How I Met Your Tervigon, Episode 6: Cutback Drop Turn

When we last left off, I'd just finished assembling my Necron Destroyers and they were raring to get in some Kill Team action at the Meeple Power league.

Now, a quick digression: Up until this point I've been keeping my friends nameless throughout my entries; I'm honestly wondering why the hell I've been doing that, because putting some names (and maybe faces) to the people I'm doing Warhammer 40K with is definitely going to add some more character to this series. I can only go so far saying "my opponent" and all its permutations after all.

Anyway, back to the Kill Team stuff.

Several weeks ago I'd gotten a challenge from Vic, one of the group's two Space Wolves (extra funny because in our AGoT circle he's pretty much our poster boy for Stark, right down to the Stark apron he's got on when he's servicing customers at the shop) players and the owner of the Appraisery. This got pushed way back due to his wedding (and all of the stuff that normally follows a wedding).

By last week I'd figured out how to adjust my routine to show up at the shop on weekdays too and still make it to work on-time. Not something I'd wanna do everyday (since it still loses me a few hours of sleep or so), but having some gaming to go with far better coffee than that Nescafe instant trash before work works wonders for one's motivation.

In comparison with Kyle, my previous Space Wolves opponent (and another part of our core playgroup at the Appraisery) way back from Week 1, Vic was fielding more of an 'elite' team of a few marines (Kyle's list involved trying to overrun the opponent with a lot of wolves). The two great attention-grabbers of his roster were his Thunderwolf Cavalry and the Lone Wolf fielded as his leader.

And yes, the Robb Stark references just keep flowing when that model's around.

I'd already been introduced to the Thunderwolf Cavalry outside of the game, having seen the model around the shop; I knew that generally, large-base models were bad news for anything they so much as sneezed at in-game. The Lone Wolf, I'd heard about from Vic himself: he especially loves the flavor of that one dude who lost his entire unit and is on a quest to die a glorious death.

The mechanics for the Lone Wolf are pretty interesting, as I was immediately informed: His deathseeker ways are represented by his opponent gaining no victory points for killing him if the Lone Wolf's the warlord -- or in Kill Team's case, the leader unit. However, the opponent does gain points for him surviving to the end of the mission (presumably due to the dishonor of him outliving more of his battle brothers).

Much to my horror, the mission we rolled was Manhunt: you know, the one were you can normally get a ton of points for slaying the leader.

Still, my Destroyers' guns would ignore Space Marine armor and I knew that their chances of killing anything in their sights were pretty good.

Right out of deployment the Thunderwolf Cav showed that he meant business. Most of the marines were hanging around the barricades while a couple of Fenrisian Wolves ranged ahead on one side and the wolfrider moved ahead opposite them. My Necron Warriors were bunched up together to benefit from reanimation as usual; one Destroyer split off to handle the smaller wolves while the other two went for the side of the map where the big guy and more marines were concentrated.

"King in the North! King in the North!"

Now, I have no idea what came over me because the huge wolf with an angry space marine coming right at us was an obvious and nearby threat. For some reason I decided to have the Destroyers shoot at other targets; namely, the Lone Wolf leader (you know, the one I got no extra points for killing) and one of his designated specialists (Manhunt also awards points for each specialist, though less than for a leader).

That went about as well as you'd expect with a gigantic wolf and its rider getting up in your grill.

Pictured: The wolf investigates the nutritional value of Necrodermis.

The match was pretty straightforward from there. The big guy went right through the two Destroyers on his side of the board, and then proceeded to steamroll the clump of mooks in his way. The lone Destroyer on the other end took care of the smaller wolves (who weren't worth any points for Manhunt). The match was pretty much decided in a couple of turns, but as the T.O. joked it was my moral obligation to at least kill the wolfrider and avenge my squad.

Now, for those who don't play WH40K a brief digression about terrain mechanics: I might've mentioned this before on this blog but the different types of terrain you'll run into (that I know of) are Difficult, Dangerous and Impassable. Difficult forces your normal units to roll to move through them, Dangerous has a chance to damage anyone in it and Impassable can't be moved through but blocks line-of-sight. Certain models like jetbikes and jump units (those who use jump packs and for other races, their equivalent technology) have a tendency to treat difficult terrain as dangerous, presumably because someone moving at those speeds has to take care not to crash into stuff.

