GTA Tournament results

The tournament last Saturday at Game Table Adventures Saturday went MUCH better than I expected. A few monkey wrenches were tossed into the mix, but I will go over those in a minute. Up front I had three great games with three great guys. You can't ask for a better way to spend a Saturday.

I took list 3 from last week with the change of using the burning brand instead of a mace to help keep him out of combat, and hopefully losing the warlord point. In the end it worked for me in all three games but I still gave up warlord twice.

Game one
WIN 10-8
I played a long time opponent Dave Semons with his Imperial Guard. The list was fairly simple. Dave I apologize for missing/mixing units here.

Reg command in a Chimera
Company command
4 infantry squads
Russ Executioner
2x medusas with bastion breacher shells
vulture with twin punisher cannons
vendetta
at least on veteran squad

The mission had us fighting over 5 objectives with various point values. Dave maneaged to immobilize his Exectutioner and one of the Medusas early, which helped me position to not take fire from them later in the game. In the end I won by having first blood and warlord on him, given that he had higher point objectives on his side of the table. I also had him physically pushed back into his deployment zone on turn three, and I think that caught him off guard, and put him into defensive mode. Hard fought, but three drakes can munch on Chimera based tanks all day. This was very much a game of cat and mouse as his flyers tried to take mine out. In the end he needed more numbers or durability in his troop section to get ahead of me.

Game Two
LOSS 3-8
I played Paul Elswick with his marines and multiple Imperial Armour units here. Paul had a lucius Pattern drop pod, a Caestus Ram and a Contemptor Mortis Drednought.....sigh.

Librarian with null zone
9 man Tactical squad
Landraider
Contemptor Mortis Dred
Caestus Assault Ram
2x thunder hammer terminators
Scouts with sniper rifles, and a missile launcher
5 man tac squad in a razorback

This was the first game I had issues with Paul's SMART combo. He had a Librarian in his landraider using the "null zone" power each turn. He parked that landraider a third of the way up the table near the center. More than half of my force has the daemon rule so I was re-rolling a lot of successful saves. That made life rough. Paul was also using a normal drednought model as a contemptor...which I normally wouldn't have an issue with except for a few points. Paul didn't have a written copy of his list handy, and didn't make it clear to me it was a contemptor pattern. That would have changed more than a few things in the way I played early on. Since the model was a normal dred, and he has been using the same subbed in model for at least 4months now, I think he has had time to order the real thing. Now it is up to me to clarify, so this is my mistake as much as Paul's. The model might be more expensive than the normal ones, but not THAT expensive. In the end this is a little gripe, but it is legitimate. I don't think he should be allowed to run it until he has the model in TOURNAMENT games. Outside of that scenario, run with it man.

Game Three
LOSS 4-0
This was the local big boy Jason Garner and his Imperial Guard. Jason's list was very similar to Dave's from round one with the addition of three Hydra PLATFORMS instead of the medusas. I spent the first three turns focused on hosing those platforms, and not his troop transports, so it put me behind schedule with his troops. I lost here in a close battle again to Warlord and firstblood. We ended up 2-0 on objectives.

That said I went an overall of 1-2-0, which is lower tier to be sure. Thing is I apparently had a good sportsman score, and I won the best painted army award. When you combine that with the strength of schedule I had, I ended up in second place over all buy a small 1 point margin!! WOW! I played three of the top five players there and took down one of them. I also hurt their scores by losing to them (lol) so I ended up really well ranked. Go me! Anyway, three good games, had a ball, and I'll be back for more to be sure.