Saturday, January 10, 2015

Warhammer 40K - Orks + Aquila Stronghold - a bit of a comeback....

Hi everyone,

We have an update to share from two battles over the New Year's weekend.  We played Mr. L Friday in an 1850 point 40K battle.  And, we played Mr. M on Sunday in a 1500 point battle.

The theme of our list?

"The Orks have taken the Aquila Stronghold!  And, with grots manning the huge cannon take on all challengers!"

Quick net:  We lost to Mr. L and his Tyranids -- but it was close!  And, thanks to an early game-ending dice-roll, we squeaked out a win over Mr. M's Space Marines!

Our list....
- Lot more boyz; lot fewer toyz.
- And, we added the Aquila Stronghold
- Against Mr. L we used the Morkanaut; against Mr. M, we trimmed down (to hit 1500 points) and pulled the Morkanaut out.

Here was our thinking:
- We needed more boyz so that point for point we could absorb damage better than we could with large, expensive vehicles
- We needed higher weapon strength weapons -- so rokkit launchas and kustom mega blastas instead of big shootas
- And, we needed some serious firepower to force our opponent to come to us so that we didn't have to charge across the landscape to try to close into close contact

Mr. L's Army -- Tyranids!
- This was our first battle against Tyranids - and man-oh-man did we learn a lot!
- Mr. L is always nice with suggestions - and pointed out that we needed lots of small arms fire to take out his psychic models.  The number of psychic dice Mr. L got to through at us was tough!

The Battle:

- We arranged 5 objectives -- then Mr. L deployed, followed by us.
- Mr. L explained that he wanted a Tyranid army which created the image of alien Tyranids attacking from all sides at once -- a true alien swarm.  So, he had some in reserve which would out-flank from different sides.
- We placed the big cannon in one corner - and probably should have placed more things right by it.  (Units which weren't near the cover-fire of the gun didn't last very long.)

Here's the basic layout.  Aquila Stronghold with Cannon on our rear left corner....

It looks very scenic - but putting our Smasha Gun and set of Ork Boyz in the back right corner didn't work out very well....

- One early thing which didn't go so well was that squad in the back right getting the "horror" psychic thing put on them - failing their morale and Mob Rule - and running backward off the board *bummer*!!
- In fact that "horror" thing pinned a number of our units and slowed us down quite a bit early on....

Here comes the Pink Ork's Morkanaut!

- We tried the Pink Ork's Morkanaut up the middle.  The long range weapons did do some damage - softened things up - but would you believe that the Morkanaut lost in combat to the Tyranids Warlord "Old One Eye!"

Lots of dice rolled by Mr. L's Tyranids!!!

- Mr. L rolled a number of dice against us several times.  He mentioned that he hit a personal record against us - rolling something like 82 or 84 shots at us.  (This was how the Trukk blew up....)

Ghazghkull Thraka and his unit finally enjoy close combat!

- Toward the end of the battle, good old GT and his unit of Ork Boyz got into close combat and were effective.  The meganobs unit also did a good job at slowing down Mr. L.

The ultimate showdown - Ghazghkull Thraka against Old One Eye!

- The battle wound up with Ghazghkull Thraka against Old One Eye.  And, holy smokes - did we meet our match there.  It wasn't really even close.  Old One Eye really worked over GT.  (Next time we'll have to soften up Old One Eye first!)
- So, we ended up losing the battle - we didn't have any units to hold on to points.  There was a brief moment where we had shot Mr. L off of objectives and could have tied - but the game didn't end there - instead continued to that point where GT lost giving Mr. L warlord points against us as well as objectives....

Questions after the battle....

- Is it OK (or fair) to place a fortification on top of an objective?  Seems like this shouldn't be allowed by the rules (unless both players use the tactic equally)....  Well, chatting with Mr. M, he was quite sure that the answer to this one is "no, not OK to do this per the rules."

Mr. M's Army -- Space Marines!
- We knew from experience that one of Mr. M's favorite lists includes drop-pods - which often get right into our rear-guard and cause lots of trouble.  So, we were hoping that the AQ with Cannon would help us with that.
- The battle was the one with only a single objective ("the relic")....
- In this case, Mr. M dropped in right by the cannon so as to quickly try to take it out.

Mr. M drops his Dreadnought and Veterans in right next to the Cannon!

- We got lucky in the early rounds - and kept the cannon in operation.

First GT's unit attacked the Veterans (while taking lots of fire!!!)

Then we focused on that Dreadnought!

- Ghazghkull and his unit munched through troops and then the dreadnought dropped in close by the drop-pod.
- Soon, though ,long range attacks by Mr. M had damaged the cannon (though the building stood).
- Mr. M and his units captured the relic - and things were looking grim.
- But, we were just barely able to get Ghazghkull's unit into close-combat with the units holding the relic - and drive them off - defeating his warlord in the process

The final scene - Ghazghkull Thraka's unit (center) worked through Mr. M's unit holding "the Relic" and then defeated his biker Warlord

- Pretty sure that if the game had continued another turn we were smoked - but a lucky role for us - it ended with GT and his unit right on top of the relic.

 

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