Old Stuff Day : 'Alpha Strikes' or how to suck all the fun out of 40K

So I've decided to support 'Old Stuff Day' by.....well.....posting something old.....

I'm not a big fan of assault, Haven't been since I shelved my Chaos Space Marines (due to their lack of competitiveness being compounded by 5th Edition, Codex Creep and the fact that apparently everybody else writes Marines better than Gav Thorpe).

I briefly became interested in winning by punching stuff again with my Cavalry Daemons list. This one to be exact. Unfortunately that list is inherently flawed because Daemons have several almost insurmountable inbuilt problems.

1) Your effectively fighting with half an army for your first turn.

2) There's a 33% chance it will be the wrong fucking half.

3) Any army who can effect your reserves makes this even worse.

4) Your best ranged weapon is only S8.

5) If your opponent has Land Raiders and remembers to move them, your only going to destroy one with a lot of luck, 2 with divine intervention and 3...well...never, if we're being honest.

As anybody who knows me will tell you I have a somewhat rocky relationship with the Dice Gods. They have an uncanny habit of deciding that a 1 to hit is all I'm going to have for 5 turns but that all my opponents vehicle damage rolls should be 5's or 6's, lol. Then occasionally they'll give me all my luck at once and I'll end up utterly destroying someone in the most unimportant game I play that month...but I digress...

So most of my Marine armies win by shooting stuff so I'm as guilty as anybody of what I'm about to whine about. But It's both the games I've lost hideously and won in the same 'only one of us is having fun' fashion that's decided the theme of this post.

Some examples so it looks like I thought about this a bit...

Imperial Guard.

If a well constructed IG army goes first your going to be in the shit quite quickly. They have ranged firepower a plenty that can be easily improved through orders, Valks and Vendettas that can deliver 3 Meltagun troops units into your lap first turn and the ability to both improve their own reserve rolls and fuck up yours. Going first or 2nd they have many ways to annoy.

Blood Angels.

5th ed. made vehicles a lot tougher, BA rhino variants can move extremely quickly and with the addition of smoke launchers cover save take a lot of firepower to destroy. Combine this with the ease with which you can give 'Feel no Pain' and 'Furious Charge' to anything you damn well please and you have an army that can do the old fashioned 'Rhino Rush' with remarkable efficiency. Also with 'Descent of Angels' they don't even need the Rhinos to be in your face on turn 2 with no way to counter them at all without IG style 'Bubblewrap' units.

Tau.

Tau can only do gunlines so I might be unfair including them in this list, after all if a Tau player is looking at the assault stats of a non-Kroot unit he''s probably about to lose.

Space Wolves

You can easily cram 9 Las/Plas Razorbacks and support units into a SW list which again does a lot of damage from your first turn salvo...

I could go on and on with similar examples but the basic point is this...

90% of competitive lists will pwn you if they go first and are in fact designed to do so.

So how do we counter this trend for boring games where you might as well just shake hands after the first turn 'roll-off' and go and have a beer or 3 instead of playing a game which will just make one of you frustrated and the other one feeling the need to apologise.

Lets look at the potential solutions then.

1) If you can't beat 'em join 'em - Build your own army that works on the same principles and hope you go first instead. At least you'll be the one having fun 50% of the time.

2) Bubble-wrap - Protect your own important units with expendable crap. Sadly this only works against lists that 'Alpha strike' you up close and requires you to actually have bubble-wrap units which unfortunately applies only to Tau (Kroot), Imperial Guard (Infantry Platoons) and possibly Tyranids (Gaunts and the like).

3) Reserves - If your not there he can't hit you, right. Again this plan also has it's problems, If your against guard they can effect your reserve rolls for the cost of a whole 30 points. Blood Angels armies can get to you anyway through sheer speed of movement and turning up piecemeal against an army designed to cripple entire armies is never going to end well.

4) 'Castling', 'Turtling' or whatever you call it in your area - Put your highest armour at the front, hide the rest of your army behind and wait and see what survives. Guard can deal with this by dropping big fuck-off blast templates into your lap as they can't really miss if your in a big clump and Blood Angels have the 'Blood Lance' psychic power.

