Warpcon 2012 Game 3 - Black Templars

You've asked so you shall receive, TKE. This is going to be short and sweet. I was paired off with Alec's Black Templars in a Kill Point/Draw Mission Dawn of War scenario. I won the roll-off to go first and, unlike the previous game, picked the wrong side. There was a lovely LOS-blocking piece of terrain in one corner and I gave it to Alec figuring that I wouldn't be able to fit enough stuff behind it to make it work for me.

It didn't turn out like that as Alec could comfortably pack 7 Land Speeders, 2 Rhinos and 2 Terminator squads behind the wall for most of the game and pick off targets as they came at him piecemeal. Or when I presented them on a plate. That was a game to forget for me but they're usually the ones when you learn more than you would from any other games.


So I go first and deploy 2 empty Rhinos to get into midfield quickly with all of my guns to get firing positions early while the other Rhinos are going to rush at him to get all of my GH into his face and force him to deal with them. Well, that was the plan and it didn't work so the GH got stuck into Terminator squads 1-on-1 when it needed to be 3-on-1 to wipe them out in one go (8-man units with Banners & Fists btw) which didn't happen and I was destroyed piecemeal.

This happened over the course of the first two turns as Alec had reserved everything giving me time to get units into position but I was worried about giving away too many KP too early and kept a unit in midfield when they really should have joined in the fight and applied more pressure. What happened was that Alec's Infantry showed up en masse in turn 2 and got stuck in turn 3 and there's only so much that GH can stand up now, which includes 2 Preferred Enemy squads, an Emperor's Champion, a Terminator Assault Squad and a Tank-Hunter Cyclone Terminator squad. The other thing I did wrong was to spread my army too thinly to set up firelanes for the Long Fangs, leaving them unsupported so they could be dealt with at leisure by being pounded by Cyclone missiles. One thing that sticks out was a Razor on my right that was taking shots at a Speeder squad, did nowt, got blown up, took out 2 Long Fangs in the explosion and the rest of the unit promptly legged it off the board. I was not amused.

I had 2 squads kept on my side of the board (one in a Rhino and the other on foot) when a solitary one would have done to babysit my objective and I could have sacrificed the other 4 trying to get KP and the enemy objective but I was worried about a counter-attack on my objective which never really manifested. 

One unit of shooty Terminators landed next to the ruin on in the middle background of the photo on the left but all they did was blow up the Razor on my left and move toward the cover before the Scouts showed up on that side (now I know how Mike felt about his Stealers) and combined with a unit of GH & Long Fang firepower to destroy them. I think that was the only KP I got in the game (I managed to get half a Speeder squad and leave the other shooty Terminators with one model after a GH charge) but that was about it. Which was pitiful.

I had enough stuff left alive to give me a few points but credit to Alec as he had played very well and denied me as much as he could to give him a decent 15-5 victory (iirc) because the units I had lost were fairly cheap, and that result thankfully meant that I hadn't drifted too far off the pace before I drifted off home and avoided the pub so there would be no repeat of last year's fiasco.