Small Tournament, part 2: Electric Boogaloo
As I mentioned in the first article, I was involved in a short tournament at the local GW store, using a Combat Patrol format. Last time I talked about my army list and my first two battles, next I'll talk about the other three battles of the 4 game tournament. (Confused? Just keep reading, all will become clear.)

Game 3
Space Marines. 1 small squad, 1 sniper squad, 1 Assault squad. table is divided into quarters. Opponent quarters are worth +200pts each.

The way the game played:
He infiltrated the Scouts in cover just in front of my deployment zone and moved the Assault Squad behind cover. I tried to move around the opposite side of the cover, but that 18" range caught me and destroyed most of my Crisis suits. The last one ran back to the FW and combined to basically wipe out his tactical squad, then had a small chance to kill the assault squad, but didn't do it. Victory to the Space Marines (4 Assault Marines and 1 Tac Marine left, I believe.)

The speed and concentrated damage of the assault marines really caught me there. If I'd gotten in even one round of good shooting at them, the game would have gone very differently. I'm going to have to brush up on how to take on fast assault units with this army.

Game 4
Space Marines. 2 10-man squads, split into combat squads. Choose an enemy unit. That unit, if destroyed, is worth double victory points.

The way the game played:
He was confident in his ability to kill anything that he could see, and with that many Bolters and a heavy weapon or two, he was mostly correct. However, he didn't get much of a chance to see my army, so I picked most of his units apart at long range. He did get a sergeant with power weapon into base contact and killed 1 or 2 suits, but the rest swarmed him and kicked him until he stopped moving. Another win for the Greater Good.

Special Game 5!
It turns out that 3 of us managed to win 3/4 of our games. After having some discussion about what to do, it was decided to have a 3-way game for the final winner. The organizer was casting around for a scenario that would work for 3 players. I suggested Carpe Ranam, or Seize the Frog. It was a scenario that Mike and I came up with quite a while ago to solve the perennial problem of what to do when you have 3 players but don't want to play 2 against 1. You can find more details here, but the gist of it is that there is an objective in the center of the table. If any model moves, shoots or assaults within 6" of the objective, the objective will scatter 2d6 inches randomly. The objective cannot be held or damaged. The final winner is determined by the player with a scoring unit closest to the objective at the end of the game. Necrons (good-sized squad of Warriors plus 4 Destroyers) and Space Marines (Brandon's Dark Angels from game 3) Unfortunately, the only picture I remembered to take of this game was the setup, so here it is.

The way the game played:
Well, two of us (Necrons and Tau) had good mobility, but there wasn't a lot of board to work with and not much cover where we needed it, so all three armies sat and shot for most of the game. While I knew that the Destroyers were the most dangerous unit in the game (since they have such awesome mobility and that's usually the best way to stay close to the objective in these games) I also knew that both of the other armies had more raw firepower than I did. Therefore, I spent most of the game trying to do a little damage to both, but appear weak so that they wouldn't focus on me. I think the others had a similar idea, so we ended up sort of plinking at each other all game. I neutralized the Destroyers early on with a volley from my Crisis suits, and I knocked one or two of Brandon's SM squads under half strength so that they couldn't claim the objective. Aside from that, I tried to hide as much as possible, so that when they couldn't see me, they'd shoot at each other. Since there was very little movement in the game, the objective (a Grot) didn't jump much, but it did move kind of in my direction, and I ended up being able to carefully move so as not to disturb it, but kill off more of the enemy so that I had the closest scoring unit at the end!

This is the second in several related articles about this Combat Patrol tournament. Once it has been written, you can find the next in the series here. What will it encompass, since I've already written up battle briefs on the games? In the next, I'll talk about different army options that I considered taking and give an analysis of the tournament from the perspective of what kinds of armies were there. See you next week.

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