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Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results

 Post subject: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2017 11:11 am 
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Ok, thought i'd set up a separate thread for game results. Vexingly my phone was set to video rather than picture, so i don't have anything from the two games i played against Mark last night :{[] I'll see if i can flesh it out reasonably well though.

Game 1: Steel Legion vs Dark Eldar.

Deployment saw Steel Legion doing the usual, two objectives as close to the centre as possible, and Mark had one on each flank reasonably close to the centre as well. One of mine became a webway however, giving Mark a pretty good position to be assaulting from.

Steel Legion won the rolloff, and sent a full 6bp from manticores against a wych unit and vessel of pain. The wyches broke, and the vessel was fine, however had 2 BM's. I then retained with a warhound, doubled up and shot it (no macro) to break it. Mark responded with his cruiser, damaging the Regimental HQ, putting some BM's on rough riders, and breaking a shadowsword and killing a baneblade with the pinpoint. That cruiser is brutal. Guard then failed to activate a few times, while mark came forward sniping a few bits where he could. After some more failed activations from the guard, Mark then decided to try an assault on my flank, with the second warhound and mech infantry not having activated yet. Kabal goes in, Warhound manages 3 hits and kills to no damage back thanks to shields, and breaks the kabal. Mark also forgot to put a portal down. We then got down to some manouvering, with Mark marching his last Kabal onto an objective way out on the flank on my side, and as i was betting on making progress in the center i marched the mech infantry over to an objective and within 30cm of his two broken units. The turn ends with the warhound doubling and trying to break another kabal in a crossfire, and fails miserably.

At the end of the turn, i held 2 objectives in my half of 2 points, mark held 1 of mine and his blitz for a 1 point swing to him. Rallying saw the wyches back in the game, but the vessel still broken. Happily the shadowsword also rallied.

Turn 2, and mark went first. The unbroken vessel tried to have a go at the warhound and fluffed entirely, and then he tried to assault it again, this time with the kabal i'd shot the turn before. This went as well as the first try, with more silly luck on my side seeing him fend off his assailants again. He then wandered off and broke the wyches again like a boss. Mark snipes at the unactivated warhound (which then promptly fails to activate of course), but is a bit surprised when i moved the mech infantry over the portal to block him in, keeping his bts locked inside. I manage to break the other vessel of pain, and the footslogging infantry co with hydra and griffons finally decides to activate, and goes and sits in some ruins near objectives, while the rough riders give me a better screen between my bts and the portal, and near an objective. Mark did break the warhound, and he went for a rest in a wood.

At the end of turn 2 mark still held his blitz and the objective in my half for 3 points, and i had 2 in his half, plus 2 in my own for 6, putting it to a swing of 2 for me. The Vessels i think both rallied, although Mark had ran one miles off to the side. A few other bits did as well, but it was pretty slim pickings in the middle now. The mighty warhound of win also rallied, facing the blitz guard.

Turn 3, and mark went first again. The vessel redeemed itself by clearing off sufficient guard from the portal so that the archon and co could jump out and smash the bejesus out of them, and i responded by smashing the unit on his Blitz with a sustain from the warhound. After plinking at the hydra battery i failed to marshal activate and instead broke them, leaving a way in to air assault reasonably safely, and mark decided to try the infantry co in the middle in ruins. He then fluffed the dice and bounced hard, losing both the slavebringer and the wyches. Meanwhile i contested the objective the incubi now held with the shadowsword (who had to march to get there sadly), while the other warhound made a run at the blitz. My Regimental HQ stayed on blitz guard, and the manticores tried to hammer the incubi but failed to really have much of an impact, killing i think 1.

At the end of the turn, mark still held onto the one objective in my half, while i had 4 points, putting me on a swing of 4. Rallying didn't go spectacularly well, and we both had limited resources going into turn 4.

Mark went first, and managed to take out the roughriders with a vessel of pain, and then broke the shadowsword with his incubi (vessel supporting). The warhound on the blitz failed to activate but i did manage to rally and hold it, using the manticore to break the dregs going off to support it. The rest of the turn was pretty much just feeble sniping on both sides and trying to hold onto objectives, and it finished with Mark having 3 points for an objective in my half and one in his, while i had his blitz, an objective in his half, and 2 of my own for 8 points, pushing it up a further 5 points, putting the final result at a 9 point swing to me.

