LoT Battle Report: Rounds 2/3: Eldar & Loganwing v Tyranids

So there are like...no pictures for these games. I got two pics from Round 2 of game 2 so this is going to be quick. Round 2 was against Tim Neal's Eldar who eventually placed 5th (Vince also played him). Game was pitched battle with primary objective as Kill Points and secondary as table quarters. He won roll off and gave me deployment. With the rather significant lack of cover on this board for vehicles or MCs he was at a distinct advantage with his 48" range. This forced me to deploy roughly in the middle but closer to the left to try and grab as much cover as possible from the large building. He then deployed most of his army as far as possible from me to force me to run through open ground to get to him. In hindsight I should of deployed in the middle but weighted to the right. This would of allowed me to use the building as cover as I advanced rather than moving towards it for cover. Mistake 1 and we'll blame tiredness yes :P? Here are two pics from turn 2:

Here we can see another couple of mistakes. One was moving a T-Fex to the left attempting to take down the Night Spinner. I would of been much better off sending the HG squad in the forest of the second picture in that direction and using both T-Fexes to drop the War Walkers ASAP. Mistake 2. As it was, my armor penning was pretty decent but then couldn't roll above a 3 (though I rolled a 4 for the Dragon Serpent). For the majority of turns 1-3 I was able to stop his tanks from shooting to some degree (outside of his War Walkers) but Turn 3/4 I didn't even get to roll on the armor chart and he was able to put in more shots and stop my shooting. Mistake 3 was poor position of my my models meaning I didn't always get cover for my 3+ save TMCs and the combination of starting to spawn a turn too late. One extra good spawn roll could of helped me swamp his lines on Turn 3 rather than the one squad that did hit him. Mistake 4.

From then on it was basically him seeing how much he could kill with the game ending Turn 6 I think. I made a lot of mistakes and I was pretty tired during the game but it wasn't as lopsided as the results suggested. His excellent to hit rolling in the early turns on what could shoot and my poor armor damage rolling put the kill points firmly in his favor but if I had been able to break his foot lines on T3 it would have still been a game. As it was I lost 6-2 on KP I believe and 2-1 on table quarters.

Round 3 has no pictures I'm afraid but it was what I had initially picked as the auto-draw mission. DoW with 2 objectives as primary and table quarters as secondary. I versused Douglas Crawford who had a very nice Loganwing army w/3x WG scouts w/CMLs and combat weapons, 2x Typhoons, 2x MM/HF Speeders, Rune Priest w/Jaws & MH, Logan, 6x LF pack, 10x GH in Pod & Vindi. Outside of the Vindie, Jaws & combat weapons was a very top notch list and not one I want to face with my Nids as my TMCs become pretty easy to drop. Luckily my game plan pulled off and I was able to grab the draw but unfortunately not the secondary objective.

My plan was to basically throw everything at him except my Hive Guard & a squad of Gants. The Gants would hold my home objective whilst the HG would attempt to hold the table quarters and shoot down the Speeders. He pretty much played a gunline army on his table edge with the Speeders zipping around and his GH camped on his objective. Plan worked out perfectly although I didn't spawn many gants so didn't actually have a chance to chew him up in cc when my army reached his lines on T5. My Hive Guard were able to drop all but one Speeder (which knicked a table quarter from me on T5 :() but if the game had gone onto T7 he had a very chance to win since all but my Tyrant were dead at that point.

Vince laughed at me later as Jaws took down both my T-Fexes & Tervigon and I will still say there are better powers in Lightning, Hurricane, Storm Caller & Tempest. Why? Jaws apparently did very little in the other games and Hurricane got a lot of use. Whilst Hurricane is a great spell, Lightning is a much better primary shooting spell against mech lists. Douglas was a really energetic guy to play against and he had some great conversions for his CML on his WG (though apparently the paint judge didn't think so).

I was able to snag 9 points from this game and 3 from the previous game against Tim so unfortunately am now well behind on battle points sitting on 31/60 heading into Day 2. Sorry for the lack of pics on these two games as well, was very very tired. 10 hours of sleep though help for Day 2 and I also took some happy snaps of other people's armies (though most of the came out terrible...).