Northern Invasion

A few years ago now I attended Kings of the North, this year, in about a month I will be attending Northern Invasion 4, without doubt the most northern 40k tournament in the country! (It may also apply to AoS and Magic as well, as I'm not going to include the local Christmas tournament, as teats just a club thing) So what is Northern Invasion? Its a small and very friendly tournament held in Orkney. At last count there were 8 40k players taking part and this is the first year that trophies will be awarded. I've posted up the basics of the tournament below and then I'll have a look at my ideas for a list. I will go over the list in detail later, as a lot of the posts in the next few weeks will be about the tournament.

So what are the restrictions? 

The army must be 1500pts and must use the CAD and be from ONE CODEX. Formations, Allied detachments and models that are lords of war cannot be used including imperial knights. So BRB CAD from one codex only and no LoW, which is nice but maybe a little to much as LoW's tend to be quite pricey and in a 1500 point list take a good chunk of points.

The Battlefield will be the standard Dawn of War setup with the usual deployment, except the objectives which are fixed. 5 objectives, 1 at the centre of the table and 2 oother, 24” away also on the centre line. The final 2 are placed by the players (1 each) and c)he games is victory point based with the objectives being the primary, 2vp each for the middle objectives and the player ones are worth 1vp to you and 3 to your opponent. In addition you gain 1vp for every enemy unit destroyed, with IC's and transports being counted separately.  Secondary objectives are the usual 3, first blood, line breaker and slay the warlord. There will also be night fighting. 

So, in general there are not a lot of changes to the game for the tournament, mainly just restricting to the CAD, and changing the objectives. Its a bit of a shame they have gone with the eternal war missions rather than the maelstrom games. At least I assume they have as there is no mention of maelstrom cards. A modified deck, like those I've used at previous tournaments, are quite good as they get rid of a lot of the action type cards, weighting the deck towards to objective cards. 

What is this going to do for my list? Well, it seems the movement will not be too important, and last turn objective grabbing will be the thing (scatbikes FTW). This means that sitting behind my defensive line until turn 4 before surging forward for the objectives and using the units in the flyers for a last turn grab as well. The main advantage will be that my list is very much a troops list,so lots of objective secured, useful for last turn grabs. Ill post up my first draft list next post, although I had a game the other day so the list has already changed! But ill write about that as well.

Initial thoughts though are that it will be a bit of a challenge to switch back to eternal war missions and the mindset that goes with them. I've been playing maelstrom for so long and think that the setup us a lot better. In looking forward to the tournament though!