Victory Pointless

Uzblitz beat his chest, partly as an animalistic display of dominance but mainly because the new heart hadn’t quite settled in just yet and occasionally needed some encouragement to keep going.

“You call dat a motah?” He scoffed, gesturing towards the flashy purple trukk owned by Kaptin ‘Show Time’ Dimz.  “I can see why youz painted it purple – I wouldn’t want nobody to see me in it, neither.” He slapped the side of his own vehicle.  “Now dis is a trukk!  None uv yer fancy shiny bitz, just good solid workorkship!”

A part of the trukk fell off.

A proper ruckus was about to kick off any second, when a shout came up from some of the forward sentries “Gitz comin’!  Humies an’ Burd Boyz!”

After a short period of meaningful glaring, the two Ork warbosses nodded at one another.  Fighting other Orks was good, but they could do that any time.  Fighting non-Orks was an opportunity not to be missed.

This was a 1000-points-each 2v2 crusade game pitting our two Ork armies against a guard infantry army allied with an all-Kroot Tau army.  For the uninitiated, that’s four ‘horde’ armies.  There was a combined total of 310 models on the field.

We were playing the Pariah Nexus ‘Gheists in the Static’ mission.  Oh no.

The guard/kroot were the attackers and therefore had first turn, so we deployed our Orks mostly in cover so we couldn’t be shot off the board turn 1, as has been known to happen in this mission.

Still, there were some casualties.  One of our trukks (Kaptin Dimz’ nice purple one, fortunately) got taken out, while on the other flank a cavalry charge into our deployment zone wiped a mob of shoota boyz and also tagged my own Trukk and Mek Gun.  My infiltrating gretchin screens were heavily depleted as were my Kommandos.

We Waaagh’d.  Uzblitz, his Nobs and the Flash Gitz jumped out of the truck and immediately murdered the cavalry (but, annoyingly, they came back in reserves).  On the other flank the big mob of boyz ran up and charged kroot carnivore and kasrkin squads, killing the kroot but doing minimal damage to the kasrkin.

The Shiny Klawz mostly went up the middle, a small unit of Meganobz charging bravely into a big mass of kroot and guardsmen.

On the next turn the Kasrkin pulled back and they and other Kroot units gunned down my poor Ork Boyz, leaving only the Weirdboy.  He went after a Krootox rider but lacking the boost of his accompanying boyz only succeeded in bringing it down to half health.

In the mid-board some Bullgryns charged into and destroyed the Shiny Klawz’ other trukk, becoming embroiled in combat with Kaptin Dimz, Nobz and Flash Gitz.  On the right flank I failed my charge rolls with everything but the lone remaining Kommando.

At this point we’d been playing for five hours and were still only at the end of turn 2, so we decided to call it a draw.

Result: Draw, 25-25

Post-Mortem

We reasoned this out to a draw on the basis that the scores were currently tied and – as the defenders – we could get as many VP just by holding our home objective as our opponents could by holding every other objective on the board (have I mentioned I think this is not a very well put-together mission?).  But, overall we were definitely losing the trade war and being out-damaged.  Had the game played out it’s likely we could’ve forced a draw but unlikely we could’ve pushed forwards and taken the win.  Some thoughts on why and what I could’ve done differently:

• My list goes through elite infantry like wet paper, having loads of high-strength damage 2-3 attacks.  But it’s less good anti-chaff, especially in shooting.  The opposing armies were almost 100% chaff, and besides the Boyz I don’t actually have much good at dealing with that.  Even Blast isn’t that helpful when hitting on 5+.
• It was annoying failing a bunch of charges, which kept me from taking an objective.  But it’s probably better that I did, since it wouldn’t have been enough to get us ‘holds more’ and would’ve given our opponents extra points for taking it back off us.
• I had a load of unspent Command Points that I could’ve made better use of.  In particular ‘Ard As Nails might have helped the Boyz last a bit longer.
• I maybe should’ve held off Waaaghing in turn 1, I didn’t really need it to wipe the units I wiped nor – other than the boyz, who could’ve da jumped anyway- to get into combat in turn 1, while the greater mobility of advance & charge would’ve been very helpful turn 2.