This was a really fun game, although i think if Mark had managed to be a bit luckier on his assaults the guard would have been in real trouble. The objective in the corner gave me real trouble, as i couldn't really spare a unit to go deal with it, and a Kabal still needs some reasonable attention to take down, especially when it's in cover. As such i decided to ignore it and try and focus on the centre. This went reasonably well, although i was hugely lucky with one of the warhounds, which just demolished all of Mark's plans. Steel legion did ironically have some issues holding on to some objectives as some of the smaller units just got vaporised, and with a unit only being able to contest or capture 1 objective each, the big mech units couldn't just gobble up all the objectives on their own, while the DE actually had a decent amount of board presence, even if a unit could evaporate when things went sideways for them.


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2017 11:40 am 
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Game 2 and Mark used the same force as last time, while i brought out a Marine army. Not necessarily the most optimised force, but i wanted to try something different with them, having 2 tacticals to see if they could be effective at objective grabbing (Hint - they weren't).

Anyway, had devs in drop pods with a dread, so decided to send my spaceship in on turn 2, so mark opted for turn 1. Mark played the objectives well i thought, i had by blitz off to the left, and he put both of his objectives on the other side of the board, while i did the classic marine spread, with one near my blitz being pretty close to the centre line, with the other in deep.

This left me with a bit of a quandry, as usual with marines i didn't really have enough ground presence to be everywhere, so opted for tactical bts with hunter and scouts on the blitz as protection (both getting on overwatch early turn 1), and the other tacticals with hunter, scouts, and landspeeders on the other flank. The game started pretty cagey, with me trying to cautiously advance on the flank with the tacticals and landspeeders under overwatch cover from the scouts. Didn't help though, as Mark pulled off a nice portal assault with a kabal and took out a chunk of the landspeeders. Before this though, running out of activations i made my usual mistake of overcomitting and went in with a t-hawk with assault marines (and chaplain) on a kabal on the objective near my blitz. I fluff the assault horrendously and the marines break and t-hawk dies. After the far side assault i try again, this time with terminators, cunningly thinking to block his mini-portal and shore up the flank. Terminators almost bounce, going to a second round of combat after rolling 1 normal and 1 macro hit, and losing a terminator to boot (it was bloody awful), but manage to wipe the unit the second round and get comfy contesting an objective. I had however forgotten about Mark's spaceship, and it battered the guys on the blitz, and then did a pinpoint on the grounded t-hawk, doing one point of damage, then critting it. Gah! Now the incubi came out, did a clipping assault on the tacticals and scraped a win from it, then ran off in their raiders behind cover.

So turn 1 was pretty much a disaster. Still, we had 2 points each, so no movement there. However, Mark had managed to clean up with assault marines and landspeeders, leaving me 4 activations down. As usual i'd massively over-committed turn 1, and now had an uphill fight on my hands. Rallying went reasonably well however.

Turn 2 and i went first again, and terminators broke another cabal, but lost another stand in the process. Mark came over and then broke them with a Vessel. I then went a bit defensive for a few activations, and Mark tried to take advantage on positions. I then dropped the spaceship barrage and devs, broke his blitz guard, and then sustained with the devs on his BTS, breaking it and killing the archon. The other vessel came over and killed the dread (but failed to do more than that), and then the scouts marched up to try and contest/take objectives. Mark then sneakily dropped the wyches in the slavebringer down near my second tactical squad (now sans hunter) and took flak from the t-bolts, but rather than engaging opted to land and shoot, ironically breaking them again after some great rolls from the slavebringer.

The turn ended with me holding i think 3 points and Mark 4, putting him ahead by 1. Mark's BTS didn't rally, but pretty much everything else did.

