So last night I played a spearhead capture and control set up with my IG versus OST's Nids. Aside from the Doom of Malan'tai causing all 3 of my vet squads to fallback off my objective at the end of the game, I made some pretty big tactical errors, the biggest of which was cowardice. I know if I was an IG commander, when I got back to the drop ship, I'd certainly receive the Emperor's Justice from some angry commissar's hellpistol.
OST played a nidzilla list and my original idea was to keep backing up and hope to bring down at least one of the three trygon's but instead I failed at target priority (something I preach) and kept shooting different targets with my hydraflaks and 2 vendettas because I was shock-and-awed at seeing the 3 trygon's and a winged hive tyrant coming at me and a tervigon pooping little nids out.
In the end it was an obvious case of being psyched out because after they trygon's got to me and blew up my 2 demolishers I poured out 3 demo squads of vets with 2 meltaguns and 1 heavy flamer each and with the help of the flaks and vendettas, downed all three in one turn. Now if I had only pushed forward with the vets and dumped out an downed the trygons before they got to my Demolishers it would have been a totally different game for me.
The game was also my first experience with a Doom though. I'm much less afraid of them after putting it together in my mind that he's not eternal warrior and only t4. In this game it was by far the luckiest Doom ever considering I almost always rolled really high on my 3d6 taking 5-6 wounds each time and when I did get a chance to meltagun him I rolled double 1's to wound. After that I failed 3 moral checks on my 3 squads that each had 2 melta guns to just instakill him.
I'll definitely remember this game and reflect on it for my future tactics. My failure was that I went against the nature of my list which is to always push forward. I built an in-your-face guard list and tried to be a static shooting list and it didn't work. So my lesson to everyone is don't fight the biology of your list. When you make your list with a tactic in mind stick with it!
The Cheese of Malan'tai is quite the problem. I like to kill it with liberal use of Reaper launchers. Its good you realize you should have just said f it and deployed your vets sooner. Trygons rollover pretty easy when it comes right down to it. I killed one with squad of guardians.
ReplyDeleteEvery battle is a learning experience :-)
It was a good game, but the lack of aggression and lack of TP for the Hydras cost you the game. When we started, I was actually pretty sure I was going to lose.
ReplyDeleteThe Doom had a great game this time, which means for the second time in the 14 times I have fielded him, he did something useful. Normally, he doesn't eat much and then either gets killed or locked in combat for the rest of the game with somebody's walker - I seem to always be on the edge of getting rid of him when something awesome happens.
I did learn that I should NEVER, EVER, let the guard out of their vehicles unless I make them do it AND I have something to kill them with nearby. Letting the Russ' act as bait was actually pretty smart in terms of frying up my big snakes the next turn.
The russ bait works better when it isn't a monsterous creature coming to rip them up in CC, but it is a pretty classic no-one-expects-the-Spanish-inquisition IG tactic. The hydras having ADHD was a definite fail. I just got excited to see that trevigon explode and destroy all those guants around him.
ReplyDeleteAs a side note I had a dream last night that you pulled the baneblade give away and said "Who ever thinks they can put it together and paint it the best at the shop can have it." and in its place for the blog you were giving away 1.5 million dollars. Pretty sweet give away, thanks OST!