Rocket City Invasion: Yay for Mediocrity

Saturday I played in a local event being run at the university in town. Here's a rundown of the basic points:

2000 point armies
Standard Missions used for 3 games (deployment and mission type pre-selected for each round)
Bonus objectives to earn up more kill points.

Here is the list I ran. It's a pretty basic mechanized Deathwing list that I ahve been using for a couple of months now:

Belial with Claws
2 Dreadnoughts with Missile Launcher/Lascannon
Deathwing Command Squad with Assault Cannon, Apothecary, Standard
Deathwing Squad with Assault Cannon
Deathwing Squad with Cyclone
2 Land Raider Crusaders
1 Land Raider

All Deathwing squads had 1 chainfist and 1 thunder hammer model.
All Land Raiders has an extra storm bolter

In the event I played against Space Marines, IG, and Blood Angels. here's a general overview of the games:

Game 1 vs Space Marines.

This guy was playing crimson fists. He had some scouts and a small tac squad and 2 scoring sterngaurd units, all kit out with combi-meltas and meltaguns. He modified the turrets on his razorbacks so he could raise them up and see over obstacles. He wins the roll and forces me to go first. Mission is dawn of war and capture & control. I deploy nothing and reserve nothing. turn 1 I roll onto the field in a central position, run the dreadnoughts and pop smoke on the land raiders. He brings in both sternguard squads in drop pods and unloads on my land raiders. One squad manages to wreck a land raider, and the other stuns and removes the assault cannon from a crusader. He complains a bit about me not explaining the differences in my smoke launchers before he podded in. The game goes on and I run over most of his army as two terminator squads are safely tucked in their boxes and only exit to kill the sternguard and take his objective. The cyclone squad holds my home objective while the dreadnoughts screen out anything that gets close.

He docked me a lot of sportsmanship points (half the amount for the game, giving me a 5) for not explaining my army upfront. He seemed kind of cool before pairings and he's looking at my army and asking some questions. When I show him my list he hints that he is familiar with the army, so when it comes to game time I let it go. All throughout the game he kept making 'minor mistakes' that could be seen as questionable, but never repeated the same thing twice as I caught him on each instance. He slow played the whole game, taking well over half an hour for his furst turn (which took me all of 2 minutes max) I got full bonus points except for killing Pedro who wasn't on an objective and thus not a problem. The judges acknowledged his douchery on the sportsmanship and possibly corrected it, though I can't verify that.

Game 2 vs mech IG.

I get paired up against quite possibly the strongest player in the region playing a much stronger army. The mission is table quarters and kill points. He wins the roll of and chooses to go first. I reserve everything to avoid the masses of lascannons, battle cannons, and other killy death. I use a massive piece of terrain in the center of the table to halt the advance of his biggest guns and whittle away at this veterans in valkyries and chimeras to get rid of the melta and lascannon threat. Pask is commanding a vanquisher that also gets some attention. I control the flow of the game until turn 5 when he evens up on kill points. In turn 6 he overcame my lead by popping two land raiders and killing an exposed terminator squad with torrents of fire. I only managed 2 kill points in retaliation and he eeked out the victory over me. Overall a great game.

Game 3 vs Blood Angels

I get paired up against a good friend whom I play against frequently. He notes that he should probably lose this game as he has yet to beat me with his Blood Angels. He's still getting used to them, but rapidly getting better with them. He wins the roll and chooses for me to go first. The mission is seize ground and traditional deployment; we end up with 5 objectives. I deploy centrally to avoid spreading out, ready to mobilize to a flank after I see his deployment. He spreads his forces out across the table (yay) and then rolls to seize the initiative, succeeding on his roll (boo). With a series of 6s and ending in a 5, he throws two lascannons in my direction killing a crusader and the godhammer and destroying both my protection and mobility. Such is the tone of the whole game as I struggle to keep up with his army, moving my dreads in and out of line of sight so they can shoot on the predators and razorbacks all over the field.

I pulled off some voodoo in turn 5 and send Belial out to contest an opposing objective (and possibly remove the threat). His command squad falls back to another objective with the remaining crusader. Belial fails to wound a single model in the 2-man troop unit in all 5 attacks, but still contests for the win. Unfortunately, the game kept going. On turn 6, termiantor and tac squad reinforcements arrived. I was unable to consolidate into the dangerous terrain near that objective, so I receive an assault from the terminators and lose my contestor, ending the game in a draw with 2 objectives a piece. Some extra movement by the BA player's armor prevented any bonus objectives from being scored.

So I finish with a great mediocre showing of 1-1-1. On the bright side, I managed to win best painted army and got a small box of plastic crack as my reward. Overall the event was very fun. The organizer is running another event in August at the university. I might help him run the event, or I might play again. I also might not be in town as I remember having a trip to Florida sometime in August, so we'll see what happens.

I'm running up to Dicehead this weekend for a big event they are running. I've acquired some sponsons this week to swap out one of my crusaders for a second godhammer, so I'm gonna finish painting those up tonight and otherwise run the same list. I figure with a slightly stronger list (the range on the godhammer helps this army a lot) and some better luck I can come out pretty strong up there as well.