Equinox, Round 6 and wrap up

Hi hi!

Late in the afternoon on Sunday we went flying into the final round of the event, and I'm tired of writing this battle report so here we go, straight into it :P!

Round 6:

Mission: 4 Objectives, in the centre of each quarter*

Secondary Mission: Destroy their most expensive HQ.

Deployment: Pitched Battle**

Opponent: Doug Sainsbury (Ravenwing)

*Only the objectives in your opponents zone counted for anything. You could neither claim nor contest the objectives in your own quarter.

** Deployment was actually slightly randomised. You rolled for each unit as you deployed them one by one, on a roll of a 1 you had to deploy that unit on your extreme left flank, a 2 on your extreme right, 2-5 in your middle, and 6 anywhere you wanted.

Doug Had:

Sammael, master of the ravenwing - Landspeeder

6man bike squad - 2 meltas, powerfist, MM attackbike

3man bike squad - 2 meltas, MM attack bike

3man bike squad - 2 meltas, MM attack bike

3man bike squad - 2 meltas, MM attack bike

3man bike squad - 2 meltas, MM attack bike

2 Speeders - 1 Typhoon with MM, one assault cannon MM

2 Speeders - 1 Typhoon with MM, one assault cannon MM

2 Speeders - 1 Typhoon with MM, one assault cannon MM

So all up, 7 speeders (one av14), 5 attack bikes, 18 bikers, and if I remember correctly, ~21 melta guns.

Let me start by saying that this was a terrrrrrrible mission for Doug. His army is all about taking your vehicles out early, whittling where he has to, using his survivability to stick around, before zooming in and contesting your objectives, while applying enough force to one to take it completely and win 1-0.

That wouldn't work in this case, he wouldnt be able to contest his, doesnt have the army to directly defend one objective, let alone both, and only has some sneaky bikes that can push forward onto mine, completely unable to tank shock to get through models in the way.

Compound this with the set up, forced to spread across the board, and Doug was in for a rough time.

I won the roll for first turn, nothing was forced to deploy on my left. The lootas were forced to deploy on my right, where a huge ruin was that they could sit 4 stories up and have LOS to the entire table. The koptas, trukk and a boyz squad were forced to this side too,while everything else was central.

Doug was forced to set up everything in the mid, except for a unit of bikers on my left, and a unit of speeders and bikers on my right, across from the koptas. He kept 2 squads of bikes in reserves outflanking, hoping to come in late and snag an objective.

Doug won the roll to scout first, and decided to protect the speeders from a deffkopta turn 1 assault, pushing a unit of 3 bikes forward to create a push back. In doing so however, he left the master of the ravenwing open. I surged my scouts towards this target, as if I didnt assault him early, I wasnt going to get that secondary.

Turn 1: The deffkoptas assaulted the master of the ravenwing, blowing him to little bits and securing the secondary for me.

The trukk pushed straight ahead, spitting out its contents who assaulted the bike squad that had scouted up, wiping them out and hiding behind a hill for their consolidate.

The battlewagon and kans pushed forward centrally as fast as possible - as I knew the battle wagon wouldnt survive turn 1 no matter what, so might as well get as ahead as I can with them.

Meanwhile the boyz pushed ahead to protect the flanks from any units trying to skirt around my army, so that I could hit anywhere on the table.

Lootas stopped 2 speeders from shooting, while supporting fire from big shootas killed 1 speeder and stunned another.

His Turn 1: Quite a hefty toll for Doug in turn 1, he pushed a squad of 6 bikes up close to the battle wagon so that they would only be able to kill that one squad next turn, no multi assault shenanigans for them. 2 Squads of bikes pushed up on his right, killing a couple of ork boyz from that squad, while everything prepared to take out the battle wagon. The speeder squad on my right bounced off it. The other intact speeder squad that couldn't shoot this turn gapped it to the other end of the table to be safe, and the attack bikes opened up, eventually exploding the battle wagon.

A small amount of fire was able to divert to the deffkoptas, killing 3 of them, but the buzz saw remaining passed his moral check and stuck around.

Turn 2: Doug hadn't moved the speeders that shot at the wagon far enough, so the trukk boyz went and hit them, wrecking them both.

Every bit of supporting fire that existed shot at attack bikes, killing 4 of them. The deffkopta went and hit the stunned speeder, immobilising it and blowing off the weapons.

The meganobs wiped out the 6man squad of bikes and Doug was left with very little stuff in the game.

His Turn 2: The last attack bike and a bike squad shot at the boyz some more and then assaulted it, losing a couple of models but hanging in there, while taking the boyz squad to about half, after the last 2 speeders that can shoot took a few out with frags. The deffkopta finished off the speeder it was whacking. 1 Squad of bikes had come on from reserve, lending some supporting fire on that boyz squad, but was too far out to help with the assault.

My turn 3: The last attack bike was killed, as were the remaining bikes on the table. Another speeder was killed, and we called the game there, as there was too little left for Doug, and he had no way of bringing down the warboss to try get the secondary.

The game wound up being 15-0, but I felt quite bad for Doug with the match up. The mission really crippled him on a game he needed to play cagily, and seriously everything I shot died horribly. A broken ass trukk kill a speeder and an attack bike in 2 turns, crazy. Doug was getting quite sick (he had a lethal case of HIV so that will do that for you) and was on a hiding to nothing in this game from minute one, so I felt really bad for him D:

That round brought me up to 6 wins, and 84/90 points for the event, so I knew I was in for a good chance at podium, depending on how comp scores came out in the wash. The last game was also somewhat of a milestone for me, bringing me to 103 tournament games with the orks, and 100 of those games being wins.

In the end I wound up with a 20 point battle lead on the next highest person, scored maximum sportsmanship and painting, so that a 2.4 for composition was enough to see me healthily through to first place. It was great to be able to defend last years win, and hopefully this year I can get another army or two done and look towards trying for a hat-trick next year with a twist!

This year the majority of prizes were done via a raffle, and to be honest, I much prefer them to go out that way, for everyone to have a shot at the prizes, rather than the same small collection of people winning everything and amassing a pile of models. Hell, half the ork army I play at the moment came from a few years ago!

Cheers for sticking it out this far if you kept reading through, and I look forward to posting some content that isn't just battle reports :]

- Charlie