Tourney Report: Warpcon Game 5

When terrain is this sparse you're in Long Fang country.

With the taste of vomit in my mouth and a manky hangover I was about to call it quits and head home to die in my bed before Floody and a few others came over to me and asked if I was going to be playing in the final round. Suppressing the taste of vomit better than an Arab dictator suppresses dissent I hauled myself over to table 17 to face Anthony.

He's one of the people in my group but I couldn't remember playing him before so I was looking forward to playing against his Orks. I was hoping for something that wouldn't be too taxing on the brain but it was not to be as I had to play 5 objective mission.

Nice one.


To make this even more 'fun' it was Dawn of War so I had to think about what I wanted to deploy and bring on from reserve. Thankfully Anthony won the roll for first turn and threw some stuff down on my left near an objective so I figured if I avoided it and pummelled it from a distance while killing off his mobility by taking out his Trukks (hooray for the lack of Battlewagons) that I'd have control of the board and it would buy me enough time to take out his Troops by forcing them to footslog in the face of all of my firepower.

Deployment and Turn 1 are seen in the opening pic where a Warboss and some boys in a Trukk are deployed on my left and push into a wood near an objective, Lootas show up and so do some Killa Kans in the centre while 2 units of Bikes push forward toward the centre.

This is my deployment.

Turn 1

Here's the end of my Turn 1.

My Long Fangs stay near the table edge so they'll be out of range of most of the Orks guns and if they want to assault them then they will have to try to get through the Lord and 2 Rhino squads that have parked on one of the objectives.

The Rune Priest on my left has Jaws so his job was to throw it out every turn and scare stuff (which he did) into chasing him while his Rhino hides the Razorback behind it so it can fire its Las at vehicles. The Speeders are in reserve. My shooting manages to take out one of his Trukks despite the night fighting in play. Sweet.


Turn 2

Here's the centre of the board in turn 2 with the Bikers drawing closer to my lines on the left and a Dread supporting the Lootas in the forest at the back. A trukk shows up on my right. There's a bit of shooting but its only minor damage to my tanks while the Lord loses both of his wolves and a wound to boot. That's not good, I'll have to be careful with him now on.


My response was to again target his mobile units to slow them down so I managed to tag another Trukk dumping a unit of boys out in front of his Killa Kan wall. My Lord went for it as I didn't want him to be shot in the Ork turn.

If Ant charged him in his turn and finished him off then I'd be free to shoot at all of the units that counter-charged and they'd be sitting in his half of the board to boot. I went in and took another wound for my troubles but mangled the unit. They stayed in combat thanks to their bosspole. Score.

Turn 3
MOAR Trukks arrive on the right. I know now that the Lord *is* going to die but the question was how much damage could he do before he went down. Like a boss.

The Warboss is hugging the forest with his unit acting as Jawsbait while the Bikers swing toward the centre of my army. I reckon they would have been better served tying up the Rune Priest but w/e.

Ant advances and shoots some more stuff and does more minor damage to my vehicles but surprisingly he doesn't charge the Lord. That must be the eau de S10. The unit of Orks survives, again thanks to their bosspole. Not so good. I wanted him free to tear through the Lootas but what can you do?

Instead of Mt. Long Fang here's Line Long Fang? No, the Long Fang Wave? No, I'll think of something.*  They were left alone to blast stuff to bits for the game which they continued to do by taking out all the Trukks on the right and forcing the boys to footslog. They didn't do much to the Bikers or Kans beside them. The Lord managed to finish off the boys on the right, just in time to sit in front of half the Ork army.

*In before Donal/Eoin/Donnacha/Ant: its not called the moo. Muppets.

Turn 4

You see the Lord here? He didn't last long as the units nearby shot him til he fell over. At least he'd managed to take out a scoring unit.

The Bikers on the left swung forward to batter my Rhinos which they tried to in combat but failed abysmally and this would allow me to drive off.

Ant's shooting had been largely tied up in taking out the Lord so there wasn't a whole lot he could do to my tanks so my mobility was largely unaffected.

It allowed me hop my Grey Hunters out and gun down the Bikers in my turn while the other Rhino simply drove off to support my push on the objectives on my left.

One of my Speeders finally showed up on the right and I decided to boost it so that it would get a save and I could keep it moving to contest objectives if needed.

The Bikers didn't last long. I think I bum-rushed the last guy with the Grey Hunters while the Long Fangs poured their fire into the other unit and inflicted minor damage on the Kans while the Rune Priest again threw out Jaws and took out the Nob in the unit on the left but they again held.

Turn 5

Ant ran his army at me to try to grab/contest objectives although he didn't move the Warboss and co onto the one on my left...

He managed to tag the Rhino with the Rune Priest in it but the squad were unaffected. His shooting and run rolls were poor so he got neither the damage results nor the distances needed to really trouble me.

In my turn I pushed my Grey Hunter units and their vehicles to grab objectives/cockblock. When I moved my Razor (on the left) next to the objective I asked Ant why he hadn't moved to grab it. He said he'd forgotten about it because the tree (on its side out of the way) had been blocking it and he couldn't see it. His unit of boys were still within 3" so I had to pour my firepower into the unit to make it shrink and hope it was unable to contest the objective. Which I did while the Speeder boosted to contest the one in Ant's backfield while the Killa Kan in the centre turned out to be too far to contest giving me the game and a 17-3 win which pushed me back up the tables.

In the end I managed to come 24th out of 66 despite only playing 4 games so I was relatively happy with how I ended up although there were a few things in the army that I knew would need changing.

The ThunderLord for starters: he doesn't work on his own and needs to have the army re-worked around him but I just don't rate regular TWC and the character's high costs mean that I can't get the Rune Priest's 4+ in and still have 3+ decent-sized scoring units as well as 3 squads of Long Fangs. I have a disability: I can't write a Space Wolf list without at least 3 squads of them. More on that in later posts.