Tournament Recap

Well, more planning went into the list and more test runs than usual and it ended up being a total disaster.  Here's the run down.

Game one against Necrons with Chaos Marines.  Demon Prince, 3 Tesla gun cron fliers and a chaos fire chicken.  I have Flakk missiles and tons of twin linked las cannons, piece of cake right?  I spent 5 turns shooting and only knocked off a single hull point from the 4 fliers.  This game was a little all over the place.  It started with Vanguard deployment with a ton of line of site terrain mid table.  He pretty much stayed in his corner, got good lines of site and shot at me at his max range with his whole army for the game.  Rather than redeploy my ranged units and suffer through snap shots, I kept shooting at the fliers.  In retrospect I should have ignored them and gone after everything else.  Lesson learned.  Also, had a bad roll with the Blackknights failing a hit and run check.  It's going to happen, but would have been better to not happen against a Demon Prince, who happened to already make 5 out of 5 invulnerable saves.

Game 2 was against Troy and his drop pods all over the place.  I played the first couple rounds well staying castled up, weathering each landing and shooting back.  As soon as I tried to spread out fo objectives things went poorly.  The pods ended up coming in a couple each turn through turn 4, which actually worked out really well for him.  As soon as I started to move towards objectives with the troops I had left, he would drop a couple pods in front of each one.  I should not have over extended so soon and recognized as pods were still in reserve that I should have pushed later or dedicated more units towards each objective.

Game 3 was just about learning how the new eldar work for me.  My opponent was not on his game and frequently asked to go back to do psycic powers after finishing the movement or shooting phase.  I let him, since we were at the bottom of the barrel, but the game would have been quite different had I not.  I got very lazy and he was kind enough to remind me of a few things as well, so it worked out pretty well.  I think the problem was I would fall asleep during the time it takes for all 300000 psykers in the list to cast their powers each turn!  protection and fortune is just stupid sauce that I'll need to start accommodating for, going to need a bit more AP.

As poorly as I played I had a great time as usual.  I came back ready to scrap the list completely and start from scratch...but after cooling down I decided to adjust instead.  I did finally get the hang of the Azrael blob and used it effectively in all 3 games.  The Black Knights were great in game one immobilizing a maulerfied and if they had hit and run, would have wasted a demon prince as well.  I need to be a little less aggressive with them and should start to get the hang of how they operate. 

Terminators were another interesting point throughout.   They survived better in all 3 games, but still never really did what I wanted them to do, which is to either absorb enough fire power to let something else live, or smash something apart.  I think better use of them will be as an objective holding deterrent.  Keep them on or near an objective that an opponent would need to over commit to.  Either they need to bring so much firepower to bear to kill them that everything else of mine can survive, or they let me have the objective.  Kill points I need to completely re-think, because these guys just give up the point without taking anyone with them.

Devastator Squads were too utility like.  Flakk missiles, lascannons and plasmacannons was too much everything, and not enough useful.  I cut one out the flakk squad and change the other plasma to las.  Still don't know how I am going to deal with fliers, but going to try the ignore and absorb approach.

Next tourney is small points either 1250 or 1500. We'll see how that goes!