Bill's Raving Rant: BatRep 1000 aka Necron Beatdown

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

BatRep 1000 aka Necron Beatdown

So, the beatdown of the metal-men continued. After many misconceptions and hand-wringing, I developed a list for 1000 points of Necrons that I wanted to address 2 issues i saw.

1. No psykers means psyker beatdowns every turn.
2. Close combat is not our bag, but the space wolves kinda dig that sort of thing.

Sooooo, I chose a completely ineffective warlord (Anrakyr), loaded him on a CCB and added 3 wraiths with whip coils. That should do it. Well, all of you who know Necron lists, know that this was pure folly on my part. In an army that survives on synergy and using all your units to the fullest, I butchered my chances from the start with bad list making and even worse play. We rolled up the mission and it looked like fun, The scouring with Hammer and Anvil deployment.

I know what your thinking, a necron dream mission. I could use the long table to maneuver and stay away from CC with the nasty armored meat-sacks. So, what do you think I did not do? Exactly, I did not maneuver and I jumped into CC. What a thundering dunder-head. Deployment was second for me, so I even had the chance to observe, and I wasted that! What really makes me mad, is that I let my poor tactical decisions get under my skin and I proceeded to channelize, and even forgot to move my CCB with Anrakyr on it one turn!!! A complete and total poster child for how not to play a game of 40k. And all through this, Devin was happily butchering my units, psyking them out and generally pummeling me with the space wolf beat stick!

So, turn 1 saw my first mistake as I threw away my pre-game plan of maneuver and CC avoidance, opting instead to cross my warriors from the flank to the center to control a fat juicy 3 point objective marker, while my 5 immortals (who were Pyrricanican or whatever because of Anrakyr and had counter attack and furious charge) went after his lone wolf. yes, that's right, I ran headlong INTO CC. I hope I don't have to turn in my Necron ID card for that.

Well, that was the beginning of the end. Devin saw my mistake and just kept putting the pressure on. I was then forced to bring my Night Scythe and warrior reserves in, not where I wanted to, but where I had to. Even then, on turn 2, I forgot to deploy them off the night scythe onto the objective andwas forced to move them up even further. I have to admit, I was getting flustered and it wasn't getting any easier. I let my annoyance at myself force me to unthink my plan and commit major mistakes as the game went on.

Without going in to too much detail, the immortals in CC managed to fail their morale check, and then failed a regroup check.... yoiks, on a 10 leadership. I also had a group of warriors fail morale, but they had lost the CC by 4 so I expected that. They got swept, of course, with that old 2 initiative. The highlight had to be forgetting to move Anrakyr in the douche-canoe and watching as he got charged by all the ICs in the SW army.

When all was said and done, turn 7 was played and it was like this, the Doomsday Ark was keeping his last squad from being able to move towards an objective. My last unit of warriors ran from one 1 point objective to a 3 point objective, needing to roll a 5 to escape difficult terrain and a 5 to make it to the objective. It gave me the 1 point win, but I was so dramatically outplayed I felt the fool for being in that position.

I learned;

1. I got flustered early and departed my plan. That took me off my whole plan and I the played like ninny.

2. 5 immortals do not beat up 1 lone wolf... ever...

3. HQ in a CCB must move to stay effective and do all the douche-canoe things we know and love them for.

4. Using Anrakyr against an army with no vehicles is kinda stupid.

Pictures follow, and I will update with an army list tomorrow!

These two are a better view of the board setup