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Friday, 26 July 2024

2024 league - guard vs orks

 So I played another game in the league, the fourth of five games and another victory, just! This was a very close game with the final score being 69 to the guard and 65 to the orks. There were a few mistakes made in the game but I'll come to them later. 

My opponents list was quite scary to look at, as it had a lot of combat punch and his previous game had been against the World Eaters, and had been a resounding victory 78 to 33, so I was really worried. His list included; a beast boss, two beast bosses on Squigosaurs and three warboss' leading two units of beast snagga boyz in kill rigs, two units of squighog boyz and three units of nobz in trukks, plus a unit of Gretchen at the rear.

So lots of mobility and close combat punch, which meant that my plan was to stay back as much as possible and force him to come at me piece meal. 

Take and hold, search and destroy, chilling rain

Mission and terrain layout were rolled for randomly.

Terrain layout 3 

Deployment 

Ork deployment

I didn't get any pictures early game, but during this time.my opponent made, what I think, was his biggest mistake, he held back, worried about my deep striking units. He pushed up with his kill rigs but bottle necked himself in the central terrain pieces. He did manage however to remove my DKoK squad that I had sent up the middle and a cadian squad on the left flank, which had claimed objectives for VP, plus my rough riders that had pushed up the right flank. However, this was over two turns and so the DKoK and Rough Riders returned as Reinforcements. 


By the start of turn 3, the game was still very close, with orls now in my lines, with the majority of my units pinned in my deployment zone. I had forced my opponent to move back by bringing the DKoK in behind him but that was it. My scions were still off the table, along side the rough riders. My knight finally did something this turn and chopped up a squad of Squighog boyz, although he failed to take out the Boss. This also saw the start of the battle between Tank commander and beast Snagga boyz. I lost the other tank to kill rig shooting which was unfortunate.

Looking a bit grim for the guard

Nobz out of position after taking on the flanking DKoK.


At the beginning of turn 4 we were still only separated by a few points and I was struggling to score primary points but doing well on secondary points, my opponent had the opposite problem. The scions had dropped in previously but some poor positioning from me and dropped me some easy primary points this turn. The rough riders also reappeared this turn in the far corner to charge down some trukks but failed the charge, twice. The knight however had no trouble dealing with the kill rig that had charged my infantry squad sitting on my home objective. The scions on the top objective were less lucky and were splattered all over the place, luckily for me another (identical) unit was waiting ready to redeploy! 



Rough riders pinned in by trukks

Turn 5 saw the knight move up and take on the last kill rig and the rough riders hit both the trukks. With both charges successful and the resultant damage enough to destroy all three units, the rest of the firepower from the two squads of scions was directed at the remaining orks and was enough to destroy all by one lone ork warboss. 




There was very little for the orks to do in there turn, having only one model left. They were however able to score a few points. The end result of 65 to 69 for the guard was a pretty fair score for the game, even though I had significantly more units left at the end, although most of these did come from reinforcements.


There are a couple of notes to make though. There were a couple of mistakes made during the game, not just in terms of decisions but also rules wise. 
For the orks, the main mistakes were tactical, with pushing both kill rigs in to the ruins turn 1 bottlenecked himself meaning one has to move back to allow the other to move forward. The second mistake was charging the squidosaurs unit into the knight rather than the squad on my home objective. They did some damage but not enough to take.out the knight, although the knight did fail to take them out in return. The last mistake I think was holding on to bring it down for so long. I think that after the second turn it should have been dropped. However, there is a caveat to this, one that is my mistake. 
I think I only really made two mistakes, one minor one was holding my knight back so much. I think I should have pushed it up further turn 2 but ultimately it worked out as it was. The second mistake was with "big guns never tire". When my tank was charged I checked the rules as I had a feeling there were restrictions about blast weapons. Having a look through the main rule there was no mention about it, just pistols, so I checked a few.other bits but found nothing, even though I was sure that there was something. Anyway we played on and I shot the plasma guns in combat even thought they were blast. I later found the bit I was looking for and confirmed that blast can't shoot in combat (in the rules commentary). Why they can't just add the restriction to the main rules I don't know, they have stuff about pistols after all. Anyway, this would have meant that I would have pulled the Russ out of combat and fired all the infantry in to the unit and probably done more damage, as they didn't shoot that turn anyway. I don't think this would have affected the game either way however, as even if they had scored the points it was only worth 3 points. There are also a couple of points in the game where I missed out on scoring points. The first was when I dropped in my scions. I dropped them in close to the enemy but if I had dropped just a few inches back, I could have claimed an objective during my next turn or two, without having to move, potentially scoring myself up to 10 extra VP. I also had cleanse for one of my cards in the last turn but got carried away with shooting. If I had done cleanse I could have picked up 3 points myself, for one objective and possibly the full 5 if I had dropped the above squad on the objective.
Overall I don't think any of these rules mistakes would have made a difference to the overall result even though it was a close run thing. Some of the tactical decisions would have had a bigger impact on the game overall and could well have changed the overall result. 

Last Ork Standing


Overall this was probably the best game of the league for me so far, not just due to the win but in overall fun and enjoyment and the ork army was very nicely painted as well. I have one last game to try and play but I'm not sure when or even if I will get around to playing it. 


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