NI25 game 2

 On to game two, possibly one of the worst draws I could have, Knights. With a limited amount of anti-armour firepower, my plan was to take and hold what I could and weather the storm, which is easier said than done. 

My opponents list consisted of a Knight Castellan, a Knight Errant, a Knight Paladin, a Armiger Helverin and three Armiger Warglaives. So a pretty standard list. 

There were some shenanigans that I wasn't sure about but I was happy to go along with as it was fun. My opponent placed one of his knights in deep strike reserve using a relic\enhancement. Now I have no idea if this is legal or not but I couldn't see a reason for it not to be. 

This mission is a bit of an odd one to me, as it involves placing down objectives in no man's land but I was confident I could get a couple of objectives down and hold them. The biggest issue for me was my opponents sticky objective ability (via another relic). This meant he could sticky a number of objectives and I would not be able to take them all back,.meaning he would be able to easily score maximum on the primary mission.

The first turn went as expected, I pushed up and placed objectives and so did he. Some casualties were taken on my side and I was unable to make much of a dent in his.

By turn 3 I think we had 8 or 9 objectives down in the midfield, with my opponent owning most of them, with several sticky. With very little ability to damage the knights, I really had to play for points, and the cards were not being overly kind to me, luckily, they weren't being kind to my opponent either.

At the end of the day, if the game had gone to the full length, I think I could have hung in for the win but it would have been very difficult. It is during situations like this were the old rules for reinforcements would have been very welcome, just being able to sacrifice units almost at will to recycle them back in for more points scoring opportunities. 

At the end of the day however, I didn't do enough to win, even if I had played Sabotage a bit better, the points would not have been enough. 

Again, we only got to turn 3, which was mostly down to my opponent on this occasion. He wasn't playing slow by any means, he was just a very chatty and social fellow who was down to have some fun and laughs, maybe a little too chatty at times. I would rank this game above the first game in terms of enjoyment and probably the most enjoyable game of the three. 

What did I learn for this game? Warglaives are not as good as Helverins. Even with their melta guns the auto cannons are just better all round weapons, and the chain swords are not very good at taking down other knights. I almost killed an Armiger with the Vanquisher but a rerolled save put a stop to that. If I could get more reliable hits with the Vanquisher it would do a lot better. The mission rule also favoured the knights, being able to do an action and shoot, meaning they could drop the objective markers at will for more chances to score points. 

Overall, I don't really think I could have done things much better. He had greater firepower, resilience and manoeuvrability than me. What I did have was greater numbers, which I did try to use. At this point I was hoping for a better match up for game 3.