Welcome to part three of my adventures in New Mexico. In this installment, we’ll be focusing on the events of day two, which was the beginning of the 100 power-level games (essentially 2000 points). This installment will read a lot like my long-form battle reports, so please forgive my lack of exposition about the actual event itself. If you missed part two, you can find it here.
The 100-power level was the type of game I was preparing for, as I went over in my original road too. This power level was incredibly telling for Necrons, as we lost a ridiculous number of points in this switch. My first builds were all around 1750 ~ 1900 points, which I felt was unacceptable. Especially when we compare to armies like one of my teammates, Mini Wargaming Matt, who brought Tyranids and a Carnifex post-focus list, which I’m sure came in around the 2300-point mark. Along with the multiple upgrades I’ve received from my crusade, most notably making the large axes on my destroyer’s damage 4, I was more than ready to tear into some really big games. I had played two 50-power games outside of the two from the day before, against newer Goonhammer authors Rocco and Enzo who were rocking Astraeus tanks like total chads. I won both and started my march into day two versus my first real opponent, known MTG (and other games) author of Goonhammer, FromTheShire. (Shire for short in this report)
Kalzyka Cargorium: Mission for Generator Collection – Blood Angels
Generator collection count:
Space Marines – 38
Custodes – 9
“Gunum, why didn’t you do any battle reports with pictures for everything on day two?” I hear you ask. Well Dear Reader, and let me tell you, it was because I was sick and tired of existing and took no pictures. Who has time for pictures when you’re lamenting your existence? I hopefully made up for that today with the photos of my games on the mean streets of Kalzyka Cargorium, a continent-sized warehouse. This is when the narrative began to feel alive to me, because the entire reason I had chosen the interlopers faction to start with was so I could hunt down as many of the Goonhammer staff as possible. Being one of them myself, and not having a chance to play any of them in years, I wanted to up the odds of my ability to be able to run face-first into any of them, as Dan “FromTheShire” Gates here was about to experience.
Before I even begin talking about the game, I want to point out this is one of the most pleasant experiences I have had with someone from the team in a game-like environment. Shire came to the table knowing that I have a lot of experience when it comes to this game, and though he approached it originally from a place of defeat, I like to think that as the game progressed, our shared love of the game really began to shine through as we traded blows. So just a quick word of thank you to Shire, and for being an excellent opponent that I had an incredible pleasure playing.
As I’m sure you can see the table we played on was rad. We even took the time to make a little bit of a thematic battle on a bridge, which was exciting when we started to even just look at the matchup. He was playing his Blood Angels, looking to come and punch me in the face. My robots are looking to shoot him into little pieces and have my Night Scythe deliver death onto his backline. We were playing the mission Raze and Ruin, where we had to get infantry squads onto objectives onto the opponent’s table half to destroy them. I thought it was a pretty cool premise; Shire and I had also decided that the only objectives that we were allowed to blow up were the ones in our opponent’s deployment zones (Rob note: The mission actually specifies that every objective marker must be placed outside of the deployment zones so uh, good job Goonhammer team). We both wanted to be there anyway, so sounded like an exciting little addition to our mission. Forging the narrative!
Let’s talk about the battle on the bridge! We had this giant setpiece, and I’d be damned if I didn’t use it. In this Battle of the heroes we had a squad of 10 Sanguinary guards, a sanguinary priest, a sanguinary ancient, and, I believe, a Campton on one side, while on the other side, filled with heart-stealing robots we had there were six shooty destroyers, and three wraiths with laser beams. You can put money down now on how this battle turned out, and while you’re thinking about how the dice were rolled and the laser beams were shot, you should play a wonderful song from Final Fantasy 5, called Clash on the Big Bridge! I recommend the Black Mages version.
