After completing my first game against my Necron opponent it
was time for lunch, basically a 45 minute break for all 250 some odd players in
the room. I quickly found Tim and found out that his game didn’t go as well as
mine. Looking around we decided to make a bathroom run, top off the water and
check on the Forgeworld line. Unfortunately the Forgeworld line was obscene so
we went back into the hall and ate some fiber bars and drank some water while
we reviewed the next mission. After all my research on Adepticon there was one
piece of advice from Sandwyrm over at The Back 40k that stuck in my mind, DRINK
WATER!
So Tim and I read over the next mission while waiting for the pairings to go up, drank water and chatted a bit while watching the huge Forgeworld line for about 40 minutes until the pairings went up. Once the pairings go up a huge line forms while everyone tries to find their tables. We waited a few minutes for the line to die down and found our next table assignments, wished each other luck and headed off to find our next opponents. When I arrived at my table a rather nice fellow was waiting for me with none other than Tau!
The mission was Killpoints, table quarters and one objective
in the center that had to be taken with an HQ. In my practice games leading up
to Adepticon I had only one practice game against Tau commanded by one of the best
players in our area, Greg, and he kicked my ass hard when I played him. So
after that experience I have nothing but respect for Tau and know well enough
to keep out of range of the Broadsides and Hammer Heads. My opponent was running
a fairly standard Tau list with a couple squads of crisis suits, some fire
warriors, some pathfinders, kroot, two Broadsides and a Hammerhead. There was a
large piece of terrain in the center where the objective would be so I knew I
could take that with a Rune Priest while staying in cover. I figured he would get off enough railgun
shots to pop enough transports that I would lose the kill points objective so I
had to make sure I had enough speeders left to contest one table quarter at the
end to pull out the victory.
Deployment was spearhead and he went first, so he set up his
fire lanes with the big guns and waited for me so come at him. I deployed all
my forces in a clump behind the only line of sight blocking terrain on the
board and tried to hide as much as I could while getting a Rhino with Rune
Priest up to the center to take the objective. For the first five turns he
tried to get off shots on me while my army shift back and forth in a large blob staying out of site while I waited for him to cross into the slim line
of fire for my long fangs and my speeders hid in back. His commander mistakenly
lead his Crisis Suit team out into Long Fang range and paid a price for it with
two suits destroyed but the commander escaped. I managed to break the
pathfinders with some long range rockets but the Kroot were fairly immovable thanks to their large size and cover saves. At the end of the 5th turn I
turbo boosted the speeders into his table quarters and hoped for a low roll,
which I got and the game ended with the Wolves taking two objectives to one.
Thanks to my practice games with Greg I no intention of
trying to rush the Tau, I knew that trying to close the gap with them was
suicide so I picked the two objectives I knew I could get and went for them while trying to keep the entire army hidden from his guns.
Running the speeders into the quarters on turn 5 was a gamble but they moved
flat out to get a cover save and they can take allot of fire when they need to,
especially because I threw them at two different quarters to he had to split his fire
between them. I also had another Grey Hunter squad positioned to move forward
in turn 6 if I needed to, but fortunately it didn’t come to that. I made a
plan based on my opponent and I stuck to it, this allowed me to pull a win
against a horrible matchup for me by sticking to the missions and playing to my
strength. It also helped that my opponent had a horrible migraine headache at
the time – he wasn’t drinking water!
I had now successfully doubled my original goal for the
weekend by winning two games and was working my way up to the higher mid level
tables. I knew I was in for even harder opponents if I kept squeaking out wins
and I still hadn’t pulled Grey Knights yet…
still practicing_
Tallarn
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