And of course there's the times when you thought you where going to get to go first and your opponent seizes the initiative...

So the question I'm asking is this,

Is a 40K game between 2 competitive lists fun any-more if either or both are of the 'Alpha Strike' variety *?

* I mean fun for both of you. Obviously if your opponent is the kind of cock who microwaves his dice, brings his fan-club to games and rolls his dice without actually telling you what the roll is for till after he's seen the result then 'fun' probably wasn't going to be happening anyway, lol.

Editors note : It would be nice if anybody who comments could avoid using the phrase 'Leafblower'. BoLS did not invent the 'Alpha Strike' list or IG fucking gunlines despite what they'd like you to believe and if your going to give your army a nickname try and make it a cool one for fucks sake.

Tyranid FAQ - how it should have been done

Pay attention GW this is how you should have written the Tyranid FAQ

Blogger Fail

Apparently there is a problem with blogger that is causing comments to disappear as soon as they're posted.

If anybody wants to contact me then they can e-mail me instead. Hopefully this will be sorted out as soon as possible.

Edit - Currently 147 (and counting) people are complaining about this problem on Bloggers forums. Not all of them are being as reasonable about it as me either...

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/label?lid=0271191b4249689a&hl=en

Edit - Well there seems to be a slight improvement. Some earlier comments have finally appeared. However more recent comments seem to still be lost in the warp somewhere...

That Fucking Guy.

We've all had games against 'That Fucking Guy' (which will be abbreviated to TFG from now on).

Now I'm not necessarily talking about competitive gamers who build their armies to win, carefully optimise units and know mathematically which unit should beat what as many of my regular opponents enjoy playing like that and are generally not arseholes...well, not all the time anyway ;-).

So, what puts someone into the TFG category?

The following list is by no means conclusive nor in any particular order but it does cover all the things that annoy me most.

1) Over Moving or the Zig-Zag.

a) Blatant Over-Moving - Usually seen waving the tape over the vague area the model is in and then moving it about 8" and hoping no-one notices or is too polite to say anything.

b) The Front to Back - Measuring from one point of the hull or base at the start of your move and a different one at the end. Most commonly seen measuring from the front of a models base and then plonking the model down in front of the 6" mark thereby gaining yourself an Inch of movement.

c) The Zig-Zag - Moving the Model 6" then changing your mind, moving the model back to about a mile away from where it started and the measuring your 6" from there.

Suggestions

At the beginning of the game this is fairly easy to counter. Most armies by virtue of there strengths or weaknesses start deployed as close as possible to you or as far away as possible, the measurements for deployment zones are precisely defined so it should be easy to tell if some-things reached you before it should have. Later on it gets trickier but by then you should be reasonably sure if your opponent is prone to this sort of activity so you should get into the habit of noticing where he measures from and what terrain features he was near. Never be afraid to say something if there's an issue as most dick-heads of this nature rely on your politeness to get away with it.

2) Line of Sight/Cover Saves.

a) The imaginary Cover Save - I'm all for giving my opponent the benefit of the doubt (That's probably a lie but it undermines my argument somewhat if I admit otherwise, lol). But I've had some really tedious games where I've spent more time debating whether a unit gets cover or not than I've spent playing. Most of these are of the 'can you see me through that twig variety'.

Suggestions

Read the rulebook. The definitions for Line of Sight and Cover Saves are clearly defined with nice clear diagrams (for a change). But as a brief rule of thumb line of sight for infantry comes from their eyes, Line of sight for vehicles comes from the guns and all guns have clearly defined arcs of fire (again in the rulebook). That said if after all that it is still debatable then let them have the Cover Save or agree to go with the decision of an independent observer and ask someone else to decide. Roll-offs should be a last resort in my opinion.

