This was my 4th game of the day, and 8th game of the weekend. After driving 14 hours straight, eating only junk food, 90+ temperatures for 2 days, and only 5 hours of horizontal sleep under my belt, I was nearing the end of my 40k endurance. The team was slightly above the middle of the pack and we paired off against the Blade and Bolter "B" team, which incidentally was doing better then the "A" team at this point.
After being manhandled by eldar and mephiston during the last two games, I told Shaun "just give me a match with no psychic defense". Shannon ended up being my 4th opponent with his Tau army. He was also my favorite opponent and I'm sure his whole team was our favorite match of the weekend. These guys were super chill, fun to play, and a breath of fresh air after some of the hyper-competitive games earlier in the day.
Shannon's list:
Shas'el + toys and 1 bodyguard, some drones
Shas'el + toys and 1 bodyguard, some drones
Crisis suits x2 + toys, drones
Crisis suits x2 + toys, drones
Kroot + hounds (13 or so total)
Kroot + hounds (13 or so total)
Fire warriors + devilfish
Fire warriors + devilfish
Piranha
Piranha
Piranha
Broadsides x2 + drones
Broadsides x2 + drones
Hammerhead
I probably butchered this list, but I think Shannon lurks here sometime, maybe he will correct me. Either way, you get the idea. Lots of battlesuits that shoot guns that hurt.
The game was spearhead deployment and Shannon was going first. He built his castle of battlesuits ringed with a moat of kroot. He reserved both loaded devilfish and two piranhas.
I put just about everything right at the front edge of my spearhead. Both tervigons are just off screen to the right by my c&c objective. I infiltrated both units of genestealers to within 18" of his front lines. The game began with Shannon dumping his entire army into the forward-facing unit of genestealers on the left, killing about half. He also zoomed one piranha along his table edge. I moved everything up, threw down FnP on both genestealer units, and spawned a scoring unit back in my corner on my objective.
I ran everything to get in better firing position for next turn and assaulted the piranha up top strung out in such a way that a majority stayed in cover, but wiffed with no rends. Shannon did the tau shuffle, moving a couple inches here and there. He decided to go for the first kp and dumped his entire army into the half-strength genestealer unit so I went to ground. Between cover and FnP, 1 survived.
Well, I lost my left push, but I'm holding more sg objectives. He's spent two turns firing everything in his army at one squad of stealers (yes, my cover saves were above average this game) and now my hive guard have reached center table and I'm ready to assert control. Hive guard and the tyrant unload on a unit of suits (I think it was one of the commander retinues), drop them below half, and they flee off the table. My big squad of genestealers is actually approaching his line but the ruin is blocking them from the camera. I'm congo-lining them along to keep 50% in cover at all times. You'll notice everything is actually in cover. The tyrant is at max coherency and his guards are behind terrain. That one piece of terrain saved my army because of spearhead deployment. It was literally the only thing on the table that could obscure my mc's.
Shannon gets a devilfish and brings it on the top right corner of the table, about 2 feet beyond where my genestealers are. This acts as an effective siphon unit, forcing me to pull hive guard off center to prevent it from getting to my c&c objective. Av12 with portable cover saves proves to be annoying. His piranhas are zipping around also with cover saves. He's starting to get overwhelmed with my target saturation on the front lines. He splits fire between the advancing genestealers, hive guard (he respects them more now that I ID'd a couple suits), and tyrant unit. Each unit suffers a few wounds. He sends a couple shots into the single surviving genestealer from the left unit, but I go to ground and make all saves again.
I advance the tfex to be able and hit both sides of the table and peel a unit of hive guard back to target a piranha that got behind my lines. One tervigon is in the central ruin, the other is protecting her brood so I can score two objectives in my deployment zone.
The hive guard explode the piranha and the tfex shakes the devilfish. My shooting in the center is far less effective and my genestealers don't have enough fleet to make it into assault so I pull them back a couple inches to keep 50% in cover. Shannon pushes up his kroot to intercept my front line. He unloads on me again scoring a couple wounds here and there, but still can't score a kp with 1 genestealer and 1 hive guard remaining. The two poker chips in the upper left are his c&c and a sg objective.
Just below this pic, another piranha is zooming across my long edge and on the right, out of view his devilfish reaches mid-board.
I cross my fingers and hope the tfex and hive guard can stop his skimmers and send everything else forward. We're running low on time so I need to get to his objective ASAP. The central tervigon spawns a small unit to send forward. Shooting is unimpressive again as the only thing I accomplish is immobilizing the devilfish. At least that won't threaten any objectives now. Genestealers assault the kroot in cover, I lose 3 and pound them into the ground. Shannon's second devilfish comes up onto his c&c objective and third piranha zooms on right into contest range on my central objective. He also zooms up the piranha from my long edge so both are contesting. He splits fire targeting genestealers, gaunts, and the tyrant.
You can see here my lone genestealer and gaunt hiding in cover and surviving despite the amount of firepower Shannon pumps into them. The green marker actually represents the true position of the back piranha we just couldn't balance on the terrain, it's indeed 3" from the objective.