Turn 3 and after taking the initiative again i took down Mark's BTS with devs, followed by doubling scouts. Neither of us had a huge amount left at this point, so the turn devolved into small scrabbles for advantage, and Mark ended up deciding to pull his wyches back off the table in the slavebringer ready for a turn 4 air assault. He had managed to put another unit on that particular objective though, and It ended up 4 points to Mark and 5 to me thanks to the BTS kill, taking us to a 0-0 again.

Turn 4 and i made a play at the blitz, using devs and scouts to take out a vessel of pain and have scouts around the blitz. however, this didn't last that long as they then died to an air assault. It got pretty close, but in the end mark managed to hold onto both objectives in my half and two of his own for 6 points, while i managed a sad 1, putting him at the end of the game on a 5-0 win.

Things kinda fell apart turn 4, i think i may have been able to pull a win out if not for squandering my air assaults turn 1 but that's how it goes. Must. Stop. Overcommitting. :{[]

Mark played it well, and i think came out better from some good objective placement, which really hampered the marines. On hindsight i should have probably taken the points hit on turn 1 and tried to come back strong in 2. Them's the breaks though!


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Mon Jan 01, 2018 3:34 pm 
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I found the new scenario to be good fun, and definitely a change from the Norm. We had an interesting chat after the game about how the scenario changes things.

(1) Both my Dark Eldar and Richards Marines were 'sub-optimal' when compared to lists you might take in an Epic UK tourney, but gave us better options in this game.
I think some of the armies that people find a NPE(Armies that turn up turn 3, or armies who hide in a corner barraging you before rushing out to grab objectives late on) might struggle in this game.

(2) Objectives counting for points each turn forces both players to either actively attack or defend objectives early on.

(3) There's ways of winning outside the usual scenario. For example, consistently grabbing the two non-blitz objectives in your opponents half will net you a lot of points over multiple turns, in standard you'd only get the one point in turn 3.

(4) Points were still up for grabs in late stages of both games, despite the insane dice rolls at times. (See Rich's report) Seems the scenario is relatively crazy dice proof!

If the suggestion is to include this scenario as one of the games in a 3 game Epic tourney I think it'd make for a nice change of pace as well as mixing up the meta somewhat.

The only aspect of the scenario I'm not sure about is the below half strength units not being able to claim objectives. It's not that its a bad rule(It adds more tactical variation) but it really does change things a lot and I imagine people might not always remember the full effects in the heat of a game. i.e Shooting units to below half strength to stop them claiming objectives becomes a valid tactic, WE become a lot better as they never go below 1/2 strength, units who recover from breaking are usually only going to contest etc, etc.

Intrested to see how others find it.

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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 12:17 am 
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Considering that the lists that do well in this mission are likely diffrent o the lists that do well in the standard scenario do you think that adopting something like the Infinity tournament rule of taking 2 lists and being able to choose between them for any given game would work?

Or are the lists not that different in your opinion?


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 1:16 am 
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Scutarii wrote:
Considering that the lists that do well in this mission are likely diffrent o the lists that do well in the standard scenario do you think that adopting something like the Infinity tournament rule of taking 2 lists and being able to choose between them for any given game would work?

Or are the lists not that different in your opinion?


Wouldn't that ruin the point of having the alternate scenario? If you where alliwed to bring 2 different lists, then you could optimize for both scenarios.

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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 7:09 am 
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mordoten wrote:
Wouldn't that ruin the point of having the alternate scenario? If you where alliwed to bring 2 different lists, then you could optimize for both scenarios.


That depends on what the point of having the alternate scenario actually is. If it's to shake up what sort of list is good, then it achieves that for the games played during that scenario. If the goal is instead to try to force lists that are pretty good at both scenarios rather than really good at one of them, then yeah, that suggestion would defeat the point.

Alternatively, allowing 2 lists and swapping could lead to some players choosing to make, for example, one list that's good against most opponents and another that's good against a bad match-up (like titans or air assault/marines). Could do interesting things to a meta as people decide whether it's worth tailoring more to scenario or opposing army (or it might lead to a terrible mess).


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:06 am 
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The point of an alternate scenario is pretty much to discourage extreme lists, especially extreme lists that for instance play the 'one turn' game. As such, multiple lists would kinda defeat the objective.

