NI24 game 1

 After a fairly gentle ferry ride, we arrived at the tournament rested and ready. After the usual admin we moved in to our first matches. Now, I didn’t get many pictures during the event, as I was pretty busy concentration on the games, as you can imagine. 

My opponents list for this game was an armour heavy sisters list, with a squad of battle sisters, a dominion squad and two seraphim squads backed up by the Triumph of Saint Katherine, Morvenn Vahl with Paragon warsuits, two casitgators (one battle cannon and one autocannon) two Exorcists and two Immolators.

All the armour was going to be a challenge for me, as I had some anti-armour but not enough for all the vehicles facing me. The Exorcists were also a worry with their powerful indirect firepower, these were going to cause me a lot of problems. 

Deployment was pretty standard, I split my forces across my lines and my opponent did the same. 

The paragon war suits are a beast of a unit, especially with Morvenn Vahl. 

While.i managed to make down a few of the vehicles, I was unable to really do enough damage to stop the sisters from pushing forward on all fronts. The exorcist proved themselves to be very damaging, doing significant damage to my vehicles over the course of the battle. My scions did prove themselves again though, proving they were the right choice for the tournament, dropping in behind the enemy and wiping out a squad of sisters holding the home objective. In the following turns they could have been very useful in pulling the enemy back or generally causing problems. 

By the time that the game finished on turn 3, I had some troops left but most of my vehicles had been destroyed. I still had enough to keep the pressure up but I think it would have been an uphill battle to keep my infantry alive and scoring points. 

This game only got to turn three for a number of reasons, partly due to a lack of rules knowledge from my opponent, partly down to both of us being to slow with our play, along side the usual distractions of running in to people.eypu haven't seen for a year. The low score of the game was down to some poor cards, with my opponent only scoring two of the six cards and me only 3 of my six. However, my biggest scoring mistake here was on the painted points. My opponent had an army that was 95% painted, only one vehicle was not fully painted with just the base colour and one other on. I gave him the ten points, as it was close enough, however, subsequent opponents were a little more harsh, with both of them scoring him 0. As I was mostly there for the fun of it, I wasn't bothered but it would have changed the result, giving me the win and while at the time I didn't feel like it was an issue for his army not to be 100% painted, given that tue others did, I feel like this could have changed the whole tournament for me. Before the tournament, when discussing the painted scores I advocated for a central decision and I now I am even more certain it should be centrally scored and not down to each individual table to decide.

Anyway, enough moaning, what did I learn from this game? The game confirmed a lot of what I had hoped for. The DKoK did their thing and were resilient, although one squad was wiped out, it took quite a lot to shift them. The Armigers weren't great and I think it was a mistake to bring them, they are just too swingy in terms of hitting and damage. Something with more reliable damage output would have been better. The vanquisher also couldn't hit a barn door. The scions did thier job though, so the was good. Overall a good game, I think I could have played it better, bulking up my anti-armour units in one group and hitting each enemy vehicle in turn rather than spreading out and trying to take as many as I could at once. 

All in all, I was happy with the first game and was looking forward to the rest of the tournament.