3) Rules 'Interpreting'

a) Ultimate rules of Doom!!! - If the rule your opponent just told you about seems to good to be true (for him) then it probably is.

b) Bullying - Some Prick saying the same rule in a more aggressive tone doesn't make it any more valid. If it sounds like a load of crap then ask to check.

c) 'Accidental' forgetfulness - 'Oh I forgot I couldn't do that/had to do that'

Suggestions

This ones easy to solve. Always make sure that you and your opponent have the Codices for your particular armies, any FAQ's for your armies (especially if rules have FAQ's or erratas that you rely on for your army), a legible army list and at least one main rule book between you. Easy ;-)

4) WYSIWYG

a) Proxy or 'That coke can is a Drop Pod' - No it fucking isn't, get an actual Drop Pod or fuck off.

b) WYSIWYG - If your model has an impressive Chainsword and you want it to 'Count-As' a Power Sword then that's fine (if a bit lame). Your Assault Cannon is however an Assault Cannon not a Heavy 'bloody' Flamer or a Cyclone Missile Launcher. I don't care if you've paid the points for it or not, anything that isn't WYSIWYG needs to be explained to your opponent before the game starts and a good reason would be nice as well ;-).

Suggestions

1 minute of explaining before the game is better than 20 minutes of arguing in the middle of the game. I'm all for cool conversions, but there should still be some basis for why weapon 'A' is actually a weapon 'B'. Also it should be consistent across your army, If that Tau Burst Cannon is an Assault Cannon then they all should be or none of them should be.

5) Transportation.

a) The Inter Transport Teleportation system - Amazing, the weapon team you need to destroy my unit is in that transport is it?, funny it started of in that one over there!

Suggestions

Always ask what's in transport vehicles, I always put characters on the top of transports they're in and if equivalent units have different wargear I put the 'special' weapon guys on top as well, It's quite reasonable to insist your opponent does the same.

6) Slow Play

a) Thinking about it - If your army consists of 100+ Orks, Guardsmen or Gaunts then you should be thinking about where to move while your opponent is having there turn not for 25 minutes afterwards.

b) You can't have a go - 'Oh look I've just beat you by one objective and we've no time for your go.

Suggestions

If there is any debate about whether you can both get a turn in then stop the game there and then. If your opponent insists (or you yourself would like to risk it), then make a note of Kill Points and Objectives at that point. If you don't both get a turn then use the Score from then.

If anybody has anything to add, or amusing stories about TFG's they've screwed over (or injured in some way) please feel free to comment.

'Alpha Strikes' or how to suck all the fun out of 40K

I'm not a big fan of assault, Haven't been since I shelved my Chaos Space Marines (due to their lack of competitiveness being compounded by 5th Edition, Codex Creep and the fact that apparently everybody else writes Marines better than Gav Thorpe).

I briefly became interested in winning by punching stuff again with my Cavalry Daemons list. This one to be exact. Unfortunately that list is inherently flawed because Daemons have several almost insurmountable inbuilt problems.

1) Your effectively fighting with half an army for your first turn.

2) There's a 33% chance it will be the wrong fucking half.

3) Any army who can effect your reserves makes this even worse.

4) Your best ranged weapon is only S8.

5) If your opponent has Land Raiders and remembers to move them, your only going to destroy one with a lot of luck, 2 with divine intervention and 3...well...never, if we're being honest.

As anybody who knows me will tell you I have a somewhat rocky relationship with the Dice Gods. They have an uncanny habit of deciding that a 1 to hit is all I'm going to have for 5 turns but that all my opponents vehicle damage rolls should be 5's or 6's, lol. Then occasionally they'll give me all my luck at once and I'll end up utterly destroying someone in the most unimportant game I play that month...but I digress...

So most of my Marine armies win by shooting stuff so I'm as guilty as anybody of what I'm about to whine about. But It's both the games I've lost hideously and won in the same 'only one of us is having fun' fashion that's decided the theme of this post.

Some examples so it looks like I thought about this a bit...

Imperial Guard.

If a well constructed IG army goes first your going to be in the shit quite quickly. They have ranged firepower a plenty that can be easily improved through orders, Valks and Vendettas that can deliver 3 Meltagun troops units into your lap first turn and the ability to both improve their own reserve rolls and fuck up yours. Going first or 2nd they have many ways to annoy.

Blood Angels.

