Tournament Planning » Prometheus at War

Feast of Blades list, Tau & GK allies.

40K, Allies, Grand Tournament, Grey Knights, List Building, Tactics, Tau 4 Responses »

Sep 282012

Been a while since I’ve posted (~2weeks) and I’ve been thinking over a few things. I’ve qualified for the Feast of Blades in Denver, and lists are due Oct 1st, so, enough procrastinating. This is the list I’ve been working with for maybe a month now (before Tau vehicles got a 3+ cover save, 2+ when turbo-boosting, so that’s all Gravy now) and it’s been working pretty well.

Basic idea is that the Shas’El goes on top of the Bastion, with the pathfinders, and mans the Icarus Lascannon. Broadsides go inside, so we have a nice, fairly nasty fire base there with cover on the battlements and AV 14.

Purifiers rush up (18″) to midfield and just sit there in their rhino as a deterent with 8 psycannon shots, and happy enough to assault you if you ask for it.

Coteaz goes with GKSS and they move up the field on foot behind the purfiers acting as the main Dakka unit, with Coteaz using Divination and Precience on them.

Psykers move up however far is required to get within 36″, drop Str 8 AP1 pieplates.

Tau Firewarriors get in their Devil Fish (steal one from pathfinders) and probably don’t really get out until last turns, just scooting around with a 3+ or 2+ cover save as required.

Hammerheads do their thing, mostly their for the pie plates.

Dreadknight is there for disruption, counter-attack, and just outright breaking units when required.

Thoughts on the list:

Anti-tank: I feel pretty solid. I have 5 Railt guns and the icarus lascannon available for first turn initial strike, a strength 8 Ap 1 large blast, 4 psycannons that should be in play turn 2+, and many str 5 shots. Hopefully the hammherheads won’t be needed for their anti-tank and can be left for pie plates, but they’re there if needed.

Anti-horde: Super solid. 3 pie plates (2 str 6 and 1 str 8), the Heavy incinerator off the Dread knight, Cleansing Flame if required from the purifiers (I think not) and lots of Dakka.

Durability: Great. AV14 bastion (vulnerable to Railguns, Lances, and deepstruck Meltas, but that’s about it). 2 Av 13, 2 AV 12 (which should have 3+ saves) vehoicles. Weakspots are the rhinos, easy first turn kill sif I’m not careful.

Mobility: Descent. 4 transports, GKSs can deepstrike if they want to (probably will not) and NDK can be wherever it wants to. (but will almost certainly make itself a big fat target)

Scoring: This is what I’m worried about. I have 4. The GKSS are 10 strong and tough, but they’re walking and can get shot up if the opponent makes a goal out of it. The FW will be pretty hard to kill inside their 2+ DFs, but accidents happen, and there’s only 6 in each. I wanted to do a big squad of 12 but didn’t know what to give up. Psykers are scoring, technically, but are very delicate. So, 3 of those scorers really, really don’t want to get out of their vehicle until the last minute, and truth is the psykers rhino will probably be shot out form under them, anyway.

If it’s nightfight first turn, things are going very well for me!

Thoughts?

2000 Pts – Tau Empire Roster – Matt Bennett, FoB list 2012

Total Roster Cost: 1998

The “Allies Tax” and Internal Codex Force Multipliers, or, the Cost to Take Allies in 6th ed.

40K 4 Responses »

Aug 302012

Allies have been on my mind a lot, mostly becuase, like most experienced 40k players I have more than one army (Tau, GK, and a dash of silver marines for the old daemonhunters ally rules, FYI) and there are obvious advantages to it. It’s one of my favorite things about 6th ed, btw, as it breaths new life into old armies, and it gives people like me that have mostly complete armies an excuse to buy “just a few” of some new army….which will probably segue into an entire army at some point. (which of course is GW’s plan, but I forgive them their mercantile intent driving rules this time; it’s just too fun)

This has been mostly a GK blog so far, but truth be told most of my time has been spent thinking about Tau….they have new viability with the change to rapid fire more general vehicle changes (massed str 5 is a vehicle killer now). However, unlike GK, which are pretty well self contained, Tau almost need allies because their weaknesses are so profound (assault and anti-psychic, lack of flyers).