It's now the bottom of 5 and we don't have time to start a new turn so I scrape for results. Right now, I'm up around 3-1 on kp's and we're tied on both sg and c&c objectives.
I decide to go for the fully monty. The blue kroot on the left are the only thing scoring that sg objective so I unload the tyrant into them. I figured 12 shots with -1 to the morale test would be a better chance then assaulting the suits because I don't reckon I could consolidate into contesting range even with a 6. He makes enough cover saves that the kroot don't need a morale test. In on my side, I put the tfex, tervigon, spawned gaunts, and hive guard into the two piranhas both shooting and in assault, but one survives to contest due to its flat-out cover save and needing 6's to hit. I actually penetrated both, but only got one explode. My genestealers assault the broadsides, sweep them, and I consolidate into contesting range of his c&c objective.
Time's up and we tally it up. I have more kp's, my c&c while contesting his. and we each have 1 sg objective and contest 1. 25-5 win for me and a great end to the evening. Shannon was a blast to play and really put those piranhas to work disrupting and contesting. The team did very well as a whole and I think we scored around 115 as a whole this round. We packed it in and headed out for some well earned rest. On the way out, we found out we were in second place overall, and our first match tomorrow will probably be against the "Wrecking BoLS" with Paul "TPM" Murphy <Wrecking Crew>, Thomas "Goatboy" <BoLS>, Nick "Darkwynn" Rose <BoLS>, Rob "Manboygenius" Baer <BoLS/Spikeybitz>, and Kenny "Next Level Painting" <Wrecking Crew>.
Great game, great report as usual. I love how that one genestealer survived the whole game. Great use of cover throughout the game.
ReplyDeleteVery few killpoints scored overall, only 4 or 5 total between the two of you. Interesting that your opponent chose to split fire after the first couple turns. Do you think things would have turned out differently if he had focused on one or two units at a time?
It was a combination of weird factors. He went first and I've only played against tau once so I didn't know the cover rules for smart missiles. As such, he killed more genestealers first turn than I anticipated. After that, I had FnP and proper cover and he had a false impression of how resilient the combination was. I really was making an unfair amount of cover saves too.
ReplyDeleteHere is the trick. I used FnP’ed devgaunts against Tau. My opponent though he can easily bring them down to decrease my firepower… he fired all his turn after tirn and managed to shoot down about 10 gaunts with cover and FnP.
ReplyDeleteJust count it: cover+FnP is somewhat like 2+,3++ save. Fair opponent should understand that 20 stealers (or 20 gaunts) with FnP in cover are equal to 20 SS-termies, bva-ha-ha!
Great batrep ! I always enjoy seeing your awesome looking army. It's nice when you can open the throttle and drop that hammer !
ReplyDeleteG
Great report and a truly fun game! Glad I got paired with you, Hyv!
ReplyDeleteChaosheade: I felt I applied the right amount of fire to the genestealer in round three to kill him on average. Problem is hyv3mynd rolled anything but average :)
My targeting could have been better from turn four on, however I doubt it would have had a huge influence on the KP score by turn five. We might have been tied up going into the bottom of the fifth at best. He still would have pulled it out with the second stealer unit hitting the Broadsides. Tau just can't afford to let str8 shots get into the suits, so he did the right thing by pushing the Guard forward. This forced some tough decisions on my part and kept the initiative on his side.
Hats off to Hyv for the excellent use of cover throughout the game too. He leapfrogged at the appropriate moments and wasn't baited out.
I think he won the early (mental) game by choosing to infiltrate rather than outflank. I had setup my army to push toward center and to my right over the course of the game. I planned to have one infiltrated unit of Kroot to form my castle wall and the other to block the stealer outflank on my right board edge. I would then focus on MCs/Guard and do the Tau shuffle around the center. Best laid plans...
When he chose to infiltrate I was thrown off balance a tad and was working to recover from there on out. The center would be off-limits with stealers skulking around and they would cover his MC advance to the center. He also did a great job of stringing his stealer units out on the deploy. He ensured I couldn't react by infiltrating a Kroot unit on his flank/rear to siphon a unit or two off.
I think I might have done better if I had wiped the unit of stealers turn two, worked toward center-right (left in the photos) focusing on MC/Guard, while tarpiting the 2nd stealers with vehicles on my left and center. meh, who cares...it was fun!
Hyv: that is most of my army. You did miss an additional unit of 2 man Crisis. I like to think of it as my MSU Tasty Tau Castle :) I've been decently successfully with it lately, but didn't do so hot that weekend. There is always next year (with a new dex hopefully)!
Thanks for the comment L0rdM0nki. It's great to get both players' points of view as it really paints a vivid picture of what happened. It sounds like it was a really awesome game.
ReplyDeleteSomething can also be said about Shannon's use of siphon/disruption units. He reserved 2 piranhas and both loaded devilfish. The third piranha started on the table and sped towards my objective. He received one unit each turn 2-5 from reserves and kept sending them towards me objective. Between flat-out skimmers and disruption pods, I had to keep sending firepower backwards and thus limited the effectiveness of my forward push.
ReplyDelete