Standish Standoff 2015

Sorry for the long delay in posting up about my experience at the Standoff. Nothing like a new baby to keep one busy. Like every year I have gone the event made for a great day out. I had three excellent games with 3 great opponents. At the end of it all can you really want more than that from an event? I think not. IF you want to see a good collection of pictures from all the armies brought for the day check out This Post by Defenders of Calth. He did a great job collecting pics from all the armies for the day. The games where all Maelstrom missions with various deployments and differing secondary missions. The secondaries really made the missions more fun because they tended toward sacrificing units or moving way out of position to score. Two of the rounds involved moving units of the table to score points. Thus weakening your offense at that point.

So lets go into my rounds for the day starting with a man I have played a number of times so far. Each game has been decisive for us and has gone back and forth every time. We've been trading wins like very good children. Unfortunately for me it was his turn to take home the W. I did however make him fight for every point and by end game we both had pretty ravaged forces. It all comes down to Eldar backed up by Dark eldar formation containing many Monstrous Creatures is just not something I was built to handle. I really am better able to take on tanks and MSU than bulked up MC units backed by Eldar psykers. His army was gorgeous on the table top and really nicely converted up. I really liked teh way he built his Warp Spiders. A mix of Dark Eldar bits with some Necron tomb spider limbs to create the back pack gave them a really neat appearance. Unfortunately I got to learn that a Wraith Knight with sword and board will just tattoo a Knight in hand to hand. Especially an invisible one. Fortunately I did get to smear a good chunk of his army even catching some Warp spiders who jumped away from my Stalkers right into range of the Knights battle cannon to get smoked early. Even taking a sound beating I only lost 10/8.  A nice close loss.

Second round I went up against another familiar opponent from the Standoff. I've not seen him in a few years so it was great to get in a game with him. He has an excellently painted up Battle company done up as Deathwatch. We had a very tight game ending in a draw. I won primary, just slightly and he took home enough secondaries to bring it up to a tie. It was a hard battle. I made one fairly large blunder around turn 4 and gave up about 3 mission points that round. Would have meant a couple more battle points and given me a minor win had I not messed up but well mistakes where made. Battle company was a hard fight. I got lucky and kept stunning both vehicles and the units inside them via failed morale checks early on. This kept my Knight in the fight a good round or two longer than he should have been given the quality of fire I was facing. My opponent also had a hard time with target priority as he'd never faced Skitarii before and thus had no real idea how the army played aside from being hopped up guardsmen. He had an Inquisitor with servo skulls and due to Hammer and Anvil deployment kept me all boxed up with no ability to really use my Infiltrators or Scout up. This actually worked to my advantage as he dropped into my lines and came at me with bikes, allowing me to fully respond to those threats as a unified castled up force rather than being taken apart piecemeal.

My outflanking "chicken walkers" did a great job ripping into his Rhino's and Razerbacks and kept a large part of his army occupied. Although in the end they didn't carry the day they did kill a lot and kept nearly half his army tied up in the back. Huge win that. I was able to catch most his bike star out with my Str 10 blasts and battle cannon effectively neutering the unit enough that a combined Infiltrator and Vanguard charge let me finish it off. In the end we mauled each other very badly and I was able to grab a few last points. To pull up into a 10/10 tie.

My last game I unfortunately did not get any pictures from. I was just getting worn out from the day as unlike most the people attending I had a 2 hour drive to get to the event rather than 30-45 minutes like most the locals. He had an nice 30k Horus Heresy modeled Word bearers army running as Cimson Fists. He had a super heavy tank (Typhon a think). With a very scary Apoc Blast Str 10 AP 1, Ignore cover cannon. I did however get a VERY lucky table draw that made all the difference for this game. It was the city fight board with lost of LOS terrain done with a modified Vanguard deployment. (The old table quarters deployment with a 12" radius no mans bumble table center.) I was able to put only my very resilient Dunecrawler unit with its 4++ and its very good anti tank fire. Everything else was able to hide out of LOS even when infiltrating and outflanking. For an army as glass cannon as the Skittarii the ability to fully get the jump on someone without them being able to effectively hit back means you can surgically strike and remove threats a few at a time free of retaliation due to my movements and the terrain I was able to maneuver around. This meant I ended up tabling my opponent and score a 20/0 win for doing so. He was a great guy and we both spend the extra round time talking Horus Heresy, about painting models and general great hobby chat. He was also someone I had never played before or met, so always good to see a new face. He also inspired me to finally paint my Horus Heresy force that I've had for over a year and fully intended to paint before ad-mech fever hit me.

So overall I ended up in 5th place for the day. Not bad for a fairly middling tier army like Skittarii. I did however bring home some prizes. I took first place in the single 40-50mm based model category and second in painted squad. I've never won anything in the painting competition as was thrilled. The only other prize I have ever won at a Standoff was best General in Year 1. So now if I could just bring the two together at the same time I might have a shot at best overall one year. I'll be going over each of the painted units in future articles and will also mark out what ones won awards for the day.

Have a great holiday season everyone.