I think we can assume for the sake of argument that ALL armies have something that potential partners will want; even Black Templars have cheap 5 man las/plas squads, terminators with tank hunting cyclone launchers (and a double dose too), and 20 point cheaper typhoon land speeders.

But there’s a cost here: obviously we have to buy 1 HQ and 1 Troop, and just obviously, not all HQs are created equal. HQs are usually not nearly as “points efficient” as regular troops — one of the main mistakes new players tend to make is over-tooled-up, bloated HQs– but most provide a decent “punch” that let you enforce local dominance in a small section of the field. Troops can vary everywhere from fastastic, as capable as the elites of other armies, to near wastes of points that people have always felt forced to take. We’re going to call these mandatory HQs and troops the “Tax”, which will be low when things are either cheap or super effective, or high when they’re useless.

There’s a second, more subtle factor going on that is probably under appreciated, though. Internal synergies and force multipliers, ways in which the army is meant to support itself. A good example would be Tau markerlights. These are pure force multipliers, and they obviously work better if you have a certain mass of Tau to utilize them properly. So, you’re unlikely to get much use out of markerlights in a small ally force, and conversely, by adding allies into a Tau army you’re creating some portion of your force that can’t use them. Less obvious internal synergies include things such as SW Wolf Guard and BA priests (both of which require an Elites slot) and Necron courts (which are a free slot, but still need units to put them in).

These are just things to keep in mind when adding allies into your list…..it’s fun and exciting but you are usually paying a premium to do so. It’s good to understand what that cost is and make sure it’s worth it.

Continue reading »

Ard Boyz Semi Final missions are posted. Wait, what?

40K, Grand Tournament 2 Responses »

Aug 302011

Well, first of all, here are the Ard Boyz Semi-final Missions.

I was starting to wonder when they would post them, but then we were all wondering that for the Qualifiers.

Look them over, then let me share my thoughts:

Ard Boyz battle reports!

40K, Battle Report, Grand Tournament 15 Responses »

Aug 182011

Let’s go on to the game by game battle report, shall we? 40k Preliminary Ard Boyz missions are here. I should mention that our T.O. had ruled, ahead of time, that Infiltrate and Scout were universal rules that were active in all missions.

Game 1:

So, I hope the kid never finds this blog, because I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but my round 1 opponent was a 17 year old puppy we’ll abbreviate as J. And I stomped the puppy. Nothing noble in it, but I took it for the opportunity it was to get full battle points.

Quick Boston Brawlcon recap and thoughts, how did my Grey Knights perform?

40K, Grand Tournament, Grey Knights, Painting, Unit review 10 Responses »

Jul 062011

So, I just came back from Boston Brawlcon. It was my first Grand Tourney, and I suppose, in the end, I should be happy with my showing. A few things deeply frustrated me though. I’ll give my general thoughts here, and then post detailed battle reports in a bit.

I did quite well with my Grey Knights, my final score was 4 wins and 1 loss, though I was randomly selected for the “bye” 5th round (annoyingly, 3 guys left, not between day 1 and 2, but between game 4 and 5, in the middle of the second day, wtf?) so that last game doesn’t count, in a way. I would have much preferred to have fought the last game, gotten in the hardcore practice (and just have the game) that I need, then get the free 20 pts. I also would have had more data on how my list performed, and had more battle reports for you guys.

Once again, the missions can be found this posting about Brawlcon. My scores were 17 (mission 1, it was very hard not to tie the secondary objective), 0, 20, 20, 20 (which was the bye). I came in 5th overall, out of 26, which I guess doesn’t include the 3 people who rage-quit.

