Hi. Erik Rutins, Elias Tiliakos and I had a battle planned for
Saturday. It was intended to be Space Marines (Erik) and Eldar (me)
against Orks (Elias), 2500 points per side. Then Elias couldn't get the
car, and Erik looked at the map and saw how far it was going to be, so I
had 1250 (or so) points of Eldar and a nice terrain setup and nobody to
shoot. (Don't worry guys; I'll concede you both had legitimate reasons.
:) (By the way Erik, Duran on the list goes to school in Amherst, and
should be lots closer to you. We've not met, but might try something
next fall.)
So my wife volunteered, and I gave her 1250 (or so) points of Space
Marines. We played the Escalating Engagement.
I realize I'm giving away to Elias what I had in mind for my half of the
SM/Eldar army, but I can always adjust it. :)
Marines had:
two SM Armor detachments
4 Land Raiders (1 HQ)
2 Predators
SM detachment
5 Land Speeders
SM detachment
captain in LR
Terminators in LR
2 tactical squads in rhinos
2 Razorbacks
1 Whirlwind
SM detachment
6 squads of assault (12 stands!)
SM air detachment
2 Thunderhawks
Eldar:
two bike hosts
5 bikes (1 warlock)
1 vyper
two nightspinner groups
2 nightspinners
2 Swooping hawks
warhost
warlock in falcon
3 falcons
2 support platforms
Engines O' Vaul
3 scorpions
Revenant Scout Titan
This is actually what I had intended for half of the SM/Eldar army, so
it really wasn't intended to be fielded by itself.
She started with Landspeeders, I with a bike host. There was a central
large hill spread across the middle of the field, with a peak on each
end of the field. (Geohex, great for setting up rolling terrain.) An
Ork village along one side (this battlefield was originally supposed to
have Orks on it :), Imperial ruins in one corner. Some of the hills
were cliffs. She picked the corner she set up in.
Both scouting detachments basically moved forward--a quick, easy turn.
:)
In the second turn, I figured she'd get her flyers in and put the
assault marines in the ruins on my end of the field. I moved first, and
had some bikes on assault, a nightspinner group, the titan, and the
warhost. Yep, she put the assault guys in the ruins, anyway. I put
some blastmarkers and killed one of 'em in shooting phase, and managed
to firefight them into retreating out of the ruins. She also brought an
armor detachment in on her side.
The turns sorta blend together here, so I'll summarize.
I hit the assault guys hard, with Titan, nightspinners, bikes,
scorpions, and psychic blasts, since I didn't want them behind me. I
used a psychic blast to damage a thawk, and snapfire damaged the other.
They didn't make it back. They did put a blast marker on the titan and
one on the scorpions, as well as putting a hit on a scorpion or two.
One bike host had won a firefight with her landspeeders, but this turn,
as the speeders got some support, they assaulted backwards towards the
marines that had been run out of the ruins. By the time they got there,
the marines had been cleaned up.
Twice during the game I rolled two 6s and a 5 for the Scorpions' AT
shots. However, I really blew it, because I forgot (the first time)
that a blast marker shuts down the whole weapon. So I got 4 AT shots I
shouldn't have. I gave her a Land Raider back, probably should have
been a Rhino or Predator, too (it was later I remembered).
There was a time where I really thought I was in trouble. She had three
large detachments facing me, two with 4 Land Raiders, 1 with another. I
didn't have much support, mostly because this wasn't originally intended
to be an army on its own. I barely managed to put the titan and
scorpions out of LOS of some of the detachments, but none was able to
pull back out of range. (The scorpions should not have been so close to
begin with.) I survived the shooting much better than I had thought I
would, but did get two blast markers on the scorpions. It was then,
however, that I remembered that the scorpions each have 2 FP at 30cm. I
thought I was going to be helpless, but ended up with all 17 AT shots
(my second 6, 6, and 5) plus a little FP. That, plus some bikes that
had marched to the other end of the field to pick up a capture objective
and now assaulted back to hit a hurtin' armor detachment or two from
behind, took her to -1 morale.
Thoughts and questions:
1) A March move means you can't take advantage of cover. What about
LOS? If most of a detachment's move was in view, and they end up out of
LOS, they're safer than if they could use cover. What about range? I
realize that this is an issue that any game that is sampling the action
at certain times will have.
2) I think the most blast markers any detachment had after removing them
in the rally phase was 2. This with tons of blast markers laid down, 4,
5, 6. I think you ought to be able to remove at least one every time
(since suppression should have to be kept up, in my opinion), but I hate
to see next-to-no effect remaining on a detachment after I shot it up
the time before. I removed almost all of my own in the game, but never
faced a large number, so I'm sorta reacting against how I saw the game I
was playing in. But I've seen the problem on both sides.
My wife says she wants a re-match (not for a while, it took a while to
play, and the kids let us know they felt neglected), so I think we'll
try my suggested blast marker rule, possibly modified and using some of
the things I've heard here:
In the rally phase, roll 2 D6 for each detachment, and remove a number
of blast markers equal to the smaller of the two dice. If double 6s are
rolled, something exceptional happened (communications problems,
everybody is changing their underwear, whatever), and no blast markers
are removed. This is close to the same average number of blast markers
removed (2.36111 instead of 2.3333), but the numbers tend to be smaller
(except that 0 is harder to get). If the average is about the same,
even higher, why bother? I don't know. :)
We haven't had a real problem with blast markers determining the winner
(the night spinners weren't all that impressive, except occasionally),
but if we had more of 'em I could see that being an issue. So I'd agree
with a maximum morale penalty equal to the morale value. Since this is
maximum over the game, not maximum per turn, I think it only makes sense
to use the temporary effect. The part that bugs me is that, if a
detachment has as much blast markers as its morale value, if it reaches
half strength, it doesn't get any worse. Hmm, no, actually, that makes
sense. Instead of a hard breakpoint in morale, this makes a gradual
increase. It is just that once you've gotten to less than half, you
can't get over it (morale-wise).
3) It is frustrating to have grav-tank Engines o' Vaul, and not be able
to maneuver the darn things. I want to go backwards, and just can't do
it.
4) I had some bikes in the front, and I put 'em on assault and hurried
to the back in the movement phase to put a finish on the assault marines
that got pushed out of the ruins. But the marines were finished in the
shooting phase. In the assault phase, should my bikes move (at least) 5
cm towards the place the marines were, or should they turn around and
move at least 5 back the way they came? The rules directly interpreted
would say the latter, but I think that isn't really the intent. This is
a special case. I ended up moving them 5 towards where they were
intending to assault, as if they saw that the marines were done, but it
took a bit more to stop, anyway. They didn't have time to turn around
and go towards the troops behind them.
andy
--
Andy Skinner
askinner_at_...
Received on Mon Apr 27 1998 - 14:39:35 UTC