Lovell and I got in a pretty good 1350pt game at Redcap’s on Thursday.  It was interesting because his army was so small.  They wound up getting effectively tabled, but pulling even in kill points through picking off all my easy targets.

Army

Lovell had tragically left a bookbag at home, leaving him with 1350pts ready to go.  I basically dropped the Devastators from my current 1500 pt list, leaving:

• Capt Angholan—Vulkan
• Librarian Rorschach—Librarian w/ Terminator Armor, Storm Shield
• Sternguard x5 w/ Drop Pod w/ 3x Combi-Meltas
• Tacticals x5 w/ Razorback, Powerfist
• Tacticals x10 w/ Rhino, Missile Laucher, Meltagun, Hunter-Killer
• Tacticals x10 w/ Missile Launcher, Flamer
• Landspeeders  x3 w/ Multi-Melta, Heavy Flamer
• Thunderfire Cannon

He brought some lord with Royal Court, two blobs of Immortals, one blob of Warriors, and two Night Scythes.

Battle

We rolled for Vanguard (corners) deployment and Purge the Alien (annihilation).  Lovell claimed first deployment, but then I Seized the Initiative and took first turn.  He only had the Royal Court and Warriors on the table, so right away I decided to get in his face.  Sternguard dropped on the Royal Court, both transports rushed Flat Out toward the Warriors, and the Razorbacks flanked toward both.  I was hoping I could get into some assaults the next turn and annihilate the unit before his supports arrived.

This didn’t quite happen.  The Royal Court ran away scared, teleporting halfway across the table.  That gave the leader a clear shot with his powerful 1-shot Gauss beam attack to explode the previously well hidden Razorback.  The Rhino meanwhile drove into a ditch crossing a crater and got Gaussed to pieces by the Warriors, stranding dudes well short of the bad guys.  The upside of this was that it exposed the Royal Court to a counter-assault by Angholan (Vulkan), his Combat Squad, and my homefield Tactical Squad lurking nearby.  They didn’t last too long.

The Immortals then came in with the Night Scythes and it became essentially a game of them trying to do enough shooting to hurt before Angholan and friends could crash into them.  The battlefield was too tight though and they just couldn’t do enough damage before the assaults came and they were slowly wiped out.  At one point things looked pretty grim for the Necrons but they soldiered on.  Eventually there was only a single Necron infantry model remaining, but the Night Scythes continued swooping around taking potshots at things and claimed several Landspeeders.  Meanwhile the Kingbreakers ran around trying to catch up to that one guy and took the occasional shot at the flyers.

Outcome

Both sides withdraw from battle, warily eyeing their foe: Tie game, Necrons with 6 kills and First Blood, Kingbreakers with 5 kills, Warlord, and Linebreaker.  Lovell would have actually won but a Night Scythe and squad leader were caught in Ongoing Reserves on game end and destroyed.

Analysis

After Turn 4 Lovell was ready to concede, and if we’d been playing objectives that probably would have been reasonable; he only had a couple infantry models remaining.  We played on, however, and he wound up tieing it up and even pulling ahead if he hadn’t taken a risk by putting his last dude back into a flyer before it zoomed off the table and was destroyed in Reserves when the game promptly ended.  This highlighted a weakness of my army in Annihilation, especially against a small force like Lovell’s.  There’s just so many units in mine that I can wipe out a ton of enemy models but still lose on Kill Points.  In this case, the Night Scythes were just barely able to take out the Landspeeders and surge up in points.  Like always, never ever give up, no matter how grim things look!

One thing Lovell probably should have done differently was to drop his Immortals farther out.  As played they landed too close to my guys and weren’t able to do enough shooting before they got assaulted and eventually taken down.  For my part, I probably shouldn’t have brought the Sternguard in so close.  As usual they just took the brunt of all the Necron’s shooting and were thinned out pretty quickly.

Thunderfire Cannon again came up pretty solid.  I need to think about some anti-air though, probably going with a Space Marine Stalker, but possibly just an Aegis Defense Line.  To some extent I can ignore or ping away blindly at a flyer or two, but it’s definitely not ideal.  However, this is a place where Vulkan’s melta buff seemed pretty useful, even in the less vehicle oriented 6th edition, by enabling re-rolls of snapshots against the flyers.

One thing that’s been bugging me about 6th edition lately is that units can’t assault out of a transport even if it didn’t move.  It does make actual assault vehicles even more distinguished, but I thought it was already a pretty big deal to be able to roll forward and still assault.  This change definitely reduced the assault capabilities of standard Marines and a staple tactic against shooty armies.  More generally and importantly, it creates some weird disincentives.  I.e., if you can’t or don’t want to charge my unit inside a transport, you probably actually don’t want to pop it open anymore.  All that does is let me charge you on my turn, whereas if I was left in the vehicle I would not be able to assault on my next turn.  Previously there was no disincentive like that, you were getting charged either way so you may as well destroy the transport.

There’s just a photo or two more in the Flickr gallery; I was running late and never really regathered my calm & focus to grab more pictures.