NI4 Post Tournament rewiew

WARNING, there's quite a bit of moaning in this post. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Well, all the dust has settled on Northern Invasion 4, and planning has already started on number 5, plus hopefully an event up here early next year. While the event was generally a success, with most things running as planned, there were as always some teething issues. I will say now, lack of planning and preparation was not one of them, as all the tables were set up properly and all the paperwork was ready to roll, but in an effort to make it as friendly as possible, I think they went to far and it distracted from the fact that this was still a tournament.

My main grip I suppose is that fact that you didn't have to submit a list before the event, which lead to some issues at the start. These were mostly due to some of the younger participants, which while I am more than happy to encourage, turning up with a box of models, dumping them on the table and saying "what have I got? How many point is it?" is not really the way to start a tournament, especially when your already late. One of them had enough models to form an army, a reasonable one at that, the other didn't not have nearly enough, and despite our best efforts to repair models and sort a list out, we couldn't get near enough to the 1500 points to make it worth while. At the time I was quite annoyed but it all, but looking back I'm equally annoyed, sorry we couldn't do something and relieved, as by other accounts the youth in question was a bit of a pain, going to to quite the magic draft as he got bored and also quitting an rpg as it was taking too long. While were on the subject of youths, the other young lad, who was playing decided half way through his first game that he was going to nip off and play the magic draft, not quite sure how he thought he would do that but I guess not having done a draft before he might not have understood what was happening. It was a shame that he abandoned his game,as it made life difficult for both the other player and the tournament organizer, trying to figure out points for the game. In the end they worked it out fairly well, and the score seemed to tie in with the general score for the day.

All this ended up putting us over an hour late in starting, which combined with the fact 2 participants got there late, through no fault of the own but due to late running ferries, it meant that we were still playing at gone 11pm, well those of us staying at the venue were!

Now, I doubt want this to sound like I'm anti youths playing the game, I had two very good and entertaining games against some other young players,where I tried to impart my knowledge to them, whether they listened or not is a different matter! I think getting young players along to tournaments like this is great, however they need to realise it is a tournament.

Anyway, now I've had my moan ill carry on with the good bits! The venue was very good, and as we were staying on site, we could keep gaming into the night. The original idea was to try and play a few kill team missions, but we never got around to it, as explained above, but it was great just playing and having a laugh without having to worry about what time it was, a rare luxury for myself and many others I suspect. As I said at the top, the tables were great,with lots of good scenery and theme, not just a collection of scenery thrown on a table. It really enhanced the gaming experience.

Next we come to the food.  Have attended a few tournaments in my time, this being the 4th, but the food here was by far the best yet. The home made soup was excellent, and I thoroughly enjoyed several helping of the chicken and vegetable curries, also home made.

The organizers all did a brilliant job of organizing the event and for us players there was little we needed to worry about, apart from playing games. So good infect that I've already signed up for next year and somehow I've also been roped in to help organize it! Ok itdidnt take much persuasion ("do you fancy helping next year" "yeah, why not"). I think my main input will be getting lists reviewed pre the event and I think that will help iron out the only down points.

So after the mamouth moan at the beginning i will end with this, if you fancy a tripup north for a few games of 40k or AoS or even magic, look out for Northern Invasion 5, you want regret the trip!

Oh and here's a few more general pictures.....

Tables 2, 4 and 6. I ended up playing on 2 and 4.

Table 1, 3 and 5. First game was on 3 and I then spent all of day 2 playing on table 5, closest to camera.

One of the many little details found on the boards. There was graffiti, posters and other little bits like this scattered will over the various boards.

Necrons vs Nids, 

Chaos vs marines, the chaos player withdrew half way through this game to go play the magic draft.

Deathwatch list

I'm going to sneak this post in here, as I think the next few weeks are going to be taken up with Northern Invasion battle reports and the likes. I'm down at the in-laws for a few days so hopefully ill get it all written up while the mother in-law is spoiling the bairns!

