A Moral Victory

Battle 02 was played last night vs. Mike’s (aka amrbean) Space Marine chapter.  Points limit for the evening was set at 750; he came in at exactly 750 while I was a mere 749.  We rolled Capture and Control for the mission, Spearhead for the deployment, and I won the roll-off, choosing to deploy first and take the first turn.  Mike set his control point in the far corner of his two legal table edges (using his wedding band), and I offset mine a bit towards center to take advantage of a bit of blocking terrain (using an Ethereal painted by my Scottish friend Tom, who first introduced me to 40k several years ago via the original Dawn of War RTS).  I was slightly preoccupied being Dada, so to get things rolling Mike setup the terrain features for both of us, and he allowed me to move one of the trees down near his table edge to beef up the foliage there (for a plan of mine that didn’t work out).

It was with no small amount of trepidation in my mind (and a hungry 3-month-old in my arms) that we shook hands and had at it.  We were so absorbed in playing the game that we didn’t take pictures at some key moments, but whatever; we’re still new at this.

Pre-Game
Mike is setting up terrain.  That upside-down-bowl looks vaguely like a Tau building, don’t you think? We’ve already deployed, so this is effectively also a top-of-Turn 1 tableau.  It didn’t matter (as he never fired them), but my Broadside has a Twin-Linked Plasma Rifle rather than the Smart Missile System as modeled.  (I was disappointed with the Hammerhead’s SMS; 24” range was awfully short for my heavy support long-range guy).  We livestreamed the game via justin.tv; that’s what the Macbook is for.  Next time we’ll even try to have the audio working.

Turn 2 (Yes, we forgot to take pics during Turn 1.  Shaz’bot.)
This is the bottom of the turn; I think Mike is looking up some Sniper-related rules at the moment as he gets ready to shoot at my Broadside.  Notice the lack of visible ASMs; Hammerhead submunition rounds took a pretty bad toll already, and the survivors are using the Tau building as cover during their advancement on the Devilfish.   Look closely; see the beautiful patterns all that lovely smoke is making as it billows out of the smashed Predator?  I can’t remember if it was the Hammerhead or the Broadside, but I scored a Crew – Stunned in Turn 1 and a Destroyed – Explodes! in Turn 2.  Now Mike knows how my Devilfish felt in Battle 01.  Somewhere in here I completely forgot about the Kroot for a turn, which let Mike amble on up and chip out a model with his Razorback’s Storm Bolter.

Turn 3
ASMs were unsuccessful in their grenade attack on the Devilfish, who promptly skimmed the hell out of there.  This is where I failed to win the game by not making a beeline for Mike’s objective; I let myself get distracted by the smell of Space Marine blood in the air and worry overmuch about the Land Speeder (in my defense it was armed with a melta weapon).

A few different shots of the end of my Turn 3 player turn.  Scouts dead, but not before Pinning my Broadside.  We didn’t want to stop to look it up, so we agreed that he would’ve been pinned before making the fall-back morale check and then later that at the end of his pinning he was back in play instead of making another morale check for falling back or not; either way it was a moot point, I don’t think he ever managed to get another salvo off.

Turn 4
I moved the Hammerhead in to cockblock the Razorback from having a straight shot at my objective, having remembered that it was crammed to the rim with a full 10-man TSM squad.  That last ASM had managed to shove a grenade up my Devilfish’s tailpipe, which removed any hope of an outright scenario-victory for me.

I managed to wreck the Razorback during my shooting phase, and you can see the TSMs piling out.

Turn 5
I’m sorry, is that a Direct Hit on the scatter dice in the midst of the TSM squad?  Why yes!  Yes it is.  Actually it’s my second direct hit of the night, the first having been earlier vs. the ASMs.

Those Kroot are getting awfully close to the Captain over there on the far side of the table.

Turn 6
Mike rolled us into Turn 6; good for me, not as good for him.  Except that somehow my stupid far-sighted Hammerhead managed to miss the Land Speeder while blocking LOS for the Broadside.  Trying to save his Shas’la, my Shas’el assaulted in and took out 2 TSMs.  There are plasma blasts and missiles landing just about everywhere except on that damn Land Speeder!

Somehow that single damn Kroot passed his leadership check vs. morale.  A Shaper in the making?

The surviving TSMs assault and manage to take out one of my Shas’el’s drones while the Land Speeder scores a second Immobilized hit on the Devilfish (I think Mike was trying to blow it up in order to inflict casualties on the Fire Warriors), taking out the burst cannon.  And the Captain didn’t have any trouble repelling the Kroot’s assault and taking his head off.  Ah well, I guess he wasn’t shaping up after all.  Ha ha.

End of Game
I roll for Turn 7 and come up short; the game ends immediately in a tactical draw, with no one controlling any Control Points.  It’s only just now occurring to me, 2.5 hours after we finished playing, that neither of us technically controlled our own control points.  Oops?  There’s so much to remember.

Post-game analysis, bragging, and commiserating.

Conclusion
This is a damn fun game.

I was convinced going into it that Mike was going to mop the floor with me, but most of my units made good turns of the bad tactical situations I put them in.  I'm laughing (through my yawning) at the fact that neither of us was controlling our own point, but live and learn.  There was plenty of fumbling for the rulebooks, but our fundamental grasp was orders of magnitude better than it was just 10 or so days ago when we played our "prologue" introductory 550 point game.  Tau army lists seem to work a lot of the edge cases (complex units with multiple-wound and single-wound components: can I put a wound on a Shas'el two turns in a row, then put a third wound on a drone during a subsequent turn in order to save the Shas'el?) which it falls on me to be clear about.  I also lost sight of the actual victory conditions early in the game, which led to enough blunders that it snowballed into me needing a complete kill in order to win.

We need more terrain.  I won't be buying any, but even though I consciously tried to bring out lots of stuff to use as terrain features the table was sparse compared to what I see in other battle reports.  That's something else we'll get to over time, I'm sure.

Mike purchased Planetary Empires last week and brought the rulebook for me to skim.  The elegantly simple campaign rules it has look pretty damn fun.  We're going to try and get a campaign going, but it might be difficult to drum up another player who's willing to approach it as, "Let's play a game together!" rather than, "Let's see who I can crush beneath my armored boot."

All in all I feel as though I won a moral victory; I didn't lose the match outright, and I could've easily come closer to victory, if not actually achieving it, if I'd not been so caught up in bloodlust.