The List This evening’s game saw my Imperial Guard, with a little AdMech salt, doing their best to make their way back to the (relative) safety of a hivesprawl while being pursued by the vicious hordes of Adam’s Tyranids. We move onto the second round of Colin’s Vigilus Defiant campaign. I’ve been really looking forward to this round as it has two particular missions that I find interesting – Convoy and this evening’s game, Running Battle. In Running Battle, the defender deploys everything in a stripe widthways across the middle of the battlefield. The attacker then deploys as much as they want in a stripe across the western (short) edge of the battlefield. They can bring on anything they want on a 4+ from reserves on either of the long edges of the battlefield. To simulate the running nature of the battle, at the start of each round after the first, everything on the board moves six inches towards the western edge; anything in the six inches closest to that edge is destroyed. To make this easier, I’d nipped round to B&Q and had a 6′ by 4′ board sawn into 6″ by 4′ strips so we could just take away the westernmost board, shuffle all the others down, and add the board back to eastern end. As defender, my aim was to keep as much of my army by power level alive as possible, while Adam had to destroy as much of mine as possible. 12″ by 4′, with a couple of bits of scenery thrown in, isn’t a huge amount of room to deploy 1500 points worth, as it turns out. I went into this battle with a relatively clear strategy. My intention was to deploy my infantry in a line to slow the oncoming horde while all my vehicles turned around and scarpered. I took Tallarn specifically so Guard vehicles could move and fire their heavy weapons without penalty. The AdMech vehicles could all move 8″ (though the Dunecrawlers can only advance an extra 1D3″), and the Techpriest had a handy-dandy teleporter in the form of the Solar Flare archaeotech relic available to Lucius. The tanks, both commanders, could have used the ‘Full Throttle!’ order to advance backwards instead of shooting. Adam advanced his Tyranids towards me on his first round and didn’t have much luck with his shooting; I think he only inflicted a couple of wounds on a Leman Russ. At that point, I should have either moved my screening infantry forward, or moved my armour back, or both. Instead, I was tempted by this swarm that had just moved into easy shooting range and I wanted to try to thin it out. That mistake should have, and almost did, cost me the match. I used the Manticore, Master of Ordnance, and Leman Russ Battle Tank to try to take out the Tyrannofex lurking on Adam’s back line. Despite excellent shooting, I couldn’t wound it for toffee. At the start of round 2, the armies were essentially the same as after round 1, except much closer together. Adam started bringing on his few reinforcements, and I was at risk of being outflanked. Well, out-tunnelled. The rest of the battle was largely me doing, all things considered, a pretty good job of holding back a close-combat Tyranid army. As I found out, the Dunecrawlers are pretty tough nuts to crack; if you’re finding that out in close combat, though, something’s gone horribly wrong. My Scions dropped in from their Valkyrie and took on a Trygon that had appeared out of the ground. The Trygon had a -1 to hit, meaning my plasma-wielding Command Squad was at real risk of blowing itself up and, indeed, three of the squad promptly did so, but not before turning the xeno into a smear on the ground. On turn three, I did what I should have done right at the start: I We ran out of time and, per the rules, I won a minor victory as I had lost more than a third but less than a half of my army. If we’d been able to keep going, I suspect Adam wouldn’t have had much difficulty in taking out the rest that he needed to. I felt slightly limited by the models I have available, but it’s still a fun list to play. When I have time and money, I have some ideas for where I want to take the army, but that’s for another day. I’d like to give this mission another go as defender, but stick to my tactics. I think I’ve made that mistake – changing plans on the fly – before, and it didn’t end well then, either. The mission is really interesting, though. All in all, it was a fun match and very much welcome after the day I’d had.
turned and ran made a tactical withdrawal. However, I had to make a load of stuff fall back, so I lost a round’s shooting. The Manticore was destroyed by a Hive Tyrant, and exploded, throwing shrapnel around the area. I used the ‘Fire on my Position’ stratagem for three costly command points when one of infantry squads fell to the oncoming brood, and proceeded not to do any damage. Those three points would have been really useful later, not least to change the protocol of my Kastelans. They did the best they could, stuck in Aegis, but, if I’d been able to put them into Conqueror, they would have finished of a squad of Hormagaunts and given me more space for manoeuvre.