catalyst2 | Battle #40

Tonight was 2000 points vs Ari's Tau. Ari doesn't usually play Tau so I had no idea what his list would be like so I went with jump pack Captain, jump pack Chaplain, two squads of assault marines, two tactical squads, 1 shotgun scout squad, 3 HB/AC Speeders, an Ironclad in Drop Pod, a Whirlwind and a Predator Annihilator. He took lost of things, most of which I forget but there were three Broadsides, a Skyray, a Hammerhead, two fire warrior squads, one with pulse carbines, one with pulse rifle (just remember those two squads because it is important later on), a small squad of pathfinders, a six-man stealth squad and a whole host of various suits.

My plan was to assault him into submission whilst his was clearly to shoot me into submission.

The mission was Capture and Control with Spearhead deployment. I let him go first after I won the toss so I could do some reactive deployment.

He deployed a very cramped line, right in the back corner with Skyray (on his objective) and Hammerhead at the back, both fire warrior teams in the centre and his suits out on each side ready to flank and get a cross fire going.

I deployed the opposite - I ran both empty rhinos as far forward as I could each with an assault squad sheltering behind it with Whirlwind/Annihilator pairing in my centre, the speeders were on my left and flung them forward as far as I could. On mu objective, I kept both tactical squads ion 4 combat squads. One squad sat right on the objective and the other three sat about 6 inches out from it.

Turn 1 - he moved many of his suits out on each wing and fired away. He immobilised one Rhino and killed a couple of assault marines but that was it. In order to get this shooting in, he had left his suits out in the open so I responded by flinging both assault squads as far forward as I could and swinging the speeders even wider after a 24" move. The first assault squad killed one suit whilst the second got very close to the fire warrior squads. The Whirlwind killed off some fire warriors with a very accurate shot and the Annihilator took out another suit. The Ironclad DP'ed in as usual but did no damage - however it's value was going to be proved next turn.

Turn 2 - because the Ironclad was right in the middle of his lines and going to assault the hell out of him he had to shoot until it was destroyed. Because he could only hit its front AV13 armour, he had real trouble, in the end needing the combined fire of the Hammerhead, Skyray and the Broadsides to destroy it. Consequently. the rest of the army pretty much got a free ride across the battle field. The Whirlwind hammered the fire warrior teams again taking two casualties off each, the death wind ML took a couple more out of each whilst the Predator killed another suit. The first assault squad got to the pathfinders and killed them to a man. The second assault squad got to both fire warrior teams, and killed all but one in the pulse rifle team. This was really a great result fro me because this squad would have been completely out in the open directly in front of his gunline otherwise.

Turn 3 - his stealth suits came on and killed the Whirlwind. This was a fairly suicidal move for them because all four combat squads turned, fired and killed three of them - then the two assaulting squads killed two more leaving just one stealth suit. The rest of his firing was mainly ineffective with one speeder being stunned (but it ignores that in a squadron) but the first assault squad was torn to pieces by the Broadsides, being reduced to just Captain and sergeant. In the assault phase though, his last fire warrior died (and I barely even noticed what this meant for the game) and then in my turn, they assaulted the Hammerhead and blew it up, taking 4 casualties in the resulting explosion. The final stealth suit died and my combat squad line redressed itself for the expected Crisis suit assault from reserve soon.

Turn 4 - his Skyray killed a second speeder whilst the final two marines from the first assault squad died in CC with the Broadsides. The second assault squad swung around and headed for his Skyray but were just out of assault range. The Crisis suits came on and headed straight for my objective. Fortunately, having 4 comabt squads meant that they were really torn as to which one to shoot - the meltas ans PF's were spread between all c four squad. In the end he did a crappy round of shooting but then elected not to assault. In my turn I assaulted him with three of the four combat squads, the fourth sitting on the objective. I lost one marine and dealt one wound to him so we drew combat.

Turn 5 - the assault on my objective was stationary with the same result as last turn so I held my objective at this point. My second assault squad were shot out of existence as they tried to get to the Skyray. All other results were academic so we roled for turn and got a 1, finishing the game here.

Final result - I was about to score it a draw, 1 objective each when I realised that he had no troops on his objective, just the Skyray, so I had won 1-0! WOOHOO!

What I learned tonight:
1)Fire warrior teams are horrible vulnerable to CC so that's always a good route to go.
2) Some types of suits aren't - I never realised that Broadsides were I5 with 4 attacks each.

My W-L-D record:
40K: 28-8-0
Apocalypse: 2-0-1
Planetstrike: 0-1-0