Warhammer 40k news
I participated in a tournament last Saturday, and I've been too busy to enter it before now.
This was a "Cities of Death" tournament, where you have stratagems that you include in your army list for free, the number depending on what level of complexity the scenario is. We used two stratagems each in all of the games. Mine was Wrecker and Ammo Dump. The first one gave my Dreadnoughts the ability to destroy any building they came in contact with on a 4+ on a d6, or 50% chance. Ammo Dump gave any unit in that particular building the ability to re-roll misses.
My first match was against John and his Orks, in a scenario called Domination. The object was to hold as many buildings as possible. John took the "sewer Rats" stratagem and something else. The sewer rats allowed him to place a variable amount of markers anywhere on the board and bring his troops up through those sewer openings. The bad news was, by the time that he could start bringing troops on, I had all but one entrance covered. So, he could only bring one unit on at a time. I had the one building with a sewer opening covered from every angle, and had a nice killing field set up all around it. All he could do was hide behind the building. At the end of the game, I had five buildings in my control, he had one. On top of that, I lost one Marine to a Plasma overheat, and one Rhino from him shooting at it.
Match number two was against Martin and his Tyranids. The scenario was High Ground, where you had to have control of the highest level of the building in the center of the board. It was a hard fought battle, but I managed to take the top of the building in the bottom of turn 6 by consolidation after killing off a Carnifex. This consolidation move gave me 200 victory points, which managed to eke a draw out of a defeat. The high point of the battle was when a weaponless dreadnought managed to do three wounds on that Carnifex mentioned above. He did two wounds by kicking the 'fex, then when the 'fex struck back, he blew up the Dreadnought, doing a third wound to the 'fex.
Match number three was against Bodee and his Imperial Guard. This scenario was Urban Assault, where you had to protect your command building, while at the same time you had to try and take your opponents command building. I was holding my own, despite losing my HQ in a fight because I forgot to charge a unit into his HQ squad. I managed to get a Dreadnought into close combat with his HQ squad and tie it up for three turns. He kept hitting that Dreadnought, but he could never get a killing blow to it. That frustrated him to no end. What killed me was I invaded his command building at the bottom of turn 5. Time was called at that point, but he wanted to get in one more turn, "real quick." He managed to bring a squad around and destroy the squad I had in his building, costing me the game.
I ended up in 8th place out of 20, a respectable showing, but I feel I could have won it because I was only 11 points off the guy who won the tournament. If I had managed to win that game, I think I could have won overall. I didn't get any prizes, someone had a better painted army than I did, and Best Sportsman went down to multiple tie breakers. So I didn't get a prize, but I think I'm getting better at these tournaments.
Wish me luck next month.