This was the ensuing scenario: My last remaining model on the board was that Necron Destroyer. It was safely hidden away from enemy fire by the ruins (regular readers and those who've seen our setup at the shop will be familiar with this: the big broken building at the map corner), which count as difficult terrain if a model stays in them. The Thunderwolf Cavalry model was just within the right range to be able to charge the Destroyer pretty much anywhere it moved...except up.

And so with my last proverbial ounce of breath for the match, I commanded my Destroyer to take its jump pack to the top of the ruins...and rolled exactly what he needed to take damage from dangerous terrain.

The intended effect. Actual result was something like PAIN.

Lesson learned: Threat assessment.

Also that night, I'd decided to finally finish assembling my second Tomb Blade out of the six that came in the Megaforce box (I don't plan to field a lot of 'em if at all so they're low in my assembly line's priority ). Here I decided to do some more funky conversion work.

What you're about to see is my attempt to deal with a WH40K rule known as What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG). The idea is that to make you buy more from Games Workshop avoid players cheating by fielding models or configurations they haven't assembled, you're only allowed (in official tournaments) to declare that a model's got something that's actually visible on the model itself. In other words, a space marine model with a chainsword can't be declared to actually wield a chainsword unless the model itself is visibly holding a chainsword.

Now, this isn't a hard rule of course; casual games and less strict gaming events (like the Meeple Power league, actually; it was made to be friendlier to new players) don't enforce that rule so much. A common workaround for models with variable configurations is to magnetize 'em, a.k.a. stick magnets onto certain parts so they're easily swappable (another alternative being tack). Just for kicks, I decided to just put all the possible guns on this Tomb Blade and simply declare which set was 'active' whenever I'd field it.

There is no such thing as enough dakka.

Wednesday was my second scheduled match for the week, against Ryan: a friend from my former EDH playgroup. The amusing thing here is that I haven't hung out with my Magic-playing friends in ages (the night shift put me in a completely different timezone from their collective schedules); lo and behold I ended up gaming with one of 'em regularly again through Warhammer 40K and the Appraisery.

See? Gaming brings people together and back together!

Ryan's kill team list was a Chaos Daemons roster fielding a whole bunch of Bloodletters and a trio of Screamers. I knew from my previous match against Daemons that the army was pretty much all melee, which meant that I'd have at least a turn of free shooting at anyone that got into sight during their approach. Josh (he's not in the country now but he's been a steady stream of WH40K advice for me; some of you may remember him from a joint article we wrote on this site awhile back) even tipped me off that camping up on some elevated terrain'd be good for my Warriors' safety while the Destroyers took advantage of their mobility and picked off choice targets one at a time.

"Now make with the shooting!"

Hilariously, the mission we rolled was Manhunt.

The opposing leader unit immediately took a safe spot behind the tower on their quadrant of the table, while the daemonic horde made its advance: with the Warrior's coverage of a good chunk of the board from atop their spot, Ryan decided to have his troops split up and skirt around the center in order to delay getting into firing range. The Destroyers did their job and started simply picking off targets from the edge of their effective range, taking down two of the Screamers early on and slowly but surely thinning the Bloodletter horde.

Most of the game went by with the daemons making their advance into melee range while the Warriors simply chilled on the roof as the Destroyers hopped around the place and shot stuff down. The big highlight of the match came when the last remaining Screamer (it hid away for a bit after the other two were shot down) made a desperation attack and tried to turbo-boost (funnily enough, Screamers are so fast that they're treated as organic jetbikes in the rules) past the ruins (a lot of the faster units in the game ignore terrain for purposes of passing through) and clip my leader unit on the way. It managed to miss that attack, take a wound for landing in the ruins (remember, difficult terrain turns dangerous for high-speed dudes) and take a hail of gauss fire from my goons.

The die is marking the spot where he was when we shot him to bits.

I still had some time to kill before heading out for work, so I ended up getting a 750-point game in with Jay. He would be the long-time WH40K vet who introduced our Appraisery group to the game, my other major source of WH40K advice aside from Josh and the one who regularly plays non-Kill Team games with me.

I decided to try for a balanced force this time around: Warriors and Immortals for the troops, the Triarch Stalker for killing vehicles, the Necron army lists of today's bread-and-butter Annihilation Barge. Two Destroyers to top off the last few points (I was very quickly growing to like Destroyers a lot; they're definitely showing up in my army lists more often) and as my biggest change, a Destroyer Lord (fielded my third Destroyer model to count as that) for some hardcore melee killing ability.

