Redcap’s January 40k tournament seemed a resounding success!  Benn and Adam have been refining the store’s standard tournament procedures and writeups, making the whole thing much more predictable and streamlined to go along with their great pile of terrain.  Fourteen people showed up for it yesterday!  Final results:

• Jonathan (Eldar) 19
• Steve Smith (Traitor Wolves w/ IG) 18
• Owen (?) 16
• Jason Woolf (DA) 13
• James (IG) 13
• Colin Kielick (Chaos w/ Daemons) 12
• Joe Kopena (Kingbreakers) 12
• Aaron (Death Guard) 9
• Andrew (Wolves) 8
• Harrison (Tau) 7
• Walter (DE) 5
• Joel (Necron) 3
• Lorenzo (GK) 4
• Buford (Wolves) 3

Missions were pretty straight-up, as usual (which is good):

• Crusade/Vanguard, 1BP for all secondaries, 1BP if opponent has no heavies on table.
• Purge/Dawn, 1BP if all HQs survive, 1BP if all troops above half strength.
• Big Guns/Hammer, 1BP for double linebreaker, 1BP for destroyed opponent HQs.

The watcher at the gates.

Army

I screwed up, previously misread both the time and points value for the tournament, and had to furiously revise and hustle over when I went to double check both and realized I should be at the store already…  I wound up with exactly 1750 points of:

• Capt Angholan (Vulkan)
• Librarian Rorschach (Librarian) w/ Terminator Armor, Storm Shield, Null Zone, Vortex of Doom
• Dreadnought w/ MM, CCW/HF, Drop Pod
• Sternguard x10 w/ Combi-Melta x6, Powersword, Drop Pod
• Tactical x10 w/ Powerfist, Meltagun, Plasmacannon, Razorback w/ HK
• Tactical x10 w/ Meltagun, Missile Launcher, Rhino w/ HK
• Tactical x10 w/ Flamer, Missile Launcher
• Landspeeder w/ Multi-Melta, Heavy Flamer
• Landspeeder w/ Multi-Melta, Heavy Flamer
• Landspeeder w/ Multi-Melta, Heavy Flamer
• Predator w/ Autocannon, Heavy Bolter sponsons

The Librarian I find useful and not particularly over costed when you pack him into Terminator Armor with a Storm Shield.  The 3++ is a big buff to his baseline survivability, and being Relentless makes it much more likely he’ll be able to throw some vortexes around.  A lot of people worry about the latter (hell, I worry about casting it…) and will focus a fair amount of concern on him.  Null Zone will also really wreck some armies’ day.

The Plasmacannon is actually super cheap (5pts) riding with a Tactical Squad and at various points I’ve used them a lot.  I threw one in here because of the increased 6th ed focus on foot troops and the generally power armor heavy environment at Redcap’s.  In general I’d love to bring a unit of Devastators with them, but they’re just a bit point costly for 1750 pts and below.

Landspeeders are a tough call, but at this point they’re part of my thing.  At smaller games they’re super versatile.  At this many points though there’s just so many things on the table that can kill them and have nothing better to do, sitting in the backfield.  Still, the combo of being able to focus on either troops or vehicles/big guys is pretty useful to me.

Round 1

After the Kingbreakers finished purging some Chaos infestation, Lorenzo’s Grey Knights showed up to wipe their minds and claim the credit.  We would have none of that!

Coteaz directs his men into the temple of doom!

This wound up a massacre in favor of the Kingbreakers, but was actually a fairly close drawn thing. In the last two turns there were two critical outcomes.  One was the Sternguard, who’d managed to survive largely intact all game, sacrificing themselves to stick up Coteaz and friends in an assault.  This held the GK up just long enough that they didn’t have a chance to wipe out nearby Squad Titus and thus could only contest rather than hold the latter’s objective deep in GK territory.  The other was a standard Tactical Squad wiping out the remnants of a Terminator Squad in assault after the latter has been decimated by repeated volleys of fire, preserving a Kingbreakers’ objective.  Morale played an important part several times, which is always good to see as in some editions I’ve felt it somewhat meaningless.

