Battle Report: Salamanders vs. Orks @ 1500pts

Tonight's game was at Da Goffer's house. His leash is much shorter now that he has a brand new baby gretchin (girl) at home. I played my standard 1500 point list detailed here, and he had an absolute buffet of orkish madness. Not sure of the exact make-up, but he had a large mob of boyz on foot, a smaller mob in a truck, some kommandos, 5 lootas, 3 deff coptas, 7 or so bikes, something called a "lobba" with four grots, some storm boyz with their insane character upgrade, that weirdo grot shooting cannon, and Gaz-somethingorother. Clearly, my lack of knowledge about codexes other than the current space marine book and the previous edition of the guard codex is one of my weaknesses. I'm working on it, but it's a work in progress for me.

We played Capture & Control with Dawn of War deployment. Our objectives were on opposite corners, and I won the roll to go first and deployed nothing. He deployed both squads of boyz and his grot shooter cannon thing. I have this nagging feeling that this was an error on my part, but I have no long range shooting and there was night fight in effect...This comedy of errors (mostly mine) was to end in seven turns as a draw.

My first turn was, understandably, short as I moved on my entire army opposite his objective. My goal was to make him commit to my objective and then leave his lightly defended. That's what actually happened, but it was uglier on my end than I would have liked. He moved the large mob towards my objective. and deployed the rest of his stuff midfield.

Turn two saw me move forward with no shooting. He got both of his reserves in and his sneaky kommandos immobilized both my speeders. I love my speeders. I don't have enough of them at the moment, and not have the two I do own in working condition for the entire game hurt considerably.

Turns three through five saw me loose both dreadnoughts, and my terminators while I took out a good chunk of his stuff in return. He still has his Storm Boy character, his large mob held my objective, his lootas were killing at will, his bikes were moving towards his objective (that I claimed with Tac squads) and I still don't know how to use 410 points of tactical marines. I seriously need to work that out so I can actually play with my whole army instead of sitting back with them because I'm too afraid of not being able to claim objectives with them.

In the final two turns, I could have moved my vindicator 24" and tank shocked his large mob and that might have contested my objective. Two caveats: I didn't know I had two turns to work with, and he could very easily have opened up my Vindi with his power klaw. Da Goffer, however, could very easily have moved his bikes close enough to contest the objective I claimed which would have earned him the win. He didn't feel that his bikes could have survived the turn of fire they would have taken, so he moved them more conservatively.

Bottom line? I played (and rolled) poorly. I'm pretty sure I botched my deployment decisions which handicapped me the entire game (especially the early loss of my speeders) and I couldn't roll 2+ saves on my terminators. It wasn't mass fire either, I would need to make four saves, and would fail three. I think I only earned a draw because its hard not to with Capture and Control. Da Goffer certainly played my better than me. Enjoyable game in the end, but it had some frustrating moments.