How I Met Your Tervigon, Episode 4: The Road to 500

By the time Week 2's Battle Report came in, the league's results had gone heavily in favor of Chaos.

Actually an in-joke because the "Tau Emperor" player ended up defaulting his matches.

A brief digression to revisit the league's tourney structure, just to bring everyone up to speed. I don't think I've actually described how the Meeple Power league works.

First things first, the T.O.'s divided the players up into three teams: Chaos (CSM/daemon army lists), Imperium (Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Sisters of Battle, etc.) and Xenos (literally everyone else). Each player is allowed two 'sanctioned' league matches against people from other teams per week, ideally being challenged once and challenging someone once. Wins and losses are tallied at the end of every week, with the Battle Reports generally showing up around Wednesday or Thursday.

Matches ideally happen throughout the week, though as expected several matches tend to pile up on Saturdays. In order for it to be recognized as a league match, the only real requirement is for one of the designated T.O.'s to be present (it doesn't have to be at the Appraisery, hence our Sunday venue for when the shop's closed; it just so happens that the T.O.'s generally hang at the App throughout the rest of the week). Sundays are considered 'overlap' days, a.k.a. the start of a new week of league play with one last chance for people to catch up on any matches left pending from the previous week. If you scheduled a match but can't show up, your opponent wins by default (unless both of you reach an agreement to simply cancel the match). Everyone's required to have at least one match per week.

As with most (all?) WH40K tourneys all players are required to submit army lists. Every two weeks of league play (effectively at every odd number: 3, 5 and so on) you're allowed to change your army list, but of course it still has to conform to the Kill Team rules.

With that wall of text behind us, let's jump back into the blog entry itself. I'd ended last week's entry with me getting in both of my Week 3 matches two Sundays ago (getting soundly thrashed in the process), so I didn't really have any compelling reason to play Kill Team that week.

So I decided to try 'real' WH40K rules.

The slope was slippery enough as is.

Well, first I had to assemble the pieces of my 500-point non-Kill Team list (500 was the next step for our playgroup after 200).

The idea of my first 500-point army list was to pretty much squeeze in all the big guns I could while still fulfilling the minimum requirements for your standard WH40K army. So far I'd already assembled the requisite troops and HQ (Warriors for this one, along with the Necron Overlord; for the non-players, HQ units are essentially the commander/hero units of the game and you're required to field at least one who'll end up designated as your warlord) and the Annihilation Barge. The last remaining model for the group would be the Doomsday Ark.

Out of the entire Megaforce box, it has the most components and its instructions have the most pages.

The Ark's model was both a chore and a joy to assemble. It felt good to finally start putting it together because I knew that the main gun on that thing had one of the deadliest guns one can field in a Necron army. My inner Greyjoy fan also delighted in working on a model that was essentially a futuristic alien boat complete with broadside guns.

The 'chore' part came in because of...well, the instructions. Several components of the model look very similar, and at one point I'd actually glued something in wrong; I wan't able to take a photo of it, but if you see my Doomsday Ark up close in real life there's a certain area there you can clearly see the marks of me biting hacking a piece away and gluing the thing back together.

It was pretty interesting seeing how the model was designed to balance on its stand.

If you'll notice, the ass hull part's tilting downwards.

As pictured above, I tried to see if the thing could stand without putting all the 'rib' components in -- turns out the model wasn't made to balance on said stand without being completely assembled.

Eventually I managed to get the whole thing done, and I do agree with what other friends in the playgroup have told me: even without paint, these Necron vehicles look good.

I have named my ark the La Calavera Catrina, flagship of Nemesor H'boh Kenn.

While assembling the Ark, I decided to play around with the extra components and start on the time-honored tradition of conversions. I mentioned this in a previous article but the gist of it for the non-players is this: sometimes you just wanna assemble a model in a way that it wasn't meant to be, maybe to give it some fancy look or field it as another different unit type in your army. In my case I was thinking of making distinct dudes to field as the specialists and leader of my Kill Team list, so that I wouldn't have to bother with the Netrunner tokens.

Oddly enough I haven't actually named these guys.

 Monday and Tuesday went into all that assembly.

