Hi!
All this talk about armies and cheese got me thinking back to my golden age
of gaming. The year is 1993 around christmas time, in the legendary 2 week
epic binge where I played about 50+!
A newer player to epic had his first time up and was at the time a notorious
power gamer. He selected chaos as his army and tried against me the "old
hat" bloodletter only army. The veteran gamers at the club grined as I
prepared to coax him into a less lactose filled diet.
I used a pure space marine army which to him was pretty lackluster. Mostly
infantry in the form of devastators with one unit of assault marines that
stayed behind the devastators and delay any would be attacker. I fielded
several whirlwinds (yes whirlwinds). A couple of t-hawks with tacticals to
take far off objectives. major support came from a warlord with heavy
weapons like volcanos and macro-cannons (quake cannons) to pick off stuff
from a distance.
...and one drop pod detachment which of course is how you really screw his
army..but I bet you cant guess how?
Besides his mainly bloodletters he had a couple cannons of khorne and a
reaver armed for close combat.
It was a 6000 point game and 55 VP's to win.
My strategy was a simple one turn knock out with the application is full of
one simple rule UNIT COHERENCY. Note epic only permits breaking coherecy
when the units are eliminated or you remain motionless. Now, have you ever
thought if you could break coherency when some units in your detachment are
knocked down, but regenerating. The answer is NO, coherency is maintained
(heck I went even as far to verify it with GW with several people back then,
hehe). So if you can hit at least one model in a bloodletter and make it
regenerate you paralyze a whole detachment. Of course you have to hit them
prior to movement-not easy in pre-snap fire days.
Thus enter drop pods (haven't guessed yet?). These fall before movement and
thus may hit several units. The diameter of 10cm is pretty powerful if they
fall correctely and given my supernatural abilities in counter dropping it
was easy.
The pods fell, the core of his army, mostly bloodletters, where hit at least
once and those that weren't got engaged by tacticals in close combat. His
remaining units had no choice to engage the tacticals. My opponent at this
point was flustered-then came the master stroke.
Using the rhinos and t-hawks I took all the objectives, since he can move,
he could not contest them seriously.
The rest of my army targetted his titan and non-bloodletter units.
End score me 57 him 10 VP.
The guy of coure couldn't believe it, but then we had one of my famous
post-game chats and he became quite a nice fellow to game with in a
non-cheese fashion.
My force was s bland could be, but of course I asn't at all gentlemenly in
my draconian application of the rules so my tactics WERE cheesy. Usually the
easiest route to chastise the power-gamer is to strictly enforce the rules.
Most power gamers have wining streaks because of a percieves some rule his
way, but more often times than not they are wrong. The next step is to show
hin that tactics (albeit sometimes cheesy ones) always beat cheesy army
constructions with tactics to back it up.
I must say I laughed quite a bit remembering this, even more so the times I
got my ass quicked by trying to pull a fast one.
Peter
Received on Wed Mar 29 2000 - 01:28:25 UTC
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: Tue Oct 22 2019 - 10:58:55 UTC