and their ability to spam land raider crusaders. If you can handle the LRCs, you win. If you can't, you lose.

Daemonhunters
With DH you pretty much have to go down the route of LRC-spam. Sometimes an IG platoon is included for bubblewrap and additional firepower. The classic smoke launchers (weapons can only glance) are a nice bonus and DH get a better crusader for 258 points than marines get for 275.

Necrons
The Crons are still kept alive by 3 units, The Deceiver, Monoliths and Scarabs. Those three units are fantastic, while the rest of the codex is pretty much crap. The Crons have some glaring weaknesses in the tournament metagame. Among other things, they cannot deal with lash+oblit chaos or seer coucils.

Tau Empire
I like the Tau a lot but they really got screwed by 5th edition. While they can pump out a lot of firepower, it isn't enough to beat the really shooty armies like IG, CSM and Eldar. It's also very easy to pin them down in a corner, because they have no counter-charge units (kroot are too weak) and no real way to move out and capture objectives. The whole army suffers from morale problems so you'll often see vast amounts of units run off the board after taking a few casualties. BS3 is a big problem, along with lack of psychic defense. They need a new codex badly.

Dark Angels
Dark Angels are like codex space marines, minus everything fun and interesting. Their assault termies suck, they have crappy psychic powers, no chapter tactics and everything is 10% more expensive. Their only good unit is the AV14 land speeder. While awesome, it doesn't compensate for the rest of the codex. Their bikers can get a first turn charge but for 40-50 points per model it isn't worth it.

Part II will answer the comments and explain why I don't like the tier system and a couple other details.