5th ed. made vehicles a lot tougher, BA rhino variants can move extremely quickly and with the addition of smoke launchers cover save take a lot of firepower to destroy. Combine this with the ease with which you can give 'Feel no Pain' and 'Furious Charge' to anything you damn well please and you have an army that can do the old fashioned 'Rhino Rush' with remarkable efficiency. Also with 'Descent of Angels' they don't even need the Rhinos to be in your face on turn 2 with no way to counter them at all without IG style 'Bubblewrap' units.

Tau.

Tau can only do gunlines so I might be unfair including them in this list, after all if a Tau player is looking at the assault stats of a non-Kroot unit he''s probably about to lose.

Space Wolves

You can easily cram 9 Las/Plas Razorbacks and support units into a SW list which again does a lot of damage from your first turn salvo...

I could go on and on with similar examples but the basic point is this...

90% of competitive lists will pwn you if they go first and are in fact designed to do so.

So how do we counter this trend for boring games where you might as well just shake hands after the first turn 'roll-off' and go and have a beer or 3 instead of playing a game which will just make one of you frustrated and the other one feeling the need to apologise.

Lets look at the potential solutions then.

1) If you can't beat 'em join 'em - Build your own army that works on the same principles and hope you go first instead. At least you'll be the one having fun 50% of the time.

2) Bubble-wrap - Protect your own important units with expendable crap. Sadly this only works against lists that 'Alpha strike' you up close and requires you to actually have bubble-wrap units which unfortunately applies only to Tau (Kroot), Imperial Guard (Infantry Platoons) and possibly Tyranids (Gaunts and the like).

3) Reserves - If your not there he can't hit you, right. Again this plan also has it's problems, If your against guard they can effect your reserve rolls for the cost of a whole 30 points. Blood Angels armies can get to you anyway through sheer speed of movement and turning up piecemeal against an army designed to cripple entire armies is never going to end well.

4) 'Castling', 'Turtling' or whatever you call it in your area - Put your highest armour at the front, hide the rest of your army behind and wait and see what survives. Guard can deal with this by dropping big fuck-off blast templates into your lap as they can't really miss if your in a big clump and Blood Angels have the 'Blood Lance' psychic power.

And of course there's the times when you thought you where going to get to go first and your opponent seizes the initiative...

So the question I'm asking is this,

Is a 40K game between 2 competitive lists fun any-more if either or both are of the 'Alpha Strike' variety *?

* I mean fun for both of you. Obviously if your opponent is the kind of cock who microwaves his dice, brings his fan-club to games and rolls his dice without actually telling you what the roll is for till after he's seen the result then 'fun' probably wasn't going to be happening anyway, lol.

Editors note : It would be nice if anybody who comments could avoid using the phrase 'Leafblower'. BoLS did not invent the 'Alpha Strike' list or IG fucking gunlines despite what they'd like you to believe and if your going to give your army a nickname try and make it a cool one for fucks sake.

Games Workshop = Fail

Apparently today should be the day that my FLGS is going to demonstrate the wonders of 8th Ed. Warhammer Fantasy. So I carefully arrange to take my girlfriend who is a fan of said game to our local Games Workshop on that day as she gets little opportunity to play normally.

Due to Games Workshops inspired 'We only need one person to run the store because that costs us less money' policy, my FLGS spends more time shut than fucking open these days so I carefully checked the opening times for the coming week. Thursday 17th June 12-8 is apparently the only weekday It's open but that's fine because that's today, right?

She gets her army together, I sort out all the domestic crap and then off we go in two separate vehicles so I can pick up my daughter from school later so as to not interrupt the rare chance my partner has to actually get involved in her part of the hobby. I have also carefully arranged both our schedules so there are no interruptions.

We arrive at 12:00....

And at 1:00 we both get back in our respective vehicles and head back home after waiting for a fucking hour for someone to turn up.

Perhaps I should have checked in advance? Of course the problem with that was Thursday was the first time the shop was open since Sunday when the information was relayed to me.

Apparently the local independent stockist for Warmachine is open 7 days a week which I presume makes buying stuff, looking at stuff and talking to people a lot Fucking easier....

Games Workshop manages to fail at the 'Customer Service' aspect of their business yet again but succeeds spectacularly at the fucking up my day part of their business plan...

I just want something I can never have.

