March 2006

The Final Preparations

Only 1 month left, and you can just feel the excitement building!

First thing I did this month was send off this final army list and entry fee to Kane, the tournament organiser of Liber Animus. Then I booked my flights and accommodation so I could get there and not have to sleep under a gaming table. With that out of the way I got back to the Tau.

One thing that you have to have for Liber Animus are some scenario specific miniatures in addition to you normal army. This year we need a hero with a sword and pistol, a beacon on a 25mm base and an objective on a 60mm base. This happened to work out pretty well because I bought 3 boxes of the new Sniper teams but I only needed 2 teams and an extra drone (see last month for why). That left me with a spare spotter and 2 spare sniper drones. I used these to make my beacon, 2 markerlight drones and my hero with his sword (bonding knife) and pistol (pulse pistol). I think I’ll use him in future as the ejection system upgrade. The objective I made out of 2 spare Ion Cannons and a Sensor Spine from my Hammerheads stuck together. Cheap as chips mate…

I painted those extra minis, finished the kroot from last month and did my second pathfinders unit. So, shock horror, I’m done painting! I’ve got everything finished with a couple of weeks to spare. I’ve taken a photo of the entire army that I’m using at the event for you to check out.

2000 Point Army	Scenario Miniatures	Pathfinders and Friends

Not having had a game for about 6 weeks, I thought it best to try out a couple of the missions we’ll be playing at the tournament. I teed up two games with the two fellow Liber Animus attendees who I’ll be staying with when we travel down to Melbourne town (I’m a poet and I don’t even know it…). They are Bryan Cook and Luke Yates.

First up I played against Bryan’s Death Korps of Krieg Imperial Guardsmen at his place. We played the mission that uses the Hero model, and is similar to a Recon mission where you have to get scoring units in the enemy deployment zone. The main points were:

• I played like a flamin’ gallah while Bryan played more slyly than a kangawallafox. That stuff that I wrote in the White Dwarf article about making sure you fire your units in the correct order, make sure you do it because I sure didn’t…
• I spit my army up too much in deployment and put the wrong combo of units together in the wrong spots.
• My big unit of kroot (see the army list) attempted to assault through difficult terrain to sort out Bryan’s Hero who was with a 10 man guard squad. They only managed to go 3 inches which was a quarter inch too slow and got flamed in the next turn by 2 flamers and an inferno cannon and ran from the table!
• I didn’t allocate any units to achieve the objective.
• Even guardsmen kick Tau’s arse in combat.

Deployed for battle	In the thick of things	What kind of beastie is this?

Even after all that, we both had 1 scoring unit in each other’s deployment zones. A draw, I thought, until I remembered that the Hero is worth 2 scoring units by himself in this mission, something Bryan did remember. A loss to the Tau, 3 scoring units to 1.

For the second game against Luke’s Nurgle Death Guard army we played the Beacon mission. This is very similar to a Cleanse mission except you have a beacon carried around by one of your models. At the end of the game the beacon gets set off and makes the table quarter worth twice as much as long as the bloke carrying it is still alive. The highlights were:

• My deployment was much better and I stuck to my plan from start to finish. The, plan, by the way, was to
• hold my table quarter,
• take the neutral quarter in front of mine,
• infiltrate the stealth team into the neutral quarter next to mine to minimise Luke’s infiltrators and then slowly run back to my quarter, slowing down his advance through there, and finally,
• use the neutral quarter in front of mine as safe passage for the beacon to get through to Luke’s table quarter and claim it.
• I ordered my shooting well this time, using closer markerlights to auto pass target priority tests and pathfinders in combo with my high strength, high AP weapons on my battlesuits to give them 2+ to hit. Very good against toughness 5, 3+ armour Nurgle Marines.
• I deep striked with my battlesuits, with one unit scattering off the table. Luckily I had my Pathfinder’s Devilfish in line of sight and rerolled the scatter dice to save them. Good little addition to the army that one.
• I killed the last member of the unit that held Luke’s beacon with the very last shot of the game.

Manoeuvring	Outnumbered!	Rampage

In the end Luke held a neutral table quarter while I held the other three per my plan.

As I write this there is a week and a half before the tournament, so I’ll try to get one more game in, but if not I’ll head down there with this army list having four wins and one loss. Not too bad really. Wish me luck.