Wednesday afternoon saw me at the shop playing my first game of non-Kill Team WH40K ever. It was against our group's resident vet, and he was fielding a detachment of Eldar from Craftworld Iyanden.

From my experience against Eldar in Dawn of War (a terrible point of reference for tabletop WH40K, I know, but it's what I've got) and seeing a few games played out by the Eldar during the league, I knew that the Eldar are pretty much a faction of specialists. They're (as far as I know) your archetypal 'difficult to master but insanely powerful when you do' faction, and in fact most of my friends who play WH40K (friends I've known from before the Meeple Power league anyway) have played Eldar at one point or another.

I fielded the Ark, the Barge, a couple of Necron Warrior units at the bare minimum size and a Necron Overlord who spent the army's last few points getting better armor.

Group shot!

As the 500-point Eldar army hit the table, my attention was drawn to the Wraithlords.

Check those mooks standing near 'em for size comparison.

I learned from the get-go that the Wraithlords literally had stats too high for anything less than my two big guns to harm, and to make matters worse they were both armed with weaponry capable of sinking both of those ships. The Doomsday Ark's requirement of staying still to fire its cannon in fuck-you-up-as-long-as-I-can-see-you mode allowed the Eldar troops to simply use the terrain to avoid its line-of-sight while the big boys stepped in to wreck my shit. We rolled the mission Big Guns Never Tire, which provided VP's for taking down heavy support units: all the more reason for the Ark and Barge to shoot stuff down or get shot down. (Okay, the actual mission was to hold objectives that could also be captured by heavy support, but let's keep it real -- who keeps objectives when there's shooting to be done?)

The Barge barely got to enjoy its schtick, getting shot down within the first few turns. The Ark managed to sit there and fire off a single shot of its signature big-ass gun the entire game before getting shot down too, though it did earn the achievement of actually damaging one of the Wraithlords. The rest of the game was pretty much the Wraithlords chasing down my troops and picking them off.

Cue Yakkety Sax.

Overall it was a massacre, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Kill Team's highly restrictive army list rules deny a Necron player most of their toys, most of which are in the vehicles or the HQ units. It was fun finally being able to field some real firepower instead of juggling 200-point lists of Warriors and Immortals occasionally accompanied by a few other friends. WH40K's highly die roll-dependent nature also makes the game itself really feel like some true mayhem's going on, which is probably why losses in this game don't feel so terrible (even the crushing defeats where you get 'tabled').

I still had some time before heading off to work for the night, so my opponent asked if I wanted to try a 505-point game. The slight increase in points allowed me to field essentially the same list, but with the Necron Overlord's armor out in favor of replacing one of the Warrior squads with Immortals.

The opposing forces consisted of Wraithguards, essentially the infantry version of Wraithlords: still way tougher than your average soldier but not nigh-impossible to harm. Half the enemy army was loaded up into a Wave Serpent: I didn't know much about Eldar vehicles beyond the fact that they have a tendency to hurt anything they so much as sneeze at.

We rolled The Relic for the mission: the eponymous objective would land in the center of the map and whoever ended the game holding it'd get a huge VP boost.

Thinking that I'd learned from the Ark's sitting in a hidden spot and hardly getting to shoot anyone in the last game, I decided to put it up on a vantage point instead.

"Nothing will protect you from me! Not men! Not weapons! Not armor!"

All this did was give the Wave Serpent an easy shot at the Ark, which fortunately didn't take the model off the board outright -- but it did manage to take out the main gun. I was forced to actually move it while everyone else tried to inch towards the relic. The Barge, just like in the last game, died before it could do any real damage.

Thanks to the Ark's broadside, the vehicles had a sweet shootout before the Wave Serpent's better guns blew it up.

By the end of the game it was pretty much the far superior Wraithguards vs. my bread-and-butter Warriors and Immortals. No need to guess how that ended up.

I can definitely say that I enjoyed the 500-point games far more than I did Kill Team. The forces are small enough so that you're not hassled with RTS-esque micromanagement, but playing outside of Kill Team rules gives you access to all of your army's toys; it's just a matter of choosing what toy you want on the table (and in my case, building with what I can out of the Megaforce box with five more Immortals added).

