First tournament of 2010.

I partook in a tournament hosted by BlueMoon this past saturday. Now it wasn't my finest hours but I had fun and was glad to be part of it.

The scoring for the tournament was slightly skewed, with 10 points of composition, 7 for painting, and 3 for sportsmanship. Now with the comp score I think lies one of my faults.


Now the Comp scoring went something like this.
3 Points: No Unique Characters
3 Points: At least 35% of your points are in troops.
2 Points: No more than 35% of your points spent in any one non-troop category.
1 Point - No more than 1 of any non-troop unit choice.
1 Point - No more than 3 of the same unit choice.
Now one problem this caused me was I misunderstood the second to last point, I thought it meant only one fast attack, one Heavy and one Hq. What it actually meant was not to take two of the same unit, aka I took one Hive Tyrant, but could/should not take a second one.

And now that along with not having many of the new models up to standard, gave me a not so competitive list. It would have been a decent list in the old codex, but now it wasn't worth its points, and I noticed it.

So here is my list.
HQ
Hive Tyrant; Old Adversary, Leech Essence, Paroxysm, 2 x Scything Talons, Wings

Elite
Zoanthropes x3

Troops
gaunts x15; Spinefists
Tervigon; Catalyst, Cluster Spines, Toxin Sacs
Hormagaunts x20; Toxin Sacs
Genestealers x12
Warriors x5; Scything Talons, Rending Claws, and Toxin Sacs
Warriors x6; Scything Talons, Deathspitters, Barbed Strangler

Fast Attack
Gargoyles x15; Toxin Sacs, Adrenal Glands

Heavy Support
Carnifex; Twin-Linked Brainleech worms, Stranglethorn cannon

Now the funny thing, even though I lost every game (minor losses each if I remember correctly) I had a lot of fun and felt very good about some things.

Game One
Now my first game was against
The Tallarn 13th company, Led by the infamous general SandWyrm
Click here to see The IG opinion of the game.

Spear head deployment with Five objectives in the Dice dot pattern. An objective center board, and one center of each quarter. While the city board looked amazing, the setup led three of the five objectives to be in the open.


Here is my deployment after winning to go first.


And Sandwyrm's Deployment. Leaving Melta and plasma veterans in chimera and a Hellhound in reserves.

Now straight from the beginning the game went against me. After his scout moves, Sandwyrm seized the initiative which led to a first turn of shooting at my army. And by that I mean twin linked lascannons into my zoanthrope. Which I then proceeded to fail two of the three invulnerable saves. On my turn my last zoanthrope shot at his vendetta gunship. The amazing power of Focused warp lance fails when it rolls a 1 for penetration. In the following turns the zoanthrope dies to focused fire, and I glance the vendetta out of desperation with my Stranglethorn from the carnifex. (Glancing the Vendetta seems to be a key of this game)



You may also notice that my Tyrant took a wound. This is not from being shot at, this is from flying into terrain. I decided it was the best course of action, to tie up the sentinels, and be locked into combat during his turn, which worked out perfectly with the exception of dangerous terrain rolls. The following turn I attempted to regain that wound by using the Leech essence power on the group of gaurdsmen that had jumped out to shoot the carnifex. What proceeded was a roll of double ones, injuring himself, using the power, and failing to wound. Hence actually ending with more damage then before. I was making the job easy for him at that point, taking half of my HQ's wounds off by myself.

With my first wave broken, my second wave made desperate attempts against the tanks. Massive amounts of rolls led to only one or two rending results, and with 1s or 2s rolled for results, it seemed defeating. A final act of desperation helped me keep my home objective after rolling a six to hit, a six to glance, and a six to immobilize the Vendetta that had moved flat out to contest my objective.



Sandwyrm won that game, deserving it with great skill of tank formations and movement, which coaxed my second wave to its demise, and his well placed fire power and focused shooting. Though I still feel he could have tabled easily me if we had been playing annihilation, he knew which objectives he wanted, and planned it out. But in my mind the winner was my Tervigon. Even though it only made gaunts one turn, it gave itself FNP and lasted near two rounds of his entire army shooting at it before it died. My first game with him and he did wonders, I guess I might jump on the band wagon after all.


Game Two
My second game pitted me against my nemesis codex. The Chaos space marines. It was a amazingly painted army, and seemed very fluff oriented. It was fully nurgle based, and even had squads of 7 and 14 (seven being nurgles number). It was played by a gentleman that Sandwyrm refers to as Kriegle, So I'll use that for simplicity.

One objective each, with dawn of war deployment. I put my tyrant and tervigon up front to put on pressure, and he placed a Demon prince and plague marines in a rhino on the objective.

My continued problem with Chaos space marines is their demon princes. The Power/cost ratio is horrible. They used to cost the same as my Hive tyrant, with a lot more power. Now they have the same amount of power, but my tyrant costs twice as much. Oh, and they still have their better Invulnerable save, while my Tyrant lost his option for the 2+/6++.

I have essentially been out of the game for the past two months, and it showed in this game. The Mistake of this game? Judging distances. Between Kriegle's vast amount of tough jump and bike units, and being 13 inches away for my 12 inch power, misjudging range and movement cost me the game.



What I did find out is nurgle worshipers dislike the 4+ poison of nids. The icing on the cake was giving my gargoyles Feel no pain and giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Game Three
This game was against the "House army". Bluemoon had created an army for the odd man out had a game to play. This was Victory points with constant night fight. The night fight is the only reason I managed to pull off a draw. BlueMoon had some bad rolls with his terminator squad. My tyrant took them to Bs/Ws 1, then assaulted. After two rounds of combat, he had single-handedly killed 8 of the 9 terminators, the first dying to gargoyles earlier.

Over all I came in sixth of nine players with somewhere near 115 points, while Sandwyrm got first by maxing out to 150 points (actually 175ish, but capped at 150) and second and third place were close behind him. While it was good to have the scoring be not so competitive, the composition and painting scores should have been a smaller percent, or calculated separately.

It was good to get some great games in, and since I had only found out about the tournament two days before hand, my general unreadiness and what some could call rustiness were prevalent in all of my games.
With that in mind, I'm on a modeling spree to get the "new" models finished. Next tourney, I'm going tank hunting!

Until then,
Happy hunting!