Astronomi-con 2012: Part 2

Oh hell, this always happens. I lost my momentum and now I can’t remember anything about day 2. 😛

Ah well, I’ll make it up as I go along.

Game 4: Mitch Stevens and his Ork mek mob! I’ve only really gotten to know Mitch as more than just a face during this last year while he worked at GW. Before that he was “that guy with the awesome looking Imperial Fists”. The weekend before Astro some of us had been playing practice games and Mitch had asked if I wanted to play. I thought about it, but decided that to go home instead (things to do…girlfriends to see…you know the story :)). So being able to have this game was pretty awesome!

I don’t recall which scenario we played, but I do recall that it screwed Mitch over at just about every opportunity it had. It was one where most of your army is in reserve, and when they do come on it’s 1-left, 6-right. Mitch rolled a lot of 6s, and none of the fighting was on my right. Consequently he had a foot-slogging mek Ork list that was walking for 3 turns to get at me. Hilariously, when his squiqqoth ‘ard boys finally did make it into combat during the last turn, they bounced right off of my regular squad! Another high moment (for me…poor Mitch) was when my burna’s zoomed on from my right and tossed out 12 flamer shots directly onto his giant shoota boy mob. I think I did 47 wounds.

I got some good game points here. Oh yeah – we placed the objectives and then scattered them D6. That little scatter wasn’t really meaningful…and Mitch and I placed most of the objectives right in the middle! My plan had been to run most of my army up past the middle to block him, while another unit of trukk boys grabbed all the objectives. Didn’t work out quite like that, but was close enough to net me a 13 point victory.

 

Game 5: Against Scott Greene and his Tau (apparently I signed him up as Giesbrecht or something, no idea where that came from, but it’s in my phone. I blame Peter somehow.) This tournament was Scott’s 8th-14th games of 40k ever, and we had played the weekend before and I’d beat the pants off of him there. But I knew that I wasn’t going to get such a large win again – Scott is a smart player who learns pretty quickly from his mistakes. We played on Damnuntion – the table which had been eating Ork armies all weekend. I always look forward to my games against Scott – I think he knows to tone his armies down a bit to play me, and we have a fun and relaxing game.

Because I was in trukks, the ork-eating nature of the table was lessened a lot. Also, from previous games people had been agreeing that the terrain was significantly less dangerous than it had been at the start of the weekend. But that didn’t save me from DT tests all game long. One squad popped out of a trukk by a railgun rolled nothing higher than a 2 for DT and run tests. Thankfully – that probably saved them from dying so they could claim an objective! Another thing that saved me a lot – Scott can’t roll worth shit for his railguns. Those Broadsides need target practice, because I saw the squad of 3 of them roll 1-2-1 for a couple turns in a row.

I won this game as well, probably 9-10 points, somewhere in there. But only because I had 1-3 Orks sitting on a few objectives and I’d had my Weirdboy do nothing all game but hide in the back of the table holding one! I’d deployed him on top of one and then just rolled for Waaagh! each turn instead of trying to shoot with him like I usually do. As well, having 2 squads aiming for a single objective provided a good amount of redundancy.

 

Game 6: Against Nick Daniels and his Guard. It was pointed out afterwards, and I think it was sitting in the back of my mind at the time, that if I was playing Nick I must have been doing pretty damn well at this tournament. That sort of thing scares me, and I set myself up for failure in my mind. But, I think that fear ended up serving me well in the end since I deployed trying to avoid his big guns! 🙂

Another objective mission with water evaporators and such. Optional reserves. I’d never chosen to have orks off the table before – more models is more dice! But I thought I’d give it a try, and it really worked out well for me. He placed two tanks and a platoon on my right side. I did a denied-flank sort of thing on the left and held 2 squads in reserve. In hindsight, I should have held back 2 scoring units instead of 1 scoring and my burnas. Because of the denied flank, and 3 objectives within ~18″ of each other on the left, I was able to focus my melee-strong army against his less strong one. As well, because of his Warlord power giving me a -1 to reserve rolls, I was able to get my troops on exactly when I needed them! Any sooner and I wouldn’t have been able to shoot the ass of his valkyrie with my dakkajet, or have 2 solid units come onto the table just as I was losing the ones I had already.

My Astro games rarely go past turn 5. Somehow I have a knack for rolling 1-2 for this. So I planned, and managed to get, a win at the end of turn 5. Unfortunately, the game went for another turn. Nick moved his tanks 6″ at a time and shot at my objective holders – he still had a fair number of troops on the other side of the table while I had a handful of troops holding two objectives! At the end of turn 6 I also had a win…but the game went for another turn! During turn 7 Nick managed to completely destroy one of my two remaining troops squads to turn it into a solid draw. Even the dakkajet coming on and shooting his objective holders did nothing to save me. This was the closest draw I think I’ve ever had! 🙂

During the game Les kept coming by and encouraging me to crush Nick, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t oblige. 😛

 

Conclusion: Probably can’t write to much here since I need to do a quick proofread and get to work. I ended the tournament with 2nd at Appearance, 1st at Sportsmanship (trophy is still sitting on my desk :D), and 2nd Overall! I was saying afterwards that if I’d known I was a contender for Overall, I would have put more effort into my army list! 😛 I also won an ork plane model which I gave to Derrick. I don’t need one, he wants one and has less money due to baby and mortgage and such things and he agreed to give me his bitz from it – which is all I use anyway because of my Space Marine theme. 😛

Astro is my favourite tournament all year round, and I look forward to it again next year!