Shaking things up a bit in terms of play is certainly a consideration as well though :)


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:59 am 
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Ultimately yeah, depends on what the goal of the second (or third or whatever we end up with) scenario is.

It really depends on how different you have to build your lists for this (or other) scenarios compared to the regular one. Likely not an issue for some armies (I can't imagine a speed freaks lists would look much different for example) but potentially the more 'limited' lists with fewer competitive builds could find themselves stuck between trying to play the normal scenario and the special one and potentially in a position where rather than being able to win all 3 games they're stuck building to either compete in 2 and lose 1 or compete in 1 and lose 2.

If that's an issue really depends on how far down the rabbit hole of optimising faction design the community has gotten for the tournament scenario.


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 10:39 am 
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It's starting to become an issue now i believe, the marine list is probably the most abusable, so it's a question of whether it gets nerfed (also affecting non-extreme lists) or whether the better approach would be to add in different scenarios and make the extreme builds much less viable, being awful at one of them. No-one particularly loves playing against Necrons either, and with them in particular the issue i think is less that it's broken or anything, and more that it can leave most of the army off board till a key turn, so it's almost impossible to really do anything to it till turn 3. Having to have a ground presence in the first few turns as well would imo solve this pretty effectively. The '1 turn' DE build likewise isn't much fun to play against, even if it's not quite as effective as the other two (although ironically excellent against both of them thanks to fighters with lance and air assaults).

Most lists would be pretty effective with both though i think, as long as the army has a reasonable ground presence it should do fine. Tbh as long as you can do a reasonable job of at least holiding onto 2 of your objectives and get into your opponents half of the board it's actually pretty hard for the opposition to run away with the game, especially early on, so even slower armies can compete reasonably well.


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 10:00 pm 
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Scutarii wrote:
potentially the more 'limited' lists with fewer competitive builds could find themselves stuck between trying to play the normal scenario and the special one and potentially in a position where rather than being able to win all 3 games they're stuck building to either compete in 2 and lose 1 or compete in 1 and lose 2.


It's a fair point - we wouldn't really want to hurt already limited lists. Potentially playtesting those lists with the scenario could show if it's particularly bad for them. Personally I think at a minimum lists should be able to attack, hold ground, and defend in Epic, and if not the list may be the problem rather than alternative scenarios.

Any you thinking in particular?

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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 1:12 pm 
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Blip's Black Legion versus my NetEA Death Guard

Due to time constraints and other stuff going on during club night we only managed two turns.

Turn 1 we both had our Blitz and all other objectives were contested, so 1pt each.

Turn 2 I managed to push Blip's forces off the three objectives in my half and contest the front two in his half, so the score at the 'end of the game' was 4-2 to me.



Notable tactics etc. included:

We both had a formation of Terminators, two Retinues, nine Lesser Daemons and a Spaceship!

My Contagions garrisoning off my Blitz (on my far right flank) and being surrounded by two Death Guard Chosen formations forming a huge anti-Deepstrike area with their Scout bubbles. One set of Chosen got clipped by Blip's orbital bombardment but it only killed a Chosen due to the Rhino making an INV save. A recurring theme...

Blip's Terminators teleported in on my back edge, as close as they could get to the Blitz (about 25cm). My Terminators came in beyond them, which accidentally turned out to be a good thing as the Contagions went to prep his Termies for an assault, broke them from Disrupt hits and there as nowhere for them to run outside 15cm so all that was left were two Obliterators.

Plague Zombies were invaluable for slowing down his advance on my left flank.



Thoughts:

Scout screens are extremely useful in this mission, even more so than usual.

Blitzes in the corners are a pain in the neck to get to.

Using the standard control/contest rules for objectives makes for a better and more balanced scenario than the one we ran at ExeTerminatus.

