Game 1 recap - knights

 My first game of the league and possibly my worse match up. I was facing a Knights army comprised of a Castallan, an Errant, three warglaives and three helverins. In other words I had 28 T8 2+ 5++ wounds and 96 T7 (or higher) 3+ 5++ wounds to chew through with .ostly lasguns and the odd occasional heavy weapon in addition to a Hellhammer. Oh and did I mention that each model would.regain a wound at the start of the turn and a chunk of the models had -1 damage?

So yeah, I was not looking forward to this match up at all. 

Guard Deployment

Knight deployment

The table

Now, mistakes were made early on in the game, possibly the biggest before deployment. When setting out objectives, I set one inside the ruins at the bottom left of the above picture. This meant that whoever held it was open to the enemy and had no real cover, I should have placed it the other side of the wall, hidden from the enemy but I didn't. It would have made no difference if my opponent had chosen that corner as the other deployment objective was in the top right ruin, under the big green knight, nicely hidden from view. Trying to hold this objective just turned in to a blood bath and I had to give up trying as it was just getting my infantry murdered every turn for no gain. Had it been placed behind the ruins, I think I could have held it for at least 4 turns and gained a few more points.

Turn 1

Turn 1 and I started strong, after taking a round of shooting with minimal casualties, I pulled three great cards and went for it, gaining 15 points and subsequently the only points I scored all game. It cost me 2 squads of infantry to do it but I thought that it was a fair trade at the point in the game, as two squads for a third of my possible secondary points seemed reasonable.

Turn 1

Turn 2

Turn 2 and the world comes crashing down. My Hellhammer bites the dust, despite a 2+ 5++ and a techpriest, it just couldn't take a volcano cannon to the face twice and a shield breaker missile for good measure. I used a stratagem to fire before it died and well, over two turns of shooting I did a grand total of 3 wounds. Not exactly a great Omen for the rest of the game. This also left me with very little to even hit the Knights with, let along wound them, apart from praying for 6's to hit and some failed saves. 

Turn 4

By turn 4 things had gone from bad to worse. At this point a Cadian squad had actually done more damage to an warglaive than a Hellhammer, as they managed to take about 6 wounds off one in just one round of shooting but it just wasn't enough. Even when the scions dropped in and took out another armiger, there were still two big Knights on full wounds stomping about. 

Turn 4

All in all I manage to take out 3 of the baby knights and put a few wounds on another by the end of turn 4, in return I had by scions, for 25 bodies, and about 16 other infantry models left. We didn't even bother to finish turn 5, the three little Knights moved in to kill off the models at the bottom of the table, the big blue knight lined up the remaining infantry in the centre and the big green knight moved over to intercept the scions. As it was getting late, gone midnight at this point, we looked at the options and cards. My opponent had already maxed out secondaries and held enoght objectives to max the primary at the end of the game, I on the other hand drew 3 cards I couldn't possibly achieve, including bring it down and assassinate! I also could not hope to hold any objectives at the end of the game, so we theory hammered the rest of the last turn and called it. 

The score card (ignore the CP, I lost track on the app but we had tokens on the table)

So, there we have it, a resounding win for the Knights. The cards were not in my favour and probably never were going to be. I had the best 3 cards I could get in turn 1 and if I hadn't I probably would have scored even fewer points. Mixed with the (read "my") objective placement, I was up against it from the start. The dice really didn't help either, as I didn't make a single one of my command point rerolls and I made quite a few over the course of the game, spending half my command points of rerolls and redrawing cards, with pretty much all of the rest being spent on the Hellhammer in one way or another to try and keep it alive.

The only advantage of this game being first is that things can really only get better, as I would have to go some to get a lower score!

Despite the crushing defeat, my opponent was great and played the game very well. The fact that I had nothing that could really hurt him and my cards and dice were rubbish takes nothing away from the fact that he played well and maximised his own opportunities. I really enjoyed getting out and rolling dice again and as long as the other 4 games are as enjoyable as this one was (game 2 was actually better), it should be a good league.