Well, it's almost midnight, and I just came through the door to my home. I would love to give you good pictures, but unfortunately my batteries were dead in my camera... I guess that's Murphy's Law for you. Not everything was glum though... I had a good time and got to test my mettle against another Guard player. Also, a person there was taking photographs, and he promised to give me some of them later of the games I played. We'll see about that...
The event was fun, free, and had some great prizes, and the gaming atmosphere was very casual. This was awesome for me, being new to the competitive circles, as I will be the first to tell you that I am a painter more than a player. The atmosphere was very casual, in fact, as they did not have set rounds or judge on battlepoints. Instead, there were awards for the "Best Overall List", "Most Epic Moment", and 2 door prizes. Much to my surprise, I won the "Most Epic Moment" award! First trophy to my collection! My prize: the basing kit you see pictured above. This is perfect, seeing as my basing for the IG needs work. I'll tell you how I won it:
Imperial Guard on Imperial Guard-
We played on an unusually-sized board, a 5'x5' board with a white tablecloth and some interesting ice terrain made from what looked to be hardened bits of mattress foam (with a really cool blue tinge) and stacked pieces of white cardboard that represented area terrain. Most of our units were infantry. He held a numbers advantage, as he ran 2 fairly-large platoons whereas I ran more points-heavy veteran squads. My opponent had enough points for a squadron of LRBT's, and an additional Punisher, along with a roughrider squad, a sentinel, and commissars sprinkled through-out.. So he moved up his squadron on my right and blasted away at my front armor of the LRBT, the shots bouncing off the hull. I blew the roughrider squad to pieces with a well-placed Battle Cannon shot on my first turn of shooting, ignoring his squadron and decimating a squad I actually could kill. He kept shooting at it until he was able to get at my side armor on a later turn, destroying it. By that time, I had advanced up some of my veteran squads. I inched up my plasmagun vets, hoping to get a shot at his side armor where they would have a chance to penetrate, but a well-placed volley of battle-cannon shots reduced them to a single trooper. That little guy defied all the odds, and passed his leadership test and pressed onward. I jokingly implied to my opponent that because my vets had been equipped with the Demolitions doctrine, this single trooper was going to assault his Russ squadron and do his darndest to take one of them with him. He knew I was joking, but at the same time I kept true to what I said and inched him closer and closer. Finally, the trooper must have been too close for comfort to his Russ's because he declared his squadron was going to shoot him. 2 templates, and 2 lascannon shots later, nothing was left of the brave trooper but his boots. The mental imagery, though, of the lone trooper watching his friends and squadmates turn to pink mist around him but finding the courage to assault a squadron of tanks single-handedly, apparently won me the award.
Things I learned about my force:
*Too top-heavy wargear-wise. Drop the fluffy stuff (I already knew that though).
*Meltagun Vets = Gold. Get more of them, and the Chimeras to take them to battle.
*Stormtroopers: don't rely on them to come in reserve. I deepstruck them, only to have a mishap and have them delayed. They never returned (rolled a lot of ones on reserve rolls.) If I am going to take them in reserve in the future, I need an astropath.
*LRBT's work just fine as single units, but you should always take more than 1 so the 1 tank doesn't get singled out (I already knew that too but had to deal with it)
*Static Gunlines don't do so hot against other Static Gunline IG builds, unless you have the heavy artillery to force them to move.
*Sentinels require squadrons too, or at least multiples, to be effective.
*More tanks, more tanks, more tanks! I need chimeras as well as LRBTs or Ordinance Batteries to make my list more effective. The Carapace is kind of unnecessary for my Mechvets, as the vehicle is supposed to take the brunt of the damage. I would gladly sacrifice the carapace for the 30 points towards a Chimera for the squad.
*Alternatively, if you're going to do a Gunline Guard list, then you have to make use of the cheap infantry available to you. The Gunline's strength is numbers: too many to eliminate, too many bodies to wade through. He had this down better than I did, and he blobbed up giant squads of them with commissars to press them on. It ultimately was a much more effective tactic than my veteran squads were. Vets are almost tailor-made to be Mechanized, rather than trying to plug a hole in the front of a Gunline.
*I was really lacking in the anti-tank weaponry too, with only a sentinel, a mechvet meltagun squad, and a single LRBT being effective against heavy vehicles. I might remedy this in the short-term future by adding Lascannon teams to the regular Infantry Platoon squads that didn't move much anyway. Put them in a position to cover a fire lane and leave them for a while, and they should do fine.
Well, it was a fun experience, and the event organizer tells me that it is going to be a regular event, once every two weeks. I had a blast, and will definitely be going again. In the shorter-term, we talked of doing a cityfight game in the meantime, so it will be fun to see what that is like with a more competitive opponent as well.
Well, time to hit the hay. Hopefully I'll get some pictures from that guy soon. Thanks Anson for putting on a great event, and having a great game! (He beat me, 3-1 Killpoints, if anybody wanted to know!)
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