Jay's side of the board had his Night Lords fielding a few cultists (for the first-rime readers: essentially the low-point mooks that Chaos players can field in droves) on the ground and a few up in the tower with some sort of heavy weapon (I forget what it's called), a Daemon Prince as his HQ unit and the entire deployment zone dominated by his artillery pieces.

His vehicles, from left to right: Defiler, Vindicator (above a "wrecked tank" terrain piece), Predator (up on the hill).

The mission we rolled was Big Guns Never Tire: each objective was worth several points, and his fielding more Heavy Support models meant I had more chances to earn points off his units.

Jay got the first turn and immediately went to work: His long-range shooters took out  both my Destroyers and a good chunk of my Warriors from the get-go. In retaliation on my turn I took out the Vindicator and most of the ground cultists. The match was pretty much back-and-forth from there, with the Daemon Prince zipping around and generally harrassing people while the Immortals got stuck in a firefight with the dudes up on the tower. The Triarch Stalker went down the turn right after it took out the Vindicator, the ground cultists failed some morale after getting shot at by the Barge (but regrouped later on and came back), and it was all-around mayhem across the whole table.

On the second turn the Destroyer Lord finally arrived from the reserves, deep striking (Non-players; the Deep Strike rule essentially lets you deploy deep-striking units later than the rest of your army for the opportunity to effectively teleport 'em anywhere on the board, though it's not 100% accurate to the spot you target.) right next to the Predator and getting ready to break that can open with his can opener (most WH40K mechanics that allow you to deploy units in a special way don't allow you to charge into melee the turn you do it, and Deep Strike is no exception).

Still later on, the Barge managed to crash-land into the ruins (Remember that dangerous terrain we mentioned earlier? For vehicles it can also get them immobilized.) which denied me one of my main shooters. It was pretty much up to the Destroyer Lord to save the day from here as the Defiler trampled the Warriors and the Immortals scrambled to shoot it down. Unfortunately the Destroyer Lord had been engaged by the Daemon Prince.

"Finish him!"

In the end the Daemon Prince won, and the Defiler had managed to get within striking distance of the immobilized Annihilation barge.

Cue Attack on Titan reference.

The rest of the match was pretty much logical progression from there: The Immortals finally brought the Defiler down after all those glancing hits, while the Daemon Prince mopped them up in turn. As we hit the roll for the game to end (I've been referring to the "timer running out" in previous posts but the actual mechanic is that from Turn 5 onwards, you roll to end the mission and the chance to end it gets higher with each successive turn), the score was 3-6; though I was delighted to be informed by Jay that had I made a couple of plays differently, it would have been a draw or possibly even a win for me.

A satisfying day of WH40K gaming, but we're only on Wednesday.

Most of the week was pretty uneventful WH40K-wise, until Sunday that is. During the week I'd discovered that Louie, a friend from a previous disbanded playgroup, (for the curious, we once tried to do a Song of Ice and Fire RP campaign awhile back but that project got abandoned when people got busy) was also playing WH40K (ever since, apparently) and we decided to meet up on Sunday to play a couple of games.

This "meet old friends from other hobbies in WH40K" thing is becoming a trend.

He was a regular at Neutral Grounds Centris and I finally got to see the gaming area I'd been hearing so much about: Unfortunately no photos of the place itself, but let's just say it did feel familiar despite being a different NG branch from the Galleria one I'd seen so much of during my competitive L5R days.

What naturally caught my eye when we stepped in was how different their terrain setup was.

Supposedly the flavor is that it's an abandoned city at the edge of a desert. Supposedly.

This brought to mind something that Josh had mentioned to me after seeing photos of our terrain setup at the Appraisery: most WH40K tables don't have clear lines of sight to be drawn through the center, as compared to our table which was generally elevations at the corners with a 'killing field' in the middle. 

It's be interesting to play a different field from what I'd grown accustomed to.

Louie's Eldar kill team for our casual game fielded Harlequins -dedicated melee units as far as I knew- and a trio of people on jetbikes (I forget exactly what kind of units). The leader of the squad was an Eldar unit I also wasn't too familiar with, but unlike the Harlequins he had a gun.

See, thanks to the Chaos/Xenos/Imperium breakdown of the Meeple Power league I'd had pretty much zero experience against Kill Team Eldar. I knew about them in passing, and hoped for the best. For my team I decided to test out a build less Destroyers (two instead of three) in order to switch the Warriors out for Immortals.