Around Thursday or Friday-ish, I managed to set up my first trade. Nothing major: just a few Deathmark heads for some Scarabs. I unfortunately wasn't able to meet the trade-ee personally (I managed to fall asleep on the afternoon of the meetup) so he ended up simply leaving the Scarabs at the Appraisery (and the next day I'd go on to leave his Deathmark heads there for him).

It's pretty amusing to come from a CCG/LCG background and see that even in tabletop war games, people barter their extra stuff around.

Funnily enough, Saturday saw me playing no WH40K; I ended up more preoccupied with the Call of Cthulhu LCG and by the evening, attending to one of the rare instances of friends outside of my Appraisery playgroup showing up at the shop.

By Sunday we were off to our usual weekly Appraisery-closed shenanigans...with a twist. We realized in the morning that we'd forgotten to have one of us take the terrain home from the shop the night before, and so were faced with either having to rush the terrain for our second table or (and this is a terrible idea) play on a blank 4 x 4 surface.

We went with the latter, of course. Much of yesterday's session was essentially arts and crafts: we were working on some styrofoam to cut out into 'rock' shapes for the terrain.

They insisted that my blog entries lack actual photos of me, so here's an unflattering shot of Brian vs. Styro.

I also managed to get some modeling in that day, having spent the morning at home and an hour or so at Xocolat (while waiting for the ride I was hitching with to the Sunday WH40K spot) prior on assembling my box's Triarch Stalker.

There's Dave for some size comparison.

Our main goal wasn't having the terrain complete for the Sunday games scheduled: we were more for simply having terrain pieces to place on the board. Thus the table was set up with most of them still uncovered, just a few having gotten the tissue mache treatment. Primer and everything else would come later on, as was instructed.

Insert joke about the special effects budget.

My one scheduled league match for the day ended up a default (my opponent couldn't make it), but I did manage to get in a couple of 500-point games.

For the first one I decided to try fielding the Doomsday Ark as a Ghost Ark: transport instead of giant-ass gun. I wanted to experiment with one particular build I read about on 1d4chan's wiki that involved having Necron Warriors in a transport led by a Cryptek. 

Now for a digression on the Necron Overlord's Royal Court mechanic: See, in standard WH40K you're required to field two units of troops (hence the two separate squads of five Necron Warriors each) and one HQ unit. In most cases this HQ unit will be one extra-powerful 'hero' unit, and most (all?) HQ units are what the game refers to as Independent Characters: they can act on their own but they're at their best when leading another unit: the models in the unit can protect them from harm, and most HQ units confer some sort of benefit to squads they lead.

The Necron Overlord lets you field him with a Royal Court, which is its own unit of elite Necrons: this consists of either Necron Lords (essentially mini-Overlords) and Crypteks (the Necron equivalent of spellcasters). However, instead of the Overlord leading his Royal Court as a unit they can be split up by having each of those dudes lead their own unit instead.

With that in context, the Ghost Ark build above involved having the Necron Lord with a Resurrection Orb leading a ground detachment of Warriors and the Cryptek up in the Ark with his Warriors: this is because this particular type of Cryptek had a 36" range shooting attack that isn't so bad at punching through vehicle armor. The Annihilation Barge still stayed in its spot for that army list.

My opponent for that game (still the same vet I'd faced last Wednesday; I think I should start properly naming/identifying people in these posts) fielded some Chaos Space Marines (Night Lords): some cultists (Chaos' premiere expendable low-cost units) chilling out at a mission objective at the back, some dudes on bikes and his main troops holed up in a Rhino. The mission we rolled was The Scouring (misspelled 'Scourging' in the link): several objectives would pop up on the board, each one with a different point cost for holding it by the end of the game. 

To represent it being an open-topped transport, I simply piled the models on top of the Ark.

From the get-go I went for the target that looked most threatening: the Rhino. This, I soon discovered, turned out to be a ruse; it was just there to soak up the bullets while the bikes maneuvered around to take some shots with dedicated anti-vehicle weaponry (well, one of 'em had it anyway). The Ark's riders were for the most part obliterated in the ensuing explosion, and even after I managed to wreck the Rhino that only left me with some marines to contend with. As if part of a running gag, the Barge went down before it really did anything.

The rest of the game was pretty much the marines picking off the stragglers via melee.

