Lusty Loganwing vs. Salamanders Rematch!

"Logan" vs. Vulkan...the outcome of this assault determined the result of the entire game.

Some of you may remember Chambers from The Back40k's blog.  He resides in the St. Louis area and plays at my store when he has the time.  Our first game was a 1500 point game where he pitted his gorgeously converted (by Ron Saikowski of +From the Warp+) Lustwing army utilized as Space Wolves against my Salamanders.  Before you purists go crazy, he uses the Space Wolf list instead of the Chaos list because the terminator army can't be faithfully done using the Chaos Space Marine Codex.  Honestly?  An army that looks this good gets all sorts of allowances when it plays against me.  Paint your models kids, it's part of the hobby.  :-)

I had played Chambers only twice prior to this game.  Game #1 = Severe beat-down against his Lusty Loganwing.  Game #2 = Severe beat-down against his Lamenters during the final round of the Ard Boyz prelims.  While I love playing with Chambers, I don't exactly love getting my teeth kicked in.  I was a bit nervous about this game.  We stuck with 1500 points, got capture & control with 5 objectives, and spearhead deployment.

Deployment

While Chamber's limited number of models limited his selection, he had three squads.  Two six man squads with various weapon load outs including missile launchers, one giant squad with a truck load of guys, Logan Grimnar and a Rune Priest, and a Lone Wolf to wrap it up.  I hate to have guys play the same list of mine twice if we can help it, so I played with Vulkan, a Land Raider Crusader, Land Speeder, two Dakka Preds, two assault terminator squads, and two tactical squads with Rhinos, Multi-meltas and flamers.  Objectives were placed in the middle of the board as well as in the middle of each table quarter.

End of Round 1

Chambers won the initiative and proceeded to take "hail Mary" shots with his missile launchers.  Seriously, that's what he called them.  He averages about 4 Str 8, AP 3 shots a round and reaps a disproportionate bounty of wrecked vehicles and my tears.  My Land Speeder (behind cover) was wrecked, and one Pred was immobilized and stunned.  He also dropped a few of my dismounted terminators and moved his lone wolf forward while his other two squads controlled one of his objectives, and moved towards another on my side of the board.  I only managed to kill a single terminator out of the large squad.

End of Round 2

Round two saw Chambers holding two objectives on his left of the board, as well as the center.  I killed off his Lone Wolf (man I hate those guys) and he wiped out my unmounted terminators.  I was not please with myself at this point.  I was moving a combat squad towards an objective with terminators on it in a vain attempt to contest an objective while my other combat squads were hunkered down for late game shenanigans.  I had five terminators in their tank, and my Preds hadn't had a full turns worth of shooting due to "stun-locking" from the missile launchers.  I had no desire to charge my boys into that mess with a dozen or so terminators in the middle, but that's where they had to go.

Wonder of Wonders!

My third round saw me throw every bullet I had at his large terminator squad.  It wasn't as small as I wanted it to be (1 or 2 left would have been nice...) but I managed a favorable assault since his squad was so spread out.  His Rune Priest wasn't able to join the assault this round.

This is getting better and better, but there's no way I can pull this off...

The next round left us with the epic match up you see at the top of the blog post, so you see, I was quite surprised when I saw this:

Last man standing!

This was classic!  After I took out that squad, he only had two remaining, thus he could only ever hold two objectives.  I moved one Rhino mounted combat squad to the middle of the board, the other went to an open objective, and my final combat squad stayed home to claim that one.  Final tally:  Salamanders 3 objectives to Lusty Loganwing's two.  It was an awesome game, but I can't fault Chambers' gameplay or anyone's dice rolls.  While winning the assault in the middle of the board was clutch, only having three expensive scoring units to my four cheap ones backed up with a Land Raider, Dakka Preds, Assault Terminators, etc...you get the idea.  The extra boots on the ground were the difference for me in a game with 5 objectives.

End Game