Victory Pointless

If Uzblitz closed his eyes he could already picture the dark bulbous shapes of the bombs as they parted the clouds, diving towards the ground like a shoal of predatory fish.

He could see the blinding-white flash and feel the wave of vaporising heat wash over his skin.  It would be glorious.

It would be soon.

Finally, they had all the pieces they needed to complete their terrorforming mission.  The ancient Brain Boyz, despite their many gifts of Mek-brain-embedded technology, had not – for some strange reason – seen fit to pass on to their green-skinned progeny the knowledge of how to build weapons of mass destruction.  It had taken the combined talents of Professa Krakdakka and Meks Wurzag and Gobdreg to figure it out, but eventually they had.

Now the bombs were ready, hanging in the pregnant belly of the Gargantic far above their heads.  Soon it would be time to unleash them, to turn this world into a new paradise.

There was just one last thing to do.

He opened his eyes and scowled at the landscape they were about to remake.  There were patches of green here, but not proper green – it was all little spindly weak strands.  A mockery of everything Orky.

A short distance away Krakdakka, Wurzag and Gobdreg were still arguing, clustered around the pile of strange-looking machinery.  Uzblitz was about to walk over and request an urgent progress report with extreme prejudice, but before he could rise Tok came running over, waving excitedly.  “Boss!  Boss!”

“Worrizit?” Uzblitz demanded.  “Are dis lot ready yet?” He eagerly stroked the surface of the big red button on the control remote in his hand.

“Not yet!” Tok squealed.  “Uh, I mean… very nearly, boss… But dere’s summit else.  It’s Kaptin Dimz, boss – ‘e’s on da way towards us!  Sez its time to settle who’s da best boss once an’ fer all!”

Uzblitz nodded thoughtfully.  It was time to settle that, and it would give him something to do while waiting to drop the bombs…

This was a 2,000 point crusade game of my (well, Uzblitz’s) Orks verses the Orks of Kaptin ‘Shiny Klawz’ Dimz playing the Dig Site Raid mission.

Result: Ork victory (not me) 55 to 30.

Uzblitz dragged himself along the ground.  He was bleeding from a dozen serious injuries, his legs didn’t seem to want to do what they were told, his transplanted heart had adopted a rhythm that wasn’t entirely regular and he was veering dangerously close to unconsciousness and possibly death.  Pure Orky stubbornness kept him going.

So that shiny-klawed numbskull Kaptin Dimz thought he was the big boss, did he?  (He did just beat us… So maybe he is? Uzblitz shushed the treacherous part of his brain.)  Well, Uzblitz Gogbusta wasn’t going to take this lying down!  (I am lying down, though).  There was one thing he didn’t have (neither do I, though, it got dropped somewhere) and that was… Ah!  There!  A small silver box with a big red button on it.  Uzblitz pulled himself towards it, across jagged rubble and splattered Ork viscera, some of it possibly his own.

He wasn’t sure if the Mekboys had had enough time to finish their final preparations.  They’d better’ve done.

He reached the box.  He picked it up.  He pressed the button.

Nothing happened.  Nothing obvious, anyway.  In his mind’s eye, Uzblitz could see the bay doors of the Gargantic slowly swinging open.  He could see the rows of Exterminatus-grade thermonuclear bombs hanging inside.  One by one with a void-silenced whirr of hydraulics the clamps suspending them snapped open and slowly, gently, the gravitic pull of the world below drew them out of the bay and down towards the surface.  They would continue to drop in a precisely(ish) calculated pattern that would devastate and irradiate the entire planet.

Was this only a vision, or was it reality?  Time would tell.  Uzblitz rolled onto his back and gazed up at the clouds.

There – was that it?  A tiny black speck, ringed with a red halo of atmospheric entry-burn.  And another.  And another.  Slowly getting larger and larger.

Warboss Uzblitz Gogbusta grinned, laid back and awaited his new paradise.

THE END(?)

Post-Mortem

• This was one of the most fun games of the campaign.  One of my main complaints about Crusade is that different armies get different amounts of Broken Crusade Bullshit, so certain matchups feel either too easy or too hard.  In this case though we were both playing similar Orks lists, had roughly equivalent amounts of Broken Crusade Bullshit and so this was a much closer and more interesting game.
• Throughout the campaign I’ve almost included a squad of Mega-Armoured Nobs every phase before switching in something else.  35 points per model buys a lot of other cool stuff with Orks.  But this may have been a mistake.  The downfall of this army both in this and other cases is a lack of durability; it hits hard but can’t take the clapback.  To win, it relies on there not being any clapback, which is relatively easy at low point values but less so now we’re up to 2000 points and it’s less feasible to table the opponent in one turn.  Something with some survivability that requires some effort to deal with is probably therefore worth the 35ppm.
• Conversely, my standard approach to dealing with tough stuff like Terminators (or in this case, MegaNobz and Battlewagons) is not to deal with it.  I slow it down, I sometimes feed it a cheap unit to keep it busy, but I mainly focus on the units I can reliably kill and the objectives I can reliably take.  This is generally not a bad plan and would’ve worked here had the mission been scored purely on objectives.  However it was not, and by neglecting to take out the tough stuff it gave my opponent’s characters somewhere to hide with their high-scoring blackstone chunks where – by the second half of the game – I had very little chance of clearing.  I think the lesson here is to not let otherwise good tactics become so ingrained that they become habits rather than something consciously thought about.
• My Weirdboy failing two Da Jumps in a row and killing his unit didn’t help, but it wasn’t the reason I lost.  In hindsight it may have been better not to try Da Jumping at all and just hunkered down on their home objective to try to hold it with his boyz supported by the deffkoptas – there wasn’t really anywhere safer on the board to teleport to anyway.