THE BROS ARE BACK much to everyone’s surprise. Battle Bros is an ongoing bi-weekly column where Drew (PantsOptional) taught his brother Chris (head58) how to play Warhammer 40,000 and now they’ve stumbled into a Combat Patrol tournament. Catch up on their past adventures here.
Meet the Battle Bros
Chris
The older of the two brothers, unsure of the road ahead.
Drew
The younger brother, overconfident in his “knowledge” of what is to come.
CHRIS: Drew and I very occasionally have Good Ideas. Usually this is limited to “marry women smarter/better than us” and “don’t perform home renovations more extensive than replacing a lightbulb.” Our food and beverage intake is notably absent from this Good Idea factor. In this particular case we thought maybe we should play a practice game with these two Combat Patrols with which neither of us had any experience. Especially as I’d only played one game of 10th edition and it was clouded by a haze of rage and disappointment.
Having spent the past few weeks in Paint or Die mode, I slapped a coat of Armageddon Dust onto the bases of my squat bikes the morning of said practice game, and was ready to go.
We rolled the “Display of Might” mission and even remembered to look at what the mission entailed before we started the first turn. There was some confusion as the pregame steps don’t actually mention when you choose your Secondary Objective. We both knew what we were going to take independent of which mission was rolled so it didn’t really matter but it’s just more evidence that GW doesn’t actually give a fuck about the Combat Patrol format. Anyway, I picked one which would give me extra points for controlling one of the No Man’s Land objectives, and Drew’s had him gunning for my Warlord. We slapped some shamefully unpainted terrain (I’ll do it one of these days, probably) on the table and were good to slam these mini hams.
DREW: The basics of the mission: two objective markers in the deployment zones, two in No Man’s Land. There’s some business about using Characters to “claim” the ones in the middle which means they score extra points and even more if you hold on to them for multiple turns. Nothing too ridiculous.
If you take a look at the photos above you’ll notice something which I hadn’t noticed at first until well after deployment: our Warlords are on opposite sides of the table. This would normally be fine except my Secondary Objective really wants me to use my Lieutenant to kill his Carl. I still score points for killing him with anything else but between the extra points and the fact that my Enhancement gives the Lieutenant +1 to wound against a specific unit it really seems like the point of this army is to soften up my opponent’s Bodyguard unit before hurling him directly into their Warlord. Part of my brain still insists despite all evidence to the contrary he should be attached to an assault unit instead of a shooting one but that’s the part which has probably been rotted out by ghost peppers and Malört so I’ve learned to tune it out.
CHRIS: It’s almost as if I deployed him far away from your Warlord on purpose. But don’t worry folks, any pretense of competence at this game ends here.
DREW: Unfortunately this mostly left a whole lot of nothing on the “south” side of the board to challenge the block of Warriors/Carl and Beserks. Chris tried his best to nuke them before they could charge but the dice were cold for him. Unfortunately they were also cold for me as after moving and charging on my turn I managed a grand total of zero wounds. This particularly stung for two reasons. First, all of their stupid little knife attacks have Precision so I had been hoping to allocate all of them to the Warlord and leave Chris wide-eyed and panicking with one of his Judgment token sources gone. Second, I understood deep down I should have expected nothing from Reivers and yet I was still disappointed.
Meanwhile on the other side my suspicions were confirmed. The Invictor took aim at the Pioneers and blew them off the table immediately. If I place at all well in this tourney this will be why. It has decent guns to handle all manner of infantry as well as light vehicles, it can punch larger vehicles to death, and it’s one of the tougher units in any of the Combat Patrol boxes. It will have a huge target on its back from the moment I walk in and I really can’t blame anyone for gunning for it.
CHRIS: I had realized ahead of time I had almost nothing in my list which was going to be able to take the Invictor down. A couple special weapons here and there, Carl and one of the Beserks have some decent melee stuff. Maybe other stuff could contribute once I got a second Grudge token onto it for +1 to the Wound roll. But I doubted I was going to take it off the board without a fair amount of luck. I hadn’t fully grasped the amount of firepower it has though. It can just delete one unit each turn and more if it shoots and charges. Observant readers will note these Combat Patrol boxes only give you about four units. And its Twin Ironhail Autocannon has a 48” range – longer than the full board – so you’re not staying outside of the S9 Twin Linked D3 bullshit splash zone. That thing fucking sucks, and I pity any fools matched up against you in the tournament. I just need to dodge you for three rounds.
Aside from your totally bullshit Mecha Shiva there were also the Intercessors which are no joke and can Get Shit Done. Kin have T5 but fairly shitty saves, although the 5+ FNP on the Beserks saved my bacon a couple times. The Hearthkyn only have 1 wound so they wither to bolter fire fairly quickly. I was able to throw their remaining firepower and a charge from the Beserks at the unit holding my “score me extra points” objective but I was fairly well spent afterward.
DREW: After he mopped up my Intercessors on one side of the table, I returned the favor with the Invictor who teamed up with the remaining Incesto block to erase the non-Bodyguard warriors. I can only imagine the look on their little faces as they saw a jumped-up Weyland-Yutani power loader careening toward them while winding up an oversized fist. It may have been overkill to make the charge but I know neither restraint nor reason.
CHRIS: If you hadn’t charged, I would have lost what little respect I had for you. It was the right thing to do. I accept my death with not exactly honor, but somewhat less shame than usual.
My Warriors softened up your block of Intercessors just enough to allow the Beserks to charge in and wipe them out. This gave me control of my Toil objective but also unfortunately put the both units in the path of the other Intercessors as well as the Invictor. You put paid to them quickly afterward with the bullshit walker stepping up to mush my Kahl into nutrient paste which left me with nothing.
