Tournament Results

I entered the Battle Bunker bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with visions of glory and victory dancing in my head. Six hours later I stumbled out battered, bloodied, and bruised as my more experienced compatriots demonstrated my weaknesses.

My first game against Chris was almost a complete disaster, with only my plan to negate his artillery working properly. A combination of bad army selection and bad luck contributed to 75% of my army being broken in turn 2 while a large part of his army was unscratched. I opted to concede at that point.

The nail in the coffin happened right at the start of turn 2: His Leman Russ tank company was advancing and I brought down my 6 terminators and 3 obliterators 5 cm infront of the formation with the intent of getting first turn (I got +3 to the strat roll to do so) and moving up my 8 marine tactical formation to shoot and get into FF range, and then retain to assault with my macro-weapon weilding terminators. Roll for going first, I roll a 1 and he rolls a 5. DOH! The Leman Russ tanks sustain fire into my terminators and killed three, combining with the blast marker they recieved during teleport to break them. Later in the turn he followed up with anything and everything to hit the terminators and kill them with blast markers. Ouch.

In the second game against Al and his Marines it was a much closer match. We had played twice before, both times my chaos delivering a world of hurt on his marines but each time Al went away with a bit more knowledge and today he put it to good effect.

I was hammering his two tacticals near my objectives but in the second turn he launched a 3 terminator formation teleport attack into my backfield and won first turn (he won first turn in all three turns) which allowed him to first assault and break the decimator formation and then assault and almost utterly destroy the defiler/marine formation. I lost 1100pts of my army in exchange for 3 terminator stands. Ouch. I was also forced to turn around two largish formations to come back and try and contiain/eliminate the terminators meaning my attack force was unable to kill enough units in his backfield to prevent the remnants from contesting objectives.

He won after three turns, but man it could have gone the other way. Had I won initiative in turn 2, the decimators could have turned their considerable MW fire on the terminators first and I could have retianed and sustained fire with the defiler/marine formation. Odds were I would have caused enough damage to ensure that he could not have broken both the decimators and defilers in return making it a much harder go for Al in turn 3. As it was, he won the initative and won the day.

To be fair, Al played a great game and made fewer mistakes than I did. I should have not turned around my forces in response to the terminators but pushed on to the objectives and try to eliminate all the marines there and push for the VP win. I should have moved my predators and terminators in turn 3 to contest objectives instead of shooting at the terminators. I shouldn't have assaulted two half strength formations of marines with my bikes and daemons, etc. All in all, too many errors.

Best Chaos Unit: Despite getting assaulted and mauled in the second game turn 2, the defilers were awesome in game 1 and had a good shot in game two where they killed two rhinos and 3 marine stands.

Worst Chaos Unit: Tie between the decimators and the chosen. Both killed absolutely zilch in two games, but at least the chosen provided some air cover with their obliterators in game 2. I never got to fire the decimators all day, which shows the experience of my opponents and knowing what to target.

Overall, it was a great learning experience and I'll only get better because of it, and next time some heads will be on my trophy wall I tell you! Next time!    ;-)