NOVA Coverage: Games 3-4

With a loss under my belt, it took the pressure off the games.  At this point I just wanted to stay at least 50/50.  My next game was the big heartbreaker for me.  Lots of mistakes on my part, mainly due to inexperience.

Game 3

The third game was against another awesome opponent, Peter.  He had a balanced tyranid list with a combination of 2 trygons, 2 tervigons, 3 zoanathropes and a Tyrant with preferred enemy. The preferred enemy was brilliant.  It allowed his hive guard two re-roll their one's to hit on shooting.  Very cool.

He rolled two spells on the zoans that would make one of my units fire under his control.  This scared the crap out of me as I worried that a flyer would fire on another (easy way to down my own).  This put them as a high priority for me.

The mission was Objectives then Kill Points, then Quarters.  We deployed Vanguard. 

Target priority was my biggest mistake.  After the zoanathropes I should have really concentrated on the Trygons.  The 6 wounds for some odd reason intimidated me... which seeing that they are only toughness 6 (against my strength 7 guns) and 3+ save, it should have been a no-brainer. 

Peter did do a great job putting the forward pressure on me with the trygons.  With them crashing the middle followed by the Tyrant and pals, I had to knock them out so they didn't obliterate my ground troops.  In hindsite, I should have just retreated and avoided them or sent sacraficial troops as my flyers wrecked havoc. 

Instead I did knock out both Trygons but in the meantime, his Tervigon pumped out unit after unit.  One of his Trygons went 6 turns putting out units... crazy.  Had I knocked them out early it would have been a wholy different game.  I did go hard after his zoanathropes on turn 3 (when the rest of my flyers came in) and caused them to pop.  This was the game that even with rerolls on my com relay, I only got a couple of flyers in to start. 

I had a failed charge by a couple of wraiths (had this happen multiple times with a 5 needed or more) meant I couldn't pull a unit off his far corner.  My flyers also pulled the Tervigon in the lower right down to 1 wound but I waited way too long... this meant it was able to capture the bottom right objective.

Damn you resiliant Tervigon!

My mistakes on target priority cost me the game and Peter won 3 objectives to 2.  My flyers ran rampant but I just didn't close it out.  All those extra units generated worked me!

Game 4

I was a little bummed out now going into my 4th game 1-2, but very pleased I had 3 great opponents.  To be honest, I wanted to dish out some hurt.  I drew one of my favorite opponents of the weekend, Casey.  Congrats Casey, by the way for winning your bracket.  He went on to go 4-0 in his 1-3 bracket. 

Casey had a tau list with ork allies.  This is the great thing about 6th edition, you can help the weaknesses of your army (resilient troops for tau) as well as paint a nice distracting force without having to go all in on a new army. 

Having played some of my local players with Tau, I have come to respect the tau rifle.  Strength 5 and 30" can chew through my wraiths.  Additionally when the broadsides get hot on their to hit rolls of 6, they tear through my flyers.

The mission objectives were: Quarters then Objectives then Kill Points

Normally I prefer to go second but I wanted to neutralize the shooting as fast as possible.  I won the roll and went 1st, trying to overload a flank.  Since his defense lines were on the left side, I figured I would charge them with my wraiths and potentially take out his AA quad gun with my annihilation barge.

Casey won a roll to seize initiatve which put me in a panic.  So much for pushing the flank! I decided to refuse the left flank and keep the orks and kroot out of the fight as long as possible while I worked on his shooting.  I pulled the one wraith unit into the ruins (since kroot don't have frag grenades) and pushed the second around and towards the middle to hide behind the middle piece of terrain. 

I got lucky and took out the AA gun with my barge which allowed my flyers to come in unmolested.  They proceeded to pick apart the army, but did get a couple downed by broadsides.  Casey got hot one round and rolled 3 6's in a row.  I luckily got 2 jink saves.  In the end he pulled down 2 flyers; the total number my first 3 opponents did combined. 

In the end I was able to push Casey down to a few units remaining and capture 3 quarters.  He was a great sport and we had a great close to the last round of the qualifying set.  I was then seeded into bracket #5 with a 2-2 record.