50,000 Point Game: RELICTORS!
Pardon the speed posts, but I’m going to try to catch all of my loyal readers up on my last few games. I probably won’t go into as much detail on what worked and what didn’t, so if you have any questions leave them as a comment and I’ll be happy to answer them!
I’ll start with the choices I made for the 50,000 point Apocalypse battle. I chose Space Marines because the organizer had a “no more than 10 tanks rule (which might as well be a “Monty, don’t bring your Imperial Guard tanks” rule).
I had 3,000 points to work with. I also wanted to avoid tons of infantry and spreading my lines out too much (there were around 8-10 players on each side of the board, after all). So after much thought, I chose the following:
FORMATIONS
1. Armored Spearhead (4 Landraiders)
2. Ancients Assault Force (3 Venerable Dreadnoughts and a Techmarine)
THE LIST
1. Master (Terminator Armor, Adamantine Mantle, and some other stuff)
2. Epistolary (Terminator Armor, Adamantine Mantle, Veil of Time and some other stuff)
3. TWO 4-man Terminator Command Squads (2 Assault Cannons, 1 Chain Fist)
4. TWO Terminator Squads (2 Assault Cannons, 1 Chain Fist)
5. FOUR Landraiders (Extra Armor, Smoke Launchers)
6. THREE Venerable Dreadnoughts (AC/DCCW/HF/EA/SL)
7. Techmarine (some servitors) in a Rhino (EA/SL)
That gives the army two “waves” — the first wave with 4 Landraiders with 20 Terminators and the second wave with the Dreadnoughts and the Techmarine. The nice thing about this is that it splits evenly with 2 sets of 4 “units” for Reserves, meaning I can take advantage of the Flank March (!!!)asset that the Ancient Assault Force gives me.
Flank March is one of those broken assets that you LOVE to use (but HATE when it’s used against you). In my “40k is like sex” analogy, Flank March would probably be “anal play”.
I planned on combining the army with the Careful Planning strategic asset, which would allow me to get that nasty assault force in the game on turn one. But in this large event, the organizers chose our strategic assets and I ended up with the Chapter Relic one (from the new Reload book).
So I had to sit around for a looooong time waiting for my reserves to come in (1 turn in a 50,000 point game can take more than an hour — and that’s AFTER deployment). So I had a couple of hours to kill, mostly chatting about how nasty things were going to get when I drove my Landraiders on the board. But I was happy that my Epistolary suddenly became a very nasty surprise (I think he had a base of EIGHT S10 I5 power weapon attacks)!
The other problem with 50,000 games is that we never get more than 3-4 turns under our belts. In this case we played 3 turns (giving me 2 turns with my Terminators on the board). In those two turns, my little flank faced off against around 6,000 points of baddies. Although we didn’t have enough time to grab the nearby objective, we did cut an ugly swath through the chaos lines. When Larry put down his 40+ Dark Angel Terminators and I put down my 20 Terminators in 4 Landraiders BEHIND THEIR LINES, it certainly caused some panic.
The past few Apocalypse games have given me some ideas about designing large games. So expect to see a few posts with new Apocalypse missions (1-shot campaigns, hopefully) over the next few weeks!
