TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 43: Rise of Empire

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last Week I talked about my final hobby prep for the Rise of Empire teams event. This week it’s time to talk about the event itself and its games. It was a two-day event with six rounds, but I’m going to go ahead and cover the whole thing in one go. Because of the timing of the event, we had a rules freeze in place from the start of the month, which meant that none of the new Detachments nor the December 2024 Balance update were being used.

My Army

I’ve been working on this army for some time but I finally managed to get it over the finish line from a hobby standpoint. It’s a solid list, and I’ve enjoyed playing it in practice games. Here’s what I’m running:

My Death Guard List - Click to Expand

There’s a lot of beef here with three Defilers and a trio of Plagueburst Crawlers, plus a ton of Blast weapons to benefit from the Lord of Virulence. The PBCs are more expensive than Predators and nominally not as good as having an extra 150 points, but the flip side is that mortars are very good and just win you some games by being able to dig out units you can’t see or force battle-shock tests. There’s nothing funnier than battle-shocking a Space Wolves unit and then telling the player they can’t do a surge move as a result.

That said, the Defilers are the real stars here, able to push out a surprising amount of damage while also being able to soak up a lot more than you’d think, and with the melee chops to be a real threat if someone tries to get stuck in with them. Their biggest downside is just that they’re huge models, though not having bases and their rule to move over 4″ terrain helps in that regard.

…or at least, it would, if I hadn’t found out last-minute that every piece of ruins on the Rise tables was 5″ tall.

I only have two complaints about Rise – which was absolutely a very good and well run event despite those complaints – and one of them was the terrain. While it was fine in terms of volume and used Games Workshop layouts, there were some bad deployment + layout combos and I had issues with the actual MDF terrain set being used. Most of the pieces on the tables were too large, both in terms of being too tall and in terms of taking up the entire footprint of the terrain base, which made it near impossible for wider tanks and the Defilers to get through. This only really caused me problems in one game, but was a headache I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with.

Then you had other stuff like this:

Where that Layout 1 gap is much smaller than it is supposed to be, creating bad chokepoints where wider vehicles can’t leave that corner. Credit to the organizers, this was something they addressed before the event – the official ruling was that vehicles up to 5″ wide could just drive through that gap – but it highlights the challenge with the actual terrain set being used.

Anyways I wanted to get that qualm out of the way first, but don’t mistake my intention – the event was great and I absolutely plan on going back next year. Now let’s talk about the games.

The Team

I’m playing with the Astros Militarum. They’re a group of locals made up primarily of guys who play at Asgard in downtown Houston. This is more or less the group of players left after the most serious players broke off to start their own team (Sanctum), but I really like these guys and they asked me to fill a spot. I needed one more event to make six for my ITC score, so I was happy to join. With me are David (Necrons), Vinay (Grey Knights), Brendan (Votann), and Chris (Astra Militarum). What we lack in practice and expertise we make up for in raw gumption and a pretty solid set of lists that lean heavy into skew in the right ways for a teams event. Vinay’s running heavy on Dreadknights, David’s list features a trio of planes, Brendan’s Votann list runs triple Hearthguard and a pair of Land Fortresses, and Chris’ Astra Militarum list is more balanced, but with a heavier dose of infantry than you’d expect.

The Event

Rise was held at the University of Houston Clear Lake, a small satellite school in the UofH system. Our event was being held primarily in the Atrium of the Bayou Building, a large, open space with good spacing and lots of restrooms, plus a side room with tables for three teams to play. It was a very good venue to host – lots of parking, a clean, open environment to play in, and it had an attached cafe with very solid food options. I think the venue was an absolute slam dunk, despite being about an hour’s drive from my house. That’s a tough drive to make when you’re putting in 9-7 at the Warhammer Factory, but it’s not over my limit.

Round 1: vs. David Sokoloski (Space Wolves)

In the first round we’re in the side room up against team Tabled Talk, made up of players who normally game at the Ettin store in Humble. They were a great group to play against and I cannot say enough nice things about them.