So I'm going to run through my list and explain my thinking a little bit further than the last Deathwatch post. As this is going to essentially be an extension of my Inquisition list (here) I though that I would just do a quick recap of the forces;

Xenos Inquisitor w/Power armour,  Power Sword, Rad grenades, Psykotroke grenades

Xenos Inquisitor w/Combi-plasma, Power Armour, Psyker ML1

Elite 1 – 7x Acolyte’s w/carapace, hotshot lasgun, 3x stormshield

Elite 2 – 10x Acolyte’s w/carapace, bolt gun, 1x psyker, 1x Priest

Elite 3 – 5x Crusader’s, 5x Death Cult Assassins, 2x Priest

The thinking for the above list is in the Inq post, so I won't go over it again but it won't change with the inclusion of the Deathwatch. So, what is my list?

Black Spear Strike Force formation 

HQ-  Watch Captain w/Artificer Armour, Plasma Pistol, Power weapon, Beacon Angeles

Auxiliary- Ancient - Dreadnought w/ Plasma Cannon

Core- Watch Company-

Watch ccaptain w/ artificer armour, bolt pistol, power weapon.

Aquila Kill team - Librarian ML2 w/boltgun, force sword. 
8x veterans w/boltgun, chainsword

Dominates Kill Team - 2x Vanguard Vets w/stormshield, lightning claw
5x Vets w/boltgun, Stalker Pattern Boltgun

Furor Kill Team- Termie w/storm bolter, power weapon, 
2x termies w/storm bolter, chain fists
2x vets w/Flamer, bolter
3x vets w/infurnus heavy bolters

Purgatus Kill Team - librarian ML2 w/boltgun, force sword
5x vets w/boltgun, stalker pattern boltgun 

Quite a compact list I think. One thing you might notice is there are no transports, well this is due to the deepstrike rule from the strike force. Basic plan is to start with Inq detachment and dread on the table and deepstrike the rest near there specified targets. This is a bit of an alpha strike type list, although its a turn two strike. There should be enough on the board to survive turn 1 quite easily.

I have a few things that I'm not sure about with this list. Firstly it seems that you can't take a boltgun and bolt pistol, which seems odd as that really is the staple marine load. Its not a problem as such but it does mean that you either pay for a pistol or power weapon or take the pretty much useless chainsword. Points wise I've gone for chainsword and extra bodies.

Secondly and related to the first is the fact that I've got a couple of marines in the Furor team armed with bolters and flames. This seems to be not right to me, as its two ranged weapons rather than a ranged and combat weapon, I would have thought I would have had to have one or the other.

The final thing I need to check is pretty much the same as the second, that being all the guys armed with both a regular boltgun and a stalker pattern boltgun. This does seem to be excessive. The idea is good though, move and shoot the boltgun, stand and shoot the stalker, whatever your doing you've got special ammo as well. The stalker pattern is also good for anything t5 and above plus extra range, which you want with t5 plus models.

I think the list is pretty balanced, with some ability to take down light armour (heavy bolters and plasma cannon) and heavy armour (chain fist and dread ccw), and with all the bolters and also stalker pattern bolters I should be able to deal with most things.

Northern invasion review preview

Well, I'm back home after a rather enjoyable tournament. There were a total of 7 participants in the end, not a massive tournament but I ended up playing 4 games in the tournament and 2 for fun. Oh and I brought this home....

A fellow member of my club brought the AoS trophy home, so that was good as well.

More battle reports and my thoughts on the day to follow.

Northern invasion preview

A quick preview of the tables for today, looking good!

Northern Invasion - the advance!

This will be a short post as I'm in the final stages of planning and preparation. My armies are packed and sorted, along with codex and various other bits and bobs. The ferry is booked and in less than 6 hours we will be heading south.

