Thanks for posting the link to this report. I love Second Edition, so I really tried to watch this entire video, but the music was very offputting, so I had to mute the video. Narrated battle reports are much better and more immersive in my opinion, so if you want to offer a more dynamic experience, I would recommend adopting that style of presentation. The writing captions are really great for inclusivity though
. Please do note that 'victory points' is a plural not a possessive, so the abbreviation is VPs (not VP's). There are also some naming errors in the captions (e.g. Eldar do not have platoons).Moving on to the actual game, the deployment confused me somewhat. I played a lot of Second Edition for the best part of fifteen years all told and I don't recall deployment being a unit-by-unit approach. Was this a house rule that you implemented?
The Eldar player was very generous to agree to that points handicap. I was an Eldar player for all of those years and still would be. I wouldn't have agree to that
! Eldar are very powerful, but they are also very fragile, so they need all the models they can get. I am also very interested in the decision to field the Guardian Warhost in lieu of the Defender Guardian Warhost, as the latter is more flexible, but I guess that it was just to get additional Falcon grav tanks into the army. Vibrocannons never did anything for me, so I stopped taking them, but they clearly worked in this game !The Space Marine army was quite strange. Not to include a Devastator company was, in my view, a mistake and the Land Raider company is rather brittle and not especially strong against the Eldar. Were the decisions here determined by the availability of models by any chance? My regular opponent was always a Space Marine player and he always run a Devastator company with two Battle Companies as his core force. The army that the Eldar faced in this video would not have worried me much and I would have felt confident of winning.
The game itself is interesting, if difficult to follow at times because of the absence of narrative presentation. I really like the board set up, and both players are making pretty effective use of their armies, although there are a few strange decisions. Eldar titans, for example, should almost never use first fire orders, as it makes them to vulnerable (as the Phantom titan discovered), and they should never be left unsupported (this enabled the Land Raiders to take it out). Meanwhile, the decision to put Tactical Marines rather than Assault Marines inside the Thunderhawk Gunships was truly bizarre, as the latter deliver far more punch when delivered on foot. Tactical Marines are defensive/support troops not Gunship deployed shock troops.
The Eldar lost that game due to not concentrating their force and due to using certain units strangely. The right flank was the prime flank for attacking, as there was significantly more cover and the Aspect Warriors were very capable of clearing Marines out of those buildings and wooded areas. The Phantom Titan (given it was geared for close range combat) needed to spearhead that attack and not be left out on a limb on the left flank, while the Wave Serpents were wasted just going around in a circle on the hill and would have been far more effective pushing the Devastators off objective one and delivering their Aspect Warrior cargo there. Finally, deploying Dark Reapers and Lascanoons on a hill may have looked attractive from the point of view of line of sight and field of fire, but the total lack of cover was costly. I really enjoyed the Warlock and Dark Reapers combination to take out the Reaver Titan though.
Thanks for the report, I hope that you will make some more. Better luck to the Eldar next time. Congratulations to the Marine player for taking advantage of those Eldar errors and taking a well deserved victory.