Saturday, 12 January 2013

Perils of the Warp 2 - Tournament Report


Today I attended the Perils of the Warp 2 tournament at the Outpost in Sheffield. This was a 1 day, 20 player event which allowed Forge World, and was at 1,500pts. This was also the first tournament that I had ever attended that submitted to rankings, so as well as being a slightly different meta to what I'm used to, with my list being developed in Oxford, it was also kicking it up a notch.

Just a quick plug before this gets started. The Outpost is an independent store in Sheffield. It's open late and sells a variety of products for a variety of systems like Warpath, Dreadball, Warmahordes, Dystopian Wars, 40k and Fantasy, etc. I'm not selling out, I just really enjoyed today's event and feel like I should give the store a mention. If you just Google 'The Outpost Sheffield' it should be the first option. They're also running another 40k tournament on the 23rd February. Unfortunately I can't attend as I'm at Battlefield Birmingham but I'd recommend it if you're in the area and have the day free. There are only 6 places left though so you'll probably want to hurry.


Now, straight into it. My first game was against Eldar, Corsairs Forge World to be precise. Now I seem to have a knack for picking up the Eldar players at tournaments, and seem to play against them quite a bit, but this was completely different. I had no idea what any of my opponent's stuff did.

He was running a Corsair Lord with the 2+ invulnerable save, some jetbikes, 2 squads of Corsairs (one of which had jump packs), a Hornet, a Warp Hunter or something (a Falcon with a D-Cannon strapped to the front), and 2 flyers, a Nightwing, and something else (one of them had a load of guns on it and a 3+ jink save and the other not so many guns but a 2+ jink save). He had some other Eldar tank as well, I think it was a Corsair Falcon.

The mission in question was the Emperors Will, with the Dawn of War deployment. This game started well for me, although he got the first turn and to choose his deployment zone, I killed his 2 Falcons in the first turn, earning me a vital First Blood point. 2 packs of Long Fangs doing the business.

The Manticore continued to shell the opposing objective but no matter how many shots went in there were still a couple surviving (only 4 Guardians lived to the end of the game).

At the end of turn 5, I had my Lone Wolf in his deployment zone, ready to charge and contest his objective, but I only had my veterans on my home objective, and the 2 flyers were coming back in, although the shootier one was only able to snap fire. He also had his Jetbikes in for Linebreaker and Slay the Warlord. So if the game ended, then it would be a 5-5 draw.

If it continued, I would probably win the game, as my Guard were in cover. As it happened, the game ended, and the game ended a draw. Which wasn't too bad as at the start of the game I had no idea what any of his stuff did, but a little disappointing given that I would have won had the game
gone on. I had killed 2/3s of his army and had lost about 1/3.

The second game is going to be the one that I speak the least about. It was the Relic, and my opponent was another Eldar player. Now, he was essentially running, a squad of War Walkers with scatter lasers (again), 2 Fire Prisms, and 10 Wraithguard with Eldrad, a Farseer and a Warlock with Conceal. He then rolled invisibility for his powers, Fortuned his guys up, walked up to the relic and walked off with it. Game over. There wasn't really much that I could do, my Rune Priests didn't like cancelling out his powers and there was a 1/648 chance that a single Boltgun shot would cause a wound on that.

 The Long Fangs take their 2+ cover saves in game 2.

I did try to hurl as many guys into combat with them and try to hold them up before they got to the Relic, but turn 4 they broke through my 2 packs of Grey Hunters and my Rune Priest and seized it. Although my Guardsmen did get a Linebreaker point back. 4-1 to my opponent.

Final game, and something else new. Table quarters, a mission that I have never played before. I was playing against Guard. 2 Vendettas with infantry squads in, Platoon Command, 3 squads of Vets, 4 Chimeras, 2 Demolishers. So 6 units that could take quarters. I wasn't exactly sure what to do here so I sat one of my infantry squads in each corner and hunkered down (as I had first blood so drawing on table quarters would result in me winning), trying to stay alive and contest/take the quarters, with my Long Fangs mopping up stray units. This went ok for a while, but eventually my opponent started whittling down my Troops, and although I got first blood, he ended up winning 6-4.

So, I still suck, and have a lot to learn. Apart from the 2nd game, I think that both players still had a chance of winning at turn 4. I did start to forget some of my psychic powers and things in the last game but that can probably be attributed to me staying up and painting really late the night before.

To me though, it didn't really matter that I got thumped. I learnt a lot and I really enjoyed the event, which was well run, everything going to time, of which the right amount was allocated to games and breaks, and lunch was well organised and good quality.

What I've really learnt is that although I do have the Wolf Guard at the front of my squads, my Troops really aren't that durable. However, I'm not sure what to drop really. I'm going to take the same list to Throne of Skulls methinks and see how it does with book missions, but if I do crap again I'm going to be unoriginal and break out the blob.

But anyway, I'm hoping to get a post done every day, every other day at worst for the near future, because today I acquired this.


So I'm going to try to analyse it a bit better and a bit more quickly than the Chaos Codex. Starting tomorrow (hopefully).

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