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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 2:04 pm 
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My thoughts on tactics. IJW deployed his blitz about 1/3 off one corner so i went diagonally opposite knowing speed would be his major weakness. Next 3 went on halfway line, my final i put on board edge nearest his blitz - thinking this would tie up at least 2 units deep in his half which i planned to orbital barrage, dreadclaw and then terminator - not really expecting to take either but to stop him scoring and tie up his already slow units deep in his half. As described above, looking the teleport and initiate rolls both turns didn’t help, and this didn’t work out well for me! :-)

I fully expected a similar terminator grab for my blitz so held my retinues back to give them a kicking. Good zombie placement and a refusal to die unfortunately kept them hemmed in too long for them to be able to contribute to the fight on the half way line. It would have been interesting to see how things would have gone in turn 3 but i suspect too little too late.

I was able to keep his rhino retinue similarly stalled with just-about effective aircraft snipping the apcs (3 inv saves?) but i couldn’t whittle down his central retinue to below half strength to start drip feeding me a points advantage.

Good and interesting game though, which provokes thought each turn. However i can see this being an issue for time limits in tournaments. Maybe familiarity will speed it up, but as you are trying to count VP advantage each activation from turn one it does seem to slow down the game (we found the same issue with the EE scenario).






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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:56 am 
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Have tried the alternate scenario twice now, both times E-UK World Eaters vs E-UK Squats, with the same players. Both times resulted in a massacre against the Squats, with no real way of seeing how the Squats could win. The second game was part of a tournament here in Sweden. The other games at the tournament saw much more balanced outcomes. Both lists can be seen at https://www.tournamentbuilder.org/

I like that the scenario discourages certain types of lists, and makes objectives count from turn 1, but it appears that it rewards lists that are already strong and has numbers and staying power a bit too much vs lists that doesn't.

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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Mon Jan 22, 2018 12:48 pm 
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First off, thanks for giving it a try :)

To be honest i've not heard of anyone considering the world eaters list particularly strong - certainly their tournament results over here have been pretty lacklustre, with a 25% win ratio. It's an interesting take on the list though, and i'd imagine it has pretty decent board control, even though the activation count is a little under what i'd be comfortable using. I think this is mostly an issue of comparative list design - i'd consider that a fairly unusual squat build, as it's not taking advantage of war engines like the land train and colossus (which are amazing against infantry), as well as the excellent berserker squads with warlords being great assault units, meaning the list looked to be more of a bunker style than one to assert control of the board with. You can do reasonably well with defensive lists on the scenario, but you do need to be able to hold your own objectives, or at the very least contest them to really be able to compete in it. If you get a chance, trying out something like this: http://epic-uk.co.uk/ukepicachampionshi ... 137&tid=99 against the World Eaters may yield better results.

I'm really surprised the Imperial Fists managed to smash E-UK knights in it though, i'd have thought that would have been a fairly close game! Magnus is pretty good though :)


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 Post subject: Re: Alternate Epic-uk Tournament Scenario - Game Results
PostPosted: Mon Jan 22, 2018 2:13 pm 
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RichardL wrote:
First off, thanks for giving it a try :)

To be honest i've not heard of anyone considering the world eaters list particularly strong - certainly their tournament results over here have been pretty lacklustre, with a 25% win ratio. It's an interesting take on the list though, and i'd imagine it has pretty decent board control, even though the activation count is a little under what i'd be comfortable using.


Because of the way the World Eaters list is structured, getting ground activations without buying too many core units* is a struggle, and I've opted to maximize ground presence, firepower and durability instead. Since World Eaters don't have Ground AA** I've simply let that part slide.

So I definitely don't consider World Eaters to be strong either, but I think the list I've made does well in the normal scenario, and does even better in the alternative scenario. For some lists that are borderline OP in the normal scenario, that's probably going to be even more of the case. Of course, that may be solved best by nerfing those lists, which might be needed anyway.

The Squats list my opponent took could probably be better (tbh he hasn't had much success with them) but I think the tendency to make lopsided matchups even more lopsided is real, and that 1/2 - 1/3 of games will end up 32-0 in either direction. We'll see if that hypothesis is supported when there's more data, or if it's simply that people will have to build their lists more with this scenario in mind.

*Berzerkers being the least effective cult marines even when you get 2 extra. They should have 15cm move & Infiltrate like the French have done.
**The W E Defilers ought to have AA, similar to the other cult lists.

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