Here’s the results:

Ben Molie      102 Best overall
Ragnar Arnenson   101 Best General and Volunteer of the Year award!!!!
Alex Fennell   97
Wyatt Traina   91
Matt Bennett   85 <– I guess for those of you who can’t count from the top, this is me.
Sam Gould      80
ryan deane 75
Matt Cassidy   75
Rick James 68
Simon Leen      67 Best Painted
Graham Rockwell   65
Chris Bradley   64
Tom Greene   61 Best Sport
Troy Esposito   60 Best kick ass Beard!!!! Not a real award but needed to be said!
Will Souza 60 Players Choice and well deserved!!! Took a silver as well in the painting comp.
Gil Fuhr      53 Silver in the painting comp
Keith Bonneau   52
Tyler Gilbert   50
Alicia Ling      43
Rob Cline      41

Stormraven and Land Raider Grey Knight list, the Army to dominate Boston Brawlcon.

40K, Grand Tournament, Grey Knights, List Building, Tactics 22 Responses »

Jun 292011

This is it, this is The List. The List with which I hope to win fame and fortune at the Boston Brawlcon.

I’m very thrilled with it, actually, it has all the things I want; It can hit like a mobile flying truck, has sufficient anti-tank, and great scoring potential. It only has 9 Kill points, total, which is also pretty sweet. I was going to do 4 of these posts, with 4 different lists, running through the options, starting with that 3 LR list I posted last week, but nah, this is it, I’m done.

It’s like falling in love, sometimes you just know, y’know?

It doesn’t hurt that I did really pretty well against exactly the guy and exactly the list I most feared: Frank, with his really heavy Dark Lance Dark Eldar over at the ‘Arvard ‘Ard Boyz in cambridge (they play out of the Pandemonium book store in Central Square). Expect a mini Battle Report on that in the next few days, but the bottom line is I had a little bit, but not a huge amount of dice luck, and I nearly tabled him, so I’m pretty happy with it. I still hope Frank, who is going to Brawlcon, stays the hell away from me, I don’t want to fight him if I can help it, but it was still a good sign.

Anti-Spamming, or: How to fix an internet Imperial Guard list.

40K, Imperial Guard, List Building 6 Responses »

Jun 232011

So, I’ve been a little negligent on this, and meant to respond quite a while ago to this post by my friend MadPersian, who is recently getting back into the game and building an Imperial Guard list. Unfortunately, I find my friend has been unduly influenced by the internet (no, not me, I’m different) and I feel he has been misled to some degree. Let’s see what his list looks like, and his reasons: (I have edited this slightly for easier commenting, original post can be found HERE)

There are some basic list building guidelines I have read that I tried to follow:

Able to threaten any unit;
Mobile scoring units;
Saturation;
Redundancy; and
Duality.

OK, some notes here:

The following list doesn’t really accomplish that, it’s way too focused “killing rhinos”. Not everything is about rhinos
SUre, IG can do this well
Saturation is good, but it’s really about providing mutliples of a particular threat: Such as Saturating tank targets, or fast assaulters, or mass troops. I’m not sure this list does that.
So here’s a key thing that bugs me about internet spam lists: Redundancy does not mean that everything has to be spammed. You can have multiple units that do the same job without necessarily having multiples of the same unit in most codexes, and your list will usually be stronger for it.
I assume Duality means “able to take on more than one type of unit?” I’m not sure I like that philosophy, for the most, part, I usually prefer units that are fairly specialized in to one role. ”Multi-purpose” usually means you’re overpaying for whatever purpose you have at that time. Still, “Multi-purpose” means a certain bit of fail-safe, and that’s good, but I’m not sure this list accomplished this.

This is my raw attempt at a list I am hoping to refine into a fearsome tournament list.

