Winds Of War

The Winds of War tournament went alright this weekend. With a few minor things that could have been improved on with regards the missions such as clarifications on how reserves worked and any special rules that were in play etc. For example the second mission only allowed one troops choice, then everything else in reserve. What wasn’t mentioned in the briefing was that everything else could come on from the second turn dawn of war style and that only one troops choice quite literally meant only one unit of troops. So that instead of 3 squads of guardsmen with missiles and 3 chimeras my firewarriors would have been facing 1 squad of guard. Aside from this though however I think a good time was had by all of us that went.

Game 1:

The Set-up for the first game was pitched battle set-up with a 12” square in the middle. Each player could set-up their forces to each side of the square without mixing their forces. Night fighting for first turn.

The First game that we played was against a pair of dark eldar players. From my memory they had 3 raiders with two units of warriors and wyches on them and 2 ravagers with so many pinning weapons they even brought a pile of their own pinning markers (which were some rather cool looking space marines with actual pins stuck in them).

They won the first turn and elected to go first. First turn was very brief for both armies, with them zipping across the field to surround our objective almost straight away. My fire warriors managed to roll a 3 for distance they could see. (I think given my average rolls for night fighting my tau are extremely short sighted). Ginges men mounted the Chimera and started heading towards the objective in the middle of the enemies deployment

Despite a strong start the dark eldar started to lose a lot of momentum as more reinforcements showed up. The most effective unit for us turned out to be the crisis suits with missile pods. Which took out 1 ravager and 2 raiders, not to mention numerous wyches. The other crisis suits took out the other ravager as they arrived but were then killed by the wyches.

All in all the game ended in a draw. With the dark eldar players having nothing left to claim our objective and our scoring units being a good two turns short of reaching theirs.

Unit of this match for me had to be the missile pod crisis suits. They were pretty much unstoppable and took a heavy toll on the dark eldar.

Game 2:

This was a very confusing mission set-up with facts left out of the briefing that could have been handy from the start. We played against a combined guard and space marine army. This game went pretty badly for us, with our reserves turning up piecemeal and everything seeming to go right for our opponents. We pretty much got our asses handed to us.

Game ended in a loss for us shockingly enough.

Game 3: Dawn of war. (or rather Yipee nothing for my firewarriors to shoot at in the first turn)

In this game we played a rather annoying sisters and guard team up. Who tried to claim that tanks could climb vertical faces to get to the second level of a four tier building. Also that I couldn’t shoot at him because I had to shoot through 2” of area terrain??? Anyway, this game took the longest by far. With lots of shooting at immolator spam causing no real damage. My battle suits once again proved their worth by taking out two immolators and a heavy weapons team, as well as some guard and sisters of battle.

Of special note has to go to the gun drone in one of the crisis squads, having charged a unit of sisters this gun drone decapitated two of them, flying saucers of doom indeed.

Game 4:

Another imperial guard and space marine pairing, this time wolves and a fast guard player with some very nice rough riders.

Game was kill points and table quarters. Finally a game where I can deploy my entire army and no night fighting or objective grabbing to worry about. They had a total of 8 kill points to our 10

Game started badly with the wolves player managing to seize the initiative. They took full advantage of this. With the rough riders wiping out one of the penal squads and my burst cannon crisis team fleeing the field after the drone and one of the suits was killed. Meaning that we had lost a considerable portion of our firepower and were 2 kill points down, instead of having the chance to thin out their numbers before they got close. This was going to be tough. The return fire was enough to send the rough riders packing and put a single wound on the attack bike. Not enough really. The space wolves second turn saw the destruction of our chimera by the attack bike charge forcing the embarked storm troopers to get out. The storm troopers returned fire on the bikes and thanks to some excellent rolling by ginge only two of their number remained alive. The third turn saw them charge and destroy one of my firewarrior squads. Only to be killed in return by my other squad (who put 9 wounds on them). The crisis suits finally took out one of the chimeras, and spent two turns thinning out the squad that hunkered down in the crater. The unit of the match though had to be the penal legion squad though that took out the grey hunter squad then went on to get the long fangs in an epic fight.

The game ended in an extremely well fought draw. With our opponents agreeing that it was probably the closest fought game throughout the tournament.

All told it was a fantastic day with a lot of extremely close games and some great opponents to play against. I’m quite happy with our overall position of 12 out of 24. Being as our lists were fluff based.

If I had to change my army list I would have done the following: Dropped the crisis suits with twin linked flamers and burst cannons and replaced them with another team with missile pods and black sun filters dropping some of the firewarriors to pay for it. The missile pod armed crisis suits were awesome and worth every taking a heavy toll on most opponents while surviving quite a bit in return. The Suits with the burst cannons on the other hand didn’t perform as well as expected. Their short range proving to be their undoing, with only getting a couple of shoots off during the course of the tournament.

Anyway, hopefully be doing escalation next.

Thanks to BFG for hosting the event I had a great time, also congratulations to my team mate for winning one of the best army awards for his aliens based army.