This was the last and final game I played in the run up to the Northern Invasion tournament. It was the second match I played against my son. This time around we decided to play a mirror match of sorts. My son took a Longstrike Hammerhead, Devilfish, Piranha, Broadside, two strike squads and a breacher squad, plus pathfinders. I took a Leman Russ Vanquisher, Chimera, a Scout Sentinel, two Armoured Sentinels, three Cadian Squads and Kasrkins.
While this isn’t an exact match, as Longstrike should have been mirrored by a Tank commander, but the cost of the tank commander meant this wasn’t possible. Another issue was the Piranha, as there is not comparable model in the guard, a Tauros might have been an option but I don’t have one, so a scout sentinel was the closest I could get. This is similar to the Broadside, the closest I could get in terms of firepower was two armoured sentinels. The last issue was the Strike and Breacher squads, as with the removal of shotgun vets, the only option was infantry squads. I could have chosen any of the battle line units, but went with Cadians in the end. So, while not an exact mirror, it was as close as we could get with the models we had to hand.
Guard Deployment
Tau Deployment
We were both quite cautious first turn, neither wanted to expose their big hitter, the Hammerhead and Vanquisher, to the others vehicle. This was sort of proved as the two vehicles that we did expose, my chimera and his devilfish, suffered, although only my chimera was destroyed, as opposed to his only being crippled down to just a couple of wounds. His piranha was taken out by the hunter killer missiles from the sentinels.
Turn 1
Having taken his devilfish down to just a couple of wounds I decided to try and wrap and trap the devilfish with my sentinels and infantry, however, I failed to take the last wound off amend the devilfish was able to retreat due to being able to fly.
Turn two was pretty much the same with the big guns trying to stay away from each other while the rest of the army started taking chucks out of the other. While i managed to get an early lead by grabbing some objectives early, it wasn’t enough to pull any sort of sizeable lead.
Turn 2
While I didn’t take any more pictures of the game, mostly as I was trying to move the game along to get the young man in to bed at a reasonable time, the game stayed pretty level throughout. When we did decided to engage each others heavy hitters, the Vanquisher went first and proved to be the lesser of the two by failing to knock out the hammerhead in one turn, unlike the hammerhead knocked out the Vanquisher with one shot. However, the hammerhead was taken out next turn, so there was no real advantage.
When we ended the game, the guard were in ascendancy but it was a close run thing. I had more models on the table and greater board control, however my son still had a broadside on the table with full wounds and I had little that could take it out with. So if we had gone on further, the guard would have increased their lead but the broadside will be able to wonder around at will smashing three guardsmen a turn.
Guard End game
Tau End Game
This game was really good fun but did prove that most of the guard stuff was actually out gunned by the equivalent Tau units. I really think guard are not in a good place at the moment, yes they can compete but i still think several units are over priced and the rules underwhelming.
Anyway, the game ended in a draw, which is how it should have finished. I think there was little that I could have done to change the outcome apart from using the reinforcements stratagem to recycle a unit of guard. We’ll have to get the last tournament game played soon and see if I can actually beat him, which would give us a W/D/L of 1/1/1!
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