3 Generals Part 1

After a good breakfast we arrived at the inn, greeted all those player we knew and the staff. Since one team didn't made to the tournament, we had an uneven number of teams (19) and the captains decided together with the staff that we would use a free ticket system, giving the last team from each round after the first one a 13:7 victory.

The first mission was then announced:

- 6 rounds
- pitched battle deployment
- objectives each worth 250 points.
- +2 tournament points if you win the mission, +1 for a draw and +1 if you destroy all of your opponents HS choices.

We met up with the first team, who brought along a DE army, a SM force with 2 raiders and Witchhunters with some drafted IG choices. After shaking hands I lost the roll, the other captain went first and nominated the SM army. I matched our SW player against them, which wasn't that clever. The other pairing ended in CSM vs DE and my eldar vs WH. In retrospective I should have set our CSM player against the SM, since he was the only one in our team with a raider. SW vs DE would have been in our favour.

My army was:

Jetseer with fortune
+7 jetlocks

2x6 FD incl. a DBF-Exarch + SC-Serpents

2x5 DA + BL-Serpents

DAVU-Falcon with Stones, Holo and SL+SC
2xprism tank

My opponent had:

HQ with holy weapon, 2+ save and jump pack
2xElite sisters with 2 melter and a immolator
4x10 sisters with a HF, Melter and rhino
1xsquad of jumping sisters
2xexorcist tanks
1x IG command squad and AC
2x10 IG with a LC
2x3 HW teams with AC

The game started rather succesfully for me with a exorcist tank and a rhino dying rather fast. I also get rid of the AC teams quite easily. Then I made a big fault in my humble opinion: I played rather offensive with the jetlock council. Guess I should have tried to get rid of his tanks through firepower, aiming for a small victory thanks to contesting objectives. So I moved the council in the direction of his tank wall, failed to spear a immolator and then charged to tanks. In return he unloaded most of his infantery (except for the two squads of sisters held in reserve), unleashed a firestorm on my council (only one lock died)and then charged it. I won the first round with a -4 modifier, but thanks to that damned 5 points wargear those girls have, I failed to run them down. In return I failed two fortuned inv-saves on my seer in one turn, lost a round of combat with a -1 modifier and rolled 11 with the council, rerolled it and got a 10. Meh! They got away, but I feeded too much units into that grinder, distracting me in return.

Thanks to those 8 scoring units he scored a minor victory over me in the end, with the overall result for the whole team was a draw.

Lesson learned: don't get in charging range with sisters, unless you own a breaker unit like Yriel, the Avatar or 1-2 Lords.


After one hour of free time (lunch hurray, did I mentioned that the tournament was hosted inside a inn?) the second mission and the pairings were announced

Second Mission:
- 6 turns with Dawn of War Deployment
- HQ, each player must declare one piece of terrain inside his DZ as his HQ.
- Holding your own was worth 500 points, holding your opponents HQ 750
- +2 TP for winning the mission, 1 for a draw and +1 if you manage to kill his whole elite-department

Our opponents were called "Westerwaelder Waagh and fielded the following armies: A hybrid Eldar force, Nidzilla with a focus on big and mean CC fexes and a mechanised BT force without a single raider.

We won the toss and after shaking hands I placed my eldar army first. The other team captain matched that with their nidzilla army, so I choose a desert table with some small tau buildings and landing plattforms as the battlefield. He placed his eldar next, which I matched up with our SW. 18 longranged S8 shots and a runic priest sounded like a clever idea to me.

My opponents army was:

A flying fex with 2xtalons
A broodlord with a stealer-retinue
One large squad of cc-warriors
Two elite-fexes with a strangler
3x6 stealers as troop choices
2 HS fexes with T7 2+ armour and talons
3 Zoas with blast

Rather toothless against my uber-mobile eldar army. I won the right for the first turn, but forfeited that to him. In retrospective I shouldn't have done that...

He placed nothing on the table and then brought his whole army except the stealers on the table. The broodlord and the warriors moved behind his HQ, which was the only large building on the whole table. On his side was that building and something looking like a small tau oil tank, which didn't provide full TLOS cover. I had a shallow landing plattform and two small terrain pieces. If I had picked going first, I would have denied him that terrain piece. Shame on me.