We rolled Forward Push for our mission: A very basic one that involved three objective markers on the table, each one awarding a point for controlling it by the endgame.

The larger terrain immediately proved a challenge: My Destroyers had to be extra-careful to not end up landing in difficult terrain (and risking dangerous terrain damage rolls), and drawing lines of sight was just flat-out trickier. 

"I can't see shit!"

The Destroyers did manage to take out a few Harlequins on their approach. Meanwhile, the jetbikes subjected me to the horrors of the infamous Eldar move-shoot-move.

For those who don't play: See, the normal sequence of a WH40K turn is Move-Shoot-Assault. Move is where you (obviously) move your unit's given speed. Shoot is where you either fire ranged weapons or try to move further (the 'second move' varying for each unit type). Assault is where melee fighters (try to) charge and initiate close combat.

This normally means that you either stay in partial cover or expose yourself to shoot at someone. Certain units (the Eldar being most notorious for it as far as I know) have the dreaded ability to take an additional move during the Assault phase, essentially popping in and out of cover to shoot you like someone in a third-person shooter.

In-game this translated to them pretty much picking off my Immortals and whittling us down while staying out of our line of fire. There were no big plays or sudden decisive moves for this game; it was pretty much a gradual grind through each others' numbers, with the Eldar establishing the tempo and winning out after the back-and-forth.

Our second game was at 500-point armies, with me fielding my familiar Doomsday Ark and Annihilation Barge (with a token Necron Overlord and Warriors to fill out the last few points) list against Louie with a whole bunch of jetbikes backed up by some Dark Reapers and...some other Eldar units whose type I can't remember; all I know is they had a few sniper rifles in their group.

The mission we rolled was Purge the Alien, a.k.a. "Kill anything that looks remotely threatening."

"Makes no difference, I'll shoot 'em ALL!"

The Doomsday Ark proceeded to fail at killing much of the guys clumped up over on the other end of the board thanks to their cover, and the Dark Reapers in turn managed to pretty much wipe out the Warriors thanks to some AoE attack that shot multiple times (one for each Reaper in the unit; there were three). The Annihilation Barge, meanwhile, went off to face the incoming jetbikes.

Lookit 'em all lined up!

The Barge put up a valiant effort against the bikes (taking most of them out) but was eventually taken out by the Eldar warlord unit (also on a jetbike). The Warriors went down quickly, forcing my own warlord to stay stuck in a building hiding from the Reapers and their sniper buddies. 

As the Edar warlord closed in and made shooting the Ark's main gun impractical (it could very well have blown itself up at this range), it was time to resort to its broadsides: essentially five Necron Warrior guns on each side. Unfortunately for me, a combination of gear on the warlord made it effectively impossible to deal damage: I would literally have had to roll two 1's in a row to even scratch him.

In the end the Ark went down to the warlord as well, and pretty soon my own Necron Overlord was picked off by the other remaining jetbike. Tabled!

Before heading off to our usual Sunday meetup, I picked up some more boxes of stuff for my growing army.

Finally got some Wraiths and oh look -- even more Destroyers.

As I was going over the sprues, I found myself with a slight dilemma. Heavy Destroyers and Destroyer Lords are normally assembled with Upgrade Packs: The idea is that for certain similar units, you buy the unit itself first then buy this pack of extra pieces that allows you to assemble it as a different (hopefully more powerful in-game) model. I was unable to acquire any upgrade packs for either of those, but both would factor into my main army list(s) beyond Kill Team (and possibly in Kill Team if I decided to go with a Heavy Destroyer or two).

Now, Heavy Destroyers were much easier since the Triarch Stalker model already came with a pair of Heavy Gauss Cannons: Same gun they wield, not exactly modeled the way they are for Heavy Destroyers but workable. The Destroyer Lord was a slightly bigger complication: I'd already used the distinct-looking bits to assemble the "specialist" models I could field as either Kill Team infantry specialists, or a Necron Overlord's Royal Court models.

Actually, the Destroyer Lord wasn't such a dilemma because of something I'd planned ever since Josh suggested it to me.

Just needs something to represent the Warscythe. Also, time for some appropriate music.

And with that, we're moving on to the following week.

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 his WH40K crew has decided to converge on Sundays.
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Updating the expenses list:

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
Citadel Paints x4 - P700
Necron Destroyers - P2250 TRADED!
Necron Destroyers - P2137.50
Canoptek Wraiths - P2137.50