HQ Company Command Squad, Company Commander, 3 x Veteran with Meltagun, 1 x Astropath + Chimera Transport, Multi-laser, Heavy flamer -> 55 Pts. - – - > 165 Points Troop Veteran Squad, Demolitions, 3 x Veteran with Meltagun, Veteran Sergeant + Chimera Transport, Multi-laser, Heavy flamer -> 55 Pts. - – - > 185 Points

OK, here’s is spammy problem number one: Why all the Heavy Flamers? I can understand having a couple Heavy Flamers scattered around, that’s just a good hedge. But why does every single Chimera have one? Think of all that heavy bolter fire you’re giving up! The heavy Bolter Bolter also has much better synergy with the multi-laser with similar range, and similar preferred targets. Whenever a unit has weapons that want different engagment ranges, targets, or modes (Short vs long, infantry vs. vehicles, assault vs heavy) you’re creating inefficiency. I suppose this is the “Duality” you were talking about in #5. A little bit of that is fine, just like a melta in a tac squad, it protects you against certain bullshit, keeps the enemy honest. But we’re talking you might 1 or 2, even 3, not the whole damn army. So much fire power wasted!

Go Heavy or Go Home: Brawlcon, Grey Knight Triple Land Raider list. Boston Brawlcon list #1

40K, Grand Tournament, Grey Knights, List Building, Tactics 12 Responses »

Jun 162011

So I tend to be of the belief that real combat is a lot of quiet, subtle maneuvering, and then sudden, over-whelming violence. If you can do your maneuvering more quietly, and your violence more sudden, things will go well.

On the table-top war-gaming front, I feel it’s usually more useful to think in terms of “pressure”. I should really do a post on that concept alone, but the basic idea is that if your opponent only have to worry about one thing in a turn, even if there will be another one next turn, if he has a clear target-priority and threat minimization strategy, then that’s good for him and bad for you.

So if you give him multiple threats, all credible, and make them more than he can deal with, meaning that he has to make at least one decision by ignoring one, then that’s good for you and bad for him.

It’s not everything you need to know about tactics, but it’s a hell of a good start.

In short, you’re trying to overwhelm your opponent. People are trying to do this when they have 9-11 razorback lists, or all terminators, or hundreds of gaunts. You can also do this with Land Raiders.

I play dual Land Raider lists all the time, and it works quite well. Two of them are pretty essential, as you need at least the two threats in order to give them multiple bad options. It’s all pretty likely that you will have a LR go down sometimes, they’re not invulnerable. Now, I’ve gotten into a lot of arguments on Kirby’s blog, people telling me that it doesn’t work because people can block your charges, and because of things like Dark Lances and such. Well, I play these things in tournaments, I do pretty OK with them, this is not just a rumor. I’ll write up a whole LR tactica later, but let’s leave at now that a big part of the trick is knowing when not to charge, which is a lot of the time, and using even the “assault LRs” such as crusdaers.

Now, Land Raiders are expensive, loading up on them can definitely leave your army thin in other areas. It also does put a lot of eggs in one basket. They’re tough, but that classic “6 and then a 6″ roll we all know and fear, 1/36 chance, well it’s rare, but it sure will wreck your day.

Conversely, though, they’re tough, and if you’re going to try to overwhelm your opponent in this way, you really want to push that to the limit. In short, Go Heavy or Go Home.

Now, three Land Raiders would be considered by most a little crazy, and I certainly had trouble making a list that had other essential elements such as sufficient scorers that I needed. However, I do own three, and I felt a terrible urge to use them. Grey Knight Land Raiders are certainly helped out lot by the Fortitude rule.

The missions I’m designing these lists for can be found here. Continue reading »

The Great Big List of Grey Knight FAQ Questions, Part 2

40K, FAQ, Grey Knights, Rules, Tactics 1 Response »

Jun 132011

I tackled part 1 a few days ago, and after writing a quite lengthy post, I cut it short, not anywhere near done.

I’m doing the Boston Brawlcon 4th of July weekend. I desperately want many of these questions answered, as some of them will affect the viability of certain lists versus others. Of course, I’m probably only halfway through this series of articles, and if they FAQ’d the thing this weekend, I’d be deprived of something to blather on about, so I’m a little conflicted.

FAQ Questions, Part 1, can be found here.

