If you've been following along at home, you'll know that I've been participating in a campaign at my local GW store with my Tau army. In the first week, we rushed to the aid of an Inquisitor and rescued him from some Thousand Sons Chaos Marines. In the second week, a Kill Team of Orks stole the Inquisitor from my intrepid Tau. On the third week, we ambushed the main force of the Orks, attempting to prevent them from escaping with the Inquisitor, but we couldn't hold them back. Now the forces of disorder have the Inquisitor, and we must surround them and keep them from getting out alive.

Breakthrough
The Breakthrough scenario (from the 4th edition Breakthrough scenarios section, strangely enough!) is an interesting idea. The defender splits his force into two parts, placing one on each of the short board edges. (With the exception of Elites choices, which may be deployed after the Attacker places his units.) The Attacker puts all his forces in the middle of the board within a six inch zone that stretches across the width of the board. After the Defender places his Elite units, the Attacker takes the first turn. The attacker's objective is to get his army off the board. The Defender wins if he destroys half of the Attacker's units before they get off the board. Otherwise the Attacker wins. My notes are nonexistant on this battle report, so I'm just going off memory and pictures. This should give you the idea of the game, though. Since this is the case, I'm going to provide the pictures and write up a basic storyline of the battle, instead of breaking it up, turn-by-turn.

Story of the game
The Chaos Space Marines surge forward and their Vindicator nukes a FireWarrior team, killing 9 of 10 members. The Broadsides smash the Vindicator in return, killing a number of Chaos Marines in the resulting explosion. My far side forces lob a few long-range missiles into the Chaos Marines as they try to catch up to them. My near side forces fire into a CSM squad, tearing it down to 3 members. A squad of 3 Terminators teleports in close to my lines and Daemons are summoned very close as well. The Daemons manage to charge both my near FireWarrior team and one of my Crisis Teams. The Daemons made short work of my poor Tau. The final Crisis team on the near side maneuvered in front of the Daemons, knowing their lives were forfeit anyway. They targeted the Terminators, but didn't manage to do any damage and were overrun by the Daemons. At this point, the Daemons, the Terminators and the CSM squad of 3 ran off the board.

Scenario notes
I really felt, at the end of the game, that this scenario is stacked heavily in favor of assault armies. (I still think that way, but it's not as heavily stacked as I first thought.) Any scenario that requires movement toward the enemy favors an assault army. Most shooting armies don't do as well on the move (what with heavy weapons not being able to fire and Rapid Fire weapons only being able to shoot out to 12" on the move.) In addition, most assault armies spend a fair number of points on being able to get close to the enemy, but in this scenario they either get that movement for free (the other army has to move to them) or they at least get to combine their forte (closing with the enemy) with their objective (getting off the board edge.) This is compounded by the defender having to split forces. Even without requirements for how you must split the forces, if you put all or most of your forces on one side, the attacker will simply run off the other side. Thus, we now have all of the attacker's forces versus half of the defender's forces. Even without any bonus or penalty in either direction, it's an advantage on the side of the attacker. Now, allow the attacker the added benefit of being an assault army that gets to do what it is good at (charge) at the same time it is accomplishing it's objective (move off the board edge) and you see why I say this is such a biased scenario.

Armchair General's response
While this scenario is indeed biased toward the attacker and toward assault armies, the situation isn't as bleak as all that. The winning condition for the Defender is simply to destroy half of the Attacker's units. You don't have to take on the whole army, you just have to pick and choose what to kill. Using this battle as an example, there were a couple of easy unit kills: the Vindicator which died on the first turn, the Terminator squad of 3. (While Terminators are tough, it's not that hard to bring down 3 of them. Given that I only had to kill 4 units, and two of them were easy kills, that's not so bad as it looks. Now, the next two kills would be harder. I came very close to scoring a kill on one of the squads of Chaos Marines, dropping them down to three models, which should have been easy to finish off. The final kill should have been one of the squads of Lesser Daemons. With T4, 1W and a 5+ Invulnerable save, they aren't terribly hard to kill, either. Though I must point out that they appeared very close and were in combat immediately, but I did have an opportunity or two to shoot them. In addition, I need to remember that my Broadsides are not simply railgun mounts, but they also have Smart Missile Systems. On my last effective turn, I could only see the spikes and banner pole of the Terminator squad, so I chose to fire at something else. I should have attempted to hit them with the SMS. That could have added some damage, and made it more possible to do something to that squad. Alternately, those shots would have done well against the Lesser Daemons. Either way, it would have been more effective than shooting at anything else. While it would have still been an uphill battle, I might have been able to pull it off. Dropping two of those units would have kept him from getting enough off the board and given me at least one more turn of shooting to possibly kill something else.

If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know

Return to Warpstorm!