So the tournament is next Saturday, and I just want to report on how a test game had gone last week. I played against the LGS owner testing out one of the scenarios he has planned for the tournament.
The scenario is a modified kill points with a Vanguard deployment. Instead of being one kill point for every enemy unit that is destroyed, each unit in your army can only claim one kill point. While a simple change, it really does make you think about firing priorities. Is the shooting from A going to be enough to wipe out a unit? Should you fire something first to soften them up? Will the fire from a unit that already has a kill point accidentally wipe them out, negating you getting a kill point for a fresh squad?
The list I took was what we discussed above:
HQ
Sammael: Corvex.
Command Squad: Standard of Devastation.
Troops
5 Tactical Marines: Lascannon
5 Tactical Marines: Lascannon
Ravenwing Attack Squadron: 6 bikes w/ 2 Melta guns
Ravenwing Attack Squadron: 6 bikes w/ 2 Plasma guns
Ravenwing Attack Squadron: 6 bikes w/ no special weapons.
Heavy Support
Land Raider Crusader.
6 Devastators: 4 Plasma Cannons.
Imperial Knight
Knight Paladin.
He took Tau with White Scar allies. The list was something along these lines:
Ethereal
Commander
8 Pathfinders
12 fire warriors
6 fire warriors
3 broadsides w/ lots'o'missiles
Rip tide with the gun that goes barrage when you power up the core
Sky ray
big mob of kroot, 20 perhaps.
Marine bike commander w/ artificer & Storm shield
5 TH/SS terminators
10 bikes w/ grav gun, attack bike w/ multi melta.
With the advice from here as well as some advice from the LGS's forums, the fight was a pretty decisive victory, all things considered. The Lascannon squads didn't do much, but they did kill outflanking kroot. For most of the fight, the Devastators were out of range, but towards the end of the game he did throw his remaining bikes away because he really didn't have a chance of catching up in points (he had 4 bikes left, I killed one, they fled off the table).
I did find that being able to throw one of the squad of bikes up a flank, either the melta or plasma bikes (in this case the plasma for broadside hunting), along with ramming the Paladin down his throat, supported by bolter fire from the other two bikes to be very effective. There are so many threats he has to deal with in such a short period of time before they make it to his lines that he isn't really focused on the three units hurling 72 bolter shells his way.
I was able to spread my fire around in such a way that by the scenario I was able to nab 4 kill points to his 1. The reason he was only able to get 1, is that most of his units just weren't able to get the job done, and then his Rip Tide would mop up. If we had gone off of standard kill points, it still would have been a 6-5 win for me, but a lot closer.
Overall I am quite pleased with how the list works, even though 3 units were pretty much out of the fight for the majority of the game. I am looking forward to seeing it in action on Saturday and will be sure to post a tournament report with as many details as I can remember about how things went.