My army of choice, dice and templates, rules and codex are all packed nice and neatly in to my new second hand old style citadel case. Bit of a mouth full I know! Cost a tenner without foam, but that's not a problem, as there are plenty of places to get foam. I wouldn't have bothered but I though it was a good idea with this trip to have a case that was a little more substantial than the card kr cases, even though theyhave served me very well over the last few years and will continue to do so for many years to come.

The case, a little battered but still going strong. That includes the clips as well!

Standard KR foam for the most part. This will eventually be superseded by the correct size foam, but for the moment it works just fine.

This case is packed full of goodies, ready to wage war! I've managed to fit in my Hjaltland 1500pts army, a Eagle Knights 1500pts army and a Dagr Ormr and a Deathwatch 200pts kill team, just in case there's some free time in the evening. Unfortunately I didn't get everything painted up, the valkyrie still needs some work as just the wings are primed! Oh well, close enough!

Wish me luck, I'm going to go for that trophy! (I would like to add that I am under no illusions that I have little chance of winning as I'm running a fluff list more than a tournament list, but I'm gonna give it a good go!)

Northen Invasion 4 - the list

As I said in the a previous post, I am going to put my thoughts down. When I looked at the rules and the fact that it looks like it will be Eternal War style missions, I considered if the Hjaltland LI were the best option to take. After looking at all the options, I decided I would take the Hjaltland aftetall. I did this for several reasons, as I thought it would be nice to field a fully painted army, something I haven't done before. That means that I will have to crack on with the Valkryie! Another reason for taking the Hjaltland is the numbers, as I don't think that many other armies will have the same numbers and finally as it is an Eternal War mission, mobility is not so much of an issue. I did consider taking my Hrossey Yeomanry, lots of armor but few object secured troops, meaning that I might not be able to hold any objectives at the end of the game. I also looked at the various marine armies, the Knights are set for mobility and work well in Maelstrom games but not so much in Eternal war, thecsame can be said of the Guardians, which also suffer from a low model count alongside the lack of objective secured troops. Only the Disciples were an option, with the most troop options. The same could be said for the Dagr Ormr, but I would like to get some armor to support them but the Anvil Industries transport is delayed until Christmas, so there on the back burner for the moment. So after all that I went with the Hjaltland LI but with a few minor changes.

As I also mentioned in a previous post, I've already changed my list once. Ill go over the first list, which I played with in the batrep in the last post though and give my thoughts and then my reasons for changing it.

So the list; 

promethiam pipe relay

Company command - creed, standard, medic, missile hwt, MoO

Vets - 3 melts, demos, grenadiers, 

Chimera - multilaser, h. Flamer, storm bolster,cam net

Platoon - 

Pcs-  4 grenade launchers

3x squads - autocannon, Flamer

2x squad - Flamer

Special weapon squad - flamers

2x wyverns - enclosed

Valkryie 

Vendetta

2x priest

Commissar 

Psyker

So a bit different from usual, I decided I'd change it up a little with the different game. The thought was to get some extra mobility and armour on the table, with the chimera for the vets. This would give them the ability to move around the table quickly and still fire. Maxing out the platoon with 5 squads also means I can take both static gun line units with hwt's and mobile units with just flamers. The special weapons squad was to give more flamers and to use up spare points. 

The pipe line looked like fun, with a cool rule to give torrent to the flamers, this I'm defiantly keeping. I loose the quad gun but I also save a bunch of points and get a bunch of torrent flamers. The vets in the chimera, gave some mobility but I think they will be better off back in the Valkryie, as it gives the option to put them anywhere turn 2, rather than somewhere turn 1. The rest pretty much worked out as planned, but the special weapons squad were a bit pointless. I can definitely use the points better elsewhere. 

