Rogue Trader Battle Report
I don't know if I'm getting better or worse.
I attended Fanatic Games second Rogue Trader Tournament yesterday, and the short story is I ended up with 1 win, 1 loss and 1 tie. Compared to the last two tournaments before that where I went 1-2, I don't know if I'm getting worse or better. My opponents this tournament were certainly a lot tougher.
My first opponent was Dave and his Tyranids (think Alien) in "Unplanned Assault." This is where you start with two units on the board (everything else is in reserve) and you must determine halfway through the battle what your objectives are. We found out that we had to control terrain features, and we had nine features. I ended up controlling four uncontested, and contesting all of the other objectives, so I won a handy victory.
Second was Larry and his Grey Knights. This scenario was "Priorities," where you had secret counters worth different points that both of us had to place around the board. He had a field around his Grey Knights that forced a test every time to see if I could see him when I tried to shoot him, and there was enough times that I couldn't see him that it made a big difference. I was also impatient, and rushed toward his objectives early in the game, instead of waiting until later in the game when he didn't have time to beat me back. In the end, I managed to control 5 of my 6 points, but he controlled all 6 of his. I was in no shape to contest any of his, and he was contesting one of mine. So, I lost.
The third fight I dreaded as much as getting a filling without Novocaine. I faced the dreaded Chip. You have to understand Chip's history. He claims to be a world-class gamer, but he has been disqualified from two tournaments that I know of because of illegal army composition. I know of as least one other tournament where he went over the point limit, but it wasn't caught until afterwards. I know for a fact that he wrote his list on paper for this tournament, then had to almost totally retool it when he stuck it into Army Builder (A program where you can build army lists for almost any game system) because he had so many things wrong.
I had to watch him like a hawk once I realized he was trying to buffalo me. First of all, he used clear dice, which is almost impossible to read, and he was picking up the dice that hit, rather than the dice that had missed. Picking up misses is an etiquette rule so your opponent could verify the dice. When he needed 4+ to wound me, I frequently caught him picking up 3's and better, rather than 4's or better. He also tried a couple of other blatant rules violations, but I managed to pull the judge over and correct Chip on those points. He was also very uninformed on several key game issues.
On to the scenario. This one was "Never Ending Carnage," where if you had a Troops unit wiped out or who retreated off the board, you could "recycle" them and bring them back on the next turn, up to their full strength, but minus any transport vehicles. Chip had a rather unbalanced force list. He had two minimum sized troops units, and then threw the rest of the points into Terminators. Terminators are almost impossible to kill. A normal Space Marine is worth 15 points, a Regular Space Marine in Terminator armor is worth 42 points. Grey Knights (what he had) are even more expensive. So as you can see, it would take at least three regular Space Marines to kill one Terminator. Well, he threw 25 Terminators at me, and it took all four of my troops units, plus a "recycled" unit to kill all of them. Fifty Marines to kill twenty-five Terminators. Either he was very unlucky or I was very lucky. Or he was a suck ass general. Which is my personal view. In the end, we ended up in a draw, with me on top by 171 points. I needed 186 points to have a clear victory.
So, I went 1-1-1. That was the bad news. The good news is I was awarded Best Sportsman again (I won one at the World of Battle back in October of last year). This time I got an official Rogue Trader Tournament trophy for my efforts (click on it for full size):
What'cha think? It's already on my wall, and I'm just waiting for the plates to come back engraved.