Um, it was quite the brutal game. I think he managed to drop my Knight Preceptor to 8 wounds in a single round of shooting just from the Volkite Contemptor Dreadnoughts alone. Despite doing my best, I was only able to destroy one Contemptor Dreadnought and reduce the other 2 to 4 wounds each. Yikes. My Knight Preceptor, despite his best efforts, only killed 1 or 2 Infiltrators.
The Dark Angels then proceeded to kill 3 Knights in the second turn with the 6 Eradicators. With most of them hiding out of view, I couldn't do much, despite shooting whatever I could. I eventually killed 1 squad of Infiltrators, but was unable to finish off the Eradicators because they had a 4++ invulnerable save from Azrael. The Eradicators took out more of my Knights, including my Knight Castellan, who failed all of his invulnerable saves and took tons of damage from both the volkite Contemptor Dreadnoughts and Eradicators. Eventually, I was left with 2 Armiger Knights, and despite finishing off the Eradicators and holding the center objective for most of the game, I lost. The score was 86-77 in my opponent's favor, with me scoring only a single point for Bring It Down. If only we had better secondary objectives for Knights. Oh, well. Still, the only reason why I scored so many points (77!) was because I attained a lot of primary objective points. I think I almost maxed it out, with 44. Unfortunately, I was unable to capitalize on it, and scoring only 1 point for Bring It Down was one of the major reasons why I lost. Assassinate would have been worse - I didn't kill any Characters, so I would have gotten 0 for that. Maybe I should have taken Grind Them Down. Would have scored 3 from killing the Contemptor Dreadnought in the first turn alone. Oh, well. It is what it is. In contrast, my opponent maxed out on To The Last, with the Talonmaster, Azreal and the Bladeguard Veterans surviving. Yikes.
The second game was Data Scry-Salgave. This time my opponent was T'au! Unlike most T'au players, he chose the T'au sept that gives a re-roll for shooting or wounding (just one), and Kauyon instead of Montka. Cool! He also had a Stormsurge, which made me really excited. I always wanted to play Knights versus Stormsurge, so yeah! Um, his list had Commander Shadowsun, a Coldstar Commander, Darkstrider, an Ethereal, 3 squads of 10 Breachers, 10 Pathfinders, 2 Devilfishes, 9 Crisis Suits (3 squads of 3), 6 Stealth Suits (2 squads of 3) and the Stormsurge. Nice.
For the first time ever in this tournament, I got first turn. Not that it did much for me because my opponent simply hid his Stormsurge in reserves and hid all of his infantry behind cover. Yikes. So I literally only killed a single Devilfish and 10 Pathfinders in the first turn, and that was it. The Crisis Suits ran up and nuked my Knight Preceptor into oblivion. Ouch. At least he didn't blow up next to my Armigers. Fortunately, I was able to lead on Primary objectives once again, with my Armigers just grabbing whatever objectives they could. My opponent attempted to deny me my objectives by piling his Breachers into the objectives, but I simply killed them with my Armiger Warglaives and my Armiger Knight Moirax. With nothing to shoot at, my Knight Castellan did Data Intercept (yeah, it was hilarious).
The Stormsurge arrived and...didn't do much, I think he did like 6 or so damage to my Knight Castellan despite firing everything at him? Honestly, it was also because I used Rotate Ion Shields and made awesome invulnerable saves. One of my three Armiger Moiraxes wasn't as lucky and died to Crisis Suit fire. Ouch. I wasn't able to kill the Stormsurge, though, and despite my Knight Castellan using Order of Companions to re-roll all ones, I only reduced him to 3 wounds. I did kill 2 Stealth Suits, the Devilfish, and maybe 1 or 2 Crisis Suits (more like killed one and wounded the other, only for him to die from a mortal wound when he supercharged his cyclin ion blaster and rolled a 1 twice). I wasn't able to do much...well, I did have my Armiger Warglaive advance, fire, and used Full Tilt to charge the Breachers and steal the objective right from them. On the other side, I lost my remaining Armiger Moiraxes to Crisis Suit fire, and the Stormsurge finally reduced my Knight Castellan to 2 wounds. On the other side, my Armiger Warglaive survived fire and charges from 3 Crisis Battlesuits and Stealth Suits, and he cut down one or two Stealth Suits. I think. Phew.
Finally I killed the Stormsurge with my Knight Castellan, as well as the Stealth suit (by charging him), while my Armiger Warglaive continued to hack away and kill another Stealth Suit in combat. Another Armiger Warglaive came up the board, charged and killed the remaining Breachers (though melta helped a lot too). Unfortunately, my Knight Castellan - despite suffering a lot of fire from 4 Crisis Suits, survived...only to finally die to Shadowsun's fire. He didn't blow up, sadly enough. Would be great if he did, but oh well. The Crisis Suits killed 1 Armiger Warglaive. The other one charged and killed the last remaining Stealth Suit while my last Armiger Warglaive went in and charged the 3 Crisis Suits. I wasn't able to do anything, unfortunately, and my opponent proceeded to kill the Armiger Warglaive in his deployment zone, but my last Armiger Warglaive survived, taking like 6 or so wounds from plasma rifles. Yes! I didn't get tabled!
It was brutal, and I was almost tabled, with only a single Armiger Warglaive remianing at the end of the game, while my opponent still had all of his Characters and 7 Crisis Suits. And the Shield Drones, because I realized it would be impossible for my Knights to kill the damned Crisis Suits, so I gave up on shooting them or the Coldstar Commander. Sigh.
Fortunately, thanks to me holding objectives and playing to the mission, I scored 39 for primary while denying him (I think he had 17 for primary). The final score was 74 to 60, with me somehow pulling a win out of the bag despite losing almost my entire army (a single Armiger Warglaive being the only survivor) and almost getting tabled. Whoa. That was unexpected. I had expected the Tau to win because of how many models he had left on the table and how he almost tabled me, but...wow. Good going, Knights.
Somehow, my Knights - in this tournament, at least - end up being unable to kill anything, but score big on primary objectives. The Objective Secured Armigers and their count as 5 models (10 for Titanic) are really important. Without those, I would have lost all my games. Thank you, Games Workshop, for giving us back Objective Secured and count as 5/10 models in the Balance Dataslate before the new codex came out. Otherwise I would have been screwed. Ugh.
In any event, I finished the tournament with 2 losses, 2 wins and a tie. Not bad, if you ask me. That gave me 20th place out of 39 with 382 battle points. Phew! I enjoyed myself tremendously, and many thanks to the Renegade people for organizing this! It was fun as hell, and there were a few unexpected results, but all in all, it was an amazing experience. Looking forward to another tournament in the near future, though I doubt I'll be participating in the summer GT. I'll be returning to Singapore for the summer to visit my folks, so yeah. No summer tournaments for me, no Waaaghfest. That's fine. I really need to visit my parents and brother after 3 years stuck in the US because of covid. It's time to return!
Hopefully the Renegade GT in November will be just as fun! I can't wait! Oh, and Horus Heresy too!
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