Our strategy in most of these rounds is going to be to throw out either Guard or myself as the first Defender. There aren’t a lot of lists I can’t go into – though I’ll find one before the event ends, believe me – and despite the size of the Defilers, most deployment maps work well enough that I can manage. On that note, I’m not really focused on the teams strategy – my general plan is to just win my games on player skill, which will work well until it doesn’t, but by the time we’re matching into superior opponents, we’ll be fucked as a team anyways.

In round 1 I’m paired against David Sokoloski, running Space Wolves.

David’s running Grimnar, two units of Thunderwolf Cavalry, three units of Wulfen, plus Ragnar and a unit of Blood Claws in a Rhino. It’s a fine wolf jail list, but I’ve played against Wolf Jail before and also this particular Death Guard list is a nightmare for Wolf Jail – the Defilers do D6+1 damage with their claws and they are more than happy to get stuck in against the likes of Wulfen and TWCs, plus stacking -1 WS/BS is absolutely brutal for the wolves’ melee output. My biggest mistake this game was not using Disgustingly Resilient on one of my Defilers when they were charged by a full TWC brick and even without using it, David only barely managed to kill it in melee – I underestimated just how difficult a time he was going to have.

While I lost one Defiler early to the TWC brick I had no problem clearing it after, nor taking out the others, and without the ability to do meaningful damage to a defiler with -1 incoming damage, David was stuck losing a battle of attrition most of the game. I took this one 18-2 but David knew coming in that it was bad and they were hoping to score anything in the matchup by tossing him on a grenade.

Result: 18-2, Win

Team Result: 56-44, Win

Brendan wins his game against Robert Wood’s Imperial Knights 20-0 after some amazing dice, while Chris wins his game over Admech 11-9, giving us the edge over Tabled Talk after Vinay loses 1-19 and David loses 6-14. A narrow win is good for us as it keeps us from matching way up round 1.

We grab some lunch at the attached cafe. It’s fine. They’ve got a grill, plus a good selection of pre-packaged stuff. I snag a buffalo chicken wrap and some Ms. Vickie’s chips. We grab lunch as a team and chat for a bit before posting up in the Atrium for the next round.

Round 2: vs. Daniel King (Dark Angels)

Round 2 saw us going up against Trinity Sol Gaming, who had a lovely set of armies. In particular my round two opponent, Daniel had some very nice looking Dark Angels. He was running Ironstorm Spearhead, and that could potentially have been an issue for me given how much damage output he had, but on the whole I wasn’t super-worried. His list was running two Gladiator Reapers, two Ballistus Dreadnoughts, a Repulsor Executioner, and a trio of Vindicators. That’s a lot, but the Reapers aren’t very good into Defilers and the Vindicators are pretty short range, plus at 11 wounds I can credibly kill them early. The biggest threat here was the terrain and layout, specifically Hammer and Anvil on layout 4.

That’s a pretty open board! My plan was to basically take out two Vindicators on turn 1, with the hope that this will cripple Daniel’s ability to respond. One key complication here is the mission – it’s the Ritual, so I need to keep some units (Blight-Haulers) to create objectives. I mostly succeed with this plan, as I’m going first and able to pick up one Vindicator and bracketing the other on turn 1. The PBCs aren’t as important in this matchup so I set them forward as bait to lure out the Vindicators and get them into range of the Defilers. I’m on -1 to saves this time around, and I think that was the right call.

This game ends up being a pretty brutal back-and-forth but the key decider in my favor was that Daniel’s dice were pretty bad in those first two turns, leading to his RepEx basically doing nothing on my Defilers and letting all three of them run wild. This was the only mission where I had issues moving them, in part because the terrain had been jostled and that meant some of the lines looked too narrow to move through. Once I’d pulled the RepEx down, it was just a matter of time and while what Daniel had left could still do real damage, I was pretty far ahead on points.

Result: 16-4, Win

Team Result: 62-38, Win

Brendan scored another 20-0 over Chaos Daemons, while David, Chris, and Roy pulled close losses (8-12 or 9-11), meaning that Brendan and my wins were enough to put us over.