The match was kind of boring. My tanks killed all his elite fexes, the one dragon squad killed the tyrant and the other one brought one of the cc fexes down to one wound. Sadly my council failed to kill that one in CC. I destroyed most of his nidzilla department, but that took me too long and with the huge building my prism tanks didn't manage to blast the stealers off the table.

I tried to contest his HQ with one prism tank. In return I only lost some seers, one squad of FD and got one immobilised serpent. With his HQ not in my hands, one cc-fex only slightly scratched, one barely alive and all those hiding stealers and warriors I only got a minor victory. I also didn't get the extra TP for killing his elite, since I forgot that I needed to wipe out the warriors for that too. Dunno why I forgot that over the course of the game.

Lessons learned:
- Think more about choosing table sides vs going first
- getting only 5 melter wielding FD in each squad hurt me a lot against those T7 W5 fexes.

Jochen maimed the hybrid eldar army. That his opponent was drinking a lot of beer over the course of the game (and the day) didn't help their team either. Manuel even felt pity for his BT opponent. That player was a really nice guy, but his list was pure crap with no raider and only to LCs against our CSM force with a raider carrying some zerkers, 6 oblis, a lashprince and squad of terminators with combi-plasma bolters. Basicaly he smoked all the rhinos and then used the BT special rule against him, letting the guys in black running into rang for lash or a countercharge from his zerkers and the winged prince.

Overall result: Major victory

And that's enough for today, game 3-5 will be written over the course of the weekend.

Team tournament (Introduction)

I already talked about the team tournament in my news from the front posting yesterday.

I'm trying to find a golden thread for this posting, so let me begin to say some words about the tournament and how I managed to form my team.

Playing team tournaments got very popular in germany over the course of the last year. I'm not sure who started the trend, but the fact is that "da boss" of my gaming club (called Firebug) announced the next club tournament to be a 3 players team tournament a couple of months ago. He is a very nice fella but also very ambitious. So the first team formed up quick, with him and the two other good players from the club joining forces. A second team formed up quickly after that. Since our club has ~40 members (not everyone playing 40k) and the inn we play at can't hold more than 60 people, we decided that we don't want to have more three club teams with the remaining members being free to form up teams of their own with friends of the club.

I'm more of a honory than an active member due to distance between my home and the club rooms(~200+ miles). For example I can't visit the weekly gaming days, so my activity is limited on club tournament participation and wearing the club shirt at other tournaments.

During the last club tournament I met Jochen gain. He is a friend of mine whom I acquainted years ago and we stayed in contact after the tournament was finished.

So we idea came up to form a team of its own. With us two forming the core we were just one member short. There is a another gaming club called WEC ~90 miles away, with a friendly relationship to our boss and other members. Their own tournaments are also a real blast and I'm eager to play one of them in 2010. After one of their members heared that our team was in need of a third player, he send us the name of a member of them who searched a team for that specific tournament. With Manuel our team was full and we started making plans using a mailing list, a couple of phone calls and gmail chat conversations.

Manuel owns a lot of armies, but he's playing chaos at tournaments for years and Jochen is mainly a SM player, running a SW force back in edition 3 and new DA army using either the DA or SM codex in edition 5. I only own eldar, so my choice was rather easy. Our original setup was SM/CSM/Eldar, but we changed that to SW/CSM/Eldar after the new SW dex came out. More about that and the reasons for that setup later.

The Tournament setting was:

- 5 games over the course of a weekend
- 1850 points per army and for every team no codex can be taken more than once.
- 20 teams of 3 players each
- Swiss system
- missions unknown
- couple of restrictions like no named chars, two Raiders maximum and no 3 units of the same kind except for troop choices. So no Vulkan led armies with 2 raiders full of SS/TH terminators or a eldar force with tripple wraithlords

Each team had a captain, in most cases one of the 3 players. I was the captain for my team, so my job was to meet with the other captain at the assigned table set to exchange lists, shake hands and try to get good matchups for my team.

The pairing system was borrowed from another very popular team tournament. After going over the lists the captains roll off like you do during deployment. Let's call the one who needs (or wants) to go first captain A and the other guy is captain B and take a look how the system works:

Captain A chooses one his three player for the first pairing.
Captain B then chooses one of his members as the opponent.
Captain A now has the right to pick the table those two player will battle on against each other.

Captain B chooses one of his remaining players for the second pairing
Captain A picks one of his remaining guys
Captain B chooses the table to play on

Rinse and repeat... As you can see this system works out with any amount of player and the penumilate pairing also decides the last one.