As well as being a line from a Nine Inch Nails track which makes it automatically awesome the title of this post pretty much sums up how I feel at the moment.

Had two (well 2 and a half really) games of 40K today Vs. 2 very good friends of mine in an effort to finally tweak a list for a tournament on Saturday.

I learnt several very important things

1) Bad dice happen and good and bad luck are rarely evenly spread during any game I play recently :-(

2) I'm sick to fucking death of Marines.

Point 1 I was aware of anyway as my ability to roll 1's has become legendary, Point 2 came as more of a surprise.

A brief history.

I started off playing Chaos which I enjoyed from a 'Fluff' point of view but rapidly got bored of from a playing point of view.

Fortunately The hobby is very forgiving of 'Count As' so my Chaos 'Renegade' Marines (who apparently forgot to take any decent equipment with them to the Eye of Terror, but remembered to pack the Reaper Autocannons for some reason) easily became Renegade Marines who remembered to take cool stuff with them when they turned.

Then the Space Wolf codex turned up and they were pretty close to Chaos anyway so I switched Codex again (not permanently as sometimes I use lists that Space Wolves suck at).

Then a bit later Blood Angels got redone and they were ideal for my 3rd Company so I had a play around with them as well.

Now

The Chaos Codex is what I'd love to play but unfortunately my competitive nature gets in the way of using that particular book (in the same way that I wouldn't saw off one leg, poke myself in the eye with a pointy stick and then have both my arms broken before I picked a fight with someone).

None of the other books quite do the job so I need to do something completely different. Unfortunately I need to do this completely different thing without spending any money as I'm currently an unemployed bum, lol.

So as detailed in this post I have dug out the pile of guardsmen (mostly still on sprues) that I had abandoned in a box and because I can't afford to buy anything to add to them I'll have to do a foot list. I also hate painting so that's going to open a whole new can of worms. It's also going to suck and fall apart Vs. 90% of the competitive builds about.

So there's the problem. I want an army that I can do with the stuff I have (99% of which is in Power Armour or Marine Vehicles), that Isn't like Marines because I'm fucking sick of them but doesn't involve painting over 150 Guardsmen...

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...

One of those days, I suppose.

No matter how hard I look for them there's always at least 3 models that I fail to notice mould lines on till after I've undercoated the fuckers!!!

And I managed to stab myself in the thumb as well...

It's also raining...

Today's Tournament.

Went to a doubles tournament today expecting to have an enjoyable time as usual at such things. It didn't go quite according to plan (not to say that there weren't fun aspects to the day just that they were in spite of the event rather than because of the event).

Rather than whine about particular people I have come up with a few pointers for the smooth running of this particular event in the future ;-)

For organisers

1) Sell the event correctly - I don't mind going to half-arsed tournaments where no-one can be bothered to allocate missions are note down Victory Points as long as that's what I'm expecting. If however I'm paying £20 for a tournament at Warhammer World in Nottingham I expect certain standards.

2) Something to note down who won, lost etc. to hand in would have been useful.

3) 3 game 'tournaments' need Victory Points to separate placings. Having 4 joint 2nd places is just lazy.

4) Missions need to be allocated by organisers rather than rolled for by players. There were 3 games, there are 3 deployment types and 3 missions, now that doesn't seem difficult to decide in advance does it?

5) Army Lists need to be checked by an independent party. I could have fielded basically anything and got away with it.

For attendees

1) There's no excuse for being half an hour late for a coach, be on time or stay the fuck at home.

2) Read the 5th edition rulebook - A basic knowledge of the core rules is absolutely essential to avoid unnecessary pissing about.

3) 5th Edition is all about true line of sight, accept it or play something else.

4) Don't be a dick - Querying every move and shot is annoying.

5) Don't be a dick - Dragging out your turn to prevent another one being played for your own advantage is the pinnacle of 'That Fucking Guy' activities.

6) Remember it's just a game.

Artwork 'Fail'

I don't really play WHFB so a new rulebook wouldn't normally raise a comment but this cover for some reason made me think of an 80's Death Metal album.

And there was me thinking it couldn't get any worse after the Blood Angels cover with the cross-eyed Priest with the melting face.