League Night 2, Game 2

I should have cut my losses at the end of the last game, but as we can play up to three games for each round in the league I setup one last game for the night.  For my last game of the round and the evening I squared off against my fellow "On a Budget" marine player.  Much like my force his core is made up of starter set marines, and tonight's force was the core of the core.  He fielded all the marine units from the Assault at Black Reach box set, with the exception of the captain.  This wouldn't have been as painful if he hadn't upgraded his dread with a PAIR OF TWIN LINKED AUTOCANNONS!!!  My poor predator had Autocannon envy. 

We rolled really low for terrain and ended up with the bare minimum on a very open field.  We opted for a quaint bavarian village and setup.   Lawrence put his tactical squad to the center and walked his dread on next to them on his first go.  I threw a combat squad with a missile launcher up on a building for a high angle shot down at the dread, everything else came on the board first turn. Our first turn of shooting in the dark of night fighting saw the two missile troopers trading rounds, with Lawrence killing a marine outright and me missing as normal.

Second round started off with a bang, literally.  The dread fired up its AC's and put three really big holes in the Pred.  4 shots hit, three shots glanced and all three rolls for the glancing shots came up 6's.  That puts it at immobilized, with two weapon destroyed results.  With only the AC on the unit it was done for the day.  The terminators had arrived this turn as well, they turned their gazes to the small combat squad with the missile launcher to their left and let loose with a hail of rounds from their storm bolters.  The combat squad was never heard from again.  I raced the two rhinos up the outer edges of the board, but the rhino on the far right carrying the other half of squad one caught a second round missile from the tactical squad in the front nose grinding it to a halt.  Immobilized time for the squad to get out and walk.

Third round found allot panic on my side, but I moved my second rhino up the far side and dumped the entire tactical squad out in front of the dread.  Second squads job is to take out armor, so I fired up the melta and the combi melta and put two shots into the dread, one penetrated and destroyed the dread!  I only rolled a 4 so with the plus one it was only a wrecked and not a glorious explosion.  The combat squad on the far side started running after all the guys in blue, but was always too far out to shoot.  the start of round four saw everyone in blue getting really really mad at loosing their big brother in the box, and moved in for the kill.  A flurry of stormbotlers and bolt pistols started the charges.  We locked in hand to hand till the end of turn 4 when the squad got wiped out.  Turn 5 saw the rhino running for its life and the combat squad moving forward with no shots available to it.  We rolled the die to end my misery but alas it was time for one more turn.  The ultra marines fired off a flurry of shots killing one of my remaining marines, and for my last valiant effort I fired two rapid fire bolters, a combi plasma and a bolt pistol into the terminators.  Did the plasma hit, of course not.  Did the bolt pistol hit for comedy, nope.  But the bolters did do two wounds, and when the armor saves came a pair of ones!  The round ended with me again down to a combat squad with nothing but moral victories to show for the effort.  It was a good game, that just went horribly wrong for me from the start.