In Round 3 we got a pairing we shouldn’t have – we were paired against The Benchwarmers, a team out of Dallas who were at the time on a 0-1-1 record. They shouldn’t have been paired into us, and our team captains talked with the judges about this, who did a repairing (which still had us playing), then gave up and told us to play.

Round 3: vs. Death Guard

This game was a slog, going into a Mortarion-led list that included Rotigus and three units of Deathshroud. Mortarion’s a big problem for me, because he turns off my contagions, so a lot of this game came down to careful positioning and picking off units that were out of his 6″ aura range, using the -1 saves contagion to score kills. I’m going second here but it’s Purge the Foe so that’s a plus.

The key in this game was locking up Mortarion at midtable with my Deathshroud, where he sat for three turns trying to kill them before my opponent rolled enough bad saves that they punched through and killed him. Morty’s a problem, but not so much in melee, where he only has five attacks. And while each one kills a Deathshroud when it connects, I can sit back and save half the ones that come through, leading to at most 1-2 dead models per swing. Meanwhile the Lascannons and Entropy cannons keep blasting away.

This game was terribly draining for a number of reasons but in the final turn I was able to flip the game from 10-10 to 13-7 in the final turn by taking out Typhus and a unit of Deathshroud to score kill more, Assassination, and Overwhelming Force in one go.

Result: 13-7, Win

Team Result: 71-29, Win

Our team went 4-1 this round, with Vinay finishing 9-11 against World Eaters. It wasn’t a matchup we should have been playing, and I feel for the Benchwarmers getting paired into us.

We finished day one at 3-0 and I absolutely did not expect that. Some of it’s a fluke – our round 3 pairing shouldn’t have happened, but who’s to say we wouldn’t have beaten another team? It has been a long day and I make the drive back up without submitting my army for paint judging. I didn’t want to leave my army sitting out at the venue, plus my Death Guard weren’t going to win and the Texas paint scoring rubric is largely complete bullshit, to the point that i don’t want to submit things for it.

Day Two

It’s day 2 and we’re inexplicably 3-0. And here’s the other complaint I had about the event: It was six rounds. This makes no sense, in part because the event only had 28 teams, meaning five rounds would absolutely give us a single undefeated team. This also put a serious time crunch on our rounds – we only had three hours per round, including pairings, leading to something more like 2 hours and 15 minutes for games. That’s not really enough and I’d have preferred to have two full, 3-hour game rounds on day 2 instead of trying to get three games in. The common refrain in these situations is “people paid for six games!” to which I say “what? Play games at home, for free.” This would end up mostly resolving itself but it was the only other thing I’d say was meh about an otherwise great event.

Our first matchup of the day is against Y’allhammer, one of the best teams at the event. It’s headed by the Pope brothers – Sam and Noah – who by all accounts are pretty good guys. I’m matched into Noah’s very infantry-heavy guard list. I previously played against Noah at Warzone Houston in 2022 and he was a great opponent then, and is a great opponent now.

Round 4: vs. Noah Pope (Astra Militarum)

Noah’s running a very infantry-heavy Guard list. It’s the perfect target for my Death Guard list, because I have lots of Blast Weapons, two big units of infantry-killing Deathshrouds, and Noah has very little that can actually hurt me.

This one’s tilted heavily in my favor and Noah knows it. He puts up a solid fight, and to his credit, it’s nearly impossible to keep his army from scoring at least a few points. His Aquilons aren’t a problem for me as while they’re annoying, I can trivially pick them up with a single deathshroud and dig out the rest with a mortar if that doesn’t do the job. It doesn’t help that this table is fairly open for my purposes – lots of 48″ shooting is also a nightmare for Noah, even if he can stay out of range of the Deathshroud, there’s almost nothing he can do about the mortars and defiler cannons.

It’s not a fast game but it’s a fun one – Noah is a very good player and a blast to play, and I’m pretty sure the next time we match up I’m not going to be so lucky.

Result: 17-3, Win

Team Result: 38-62, Loss

We have a great set of games overall against Y’allhammer but they’re a much better team than we are. I win my game but Brendan’s is a tie and the rest of our team drop their games. We hold Y’allhammer to one of their lowest scores, but aren’t able to pull it out. They’d go on to win the whole event, and I don’t feel bad about dropping this round to them at all.

