Played in the team tourney yesterday with my good buddy and fellow 40k Wrecking Crew member, the Hod. We were running Team Twilight, BA (BBF) and SW (Hod). My 1250 point list can be found in my previous article here... I brought an electronic copy of my army list in iRoster 40k on my iPad - everyone was cool with that (of course I had my codex but never had to break it out).
The Hod was running a drop pod list - Rune Priest (JAWS), 3x Grey Hunter in pods with terminator Wolfguard pack leaders, and two squads of Long Fangs (mix of missile launchers and lascannons). There was definitely some good synergy between our two armies. I've always known that jump infantry and drop pods work quite well together. The pods full of Grey Hunters are an excellent shock troop. They come in, blow things up and the enemy must react... Or you can land on an objective and force the enemy to come to you. Hod had one Wolfguard in terminator armor (combi melta and chainfist) in each squad of Grey Hunters, the Rune Priest ran with one of these squads.
There was some good missions (first two), third mission was a bit wacky though (see comments below). First mission was versus Orks and CSM. It took our opponents over 1/2 hour to deploy.
* sighs *
This mission on the top of the third turn you rolled to see what was the mission primary win condition - three objectives, kill points or get more units in your opponents' deployment zone. The young fella playing Orks (Brandon) just did not know the rules well for 5th edition and we had to call the judge over several times (Brandon was always wrong by the way). At one point Brandon claimed that combat resolution cuts off at five wounds - the Hod and I had racked up an impressive 27+ wounds for combat resolution in a big melee involving six units. Brandon couldn't find the supposed rule in the rulebook but kept insisting it was in there somewhere. I think we must have spent 15 minutes getting this resolved - very frustrating to say the least. We only got through the 3rd turn and the judge added 30 minutes so the Hod and I had time to play our final turn. The primary objective ended up being the three objectives. We held one and contested the other two for the win. Three turns is just not enough - the very slow deployment (gluing models together before placing them... Jebus help us!!!) and all the time spent discussing the rules made for a very unfun game.
The second mission was versus a team of IG (air cav) and Orks (horde and ordnance). These guys were a blast to play! This mission was killpoints - 2 kp for each non vehicle unit 1 kp for each vehicle. Personally I'd rather just see one killpoint for each unit, otherwise armies like mech IG and razorspam have a clear advantage. The IG player held all his skimmers in reserve so I advised the Hod to start with his Long Fangs in reserve... Otherwise they would have gotten alphastriked by the air cav. The IG player had MotF to screw with our reserve rolls but DoA pretty much negated this for my army. I landed the Sanguinor close by the IG CCS so he could snipe them the next turn but unfortunately he ate two lascannon shots from Vendettas then was charged by a huge mob of Orks that just managed to reach him using their mighty Waaagh. It was a downer losing my favorite hero ever early in the game. Oh well what can ya do? Our opponents jumped ahead on killpoints early in the game but then around the third turn the Hod and I started racking up the killpoints and pulled ahead by a wide margin winning the second mission as well. This game made it through the 4th turn... No slow play and no long discussions involving the rules. A very fun game! :D
So going into the third and final round our team was the only team with two wins, so one more win and it would be a wrap. We were playing George Miller from 40k Radio and his good buddy Jim. This was by far my favorite game I've played in a long time. George had put together a very beautiful and highly converted gene stealer cult army consisting of IG and Tyranids. This was the wacky mission - spearhead deployment with 2 + 1d3 objectives (ended up being 5 total). Objectives had to be placed outside the two deployment zones and at least 12" apart and at least 12" from any table edge. Sounds good in theory but you could simply place an objective just outside of a deployment. At the end of each player turn each team scored a point for each objective they held with a scoring unit. So I'm playing a fully reserved army and Hod had three drop pods. I know I could have started the game with my units deployed on the table but then they would have been big targets for the IG pieplates. George and Jim racked up an impressive 12 points over the first two full turns so the Hod suggested we go for the table... It all came down to one Broodlord left on the table with just one wound left... He was out in the open and in plain LOS to a squad of Long Fangs - all of Hod's shots either missed or failed to wound. So we ended up just losing the mission by that one wound which took us out of contention for first place. Again this mission got through to the 4th turn - no slow play and no problems with any rules. Now it turns out that good old Brandon ended up playing his game that round a full 1/2 hour over the time limit when DICE DOWN was called. Neither his team nor the team he was playing won any awards so that extra 1/2 hour was all for nought. If the Hod and I had just had an extra five minutes we would have won our final mission and I'm pretty confident to say we would have won 1st place. While it's not a big deal I do have to say when DICE DOWN is called its only sporting to finish your turn and hand in the results. For a game to go an extra 1/2 hour over time called and the results don't affect the final standings just comes across as a bit rude/selfish. There the rest of us were standing around waiting plus I had a 1.5 hour drive back home. I'm not knocking the TO as he did a great job overall running the tourney.
So I'm thinking that 1250 points per FOC seems to be the new standard for team tourneys - basically that is 2500 points per team with 4 players involved per game. I have played in several of these events around central Florida and don't remember one game that ever got past the 4th turn... And that's with 2.5 hours per game. Seems to me it'd be much more practical to design these missions for four turns. Remember I'm playing a fully reserved army and none of my units come in until the second turn plus I'll go second if I win the dice off for deployment/1st turn. I just don't think it's possible for these types of games to reach a 5th or 6th turn. I'm a fast player too, at the Adepticon gladiator this year I finished all four of my games in an hour or less.
I'd be very interested to see others thoughts.
G
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