Victory is Mine

amrbean and I played our fourth match Monday, 2010/05/31, and the luck of the die (and a bit of tactical fumbling on both our parts) brought me an incontrovertible, but hard-fought, victory.  We rolled Capture and Control for the mission and Spearhead for the deployment, with 750 point armies (my cadre list is in the sidebar).  amrbean won initiative, choosing to go first (and thus deploying first).  We deployed, with amrbean  putting it all on the line while I reserved my Devilfish with embarked 6-man FW squad.  I failed to seize the initiative, and the game was afoot!

We tried to livestream the game over justin.tv, but the broadcast quit after 20 minutes or so and I have no idea why.  We didn't bother with trying to get it working again.

Turn 1: I believe this is in the midst of my movement phase at the bottom of Turn 1; I forgot to take a pre-game/post-deployment picture.  The first turn was a bit of shuffling around and some ineffectual shooting on both our parts.  In subconscious penance for being at 759 points during our last game (SMS instead of burst cannons on my Hammerhead), I forgot that my XV88 had a targeting array and thus played with BS3 and 739 points.  And I know for a fact that I rolled a few 3s during the game that would have been hits if I'd remembered that TA.  *sigh*  I don't think his (twin-linked!) railguns managed more than a weapon destroyed and an immobilized all game.

Turn 2:  My reserves failed to arrive.  Volleys of fire splattered 2 Kroot Carnivores and nicked the armor on my forward-most shas'el.  From off-screen, the Predator manages some nice long-range shooting and immobilized my Hammerhead almost right on top of my objective.  Lots of wild return-fire from my units in the thick of the scrum had no effect beyond destroying the Rhino's storm bolter.

Turn 2: Up at the top of the battlefield, though, amrbean 's Predator swung wide and is ready to come charging down the edge; its placement will cause me some panicked indecision later on.  My Stealthsuits with their combined total of 18 shots per turn have managed to gun down the foolishly heroic Captain.  I mean, really, what was he going to do, play ring-around-the-rosie with them?  They were hopping up and down the piece of tupper-terrain, there, staying out of line of sight of the scouts and out of melee range of the Captain.

Turn 3: I'm not sure exactly when this picture was taken; itmust be in-between player-turns in turn 3.  From the time-stamp it's several minutes later, but look how far forward my Stealthsuits are from the last pic.  It's before my player turn 3, though, as my Devilfish has not yet arrived from reserves.  So I'm not really sure WTF is going on here.  The Dreadnought smells blue blood and is bearing down on the wounded shas'el and the Rhino is trying to get its embarked 10-man SM squad as close to my objective as possible, but other than that I have no recollection.  Looking at the next pic in line amrbean is still moving his units, as the Dreadnought winds up in a different place.

Turn 3: This is the end of the turn.  My Devilfish+FWs have arrived and made a cruising-speed move directly toward amrbean 's objective.  They've tantalizingly stopped in front of the Predator, blocking one of its lascannons and tempting it mightily with a side-armor shot.  I believe I scored another weapon destroyed on the Rhino, which upgrades to an immobilized in the absence of more than 1 weapon.  The Kroot are guarding the objective, the Stealthsuits are looking to mow down some scouts (having taken a casualty but holding firm), I don't recall what I did with the Hammerhead, and the Broadside keeps not blowing up the Rhino.  Also, amrbean is playing host to a chest-burster, apparently.

Turn 3: Effectively the same picture?  Timestamps bear that out.  Maybe I was trying to get the flash to work, I dunno.  I'll leave it here for posterity!

Turn 4: End of amrbean's player turn.  ASMs have been in hiding most of the game, locked in combat with my shas'el.  They've managed to take him down and the survivors are looking to do the same to my 2nd one. Look how dejected amrbean is that his Rhino has failed to repair, and his TSM squad has disembarked + run at my Kroot.  I'm pretty sure the Predator took a snapshot at my Devilfish as it swam past and blew off its  nose-mounted burst cannon.

Turn 4: I dispensed a lot of death on this turn.  The TSM squad was on the receiving end of the brunt of it: the Kroot rapid-fired their rifles, the Hammerhead blasted away with both burst cannons and the ion cannon, the Broadside put a railgun slug straight through someone, and the Devilfish squirted forward only to belch 6 Firewariors who took aim with their pulse rifles. Results: even with a 3+ armor save, that's a lot of weight of fire to try and survive, and only 3 did.  One guy with a lascannon, one guy with a flamer, and one guy with a bolter.  My surviving shas'el gunned down the ASMs while the Stealthsuits riddled 3 scouts full of holes and continued forward to try and contest the objective.

Turn 5: We got so wrapped up in it that I didn't take any mid-turn pics.  amrbean's flamer-armed TSM took out all but 3 of my Kroot with a single shot (no armor saves, damn useless Kroot!) but somehow they held the line and the objective.  He gambled on a turn 6, assaulting his scouts off the objective and into my Stealthsuits, managing to bring them both down but leaving the objective uncontrolled.  The centrally-placed Fire Warriors turned their iron sights on the no-longer-in-melee scouts and managed to put one of them down.  My Devilfish rammed the throttles to the stops, ejected the drones, and sent them forward to contest the objective come turn 6.  Between the Kroot, Hammerhead, and shas'el (who'd played a near-thing game of chicken with the Dreadnought) the remaining TSMs were buried 6 feet under.  Mike rolled for continuation-of-mission and...

It's game over, man, game over!  Look at that thousand-yard stare.  With my Kroot on my objective and amrbean's lone surviving scout about 3.5" away from his objective, victory is mine.  It was an intense game that could've gone either way; amrbean's dice went completely cold for his Turn 2 or 3 shooting phase, and my mine were almost on fire for my corresponding shooting phase.  Rules-wise we did very well, I think, the biggest blunder being some incorrect shooting-then-running and moving + firing heavy weapons, which we were able to immediately redact so they didn't affect the final outcome.  I got REAL lucky with the flamer template needing to be placed at the shooter's base, not the barrel of his weapon, or all of those Kroot would've been dead.

Just another end-of-game angle.

Just another end-of-game angle.

It was a gg all around and left us feeling comfortable enough with our grasp of the rules that we'll be playing a full 1,000 point game next, whenever that may happen to be.