Battle #26

[catalyst2]

Last night was 2000 points against Mitch's über-shooty Eldar army. It was pitched battle deployment with 4 objectives. His entire army is in reserve so nothing comes on this turn. I deploy in a highly defensive ring of rhinos interspersed with the rest of my armour with a full terminator squad in reserve.

Turn two and almost immediately it goes wrong - his reserves come on on a 2+ roll I discover so my plan of piecemeal demolition is thwarted. Worse still his three warp spider squads deep strike just inches from my tanks, with three direct hits for scatter and the vindicator, predator and whirlwind all go boom. Two of his three walker squads come on and one entire tactical squad evaporates.

Turn three and my terminators come on but scatter so far that they are out of range of anything significant for a whole turn. The second squad of warwalkers come on and reduce my only remaining tactical squad to four. Both rhinos blow up.

Turn four and my terminators shoot one squad of warp spiders to hell whist the 5-man assault terminator squad manage to get to the fire dragons and kill them off. The last 4 tactical squad marines die.

Turn five and his warwalkers kill 3 of the 5 assault terminators and my terminators, because there are so many destroyed tank hulls around the place, are out of line of sight of almost everything and so have to plink away at some insubstantial target doing minimal damage. His two squads of bikes emerge from behind cover and turboboost over to two objectives.

We get a turn six and the last two assault terminators die but he concentrates on bunkering down so my ten-man, very expensive terminator squad again does next to nothing.

Final result: Loss by 2 objectives to 0.

What I learned tonight:
1) I think I should stick with only two or three basic lists and get good with those. Every time I try a different combination, it takes me a couple of games to get the synergy right.
2) Terminators can be awesome - in the wrong place they are just a waste of space.
3) His combination of 9 warwalkers in three squadrons of three with 8 S6 scatter laser shots from each model taken with three squads of warp spiders, a squad of fire dragons in a Falcon all played from reserve on turn two (with a 2+ reserve roll) is one amazingly effective list.

My W-L-D record is now 19-7-0