I think Lorenzo’s Grey Knights here were hobbled by a lack of mobility.  They all managed to Deep Strike pretty well to shoot away at stuff and get onto one objective, but then they had to slog toward the others while getting shot up.  In contrast, while the GK were still arriving the Kingbreakers managed to get troops onto all five objectives, spread all across the board.  That gave them the momentum and the defensive stance, requiring they be pushed off rather than having to fight on.

Beyond that, I was fairly happy with the Marines’ ability to steadily whittle away at the GK through sheer volume of fire.  The changes to Rapid Fire in this edition were a huge improvement to mobility and shooting, and I think made the game much better and balanced out a lot of issues.  Without the ability to shoot at range on the move, the Marines were much much more crippled in producing a meaningful volume of fire.

The forty-yard stare.

Round 2

Next some Dark Angels jerks showed up all upset because the Kingbreakers were rockin’ the Gryphon Sepia first.  I guess the KB will be changing their paint scheme, because they got hammered here in a crushing loss.

The basic challenge here is that Jason’s Deathwing drop something like 5 kill points.  Kingbreakers bring like 16.  That’s a hard ratio to have to keep in check in an annihilation round.  Especially when those damn Drop Pods are so tall they can be seen over basically anything.  I’m sawing them in half right after I finish this report.

I thought pretty hard about not deploying anything in order to minimize exposure and help mitigate that imbalance.  However, my biggest concern there was the likelihood of my guys getting chewed up piecemeal as they entered.  A single Tac Squad isn’t going to do much against Belial’s mob of doom.  Hell, my entire army shooting at them barely dealt with it in a timely fashion.  So, I deployed mostly as usual in hopes of being able to concentrate fire and limit my exposure.  In the end though there were just too many kill points on offer.

By the time Belial and goons were down the numbers were not looking good.  At that point I could almost have fully retreated and maybe held to a minor loss.  However, I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about the Drop Pods now on the table and it was looking like that would tip him to a major anyway, so I felt I had to try and rush some of his oncoming guys, take out a small unit of Terminators, and hope for a Turn 5 end to stick for a minor.  That didn’t really work out.  I’ll have to think a lot more about this army as I’m sure I’ll be seeing it around a lot, from Jason and others.  Otherwise, this mission never happened…

Round 3

Finally we dispensed with the internecine internal jealousies of the Kingbreakers’ awesomeness to slaughter some xenos: Walter’s Dark Eldar leapt into the opening on our dance card.  This wound up a massacre in favor of the Kingbreakers.  The emperor’s men basically formed a wedge pushing down the center of the table onto the objectives as the fallen ones tried to flank along both sides.

The fallen lay in wait.

I’m still not too sure what to make of the Dark Eldar.  I feel like I should be really scared of them, with some strong assault units and tons of crazy powers and rules going on.  I haven’t played against a DE army composition though that really made me worry.  Ultimately they’re just not super survivable compared to Marines, especially when the latter have a couple highly mobile flame templates whizzing around.  They just don’t seem to have really tough nuts to crack in the same way that loyalist and traitor Marines both do, Tyranid are great at, and even IG can field with some of their very destructive and well armored vehicles.  However, Walter says he’s bringing his flyers next time, so we’ll see how that goes.  There’s not a ton of air action at Redcap’s yet, so I’m definitely behind the curve on preparing to defend against it.

Kingbreakers stare down the horror.

General Analysis

Two things I really need to brush up on and ready for: Psychers and flyers.  Neither are very present at Redcap’s right now, but I’m just walking on ice by not having a great plan for either.  It is definitely unfortunate for me how seriously psychic hoods got debuffed this edition.

I might also think about a Predator-heavy force like I’ve used a few times, possibly with a couple Dreadnoughts for assault and forward action.  They’re both fairly tough to crack, and in our current scene it seems like people may not be really bringing much to go against AV 12 or 13.  In contrast, Jason’s Belial-ball-of-doom notwithstanding, people do seem to have diffused their armies.  There aren’t as many high value attractive targets just asking to be alpha striked by the Kingbreakers’ Sternguard.  A couple times now I’ve had no great options on juicy targets worth dropping on.

There are more photos in the day’s photo gallery.  Notably, a fairly high percentage of the armies in play had a good amount of painting and customization going on, which is great.

Grrr, leave me be, unpainted wretches!