Adepticon 2014: Friendly Tournament Re-Cap

So this year's theme for the Friendly Tournament was "The Dirty Dozen".  There were three rounds, roughly equating to the major plot points of the film.  Round 1 your lads didn't quite get along, Round 2 they were participating in the war game, and Round 3 was the final suicide mission.

I brought, what I thought was, a fairly "friendly" list.  I was a little hesitant to bring my three Centurion Devastators with Grav Cannons, they performed very well for me, but I don't think they ended up being over the top.  My list can be seen here.

My Storm Talon was only shot down once on the day...about three seconds after this picture was taken.
Rathnor used orders, and some timely "6's" to down the aircraft.  Who needs skyfire?

In the first round, I played a list that seemed eerily appropriate.  Rathnor's IG list with Space Wolf allies was my first opponent.  He brought a Creed, Kell, a command squad in a Chimera; a big blob of a platoon with a handful of dismounted regular squads, heavy weapons with lascannons, and 50 conscripts; a squad of vets in a chimera with melta guns and demo charge; Logan Grimnar, and three wolf guard in power armor.  It was an unusual list (for me with my limited exposure to games outside my own shop) with a lot of optimized quirks (Logan's abilities adding to the conscripts, Creed's boatload of orders, etc.) but it was well played and likely not overly optimized (more on that later).

This was "the end".  He had marched across the board, shooting up everything in sight.  The next round would
see a charge that left me with a combat squad and an immobilized Razorback.  The Gods would take pity on me
and end the game (and my misery) shortly after that. 

For this mission, players had to split their army in half, with each half counting as desperate allies.  This did almost nothing to my opponent, but was disastrous to me, as my play style involves castling up my entire army to support one another with short range firepower.  That, plus dice rolls so bad that Rathnor offered up his own dice for me to use in an effort to stop the painful torturing of probability that was my dice for that round.  In the end, I was trounced.  I "earned" a crushing defeat and garnered no points for my team.  Rathnor did have an entire 50 man squad of Rogue Trader era human bombs.  Some with the neck collar, and the rest with the backpack bombs.  Nifty stuff if you're into that sort of thing.  He says it only took him two years to get them all...

For my second round, I played The Bloody Chaos, who happened to be Chambers' opponent from round 1.  He normally plays chaos, but decided to do something different for Adepticon.  He brought a Carcharodons (space sharks) army that was awesome.  As none of you know, I harbor a secret desire to own a Carcharodon army, so this was a special treat for me where I got to live vicariously through TBC's army.

My crap pictures don't do it justice, but he had a Chapterhouse Studios "true scale"
marine with a gigantic chainsword (can't remember the company he got that from)
that was simply amazing.

TBC's list was as follows: Tyberos the Red Wake; a squad of assault terminators as elites, and another as troops; a scout squad in a Land Speeder Storm; 2 Tactical Squads; a Storm Talon; an assault squad; and finally, a devastator squad.  This round's special rule was that ambulances were placed on random tables and they scattered 4d6" every turn with the possibility of moving onto neighboring tables if they had the movement for it.  Any unit hit was either tank shocked or rammed.  We had an ambulance show up at our table during the game, but it promptly drove off with no effect.

This was my deployment.  Notice the gigantic hole for deep strikers.

TBC was easily my most fun opponent on the day.  Beer was exchanged & fun was had.  This was the epitome of what the "friendly" tournament should be.  TBC's army is obviously an assault army with some long gun & air support.  That's probably the type of opponent my list is best against.  He faced an uphill battle all game, but this...

...is where his fate was sealed.  He was only able to get one of his terminator squads in from reserve on round 2.  That meant my entire army, but mainly my Centurions, could focus on that close threat.  And believe me, getting a squad of Carcharodons in close combat was not a goal of mine.  He lost one to quad gun fire on the way in, and the rest were taken care of after that.  The next round Tyberos and his squad showed up, but again, I had no other obvious targets.  Even after all that fire, I still needed to assault him with my own terminators and Vulkan to keep the upper hand.  Some poor rolls in TBC's part sealed the deal.  After that combat, I ran my lads towards the relic and table quarters for the crushing victory.

Round three is where I lost all credibility as a blogger since I didn't take any pictures of my game with Cee Kay and his Tau-Dar list.  I'm not going to lie, this was the weirdest list I've ever played against.  At first glance it seems too optimized for the friendly, but when you look close, he made conscious decisions to weaken his list.

As penance for not taking pics of the game, here's a real life fire warrior that I saw.

He was pale, yet quick.

He brought Farsight with 4 crisis bodyguards with flamers, stim injectors, & vectored thrusters; a crisis suit commander with every piece of wargear available to him (354 points!), a 6 man stealth team; a single crisis suit with flamer; a three man crisis suit with bonding knife (no weapons?), Karandras the Shadow Hunter; & 6 guardian jetbikes.

