Smacked Down!

I had my 3000 pt Grudge Match!™ with Corey yesterday and the final result after a fun battle was 1395 for Eldar, 1091 for Chaos. Giving him 3 points more than he needed for a minor victory.

It was a great game with lots of thinking and tactics, but I admit I was down on finding out I had lost. I felt I had played a solid game with no mistakes and I couldn't understand why I was left without even a tie. At the time I could not see what I should have done differently given the circumstances but in retrospection I see the error of my ways.

In third edition 40K, if you destroyed a weapon on a vehicle or immobilize it you get half points for that vehicle. In fourth edition only immobilization gets you half points. When faced with the super heavy Scorpion grav tank, I dedicated approximately 600 pts of units to attacking it and succeeded in destroying its main weapon which in third ed would have been sufficient for 325 VPs, but is worth nothing in 4th ed. A quick analysis of the damage tables reveals to me that in order to earn points for the Scorpion, I had to destroy it or immobilize it, both of which required far larger percentage of my army dedicated to destroying it than the 600 pts or so I used. For example, I need on average combined 8 glancing hits of 2 or penetrating hits of 4 in order to immobilize the beast and that is not taking into account the 4+ holofield save. Yikes! Destroying it outright may be easier but definitely requires more firepower than the 2 lascannons, meltagun, multiple plasma pistols, plasma gun, and 2 powerfists I threw at it.

So, now that I have re-aligned my view of the super-heavy tank universe, I can say that I should have totally ignored the Scorpion and went after the rest of the Eldar army with gusto.

Ah well lesson leaned. I was due for a beating anyway and Corey was nice enough to let me tie him in a 1000 pt game afterwards. He's a decent chap that way.