So I changed the list, putting back a lot of things I had taken out. So the current list is;

Company command - creed, medic, standard, missile hwt, MoO
Company command - 4x plasma guns, carapace
Vets - 3 meltas, demos, grenadiers,
Platoon
Pcs- 4x flames
2x squads - flames
3x squads - autocannons, flames
2x wyverns - enclosed
Valkryie
Vendetta
3x priest
2x psyker

So a very similar list to what I usually run at 1500 points. Seems I'm not one for change! So as usual the vets will run in the Valkryie and the plasma ccs will run in the vendetta, giving some rapid response/movement options. The vets will have a priest as will each of the blob squads to stop them running. The psykers will be split between the blob squads, depending upon abilities. The ccs in the vendetta are a bit of a sacrificial unit, designed to hit a priority unit and do as much damage as possible before dieing. Hopefully my wyverns will keep up their kill rates, so far they have never let me down. I did think about dropping the MoO and the demos on the vets and maybe a few other bits to get some power weapons on the Flamer blob squad or the Aquila relic for PE on the plasma ccs. I think that I might keep them as they are though, even though this means I have almost 0 anti-vehicle close combat abilities, which hasn't really stopped me in the past!

Hopefully I get a game in to test this list.

Northern invasion practice game.

Well, I haven't got quite as much practice in as I would have liked for Northern Invasion 4. In fact I only got one game in. This means that I will have to fall back on my existing knowledge of my arms strengths and weaknesses and try and apply it to the new situation. While the list I used in this game is not the list I'm going to be taking there is a lot of overlap and I learnt a few things.

Deployment

For this game I decided to split my deployment, with the bulk of my units on the left, my wyverns and company command with warlord (creed) behind a large 30 blob squad and promethium pipe line. On the right flank I put a 20 blob squad to support the melta vets.  If I had thought about it a little more i would have realised he'd pod in his dread right in front of my lines and placed the vets over there, probably dismounted as well. 

He dispersed his forces across the board with his scout squads to the front, his attack bikes in the center, devs on his right (top left) and main bike squad on his left (top right) he held his pod and dread and also a Storm and bolters scouts in reserve.

Our warlord traits were not very effective this game, with creed gaining preferred enemy and relentless and his, a captain on a bike, gained rerolls to 1's (can't remember if this was to hit and to wound or just to hit), it was out of the BRB, that's all I know.

Turn 1

Turn 1 was quite quiet, we both traded shots with little effect. From memory he lost a few scouts and a assault bike and I lost a few guardsmen from the prodded dread.

Turn 2

Started well with the arrival of the reserves. However, it all went down hill from there. 3 autocannons with tank hunter and 3 twin linked lascannons managed to do 1 hull point of damage to the dread, not really what I was hoping for. Most of my other shots did little as well, the best result was taking out the majority of the scout squad in the table centre, but I couldn't quite finish the job.

His turn 2 went a lot better, charging in on my blob squad. Luckily with the priest and the sheer numbers there was little he could really do, apart from tie them up for the rest of the game. Rather annoyingly he also took out my chimera for first blood and also a victory point. This meant that the vets foot slogging, even though they didn't really have anywhere to go as the dread was locked in combat. At this point I should say that the red yogurt pot below is actually drop pod (it was a list testing game), but with all the other pots on the table as scenery, it got forgotten about, which was useful as it had a deathwind launcher in it!

Turn 3

Things got better at this point, as I managed to take out the assault bikes, even though my demo charge on the vets did nothing! 3 meltas, a grenade and a charge did enough though, plus they consolidated on to an objective. The main blob squad on that side though was suffering and down to 3 models though, so much for objective camping.

Not masses happened in his turn, the removal of the last of the blob squad on the right flank and some damage to the vets from the big bike squad. the combat on the left continued. If I remember right at this point the dread fluffed all its attacks though!

Turn 4

With little left on the table to take objectives at game end, I decided that I need to change up the plan slightly. I had a handful of vets on one objective and nothing on my objective. Somehow I managed to take out the Landspeeded Storm and the scouts inside, not really sure how I did it now, luck I guess, although I imagine that the Vendetta had a hand. I do remember that 3 of the 5 scouts died in the crash which helped. Also the vendetta dropped on its cargo of special weapons boys, who tried to flame the dev sgt to death with 3 flamers and failed, the 3 rapid fire lasguns also failed to make a dent as well.

