This was the first game that my son played in the league, playing his Tau against a foot Custodies list. The Custodies was a simple list, with a Captain, three blade champions, three guard squads and three warden squads. These were backed up by a small squad of sisters and Inquisitor Drax.
The game itself was a simple Take and Hold, with Chilling Rain on the Search and Destroy deployment map. Nice and simple, not like the game unplayed with deploy Servo Skulls!
The board, no GW terrain but pretty close and even
Deployment was fairly simple, the custodies pushed right up on to the line, ready to charge forward and get stuck in, this was partly helped by a redeployment ability. The Tau spread out in their deployment and also pushed forward down the left side of the board, with the infiltrating units pushing on to the objective.
The game went pretty much as expected, the tau manoeuvred to get shot off and the custodies using their ability to advance and charge to get some units close enough to charge first turn.
This is where the Tau started to run in to issues. While they were putting plenary of wounds on to the custodies, including with the Railgun from the hammerhead, actually getting wound through the 4+ invulnerable save was proving problematic. While they did manage to take down a few custodies, it just wasn’t enough and once the custodies got in to combat they pretty much cut clean through everything they touched.
By turn 4 the Tau were on the ropes with little way of getting back in the fight. The custodies had taken their blades to the bulk of the Tau forces and there was little that they could do to fight back.
By the end of turn 5 there was just 2 crisis suits and a commander on the board against around 20 custodies, down from the 35 or so that started the game.
Overall my son played the game very will. There were a few mistakes made but nothing fundamental. After the game I spoke to him about it all and, while I am not exactly a tactical genius, I do have some experience to my name. The only real points i had to make were down to the fact that he pushed forward to get shots turn 1. If he had gone sideways or even backwards to get angles he might well have been able to prevent the custodies from charging until turn 2, giving him two rounds of shooting instead of just one.
Another point was that he pushed up his Rampagers and they were caught out in no man’s land with nowhere to hide. If he had kept them back and waited for the counter charge, he might have had better luck with them.
The third and final point of advice I gave him was to keep paying attention to his rules and objectives. By the end of turn 3, it was obvious that he was going to loose and he got a little down heartened, not in a stroppy teen way, just lost focus and thought. I had to remind him a couple of time to read his data cards properly or re-read the tactical objective cards, as he was making assumptions and jumping ahead without considering all the options. The classic example of this was turn 4 and the Cleanse secondary. He was just going to leave his last breacher squad where it was, when I reminded him to check his cards, which he did and realised he could get cleanse before the units got wiped out next turn. It's was only 5 points game wise but league wise took it from a major defeat to a minor defeat and improved his league score substantially, so it was well worth it.
Ultimately I think he played very well and I honestly don’t think I would have been able to do any better than he did against the opponent, who is easily one of the top 3 players in club and sitting on three out of three wins this league. The cards were not great either, not terrible but not as helpful as they could have been. His opponent did better with his card draws but I don't think this was a major factor in the game.
So that's his first game done, on to the next one, which should be against Grey Knights.
Some more photos taken by the opponent;
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