Our First Skirmish
As announced at the beginning of the thread, the whole point of this challenge was to put together a credible gaming army and to play them. After a months painting, it was time to put what we'd painted to the test. We choose Bromely GW's gaming room as this was close to Stu (who probably earned himself some serious doghouse points for nipping off in the middle of moving house), Chris, and Ben. Sadly, we'd picked the release day for all the lizardmen stuff and the branch was packed with kids, and a huge apocalypse game dominated the usually quite quiet gaming room.
Unfortunately, I live miles away from Bromely, so by the time I got there Chris and Ben had already fought their battle, with Ben's Plague Marines easily beating Chris's Ultramarines. As I unpacked, Chris explained that we would all be fighting annihilation battles on a 3X4 board using the Dawn of War escalation. Which I knew would work ok-ish for my fragile guard platoon.
This months 250pts for me was going to be: a very basic command squad with a junior officer armed with a bolter, two ten man squads to make up the platoon with no special or heavy weapons. and to give this manpower some punch, a veteran squad with two melta-guns. From the boards, I knew that both Chris and Ben Would be fielding Rhinos, so i figured infiltrating meltas that I could position against his armour would be important.
My first game was against Ben, and after catching up and admiring each others figures, we promptly forgot about the dawn of war rules. I reckoned this was going to be the toughest fight of the day, with Ben fielding a Rhino and nine Plague Marines, with one armed with a melta (all fearless, and feeling no pain, with toughness 5 vs my little flashlight pop guns). I knew it would simply come down to the weight of my shooting dice to his resistance and aggression in melee. Typical for guard, my ambush with my veterans failed utterly. Both meltas missed and the unit was quickly dispatched by the marines. I now had two units in cover and another on a hill at the back to whittle down the oncoming chaos corruption. Cutting a long story short, they failed. The rearmost unit was tankshocked and blocked from firing by the rhino, while the marines chewed through one then the other unit. While the morale tests worked for me, the vital rounds of rapid firing lazguns didn't. Cest la vie. There wasn't much about this battle i would have changed (except the dice rolling), everything went well tactically, and I did kill 4 plague marines, but I was wiped. Next month I'll have the points to add some much needed punch to my army and we'll see what happens then.
While we were playing this, Chris fought Stu's Grey knights - all 6 of them. No really, that's what you get for 250pts. Three with force halberds, one with a flamer and one with a psycannon I think. This was a much closer game than mine and Ben's, and the two sides hammered eachother down to lone figures, but in the end the Grey Knights determination won out. In the post match analysis, Chris remembered about some rules that would have swung it for him, but that was all after the event. Sadly, Stu had to leave at this point for fear of never being allowed into his new house, which is fair enough and shows what a hardcore gamer he is for managing to be there at all.
Then it was me and Chris. Chris produced a rhino, a five man tactical squad, and a five man scout squad with a heavy bolter. He was going to put the scouts in reserve and flank them, and push forward with his rhino. Luckily for me, the board had been laid out with a bottleneck of hills half way down. I put my veterans on one hill, with just the sarge, and meltas exposed. As the Ultra marines rhino trundled towards them popping smoke to conceal it's advance, both melta opened fire and for once did their thing! Two penetrating hits - vehicle destroyed on turn one! What was better, as was the fact that only 3 tactical marines staggered from the flaming molten debris and into the massed fire of the guard platoon. Luckily, for Chris, his flanking Scouts now appeared and promptly shot up my veterans before assaulting them. Demoralised by this sudden attack they broke and ran for cover, but were cut down like the cowards they were by the faster marines. This however left the scouts out in the open facing the vengeful ranks of the guard. With no cover to save them, the lazguns made short work of slaughtering them before they could engage another unit. Flawless Victory as they say in Mortal Combat.
So, one game lost, one game won, one game differed till next month. Everyone else took loads of pics, so with luck you should all see a visual record of the day's battle soon.