His plan was to camp weaponless crisis suits & jetbikes on objectives, infiltrate Karandras with the stealth team, and deepstrike everyone else with Farsight et al.  I'll admit, I was pretty nervous.  I shot up the crisis suits as much as I could, but with nightfight, those guys are tough to shift.  He deepstruck right next to my castle (which I deployed with no room for deepstrikers behind my aegis) and proceeded to use flamers against me.  He was unaware of the Salamander's chapter tactic known as "lol flamers" and was disappointed to cause no wounds.  Everything in my army, minus the 145 point Storm Talon, then shot at that squad.  At the end of my shooting phase, he had one Stealth Suit left on that corner of the board.  I spent the remaining rounds getting line breaker, grabbing objectives, and killing his bikes and backfield crisis suits.  I have no doubts that had Karandras and/or Farsight got into assault that it would have been a different game.  This round's special rule was to have vortex missiles moving about just like the ambulances previously.  A vortex missile made it to our table about 5 minutes after the game was over, having no impact on our game.

All in all, I think this year's friendly was an improvement over last years.  Yes, I went 2-1 this year, while going a disastrous 0-3 (finishing dead-ass-last overall), but the lists I saw were more friendly.  My worry was that this was going to become just another 1500 point tournament, but it didn't happen.  That's not to say that it's out of the woods.  Many of the guys who showed up with quirky or overly friendly lists were saying that they wouldn't make that mistake next year.  The friendly walks a fine line, and I think they need to review lists as advertised.  Early list submissions would go a long way towards maintaining the trust of the community that rock hard lists won't be seen at this tournament next year.

New man-hole & future projects

Here's my new workspace. I've got a bit more area than my previous place, but the lighting's not the best. I've bought a few new lamps tough, so we'll see how it works out.


The move gave me the opportunity to dig out my Imperial Guard army as well. This army was built (back when I didn't care about mold lines apparently) with the old codex, and they were primarily drop troopers. As such, they're now pretty worthless. I just don't have the money or time to give them the vehicle options the new codex offers. I can't get rid of them just yet though. They were a labor of love even if my modeling and painting techniques leave a bit to be desired. You see the cool commander and vehicle models? Aerion painted those. By now you should see a trend. I can do bulk work on troops, and while Aerion says I am improving, the more complex techniques are still beyond my reach in my mind. I hope you enjoy the Something something something something guard (I never gave them a Regimental home). I hope to devote some more work on them in the future. ;)











Speaking of practicing some more advanced painting techniques...Team Snake Eyes is gearing up for Adepticon 2011 in April. We need to work up our lists and develop a strategy for fine tuning the paint jobs we skimped on during last year's work up. Work continues...

IG vs. Orks @ 1500pts

I had a great game with the new Imperial Guard codex today against Partho's orks. I showed up with: (3) leman russ tanks, (2) chimera mounted veteran squads, (1) heavy bolter armed vet squad w/ Sgt. Harker, (3) autocannon armed armored sentinels, (1) devil dog, & a chimera mounted company command squad. Partho had an approximation of the following: (2) battlewagons filled with 20 boyz each, a truck w/ Gazgull, a painboy, and 6 nobz, a truck with shoota boyz, and truck with slugga boyz and his ubiquitous biker mob. We played capture & control with spearhead deployment. I won the roll to pick deployment area, but subsequently Partho "siezed the initiative". That was a grim sign of things to come. :)

Partho's Orks are fairly mechanized, and those two battlewagons are able to reliably transport their cargo where they are needed. I, however, have always played drop troop/light infantry guard armies. So, neither Partho nor I knew what the hell I was doing, and the first two turns were relatively uneventful. Partho didn't dismount because he didn't have enough anti-tank at range. I couldn't stop his advance for the same reason. On turn three he moves forward, dismounts and tears me a new ass with his power klaws. I lost two of the LR tanks and my command chimera. What really hurt, was loosing all of my mounted special weapons from the destroyed vehicle. After that, I focused my surviving templates on his (now more vulnerable) infantry,b killing them in large numbers. In the end, it came down to famous Team Snake Eyes rolling (failing leadership, difficult terrain checks, etc.) and some clever tricks on both our parts. Partho ended up with both objectives for a decisive Ork win.

My first thoughts are that in 5th edition the easiest thing to earn is a win or a draw in a capture and control mission...I earned neither. Partho is a skilled warboss, however, and it was my first game with the new codex using an army style (mech) that I am still unfamiliar with. I've got a few ideas on tweaking my list, but I'd like a few more games in with it against some other opponents/missions before I go too crazy with changes. I misused some units, so I can't justify getting rid of them until I learn how to better use my new list. I thoroughly enjoyed the game because even though Partho was the clear winner in the end, it wasn't clear until the VERY end of the game. As always, never give up, remember your objectives, and keep playing.