Bloody Battle to the End

Last night I hooked up with Chris (Suicide_King) for a game of 40K, him using the new chaos codex and me fielding my faithful Eldar. I decided to experiment a little and since I knew Chris liked to make my life hell in the past, I decided to respond in kind.

Chris:
Daemon Prince
10 Terminators
3 squads of 10 marines with rhinos
10 Raptors
Dreadnought with twin lascannon
2 Predator Destructors
1 Predator Annihilator

Bill:
Farseer + 8 Warlocks in Wave Serpent
Autarch
10 Scorpions
10 Dire Avengers
10 Guaridans
6 Jetbikes
5 Pathfinders
2 Vypers
Uber Falcon
Uber Fire Prism
3 Scatterlaser Warwalkers

We played on an 8x4 board, but the game quickly devolved into a 4x4 battle. I deployed deep in my zone with only the guardians, Avengers, and Scorpions out front and the rest hiding behind a large ridge, while Chris deployed everything as far forward as he could be and used turn 1 to charge into my half of the board intent on swamping me.

I tried to play sniper with the Falcon and Fire Prism and it sort of worked, but a couple turns the Falcon got shaken and the one time he turned the pred annihilator at the Fire Prism he blew it up. I shouldn't complain though, the lascannons on the pred and dread where mostly horrible all game, with the dreadnought finally picking up a kill near the end when he fire frenzied and the wave serpent was too close.

The Scorpions made good accounting of themselves as they often do, charging and killing the raptors and then charging and killing the second half of the terminator squad. The guardians helped out by killing a predator with side shots from the scatterlaser, but the Dire Avengers failed to stick around as I left them exposed early on. Poor guys.

The warwalkers trotted to the top of the hill and unleashed a wall of light on the 8-9 remaining terminators, bringing down half the squad. Chris responded with vengeance by shooting everything he had at them to destroy all three in one turn. Ouch.

After a couple turns of letting Chris beat up on my exposed units, I brought the jetbikes, vypers, and seer council in wave serpent around the end of the ridge and slammed into the flank. The jetbikes and vypers were not impressive against the power armour marines, but 6 destructor templates proved to be quite illuminating, frying one squad that was dispatched with a charge next turn, and then frying another to bring it below half. All that and surviving a fusillade of firepower as Chris tried to drive me below half.

At the end of six turns the predator annihilator held Chris' original deployment quarter all by himself and his Daemon Prince and one marine squad contested my deployment quarter against the Falcon and pathfinders, while the Seer Council heroically took the adjacent quarter to my deployment zone to make it a tie.

Analysis:
I made some mistakes in this game. First off, I choose quarters such that Chris had the zone with lots of trenches and obstacles that I thought would slow him down, but instead he deployed as close to me as he could and ignored all the terrain in his zone. Doh. That meant he had clear sailing into my flat and clear quarter and it became a firefight in close quarters, something I wanted to avoid. As a consequence, the Guardians and Dire Avengers got hammered early on and the scorpions avoided a similar fate by virture of being off on a flank far enough from his main assault.

I also made the grevious error of not killing that predator annihilator which not only cost me my Fire Prism when I really needed it alive, but also held a table quarter at the end. That armour 13 on the front really intimidated me and my lack of brightlances really told in that account. Should have upgraded the wave serpent and guardians.

All in all a great game. Chris had me on the ropes and it took some terrible armour saves on his part to counteract some terrible wounding rolls on my part to preserve the tie.