Post Tournament Analysis

So after this Practice Tournament, did I learn anything.

Game 1

Having more long range fire-power than my opponent I took the slightly strange decision to not actually deploy on my own objective. Positioning allowed me to effectively target the whole board with both anti-infantry and anti-tank firepower anyway and forcing your opponent to either ignore your army and head towards the objective (being shot to shit all the way) or split their force both have there benefits. My army is pretty mobile and tends to worry about objectives later rather than straight away (people often seem to forget that it's what objectives your sitting on at the end of the game that count not the ones you were sitting on turns 1-4). My dice were doing there usual rolling 1's and 2's to hit thing which made it harder going than it should have, lol.

Both Ironclads and Venerables are difficult to kill with minimal Melta and 5 Dreadnoughts in 1500 points is unusual to say the least.

Other than the fact that I needed to throw my dice away 3 games ago I didn't learn anything from this match that I didn't already now.

Lessons learned.

1) Ironclads and Venerables are difficult to kill.

2) Deployment can win or lose you the game in 5th Ed. Think about it carefully.

3) My dice hate me.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Adam rarely uses super-competitive optimised armies. He does however play lots of games with them and gets the maximum effectiveness possible from them.

Game 2.

Having your opponent outflank with their whole army is irritating if your a gunline. If the army then turns up in it's entirety on turn 2 that's pretty annoying as well. My shooting was Orklike in it's rubbishness (again). That said, a couple of 1's rolled for Melta weapons saved me from an early disaster and I managed to drag myself back into the running. If my shooting had been anywhere near average I'm reasonably sure I would have won this one.

Lessons learned.

1) My dice continue to hate me.

Game 3

I've destroyed large chunks of Dave's guard army with us both playing almost identical lists to these. Today was not to be a repeat of that, unfortunately. Good deployment limited the damage somewhat but after the 15th 1 was rolled I'd pretty much lost interest.

Kill Points missions are not my friend at low points levels (I consider anything below 1750 to be low). I failed to hit with pretty much all of my anti-tank and then the vehicles that should have been dead killed my anti-tank in return. Being as we're stuck with Kill Points till GW realise that people are perfectly capable of adding up Victory Points I may have to consider reducing the Kill Point count of my army some how*.

*Yes GW you win I'll make my army less effective because your mission design team is a bunch of lazy useless fuckwits, I hope your happy with yourselves, this is why so many people leave this hobby and go and play something else.

Lessons learned.

1) 1500 Points is no longer the points level that 40K is balanced for, 2000 is probably more like it. Be nice if GW would just be honest about this and had designed missions accordingly.

2) Including as many Armour 13 vehicles as you have Armour 11 Transports increases the survivability of said transports exponentially.

3) Decent deployment is essential.

Lessons learned about my army.

1) Marine Mech and Space Wolves Mech need to be built differently. Copy/Paste/Change points values makes you lose out on some of the benefits of the new army without necessarily gaining you anything.

All in all it was a lot of fun. A few other points spring to mind based on the tournament aspects of the day.

1) My crappy dice rolls are not my opponents fault so I try not to take it too seriously.

2) 3 Games isn't enough really for a tournament. Next time I'll try to fit in 4. The first 3 will follow the same format as today with a 4th Game being a different mission/deployment combo pitting the top 2 players against each other and also the bottom 2.

3) 'Friendly' games with competitive opponents are the best way to improve your game. Never be afraid to try out something new, better that it fails in good company rather than while playing against some twat in a tournament.

4) Don't change your list straight away unless the weakness you've discovered is glaring. Play it as is for at least 3 games vs. different armies before you decide that you don't need Meltaguns because they're not much use against the foot horde Ork army you played against twice ;-).

That turned into a bit of a rant at times but I'm too tired to tidy it up so I'm going to post it as is...