Vapnartak Tournament

Ok then, Sunday was the big day - 40k Tournament at the Vapnartak games show in York. The format of the day was 4 x 1000 point games lasting for a max 80 minutes each. Although I was happy that the list I was planning to take was reasonably versatile I wasn't expecting to place very highly as it was my first ever tournament and I there are allot of armies out there I don't have any experience with - my main plan was to go down, have a few games and have fun (even if I got annihilated) and I decided it would be a real mark of success if I managed to get even 1 win.

The list I was running broke down as follows:

HQ: Crisis Suit Commander with Plasma Rifle, Airbursting Fragmentation Projector, Positional Relay, HW Drone Controller, HW Multitracker, 2 x Shield Drones, and 2 x Crisis Suit Bodyguards (each with a Plasma Rifle, Missile Pod, Targeting Array and HW Multi Tracker)

Elite: 1 x Crisis Suit (upgraded to Team Leader) equipped with twin linked Fusion Blasters, Targeting Array, HW Drone Controller and 2 x Shield Drones.

Heavy: Hammerhead Gunship with Railgun, 2 x Burst Cannons, Targeting Array, Disruption Pod, Flechette Discharger, Multi Tracker and Sensor Spines.

Fast Attack: 4 x Pathfinders with Pulse Carbines and Marker Lights and Pathfinder Devilfish with SMS, Disruption pod, Flechette Discharger, Multi Tracker and Sensor Spines.

Troop: 6 x Firewarriors with Pulse Rifles in Devilfish with SMS Disruption Pod and Multi Tracker.

Troop: 6 x Firewarriors with Pulse Rifles on foot.


That lot comes to bang on 1000 points and I was reasonable happy that it had something in to deal with most situations, well, other than close combat but Tau aren't particularly strong in that regard anyway.

The general plan was to deploy everything other than the lone Crisis Suit for the start of the battle (or in the case of Dawn of War on Turn 1). Deploy the Pathfinders on foot, preferably in cover with nice lines of sight for dropping Markerlights onto enemy units, and mount the non-mechanised Fire Warriors into their Devilfish on turn 1 moving it so it had line of sight on some big nasty piece of enemy armour. Turn 2 bring the lone suit in from reserve on a 2+ with the benefit of the commanders positional relay and drop in as close as possible to the aforementioned big nasty armour, using the scatter re-roll from the Pathfinder Devilfish's Marker Beacon if needed. Then the rest of the battle would pretty much involve trying to stay out of the way of the enemies units as everything can move 12 inches a turn and still shoot and in the games which involved objective grabs to try and sweep in and contest and control enough to win on turn 5 (and hope that the dice gods would be with me for there not to be a turn 6!!).

So, the 4 games I drew broke down as follows:

1) Capture and Control with Pitched Battle setup vs Chaos Deamons
2) Annihilation with Spearhead Setup vs Chaos Space Marines
3) Seize Ground with Dawn of War Setup vs Necrons
4) Cleanse (will explain this one in the battle report) vs Space Marines

The games were set up in a kind of Swiss style so after the first round (which was just purely random) you would be playing against someone on a similar amount of points to you who you had not played before. You were awarded 10 points for a win, 5 for a draw, and 2 for a loss with the potential to gain or lose some bonus points for meeting various conditions (eliminating the highest points cost enemy unit, wiping your opponent out, etc).

My next few posts will give a brief Battle Report for each of the games I played (details may be a tad light on these due to the fact I didn't really have time for note taking on the day) and some overall conclusions from my first tournament experience.