In his turn, the bikes carried on moving across the board, the dev sgt ran away, or rather ran to the centre objective. His librarian also decided it was time to stop hiding at the back doing nothing.

Turn 5

In some cases it was a little to late for both of us. I did what a could and charged up my Wyverns, going flat-out to get the objective, also forcing the bikes to either charge or drive around. If they charged they would have been stuck at the front of the first wyvern and possibly not able to claim the objective, as if they wrecked the wyvern, which only the captain could do otherwise, they would have been stuck between the chimera wreck, the wyvern wreck and the other wyvern, which may or may not have also been wrecked. I also dropped of the Valkyries cargo, putting both flyers in to hover mode as well. The platoon command squad went for the centre objective, where the marine scouts seems to have disappeared. they may have been the scouts I destroyed in the last turn and not the ones that were in the storm, as there seems to be one of the storm riding scouts contesting the vets objective in the endgame picture. Anyway, they claimed that one. The vendetta had some fun, and roasted a librarian with 3 lascannon shots, even with a storm shield. Strength 9 to the face tends to have that effect!

In his turn, he did the sensible thing and ignored my wyverns, instead going around for the squishy squad manning the objective on the left of the table, who where swiftly dispatched by HoW attacks and the captain and his burning blade. The punch fest behind my lines continued, if it had been able to go to extra turns, I think I would have lost, and then my warlord would have been for it. There was a bit of rule bending going on with the combat, I say bending, its more like using to my advantage. With such a big base size, I could get a lot of guardsmen in contact with the dread, and thus keep my priest alive by selecting guardsmen to die. With only a couple of attacks each turn coming my way against a squad of 20+ models, it was going to take time to whittle down the numbers.

Oh, and the dev sgt tried to be a hero and challenged the platoon command squad in the middle and took a krakk grenade to the face charging in.

End of play

Well, at the end of play, the board looked like this. The bike squad are strung out like that to enable them to either hold the left objective or contest the centre one. I think he would have liked to split the bike squad, but his captain may not have had enough attacks to kill the unit, so he went all in. His last storm riding scout, ran up to contest the vets objective and the scouts that had been hiding in the trees on the right came out to grab that objective.

So, at the end of the day, for the primary objectives, I claimed my objective for 1 point and that was it. My opponent claimed one of the board objectives, the one on my right flank. One objective, the one on my left flank went unclaimed as he chose to contest the centre objective with his bikes and my platoon command squad, and his objective was contested by the lone scout and 2 vets.

Victory points for units destroyed was a different matter, I had scored 5 points, for killing the Landspeeder Storm, killing a units of Scouts, the Attack Bike Squad and a unit of Devastators, plus killing his Librarian. While he had scored 3, for killing the Special Weapons Squad, the Blob Squad on the right and destroying the Chimera.

For Secondary points, I had Line Breaker (just, completely by accident) and he had both First Blood and Line Breaker.

At the time this meant a 7/7 draw. However, I have since had a check of a few things, not related to this game and found out a couple of points, namely that both the Priest and Primaris Psyker are Independent Characters. I had always just thought they were Characters, not Independent Characters, the same a Commissars. This changes a few things, Look Out Sir rolls to start with, but also means I can chop and change units during the game, which could be handy. It does also mean they give up a victory point when they die, so in fact the game should have been a 9/7 loss. Which is annoying.

So, lessons learnt: Apart from the above point, taking a single Chimera is pointless, to easy to destroy and is easily out manoeuvred. The melta Vets are back in the Valkyrie. I also need a better heavy hitting unit, so the plasma CCS are back. With orders and the plasma, I should be able to deal with a lot of threats, its just a shame I couldn't squeeze in Kurovs Aquila, rerolling those 1's is always useful with squishy guardsmen. Krakk grenades would have been useful, but I'm still not taking them, there still way overpriced, and will be even more so with the new grenade FAQ ruling.

So what's the plan? Well that's in Fridays post!