And unfortunately, the Cryptek's awesome pimp gun does nothing at this range.

Less people were able to make it to yesterday's session than usual, so I ended up playing a second game of 500 points: this one against another of the group vets with his army of Orks. He actually wasn't planning to play 500 points that night (a.k.a. he didn't bring his actual 500-point army) so he ended up just rummaging through his stuff to see if he had enough boyz to put together an army of that size. Fortunately...

My 500-point army fielded 13 models (vehicles included). His orkish horde had over 30, including those Deffkoptas.

 After seeing how the "Cryptek and Warriors in a Ghost Ark" version of the build had done next to nothing in the last game, I reverted to my previous army list with a single change: instead of the armor boost I left my Necron Lord with Mindshackle Scarabs: a cute lil' device that has a chance to make a melee attacker hit his friends instead of you.

Much to both players' delight, the mission rolled was Purge the Alien: also known affectionately as the Meat Grinder. It's worth noting that points are awarded in this mission for killing units, not just models: taking down a lone vehicle is a point, but for an entire squad or horde you have to completely wipe 'em off the table.

My kinda mission, in other words.

The Deffkoptas immediately made a mad dash for my big guns, hoping to take out the Ark before its main gun could do any damage. Fortunately for me, all that did was land them in my line of fire: The first one went down to a volley from the Overlord and his Warriors; the second one had a taste of what the Annihilation Barge can really do (Yes, it literally is pretty much the R-Gray 2's lock-on shot. It even scores extra hits on a roll of 6, flavored as the lightning arcing back to hit the target again.).

From there we had to deal with the approaching horde.

"Keep shooting! Keep shooting!"

Try as we might, the big guns couldn't completely halt the Ork advance. While the mob charging down the middle was down to manageable enough numbers for the troops by the time they closed in, the one to my left was running through some cover and barely got glanced by the Ark (they were too far for the Barge's lightning to work its magic). 

They pretty much trampled the Warriors though the Overlord managed to stall 'em for a turn with his better stats and the Mindshackle Scarabs (at one point he actually got one of the Orkz to kill a friend).

"I'm sorry, I'm not signing autographs today."

The horde finally made contact with the Ark, and its Nob's Power Klaw started digging into the Ark's hull. Meanwhile, having dealt with the threat on its side of the board, the Barge began inching away in anticipation of the greenskins coming after it once they'd finished off the Ark.

Almost time for Yakkety Sax. Almost.

The match's turnaround came when the Power Klaw struck its final blow against the Doomsday Ark...and its penetration rolled for an explosion, causing the Ark to take the Nob with it -- wiping off the last model on the board actually capable of harming my vehicles (see, in WH40K if your weapon's not powerful enough to get through a vehicle's armor it literally does nothing). I was leading in points by then and we ended it there.

Still, getting your Power Klaw stuck in an exploding ship is a very Orky way to go.

The rest of the session was spent emptying the Triarch Stalker's sprues out (still had some leftover components after assembly) while a couple of us had their league match for the night.

My thoughts at the end of this WH40K update: Yes, I'm immensely enjoying 'real' rules where I get to field the big scary guns capable of wiping out hordes in a few shots. However, the Kill Team league still ends with March and I should remember that I've also  matches to win there.

But hey, at least I've already got a feel for how my playstyle might end up once our playgroup escalates beyond Kill Team.

Brian was born in Marikina but swears that Katipunan raised him. On weekdays he's pretty elusive thanks to his night shift job, and on weekends you'll generally find him at the Appraisery on Saturdays, and wherever the Meeple Power crew has decided to converge on Sundays.
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Didn't buy anything new for the army last week, but the list's here for completion's sake.

Necron Megaforce - P9975
Side Cutter - P320
Mighty Bond - P50
Nail Files - P30
Plastic Container (Japan Home Centre) - P66
Bahco Extra Slim Taper Saw File - P99
Bosny Spray Paint (Flat Black) - P95
Necron Immortals - P1377.50
Mighty-Pid Pack - P149.75 (contains 2 Mighty Bond 3g and 1 Mighty Bond Xtreme 3g)
Faber-Castell Tack-It Multipurpose Adhesive - P56.76
Elmer's Glue - P34.75