DREW: With the tabling complete, we sat down to figure out the rest of the scoring. I still had eleven seconds left on the clock to move one model four inches so I was pretty sure I could make it in time. I slid my Lieutenant onto the closest objective in No Man’s Land to claim it and score a few extra points but in all honesty it wasn’t necessary. This was a shellacking through and through; I think Chris scored exactly once the entire time and I’ll thank you to leave your “just like in high school” jokes at the door. Gregbot reminded us to take a photo of the endgame state in the rudest way possible.
CHRIS: Drew mentions the clock and that’s something to note here. This tournament is going to use chess clocks so we wanted to practice on one, to see how it went. To be honest: for me it fucking sucked. It added a whole new level of anxiety to the game. I was already stressed about a game I didn’t know very well and an army I’d never touched before. Two things in particular here:
- The last time I used a chess clock was in 2016ish, in a Warmachine tournament. The clock had a metal wind-up key in the back, and I somehow cut the fuck out of my hand winding it up just before the game started. Didn’t stop or pause the game, just bled all over my shirt (and my models, but they were Skorne so it just made them more metal! I made sure not to touch my opponent’s models though, I’m not a complete monster). Not a great time!
- I had a dream a few nights before our game. We were playing and Drew got first turn. He finished everything in about 2 minutes. Then I went, and I had no idea what I was looking at on the table. I tried to find the sheets for my models’ stats but I had the entirely wrong set. I had deployed entirely wrong, there was a massive cannon with no ability to move or pivot which I’d set down facing the wrong way. I dropped models and had to glue them back together at the table. I clocked out of a full two hour round before completing my first turn. Did I mention I was feeling anxious about this game?
DREW: Holy shit, I had no idea about the dream. You know how you should have known it was just a dream? I managed to roll first turn for once in my life. That part about me finishing fast, though, it’s uh… probably best not considered further.
CHRIS: I could go on about how The Internet tells me repeatedly that the Leagues of Votann Combat Patrol is the weakest one out there, clocking in at a mighty 360 points vs the Space Wolfs 450, and being a mass shooty army with only 4 units. It’s said that a bad craftsperson blames their tools, but in this case these are Cow Tools and they didn’t help matters. I’m happy to admit I don’t know the game or this army as well as I should and my personal stress levels didn’t help much. The only fix is more reps and I hope to fit in a couple more test games before the tournament but I have no illusions on how I’m going to place. Wooden Spoons for the Wooden Spoon God!
I will say though that I had a great personal triumph in denying you the Nice Score by one point.
DREW: Okay, there is one teeny tiny thing to add: I earned an asterisk for my victory on this one. I used the Grenade stratagem multiple times in this game and only realized while glancing at my datasheets that nothing has the Grenades keyword. In fact, as far as I can tell, nothing in Combat Patrol at all has the keyword. Technically I did manage to kill a couple of models with this, but realistically every time I used them they really didn’t make a huge difference as you either FNP’d away the effects or they would have been turbo-murdered by the Invictor anyway. Let’s call it a soft asterisk.
We did some postgame analysis over a weird Brazilian pizza from the same place which brought us the dog vomit pizza. Sadly it was neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally weird. The same can’t be said for the “Brazilian X-Tudo” which I insisted we split rather than order individually as “falling into a coma” wasn’t in my evening plans. For those not familiar with the concept, it appears to be a burger conceived by a child intent on just stacking everything possible on it. This one was bacon, corn, ham, chicken, egg, burger patty, cheese, lettuce and tomato. Because I am not a cartoon, I had to set it down and figure out how to divide it up in order to choke it down.
CHRIS: I think I can honestly say that sandwich was Too Much. Just too many things going on at once, as well as being strangely dry (adding a sauce would have only made it worse) and physically impossible to fit in one’s mouth.
As for the postgame analysis, it was strangely similar to our lunch. The LoV Combat Patrol has a lot of moving parts for being so small (no pun intended) a force. The Hearthkyn Warriors have two special weapons, a leader with a different weapon loadout, and two different wargear things, plus the Kahl. So any attacks with them was a multi stage affair and I’m pretty sure I forgot the free “reroll 1s on ranged attacks” from my Enhancement. The Beserks are similarly inconsistent across a five model unit. Just a lot to keep track of, but all of which ended up not quite being more than the sum of its parts. Thank God I didn’t need to worry about the Pioneers for very long! I would frankly love to see an experienced Votann player pilot this box and see how much juice they could squeeze out of actually knowing what they were doing with it. That could be very helpful before the tournament. Maybe I’ll spend some time searching YouTube and be disappointed and/or swamped with Nazi propaganda.
DREW: We also talked a little about the merits of splitting your Warriors versus keeping them as one big block attached to Carl. For me it’s a relatively easy decision because the Lieutenant doesn’t really provide much benefit to his Bodyguard so I will likely split every time. Your Warlord provides a crucial resource while alive, his Enhancement benefits the entire unit (reroll ranged 1s to hit), and the medipack in the Warriors is such a decent benefit that it makes sense to keep them together. On the other hand that also leaves you with one fewer unit with which to score and sticky objectives.
However, I can’t help but agree with you on the complex/fiddly nature of your units. All I have to remember for my two units is to shoot bolters with one and stab knives with the others, which is just within the limits of my cognitive capacity. It definitely feels like you got the shorter end of the stick with this box and I’m sorry.
I’m not so sorry that I won’t beat your ass like a drum and wear the title belt next time, though. Woo!
Next Time: Okay, That Probably Doesn’t Happen
I think we all know ain’t neither of us winning the Big Day but Dear Readers will have to stay tuned to find out. Same Bro-time, same Bro-channel.
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