Round 5: vs. Andrew Corban (Astra Militarum)

LET’S FUCKIN GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Andrew’s great. I love that guy. You know what he’s really great at? Giving up and/or surrendering. But beyond that, he’s pretty good at Warhammer. Round 5 sees us paired up against the Sanctum B team, made up of a bunch of guys who also game at Asgard. They’re doing better than the Sanctum A team and right now, so are we. We all know each other, and that means a more chill round. I’ve played Andrew’s Astra Militarum so I know what to expect. Or at least I think I do, then I see that his list is just all tanks and I’m suddenly not so confident.

To make matters worse, this table is an absolute shooting gallery, and I’m going into triple Dorns, a Hellhound, and three Leman Russ tanks. I was expecting triple dorns, but with more Chimeras and regular guys. This isn’t great for me! My only chance here is to deploy on the line and go first.

The good news is, I get that. The bad news is, I get diced so incredibly hard in the first round that I pretty much lose before turn 2 starts. All six of my blast guns roll a 1 on shot counts. Every single lascannon and Entropy cannon fails to wound. My initial plan of “try and kill one Dorn, plus the Hellhound and a Leman Russ” ends up with 2 damage on a dorn and 0 dead tanks. I pick up the Hellhound in Overwatch but that’s about it. My lone chance here is that I am able to charge a Defiler into a hidden Sentinel round 1, then consolidate into a dorn, keeping them in his deployment zone and potentially protecting it the following turn.

Meanwhile, Andrew repays the dice favor in kind. His dorn in combat there? It rolls three 6s on its melta shots, then he rolls 14 damage with them after I fail all three saves. Another will casually pick up my other Defiler in Overwatch, while I lose a PBC to 11-damage melta shots at 18″ range. Everything that could go wrong in this first two turns did, and while this wasn’t a good matchup for me to start, this made it more of a nightmare.

We play a bit more then end up speedrunning the final turns. I’m able to scrape out some points after killing a Russ and a dorn on the bottom half of the table, holding Leontus and his losers at bay, but I end up losing 4-16 in this one. The only upside here – aside from playing Andrew, who’s always a treat – is that Andrew did the same thing he does when we play at my house, and that’s roll so hot on his shot counts and to hit rolls that I never question opting to go for -1 to saves instead of -1 WS/BS. When your opp just rolls all 5+ to hit, it takes the sting out of wondering if you made the right call.

Result: 4-16, Loss

Team Result: 37-63, Loss

This one felt more winnable for us, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Chris and Brendan win close games over Conor and Kyrstian, but David and Vinay lose their games. Credit to Vinay for hanging in there – something he ate was disagreeing with him and and was dying in that last game. In light of that, and the final round being more or less meaningless for us, we opt to drop from the event. Half the teams already have, and most of the guys from Dallas and San Antonio/Austin are on the road already. Even with only five rounds played we finish 12th, and I don’t think it would have been worth trying to tough out one more round. At least, not for me anyways. I had a great time but I’m always glad to be home for family dinner on Sunday.

On the whole I finished 4-1in my games with a 3-2 finish for the team and I’m very happy with that. We didn’t do a ton of prep but it’s a great group of guys and I had a great time playing with them. We’ll likely do another local event here or there, and maybe look at Champs’ cup next year in Dallas. Massive props to those guys for showing up and putting things together.

And on a similar note, the event itself was very good. I’m definitely interested in going back next year, and props to the organizers for putting it on. There were a couple of bumps, but nothing that can’t be ironed out, and the timing was solid.

Hobby Progress

Would you believe I’m taking it slow? After a whirlwind year of hobby progress I’m just doing some terrain now, trying to get my Killzone: Bheta-Decima set painted. I’m going with the box scheme, as it’s a good break from my other Mechanicus terrain and I want it to match the board, if I ever play BD Killteam.

Next Time: The End of the Road

That wraps up my recap this week. I had a blast but now the year’s winding down. Come back next week when I’ll talk about this year as a whole, what I accomplished, what it meant, and what my plans are for next year. Happy Holidays, and I’ll see you then.

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