1500 Points Versus GK

Timbo Wed May 25, 2011 3:10 am

I had a game today versus Mike's Grey Knights. It was my first time playing against GK so I was keen to see what they could do. Mike fielded 2 psybolter razorbacks, one min squad of guys just to hide and score, 10 terminators, a librarian, 6 purifiers, 2 dreads and a stormraven. We rolled seize ground with 5 objectives and Mike won the rolloff to place objectives. Mike ended up placing the last one lopsided so there were three on one side of the table and two on the other. He then won the rolloff for deployment (it was spearhead) and he chose the quarter with 2 objectives in it. Alright, off to a crappy start! I set up a vehicle wall and we began. My list is primarily a shooting one, and I combat squaded all my tacticals to give him as many targets as I could. He flat-outed his stormraven (with dreadnought, libby and 5 termies) towards the left side of my lines. His other 5 terminators were camped on the closer of his two objectives to me. I countered by putting my two dakka preds opposite and I planned on shooting the terminators off the objective. Turn 1 he blew a multi-melta off one of my dreads and stunned it. He also stunned another one, and immobilized my librarians rhino. Kinda bad, but not terrible. My turn I shot whatever I could at the stormraven, which amounted to 4 multi-meltas. Mike had 3+ cover (with shrouding) but because it moved flat out if I could just glance it I would have a 1/3 chance of killing it. My shooting was good, but he made all of his saves. I put 10 wounds on his terminators and he again made all of his saves.

Turn 2 Mike played aggressively and disembarked everything from the stormraven. He also moved his purifier's razorback right up the gut and popped smoke. His dreadnought assaulted one of my attack bike units, and his terminators multi-assaulted two of my rhinos which had moved 12". I didn't really mind this because this was all taking place a good 24" from my objective. Whatever he killed here, I would have lots of shooting coming back at him over the next couple of turns. His terminators did incredibly poorly in hand to hand and managed to only immobilize one rhino and weapon destroy and immobilize the other one. This really wasn't a huge deal either way because he could now easily kill both in my assault phase, but it did mean my marines would not have to disembark from my rhinos to shoot. My target priority was still the stormraven, because it was the biggest threat to my vehicles and attack bikes, and its mobility could contest objectives late in the game. So I shot it with 6 more melta weapons. Nothing. I shot the charging razorback also, and assaulted it with a dreadnought. Nothing. I put 9 more wounds on the termintors, killing one. This was basically the game on turn two. My entire army's shooting output had done one wound in two turns.

We played it out. I shot the stormraven a bit more, put another 15 or so wounds on the terminators with the predators. I was basically scrambling for a draw at this point, and even that was looking slim. At the end of the game (it went the full 7 turns) Mike had suffered more wounds through my vehicles exploding and perils of the warp tests (4) than I had done with my shooting (3). I did manage to kill a single dreadnought on turn 4 or something like that. Mike shot me off my last objective on turn 7, securing a 2-0 win. It was a very frustrating game for me because nothing I tried to do worked, but it wasn't a discouraging game because I know the results would be different if we played again. I'm not saying I would win, not at all. Mike is an excellent player, and was full value for the victory. So what did I learn? I perhaps could have concentrated my firepower a bit better. My attack bikes missed one turn of shooting which was a definite mistake on my part, but other than that my target priority was fine. The stormraven was the main threat and I couldn't kill it. His terminators made 35-40 armour saves. As Mike said afterwards, "It's a dice game." It was very cool to play against GK and I look forward to the challenge of fighting them again. Thanks for the game Mike!

System Commander Wed May 25, 2011 9:25 am

Ack, I feel for you. I think everyone has to have one of those games jsut every once in awhile to make you remember that yes, it is based on dice. It doesn't sound like your dice rolling was that bad at all, just that Mike's was super hot.

Now watch your next game.. the Stormraven will die from the first shot of the game, and termies will fail 4 of their first 5 saves..

smackman Wed May 25, 2011 1:27 pm

I guess Mike was just saving all his dice karma for that one game Tim, cuz this might be the first time I've ever heard Mike have good dice luck. lmfao.