Another round of thanks from me to Steve and Dave for organising and running such a great event. It felt gruelling by the end of day 1's fourth game (especially facing Team UK...) but it all worked smoothly. Also thanks to my opponents - every game was enjoyable - yes, even getting battered by Steve, in a way.
Highs and lows for me:
Against Tom's Krieg things didn't start well, losing the strategy roll-off (and thus a void spinner) and then rolling a 1 to hit a juicy gorgon with the spaceship. Overall I probably overcommitted some of my AA assets but I did manage to destroy one of the gorgon formations which is more than I've managed before. This game came down to the last activation, my air assault vs an infantry formation. This would have yielded either a 3-0 win or a 4th turn, but the vampire was shot down turning it into a 2-1 loss. You can call this bad luck, or a direct consequence of sacrificing my falcons.
For some reason my memory of the game vs Chris's guard is hazy, except of course losing a vampire full of aspects -again-, this time to a hydra (I think this was a crit?). Not the autarch in fact, but still. We ran short of time so the other aspects didn't get their chance to get shot down by that hydra. The game ended on countback, a losing draw.
I had a feeling UK South's round vs UK North could prove decisive, and Darren's orks had beaten me in our last match-up. In the end this game was quite embarrassing. That is, it was embarrassing how badly the orks were crushed. I hit 3 formations with my spaceship barrage, including knocking out a load of flak. Darren failed to CAP both sets of FBs, two turns in a row. He moved forward but couldn't really touch any of my stuff. By the end of turn 2, he had actually killed more of his own units than mine: failing 3 dangerous terrain tests from his stompa mob and killing only 1 unit. His broken formation were two small to rally well and so he didn't have enough in turn 3 to stop me winning 4-0. Darren took it in great humour, reasoning that he had had some good luck in his previous game to balance it out...
...and so it turned out to be for me. Facing Steve for Team UK was one of the most one-sided games I've played. We had the same list, and we both knew it would be crucial who won the roll-off to plot the spaceship. Steve won that, and yet again showed masterful prediction of where units would be, critting a void spinner and breaking flak straight off the bat. From this moment I knew it was a hopeless cause. In retrospect I could have deployed in the open spaces but of course that has its own downsides. It didn't help that I forgot to activate my own spaceship when it arrived turn 2 until the void spinner had already activated - and when it did, it only caused a single point of damage. I still thought I could keep it to a 2 or 1 point loss or even a 4th turn up until the end; Steve couldn't be strong everywhere and I was saving my air assaults to contest the weakest objective. Luck continued to elude me however, as one vampire failed its activation and the other (with BTS aspects inside) came down to a shot from a firestorm. That sealed a 5-0 win for Steve, and thus payback for the one-sided game against the Orks.
The final round for us was France. Despite not having any sleep the night before I enjoyed playing the nids a lot. I made some mistakes in this game due to not knowing the list well (e.g. not bothering to retain thinking I was outside of harms way) and also indecision in whether to take on the BTS, but overall things went roughly to plan. This involved killing the harridan and allowing him to close on the formations blocking the corner of the board, contesting at the end of the game and meanwhile using my mobility to take the other side and blitz. The French guys had to leave to catch a flight so we called the game a 2-1 win.
All of my opponents' armies were wonderfully painted. It's a real pleasure to play against them, to the extent that it's almost a shame to remove them from the board. Almost.