In my opinion this kind of tournament is far more challenging than a normal one and it needs a bit more preparatory work. Why?

Let's run a quick scenario and assume that we have team A (lash-CSM/Mech-SM/nidzilla) facing team B (Pod-SM/JotWW-SW/BT). Team A has put some thoughts into the tournament and after hearing those horror stories about Jaws of the World Wolf the nidzilla player says that he can't even guarantee a draw against a SW list with JotWW in it. After looking over the lists team Bs captain sees that he doesn't want a CSM vs SM matchup, thanks to lash and oblis using morphed plasma cannon and his SM player skipping on a psyker in favour of other HQ-choices.

Team A wins the toss and what can the captain do?

Scenario A) Listen to the words of his nidzilla player, trying his best to avoid a Nid vs SW game at any cost. He can achieve that regardless of going first or not. If he goes first he doesn't elect his nid-player. Thus he can influence the second and third pairings, but looses the chance to pick a good table for those games. If there is only one bad table for the nid player, which isn't too bad for the one player of his team, who goes first, he can also take care of that. For example if one of the three tables is void of any good terrain, while the other two aren't and his nid player doesn't use warriors to create coversaves for MCs, he just use that table for the first pairing.

Scenario B) He thinks that his CSM player would massace both the SM and BT forces, thanks to their lack of psychic defense. He also thinks that his mech-SM have a small edge against the BT thanks to his SS/TH terminators. So if he sees a chance that his nid-player could achieve a draw or minor loss against the SW through a denial tactic, he could sacrifice him and hope for two other good matchups (Mech-SM with SS/TH against BT and Lash-CSM against Pod-SM)

So you need to pour some thoughts into army combinations and tailored vs all comers list. That of course assumes that you have enough large armies to draw on. If you're only 3 best friends with one army each you can skip the army selection process.

That's the reason why we choose SW, CSM and Eldar. We didn't have a tournament ready IG force in our closets and Manuel really excels when he plays CSM. CSM gave us a very offensive army, esp. against enemies w/o psychic defense or a lot of transport vehicles. Our SW army packs a lot of long ranged punch, has the "new kids on the block" bonus and with JotWW works really well against both nids and ork armies. My eldar force filled the need for a denial list. With the scoring system used my chances weren't that high to achieve a major victory or even a massacre, but you don't get tabled that easily with them too. Manuel made some test games with his army, Jochen went to a small tournament with a first version of his new SW. I talked a lot with Dverning (thanks again if you read this!) over gmail chat, since my experience with eldar in ed5 is rather limited and with my side job I didn't managed to glue everything together for some test games.

We all met up at the inn on saturday...that was where the fun started, but more about that and the first game in my next posting tomorrow.

News from the Front

2 weeks after the last posting I find myself looking on a little trophy, a nearly full jetlock council and those drugs I take to remind me that I lost all my 4 wisdom teeth to a cruel painboy in a white cloak this week.

But let talk about those things in a chronological order:

Over the course of the last week I managed to convert those 7 jetlocks and the jetseer I needed for one of the tournaments I talked about. I still need to glue some crests on the helmets, so you will have to wait for pictures of them.

After getting them done, buying new foam trays for my army case ( I realised that my jetlock wouldn't fit in my original design) and glueing together 15 ordinary DA I was ready for a team tournament called "Firebug 3 Generals". So as the name already hints at: You need to have 3 players to form a team. Not two, not four...just three.

On Friday the 6. November I travelled southwards to meet up with my two fellow teammates. Now how does such a kind of tournament works? Each team has a captain, this can be one of the 3 player or a fourth person. Each of the 3 players need to play a different army, you can't play two armies using the vanilla SM codex. Our team combination was SW, CSM and my eldar, with me being the captain.

Sadly none of us did bring a camera to the tournament, so you won't get any huge pictured battle-reports from me. But I will talk about the tournament in another posting next week, let me say that as a team it went rather well and after a hard fought match against the leading team in game 5 we placed third in the end. A trophy for each of us: Huzzah!

Two days later I got my teeth pulled, which is also the reason why I cancelled my participation for this weekends tournament. Ironic thing is that after loosing their original place, they moved the whole tournament into the german GW mainstore in my town. So I will visit the tournament as a spectator today, grab some sprues from another local player and then travel home again.

Nice weekend folks,

Karnstein