A Melancholy Win and Nearing the End of the Gaming Year

I arrived at the FLGS (Crossroad Games) wednesday night for our informal 40K club night, not knowing who'd I play or what I'd be doing.  I though some would be getting ready for tomorrow's (Saturday's weekend tournament (Pairs, 750 points per person, FOC per pair), but it seemed the most serious were playing 1850 games in preparation for the DorkaMorka June Event (6/29) to be held in the Boston USA area.  Overall, the biggest change...was the HUGE increase in Eldar being on the table.  It had been 2 weeks since I'd last been at the club, and it seemed their were wraithknights and wave serpents all over the place!

So before you think this will be a battle report about that, I'll just say nope. Instead....

There is a fairly new guy at the "Club".  He is an enthusiastic 40K player, with his own space marine chapter and growing tau collection.  Since neither of us had no immediate opponents, I decided to check out how well he could play. 

Overall, it was pretty fun, but melancholy. The game rolled up as the Relic, Vanguard deployment.  The first turn was mid-day. 1850 in points, woods and ruins and hills.

My opponent had a pretty good list (more or less):
SM Captain
Command Squad w/ HB Razorback
Tactical Squad (10) , FL, ML, Pod, Deathwind
Tactical Squad, FL (10), ML, Pod
Dreadnaught, AssCann, FL
Landspeeder, MM/HB
Whirlwind
Tau Allies:
Farsight
Firewarrior squad (10), 2 drones
Firewarrior squad (10), 2 drones
Broadside, Missile Pod, Railgun, 2 drones
Tau scout skimmer, 2 drones

My list was a 350 point upgrade to the Calth Reaction Force - so it included a demi-dev squad (4 MLs), 2 Landpeeder Typhoons (squadroned), a single MM/HF Landpeeder, and deathwind launchers on the Sternguard and Alpha Tactical Squads. Here is a photo of my force right befor deployment.  

My opponent won the roll to deploy first so he chose the upper left table corner.  Everything was deployed but the 2 tactical squads/pods. His warlord would be his SM Captain, I cannot recall what his warlord trait was. 

On my deployment (lower right), I deployed the Speeders, Librarian Arcadius, Terminators, and devastators. Arcadius was my warlord, and he rolled up the ability to reroll my reserves rolls, and kept his base psychic powers of gate and avenger. 

My goal was to continue testing the use of Sternguard as an alpha strike unit, and terminator mobility by gate.  I determined that the job of the reserved pod squad (bravo) would be to collect the artifact, while the other squads made it so.

I did not roll to sieze. 

On his first turn, my opponent immobilized a typhoon, and killed off a forward devastator ML carrier, and he dropped a pod of tactical marines in front of my lines while most of his spread out forces moved to better firing positions for turn 2. 

On my turn, my two drop pods descnded into his backfield and and center and he immediately lost his dreadnaught and broadside to the combat squadded sternguard, and his forward tactical squad and their drop pod to combined fire from everything else. 

On turn 2 he fed more units into the meatgrinder, while I got all my reserves. 

In the middle of turn 3, we shook hands and he conceded the game. He was heading towards being tabled.  Farsight had been dispatched by Arcadius' power stave while standing close to the artifact.  His SM tactical squads were gone, and his Tau were fading fast. 

We then spent a while packing and yammering about how he might improve his Tau allies, study the Tau codex a bit more, and swap out some of the gun drones for markerlight ones. 

Now for a bit about how I'm doing this gaming year. 
Fo those of you who used to read my blog over the years back at B&C, I used to benchmark the start of the gaming year at August 15+/-, coinciding with what had been the HardBoyz tournament prelims.  The following is my W/D/L record for the past three years, of course the 2013 gaming year still has about 7 or 8 weeks to go. 

2012-2013 Record for Third Company: 20 wins 2 Draws 16 Losses
2011-2012 Record for Third Company: 18 Wins 7 Draws 15 Losses
2010-2011 Record for Third Company: 35 Wins 10 Draws 30 Losses

I decided to Normalize each year to get a measure of improvement, giving a win 3 quality points, draw as 2 quality points, and loss as 1 quality point. The game year averages then become:

2012-2013 QPs = 2.105
2011-2012 QPs = 2.075
2010-2011 QPs = 2.066

The first thing that really sticks out is that I'm average...meets expectations...satisfactory.  A C for effort. 

To look at it from a optimistic view, one could say I very slightly improved over THREE YEARS of time, even though my codex aged and the game entirely changed.

Of course more pragmatically, I do play Codex Marines, through which the game is hypothetically balanced or designed around,so you would expect me to be in the middle unless I was totally amazing, which i am far from. The numbers might confrm that, if we make some big assumptions over the players and games behind the data set.  Regardless, I might be able to get about 5 to 9 games in before the end of the year wraps up, and I hope I can keep my QPs above 2.1.....

Future Blog News.
This is a great weekend for beer geeks in Maine - look for some posts on tasty stuff I get into over the weekend. The "Festival" event begins today. I'll be off to the "Old Port" for some crafted beers later today.  Pigs Ear?  Novare Res'? Who knows...

Also - I added a Forgeworld item to my collection this week - look for posts and pix on that as well!  I may also have a post on a game of Diplomacy I'm engaged in. 

Don't forget to share my blog with friends!  Sharing is caring....