As before, I will make some notes regarding RAW (read as written), RAI (read as intended), and GAP (game as played, which simply means what the consensus has been to play it as, in the lack of any other direction, or perhaps “screw it, rule is fucked)

Here we go!

All the Anval Thawn questions. I wrote a post about him recently, which people seem to have liked, and I’ve been using him a fair bit recently. GW actually did a good job describing when, where, and how he comes back to life, but truth is a great deal about him is unsettled, rules wise, because GW didn’t seem to realize a guy who has all these special abilities like an IC, but is a sergeant, and then resurrects on his own, might cause some unique situations and need more than a paragraph explaining him.
1. Does he grant the squad he leads fearless? “But ICs don’t give fearless to the squad they join!”, you say. Well, sure, but Anval isn’t an IC, and he didn’t join the squad, he’s their justicar. He’s a full part of the squad.
  - RAW: There’s really no precedent for this, so who knows. I’d say he does.
  - RAI: I think they probably meant for it to grant
  - the squad fearless. It’s actually not that big of a difference with terminators.
  - GAP: Probably not. People react very negatively to this, and keep on bringing up the IC rule, even though it has no bearing. In a tournament, in the interests of time and sportsmanship, you shouldn’t argue about this unless it’s going to matter, which is rarely.
2. Does he and the squad share a kill point, or is he a separate kill point entirely? The codex is very specific about when he grants a kill point, but does not mention if once he dies and resurrects, do you have to kill him in order to have finished off the GKT squad (and have him stay dead) or is he worth an entirely separate kill point on his own?
  - RAW: The closest precedent is a Devil Fish and its drones. But that’s different in that the drones are proper passengers, while Thawn is properly the sergeant for his squad, fully part of it.
  - RAI: He’s probably a separate kill point. It seems that if it can operate separately, in 40k, then it’s a kill point.
  - GAP: He’s a separate KP
3. A little minor one here, but, if you buy psybolts for the GKT squad, does Anval get a Str 5 bolter once he resurrects?
  - RAW: Who knows? It seems though, that if Anval’s clip had ammo filled with the emperor’s special love-juice when he died, the extra special holy rounds are probably still there when he gets up.
  - RAI: I actually doubt GW thought of this.
  - GAP: If your opponent ever argued with you about something minor and stupid like this, punch him in the crotch. Continue reading »

Servo-skulls are probably better than you think they are……and I know you think they’re pretty good.

40K, Grey Knights, Rules, Tactics, Unit review 8 Responses »

Jun 102011

So this may be the shortest blog post ever, but there’s something I wanted to share with you.

We know servo-skulls are good, right? Stupid cheap, cheapest if you can get them on a techmarine or inquisitor, and they let you play all sorts of board control games:

They deny infiltrators within 12″
They stop scout moves by the enemy within 12″
They reduce scatter for Deep Striking within 12″
The reduce scatter for blast templates similarly

I mean, we all know this stuff, and it’s been my policy to take 2 or 3 of them since the codex came out. But I was stricken, in a game today, by just how awesome they can be. It was GK on GK, and we were playing a practice game for the Boston Brawlcon that’s coming up, mission 4. It was spearhead deployment, and he had an infiltrating vindicare that I was quite scared of taking out my Land Raiders. I was able to, using my 3 servo-skulls and careful deployment, keep that vindicare more than 36″ from any of my units.

Turn 2 I take him out with a couple autocannon shots, easy. 145 pts down.

Older Entries

Prometheus at War

The “Allies Tax” and Internal Codex Force Multipliers, or, the Cost to Take Allies in 6th ed.

Continue reading »

Ard Boyz Semi Final missions are posted. Wait, what?

Ard Boyz battle reports!

Game 1:

Quick Boston Brawlcon recap and thoughts, how did my Grey Knights perform?

The Great Big List of Grey Knight FAQ Questions, Part 2

Servo-skulls are probably better than you think they are……and I know you think they’re pretty good.

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