Start reading this at 47 seconds into the song: The ABS timer activated quicker for my wraiths and my destroyers than for Shire’s Blood Angels. Quickly using my move to switch positions, I push my wraiths up into the middle of the bridge, as well as a unit of bikers coming up from below. I left my Destroyers back in the back row, having them channel their energies for the coming shooting phase. I quickly activated my attacks, pouring fire into the blood angels only to do basically nothing, My bikes standing, staring at the blood angels and their swords, understanding 100% that their lives are in danger. My bikes had shell and protect, giving them a 3+ armor save and a 5+ invulnerable save. Tomb blades were made for Crusade and PL as they had so many upgrades to buy that I could offset the madness of Power Levels by gorging them on “free” upgrades that’d otherwise be overcosted in a points environment. Unfortunately, whenever you’re fighting against guys with swords, mages tend to fall very quickly and easily. Even when your magic is just guns. So thanks to the abilities of Cura, provided by the sanguinary priest, they were able to wither my first rounds of attacks and had plenty of guys left to finish off my bikers.
Luck would have it that I still had my frontline tanks of wraiths in the way, and I was able to unleash another devastating volley of shots from my destroyers into his Sanguinary guard. They did not withstand a second-round shooting, especially with re-roll to wound. I devastated what was left of the same guard, my wraiths were able to clean up the characters, and as you can see in the next photo, I was starting to begin to cast Fire 3 onto all the poor infantry below our death bridge. The photo above is representative of the rest of the game, and the advantage I was able to enjoy by having nothing to stop my shooting anymore.
Shire put up a hell of a game, but what it just basically came down to is I was able to complete the objectives, and he was not. His Librarian Dread though ends up being my favorite model of the entire narrative event, but I’ll get into why that is later on. Once again, Shire, thank you so much for the game, Thank you for putting up with my aggressive play style, and I thoroughly enjoyed our playtime together. You put together a hard battle for me, and I collected many hearts from this game. I mean generators. Whatever.
Shire put up a hell of a game, but what it just basically came down to is I was able to complete the objectives and he was not. His Librarian Dread though ended up being my favorite model of the entire narrative event, but I’ll get into why that is later. Once again, Shire, thank you so much for the game, thank you for putting up with my aggressive play style, and I thoroughly enjoyed our playtime together. You put together a hard battle for me, and I collected many hearts from this game. I mean generators. Whatever.
Facility Lambda Rho: Mission for Generator Collection – Custodes
The next battle took place in an industrial facility called Lamba Row. The mission this time: Supplies form Above. Two things that I remember about this battle: 1. The gentleman I was about to play was brand new to the game, only having played for about one year. And 2. My lips were incredibly chapped. I hadn’t even noticed until this point that the weather was beginning to drag me down with it. I don’t know if everyone knew this, but deserts are very dry. And coming from a Great Plains area, where the weather is usually humid – moist even, or freeze-to-death, cold. Experiencing the temperature swings of New Mexico, was unexpected to me. So, I began my game with Robert, of the Imperium, and his Golden Boys, with glasses of water for all at the table. From what I was able to glean from Robert and all the people that kept visiting our table, he was a bit of a hobby encourager in his community. I believe he had said that of his group, he’d been playing the longest, and he was seen as one of the better people in his area. That was great to see because you need people with a passion for the game to continue to grow communities.
By the time this game was done, I think I had drunk about five glasses of water. There were a lot of places I’d love to live in this world but unfortunately, New Mexico doesn’t exactly make the list. The reason I even bring this up is that the facility we were about to battle on appeared to be a desert of itself. The table was rust-covered, filled with pipes and. Scaffolding as far as the eye could see. And in this game, there would be a strong focus on placement, as his units were not many and mine were multiple and great. There would be lessons in character protection, objective control, and let’s be honest, when you are playing Supplies from Above, objective movement.
