TMI-pocalypse

This last weekends gaming was just one game, but it was anything but short. IT WAS APOCALYPTIC!

I went into this kicking an screaming. And continued to kick and scream through most of it. A friend put it best, "the player with the most points has the most fun." And I think this is mostly true, just because the player with the most points is the most involved. However, the new Apocalypse added another wrinkle, deployment. You can no longer put it all on the table. You have to deploy less that 50%, but more than 25% of the units in your or your teams army. In a two player game that is fine, but in a team game, it starts to hurt some players. My team was Orks, Necrons/Eldar, and my Eldar/Dark Eldar with some of Shaffer's DE Reavers thrown in to get me to 2500. As the fastest army and also likely the frailest, I only ended up deploying my Council, thus, no matter how many points I brought, I was kinda relegated to a back seat first turn. Reserves are different, since you can choose when things come on, plus certain units can come on turn one. Another change is that instead of how long it will take you to deploy, its now a bidding war on how few UNITS you will deploy. And, since we had the smaller army(both in points and units, though only units matter here), we really never had a chance at going second. I will explain more when I get into how the actual game went. Also, they changed how assets work. Now, I have never read any Apocalypse book, and since this was crack and play, I wasn't even able to start here. As such, I really didn't know how assets worked. Assets are mostly one use only, though they don't specifically say that. As such, I chose a one use only gun that I never actually used. We also chose another asset at my suggestion that gave all Eldar(including Dark Eldar) Shrouding on the first turn. Awesome, unless you plan the ability of your Necron allies to give EVERYTHING night fight on turn one, thus not really being helpful on the shrouding thing. I also have a bit of an issue with the fact that Eldar and Dark Eldar don't even get separate sections, being clumped into one. I guess I shouldn't be to upset since it is an upgrade from the Dark Eldar not even being mentioned in previous books. Anyway, that is enough rambling about how the book looks to me, on to the game.



As I said, we were trying for going second, and here is why. There was a 24" bridged gap in the center of the board, then each side had an entire table to deploy(us a 6'x4' them an 8'x4'seems unfair, but they had more points after all, so it balances, right?). The plan: deploy behind the 12" line, they can't see us unless they come get some. Genius! All we need to do is declare all of our available units being deployed. In hind sight, our max was 27, their min was 24, guess how that worked. Yep, we went first. Well, crap. Okay, no problem, we will just sit on it turn one, THEN get them when they have to come get some. Except, you can't really restrain Orks and Necrons, so off they charge. *shrug* Whatever. Plans and contact and enemies and all that. So, my side starts forward. I am the master of disaster, and I roll ZOMBIES! So, I get to place a unit of 18 Zombie Kroot anywhere, and I pick their zone. In doing so, I notice that the have an unmanned Quad Gun. Sweet, and since flyers can come in on turn one, we do, negating his intercept. No we find out why they wanted to go second. The took an asset that allows all IG infantry to deep strike and another that allows all of their deepstrikers to not scatter. Then they brought in like 5k of terminators plus more IG squads than I care to think about, including some Ogryn. They did all of this right in the middle of our army. There were some shady deep strikes, and we got them to mostly put them in concentric circle, kinda, and it was a little less shady, but its Apoc, so who cares. They then did some shooting, and it was cool. On our turn, I can barely bring in anything. I move 12", but I can't find holes to bring in my bikes. I do bring in some of the reavers. I also look at bringing in my Hellions, but my team mates start placing their stuff, and I decide I can't really fit them on the other table either, so again most of my stuff sits off. Being fairly elite, or just trying to move forward, our turn goes semi fast. However, the opposing turn is incredibly long, and as I mentioned, I basically have nothing on the board, and what I do have, nobody cares about. So, in a 2+ hour opposing turn, I get scattered on twice and shot at once. Needless to say, I was not terribly vested. The following turn I spent most of it begging for Patrick's attention, as he is the biggest player(see above) by 4k+ points. At the end of this turn, the Blood Angels player(who is giving everyone FNP) has to leave, to which every opposing player makes it a point to explain that they are extremely hampered having lost 4k points, to which I reply that they are still 2k up on us, then they move on. However, this does give me plenty of room to move my Windriders on at the start of turn four, both from the BA player and just stuff dying and getting the heck out of the way. This is where I learned an interesting fact, Windriders can take down terminators. It took three squads(and a little help on the last guy), but I was able to remove a ten man unit of termies. I was both happy and impressed. My opponents were not. They seemed a bit upset that I held my Windriders off for so long, ironic with them bringing in everything so early. I see it as a similar tactic on two ends of a spectrum, even though I mostly just didn't see any use in the units until the end. My Hellions continued to wreck face, my council double charged, taking two squads of IG, and my reavers flew and sliced, cleaning up in various places. In the end we lost all of the Necron/Eldar player, a ton of Orks, and some of my Reavers(no whole squads). In the end, I think I only lost my flyers. I also managed to all but win the game for us, locking down both sides' objectives with Eldar Shenanigans. It helps to be the most dangerous(tactically, maybe) contingent, while being the least intimidating.

I did enjoy the end of the game, but mostly because it felt like a normal 40K game again. I still think I would rather play a normal 40K game over an Apoc game. Mostly this has to do with what I look to get out of it. For me Apoc isn't about getting out everything I have and playing with it. I have 5k of Tau, 2500 of CSM, and 1900 of Eldar/Dark Eldar, totalling nearly 10k(maybe more as there are things I have never pointed out). Easily matching Patrick's force. But I have no urge to put all that on the table. Each army I have has a different play style, and I pull them out to play that style. Putting them together doesn't really do it for me. I can see how they could all compliment each other very well, I just don't want to. I don't want to move that many models or fire that many shots(even 4k of Tau is a brutally long shooting phase). Players like Patrick want to have all their toys on the table. Apoc works for them. There is a reason I only have 1900 points of the Eldars. I get to play with almost all my toys every game. I only have more than 1750 because the Reavers didn't end up working for me, and because Hellions come ten to a box. The rest is upgrades that could be useful, but I wouldn't waste points in a tournament list because they are useful often enough. The tons of models just doesn't appeal to me any more. I would rather play a game with the Eldars, then a game with Tau, and then a round with CSM. Though I may drop the CSM for some Malifaux, but that's another article. Point being, I don't think Apoc is bad, I know I have played my fair share of it, I just don't think it is good for me. It takes a mindset that I don't find myself in very often to play. Maybe if games are limited to each player having a smaller, similar sized force, but the massively disparate forces just doesn't seem to do it.

Well, its off to sleep for me. I hope to have some more battle reports after this weekend and to also unveil my Steampunk Ewok Malifaux board very soon.