[Battle Report] Ultra Marines Last Longer With Calgar | Tenth Edition | Incursion | Only War | Necrons vs. Space Marines

"Execute the simulation again."

"If I might ask, Supreme Overlord: what is the point of this exercise?"

"If we are to uphold the good name of Kadavah, we will need a better show of tactical prowess than the embarrassment over which you presided. Trawling of sub-aether discourse indicate that these transhuman anomalies are designated 'The Greatest Of Them All, the Ultra Marines'. Thus: any victory against them can be replicated against other, inferior anomalies. Now. Execute the simulation again..."

 A return to the battlefields of M'erthyrod this month, this time engaging clubrunner Kraken and his Ultramarines. He's an old hand at second edition who's skipped basically everything between then and last year, and it shows, with Marneus Calgar and Tigurius showing up for an Incursion. 

I'm joshing. You bought that cool named character, you should play them, and to hell with the "pwetty pwease?" opponents-permission nonsense of the grimdark Middlehammer period.

Marneus Calgar and Victrix Bladeguard
Tigurius leading 10 Helblasters
10 Intercessors
3 Incursors (of the plasma variety)
Redemptor Dreadnought

Up front, I'll say that we got few rules wrong - Calgar has access to an innate "advance then shoot/charge" ability that would have made for a second turn with very different tempo, and I don't think we played Feel No Pain correctly either (I keep forgetting it's a save after your "proper" save, because I'm old and think "choose your single best saving throw" is quite enough to be getting on with). We also skipped a round of retaliative shooting from the Helblasters that might have made an impact. That said, the result is still... what it is.

I, meanwhile, was bringing the revised standard Kadavah Incursion Phalanx discussed in the previous calendar cycle. Deprived of a "home" objective for easy scoring I would have to push forward to accumulate points, and my plan was to press up one flank with the Distraction Skorpekhs, bully the central objectives with my Immortals, and fly the Night Scythe in turn two and drop its cargo of Warriors somewhere to open up a new front...

 It didn't quite work out like that. I spent too much time vacillating about exactly where to put the Scythe on the board so it could make its 20" minimum zip and safely deposit its cargo, and despite measuring multiple lanes of attack I still managed to beef it somehow. Instead of being dropped on the right hand objective, the Warriors ended up down here, within Rapid Fire range of an oncoming Calgar and his associates, but also in a position to be jumped and wiped out by the Intercessor squad, in a move which ultimately cost me control of the right hand side of the board. With the Incursors dropping down to claim the other objective there, the scoring turned against me by the bottom of round three.

That said, it wasn't a total disaster of a game. I was actually making Reanimation Protocols rolls instead of simply taking off an entire 200 point unit every turn, and these Immortals in particular proved stubborn as anything to shift. My melee units made contact with the enemy - a Skorpekh trio and a round of shooting from the Immortals ripped the Helblasters off the board, the Flayed Ones managed to finish off Calgar's bodyguard, and my Overlord stuck their voidscythe right up Calgar's Rubicon Primaris over a couple of rounds.

From a scoring perspective it was too little too late (the best I could have managed was a 6-9 defeat), especially since I didn't have a quick answer to the Dreadnought, but I feel the Necrons gave a better accounting of themselves, with every unit making a contribution of some sort to the three rounds we had time and inclination to play out. (Even the Skorpekh unit that died early on kept the Helblasters from shooting into the midfield for a couple of rounds - I just wish I'd put their counterparts in the middle where they could have messed up the Dreadnought a little.)

I also like this version of the army list more. The Night Scythe forces me to play more aggressively and press into the opponent's half of the board, and in theory I have a lot of redeployment potential between that and the Veil of Darkness. If I'd moved the Night Scythe straight up the middle and dropped my Warriors on the platform objective, or used the Veil of Darkness to reposition my Immortals away from Calgar instead of trying to kill him, the tempo of that second round might have been different and the points falling differently going into the third.

Heigh ho. You (un)live and (potentially) learn. Execute the simulation again...