In to the breech my friends!

Well this past weekend the Salamanders deployed a small task force for the first time.  In a joint operation with the brothers of the Imperial Fists 3rd company.


After a long night of prep the night before (3am bed time).  With an early morning to finish the details (dear god 7am) I headed out only 15min late (9:30 am for a 10am check-in).  This was to be a doubles tournament with two small 750 point armies combining to form one larger army.  There were no restrictions as to whom could team with whom, but you got extra presentation points for justifying it.

My partner had spent his late evening building us the first part of our goal to grab as many presentation points as possible with his fantastic display base.  If anyone is interested he gives a quick tutorial on it over on the IF 3rd board.

 Round One
Round one found us across the board from a very interesting combo and a very tough opponent, Team 3.  Team 3 was comprised of a father and son team, fielding Necrons and IG.  What really stood out was the IG Air wing and the Monolith.  We had discussed the day before my biggest fear was going to be an IG vet army all in Valkyries.  That's almost exactly what we got.  What we got was a Valkyrie based Vet squad, with two Vendettas bristling with las cannons, and some un-killable Necrons thrown in to boot.  What's even more fun, what you can barely make out in the photo is a Medusa mortar unit hiding behind the air wing.

The massacre was a fun game, the gunships and the Medusa systematically removed most of our tracked units from the board while the Necrons and the missile pods on the Valkyrie harassed the ground troops.  The end of the game saw the fists down to their command squad, my predator down to a single heavy bolter and my command squad bailing out of their flaming Rhino.  I scored a moral victory for my command squad, who after being dumped out of their Rhino drew their plasma pistols, fired up the plasma gun to rapid fire and scored enough hits to immobilize the gunship bringing it to the ground.  Unfortunately it was inches out of range of a charge to finish it off.  While I was bird hunting, the Fists had tied up the necron warrior force emerging from the monolith.

The goal of the game was to get troop units into your opponents deployment zone, the most troop units there at the end of the game wins.  Well our opponents had pretty much killed our forward advance, the gunships played havoc on our tracks.  The monolith dropped down on top of the IF command team.  They were having so much fun ripping our troops to shreds they forgot about the objective.  At the end of the game, their closest scoring unit was inches outside of the zone to score.  We had managed to pull out a draw!

Round Two
We learned allot in round one, mainly the rules as both of us were very very rusty at 40k, and I had only just read through the new rules by the time we showed up to play.  I was relying on my experience with 2nd, 3rd and 4th ed to hold me through the day.  Little did I know other experience would help out.

Our second opponents for the day fielded a mix of IG and Tau.  Now when I say IG I really mean a Hydra battery that brought some troops along.  Wow a battery of Hydras backed up with a chem-hound, a Chimera and a Tau Hammer head was gonna be tough.  The players were great to play against and this board and mission suited them well.  Our board was an urban terrain and we had to seize three objectives which we all agreed would be the three buildings in the middle of the board.  First turn saw the IG come out strong, when the Hydras fired off a hail storm of lead killing the whirlwind on the far right.  They moved forward with some troops to take the building there.   Personally none of the rest of our forces were really that anxious to try to take that building after that.   The far left saw the Salamanders tactical team advancing to take that objective after having their ride shoot out from under them.  The middle building quickly filled up with Fire Warriors, a Tau Commander and an IG squad who all bunkered down.  The IF command team raced to teh building finally getting in during the final turns.  The Salamanders command team took the opportunity to kill the Tau commander while he stood admiring his handy work in killing the land raider.  The final turn saw the IF command team decimate the fire warriors as the horrified IG squad looked on. My moral victory of the round came with turning the Hammer Head into a fireball with a well placed Hunter Killer round from the Predator.  My inner Tau cried a little, but I remembered I was playing space marines that day and went back to the fight.  When the time was called the Marines held one, the Tau/IG held one and the middle objective was still contested!  We had managed our second draw of the day!

Round Three, The Final Round
We were feeling pretty good, we had managed to pull out two draws, not completely embarrass ourselves with our lack of the current rules knowledge, and we'd had two great games.  We found ourselves on table one, a fairly open terrain table against one of the best looking armies I've ever seen.  We found ourselves facing a combination of Eldar and Salamanders.  Of course I made the jokes about Salamander on Salamander fighting was wrong and we should turn on the others, but really I was dreading the beating I was about to receive.  Now back to appearance, the Salamanders were fielding a tricked out Land Raider, awesomely painted with a scale pattern, and featuring some awesome upgrades from Chapterhouse Studios.  The terminators that poured out were just as fantastic.  The Eldar that made up the other half of the army were just as amazing, magnificently painted falcons and fire prisms made up the bulk with jet bikes for skirmishers.  I imagine that the Eldar troops looked good too but they never had to get out of their tanks.

The final mission for the day was what I call a head hunter mission.  Simple and too the point, Kill the other teams commander.  In this case being a double tourney we had two per side to kill off.  So my commander took one look at his ride and placed an order with the quartermaster.  My command team was sporting a shiny new Rhino, while the IF and Salamanders 2nd Co. were in Land Raiders.  The Eldar I were in their falcon with what I can only imagine was air conditioning and a dvd player.  The IF lost their land raider early and took cover in some ruins in the center of our deployment area backed up by their sniper team while the enemy salamanders barreled down on them.  My command team dodged the fire prism shots and the other falcon until they finally had their Rhino shot out from under them.  All of them survived the resulting explosion, and moved towards the enemy command team in the falcon.  Alas the plasma gun trick from the first round didn't work as well.  While I managed to hit the falcon tank, I only knocked off one of its weapons, not bring it down where I could get to the soft squishy far seer in the middle.

The real heroes of that third round were the IF command team, having survived several close combat encounters against Assault Terminators no less till the end of round 5, Capt Wolfe managed to stay alive.  When we rolled the die to see if the game would continue we rolled the magic 1 game ends, we had managed our third draw!  Though we all know one more round and neither of our commanders were going to be alive.  In the end luck and perseverance saved the day.  Though I give luck most of the credit.

Wrap Up
We managed three draws, not to shabby.  We had three great games vs three great armies.  We didn't screw up too bad and didn't embarrass our friends and family which is always a win!  We also some how managed to pull out second place!  Between allot of prep work before hand and a nice compliment in the way of sportsmanship awards we managed to tie with the number one team, who happened to have been our final opponents.  It came down to three tie breaker levels to settle the tie with a well deserved first place going to them.  My thanks goes out to Jeff and Chris for running the event, a shout out to Hobby Town USA Dallas for hosting, and my compliments and cheers to all our opponents and the other players present for an awesome day.