Why do I say that? Well, it’s because, in Supplies from Above, the objectives might just simply float away! At the start of every battle round, you roll two dice in the center of the table and make a direction that went towards the highest dice of the two. For example, If I rolled A4 and A3, and the four were pointing towards the southeast, that’s the direction every single objective on the board would go. And it wouldn’t go just a small number of inches, like one or two periods. It would go D3+3 inches towards that direction, so some objectives would just float 6 inches and you would be standing on it, and then you suddenly wouldn’t be. That alone was quite a bit of fun, as you kind of had to spread out and plan for the adjectives to land on your head. And if they didn’t, well, they just might float away, and you won’t score any primary points.
This game went about how you would expect when you’re playing against custodians. Everything’s tanky, everything can kill you if it touches you, and Bah GAWD is that Necron Warriors with a steel chair!?
This game boiled down to two different death stars versus my army, one on either flank of the map. One Death star is made up of a collection of characters and guys with cover-providing flags. And another one, that was his warlord and a brick of 10 Custodies. I’m going to be honest, in my entire time playing this game, I haven’t seen people try to run Max squads of custodes, but he was telling me this was for buffs and strategic support, and since I’m not a custodian player, I tended to believe him. There was a clear discrepancy in what we saw in the game though, as my forces were able to take advantage of a lot of holes in his lines, push on to objectives and attack his forces. When I redeployed my Necron warriors behind his left deathstar, using the Veil of Darkness, I had a clear line of sight on three characters. Using this opportunity, I killed two of them, leaving his Captain mortally wounded.
Thanks to the way this mission worked, scoring in this game kind of began to go in One Direction as one of us luckily was underneath where the supply cashes landed, and the other one was not. Not to say there weren’t some standout moments in the game – for example, you’ll see above where my weak Necron overlord, who is disdained by my entire faction, is about to brawl with some bird boys. Not pictured here is him failing this dramatic charge, and then getting charged by said bird boys and shield bashed to death. I made it a point to make sure my overlord died in every single game, just to try and reflect the disdain my faction leader held for him.
I don’t know if I’d talked much about my chapter tactics during this event, but I had taken the Healthy Paranoia Circumstances of awakening (+3″ to ranged weapon ranges), and the Rad-Wreathed Dynastic Tradition (-1 Toughness to enemy units within 1″). This allowed my Gauss Reapers to be 15 inches instead of 12 inches, which is a significant difference in play style. 12-inch guns can be good at all, but sometimes they just don’t reach where you need them to. And jumping out of a plane or teleporting these Gauss reapers to the places they needed to be made them without a doubt the standout weapon for me in the Necron book. It’s also hard to beat AP-2 and S5 in an Armour of Contempt world.
Either way, I was able to achieve all my mission objectives for this round, continuing my win streak and my complete dominance of every single Interloper objective. I didn’t know really what I was playing for, but I did know that I was doing my best to get there. Finishing this game off left me at a comfortable 6 and O for the weekend so far.
Generator collection count:
Space Marines – 108
Custodes – 34
And that’s it for me at the close of day two. This day’s event ended much like the other ones, we got yelled at by our leaders for doing better or worse than the day before. There was also a riveting call for combat in Kill Team and Aeronautica, to try and control a Space Hulk that was nearby, as well as the skies over the planet. I wanted to be a part of those because after going six and oh so far and being very focused on making sure our faction did the best it could, not being able to participate in kill team or airplanes was very difficult. I even decided to look to see if I could buy the Necron airplanes from the Forgeworld store in the building but was sadly unable. Think that’s something else to start to investigate moving forward here because if I’m going to be joining in more narrative events, I’ll want to make sure that I’m able to have my hands and as many war zones as possible.
Thank you again for checking in with us, dear reader, the interlopers of Battle Group 16 were on a rampage as we had won most of our rooms, and most of our people were doing very well. In our battle group alone, we had two undefeated people. Catch me next time for the exciting conclusion of my event, what my final thoughts of the event were, and Any bonus content that I can think of. Day two felt the most like an actual tournament to me, and it was nice to get into that groove again.
See ya next time, as the War concludes.
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