Good day to you all, and thank you for joining me once again.
Today, we lament the unfortunate loss suffered by my Imperial Guard at the hands of one of the club's top players and his despicable Tau. Yes, I lost my first League game. Am I bitter? No. A little disappointed maybe, especially as I got off to a flying start by taking out his Broadsides on turn one, but after that it became a bit of struggle.
I have to be honest with myself and admit that for me to win would have been a bit of an upset anyway. I'm out of practice, have only played three games in 6th edition 40K, and my opponent has only lost one of his League games so far. The important question I need to ask is 'what did I learn?'.
Well, I am pleased to say I learned plenty, about my army and about how I play the game.
I learned that I was right to target the Broadsides and Hammerhead early, as they were the biggest threat to my tanks. One thing I learned is that Tau skimmers with Disruption pods are very bloody hard to kill, what with having a 3+ cover save, and 2+ moving flat out! The Hammerhead ended the game on 1 hull point left at the end of turn 6. The fact is that long range high strength guns don't have a high enough rate of fire to take down such a target without a lot of luck. They need to be engaged close up, point blank in fact, and I just wasn't equipped to move that fast.
I learned about improving my depolyment, and connected to that, the placing of objectives. This is really something new to 6th edition and the placing of objectives is a game in itself. We had three objectives, and I got to place two of them, and I placed them both in my own half of the table.
The mistake I made was placing them too far apart, because of a fear of losing them both in one go if things went really badly in one area of the table. The other side of the coin was that I had to split my army to cover them both, which I managed for a few turns, but in the end I would have been much better off placing them closer together so my various units could cover each other and concentrate fire better.
I could moan and whine about bad dice, but I won't because dice tend to balance out. Having said that, some dice rolls are more important than others. Like the three failed cover saves that saw my Lascannon squad die and ended my chances of taking down the Hammerhead once and for all. Such is the nature of the beast I guess.
The thing that had the biggest impact was the diagonal deployment, which placed our lines at about 40" apart instead of 24-30", and effectively neutering my Demolisher and Lasguns, especially after it lost its Lascannon. That 72" range on the Railguns, combined with an armour 13 skimmer with a 3+ cover save is a real nightmare when you don't have anything that can move fast enough to engage it close up, especially when losing Tanks in the 'Big Guns Never Tire' mission gives away extra victory points.
One game down, four more to go. Now I just have to take what I learned and use it to forge a victory in the next game. I'm facing Marines next.
One last item for you which became a running joke. Both of us had an objective in our own deployment zones, held from turn one, which both turned out to be Sabotage! objectives. The game lasted six turns, and between us we rolled twenty four dice, and not once did we roll the '1' that would have seen one blow up...
Wish me luck, and thanks for reading...
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