A Hard Day at the Fail Factory | Reflections on a losing streak

So this weekend, I played a "test game" against Young Apprentice's Thousand Sons. We both wanted to try out some competition-type lists in a competition-type game, in the hopes that at least one of us wouldn't eat dirt with a wooden spoon in our next encounter.

How it started.

 

How it's going.
The Necrons on the bottom left are the "dead pile."
The Scarab Occult Terminators on the bottom right are very much not dead.

It wasn't a complete failure - I did pick up two units of Rubric Marines, an Exalted Sorcerer, Ahriman and one of the two Daemon Princes in evidence - but I'd been left with no effective answers to the two big lads and the Thousand Sons cleaned up my reinforcements on the turn they arrived. 

As usual, I can spot the individual things I did wrong.

1. I didn't adequately protect my Monolith from the Knight Tyrant, and lost it on turn one.
2. I subsequently forgot I had a Detachment Rule at all and didn't correct any matchups in my favour (swapping the two Immortal units around and getting my Skorpekhs somewhere upfield on the top left would have been Ideas).
3. I didn't know the Knight Tyrant had a 12" you may not Strategic Reserve near my enormous base bubble, which kept the Void Dragon out of effective range.
4. I didn't touch enough divots because I had it in my head that I could score at the end when I'd cleaned up enough Sons to make a push viable.

It's that last point about the divots that I want to investigate further. See, I've been losing a lot recently: my last six games have all been defeats, and as much as I enjoy being the designated heel, the cartoon villain, the antagonist not the deuteragonist and so on... it's getting a bit depressing. Army lists cannot be the problem as I've been changing those up: there has to be something in how I'm playing, not what I'm using, that's consistently messing me up.

When I look at this scoresheet in detail, I see we were pretty close on secondary objectives and it's the primary where I visibly fell apart. Going back to review the tournament scores from last week reveals a similar pattern: acceptable scoring on secondaries and challenger cards, but next to no presence on the primary objectives.

Then it occurred to me to investigate the games I'd won, and correlate the observation. Depressingly enough, the same was true of those games - Crusade missions where a last-minute surge from an end-of-game objective was possible, which at least explains where my understanding of How To Win Games came from. Primary scoring was minimal for both sides, maybe one divot or two here and there, probably reflecting the smaller size of the games themselves.

Then I looked at my Crusade defeats and - yep, two missions where there was only one primary objective with progressive scoring. Very, very clear where the skill issue lies. I clearly understand the essentials of divot touching, but I'm having execution problems.

To figure out what those are, let's look at the patterns in when I score and see if there's anything interesting there. There's a minimal score on turn two, and a peak in turn three or four, followed by a collapse into nil points. By contrast, my opponents are taking big leads in the second round. This says, to me, that I'm not making decisive enough moves in turn one, not getting my bodies onto points to score or contest objectives at the first opportunity. If I go first, I need to get out there and score first. If I go second, I still need to get out there to deny scoring and be in an effective position to clear things off so I can pick points up in my turn. (mem. sel. Heroic Intervention is a stratagem that exists, use it.)

Deep Strike won't do it: in Matched Play you can't bring on Reserves until the movement phase of turn two, after the scoring. Good for a comeback, not great for establishing a lead. Infiltrators aren't the answer - all I have access to are Flayed Ones and, with the greatest of respect to them, they occupy a space for long enough to get something else in behind them, and die. Scouts? Scouts are a possibility. I have a trio of Triarch Stalkers, and the game in which I was at my most decisive early on ever was with three of those in Starshatter Arsenal. Beyond that, bullying forward and... yes, the least worst scoring game at Molten Crown was the one where I had Warriors gritting their teeth on the middle point.

And now, with those thoughts in mind, we can turn our attention to the army list itself. Here's what I have in mind.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+ FACTION KEYWORD: Xenos - Necrons
+ DETACHMENT: Hypercrypt Legion
+ TOTAL ARMY POINTS: 2000pts
+
+ WARLORD: Overlord with Translocation Shroud
+ ENHANCEMENT: Arisen Tyrant (on Char4: Plasmancer)
& Hyperspatial Transfer Node (on Char5: Royal Warden)
+ NUMBER OF UNITS: 16
+ SECONDARY: Bring It Down: (4x2) + (1x6) | Assassination: 6 Characters | Cull The Horde: 1x5
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CHARACTER

1x Chronomancer (65 pts)

1x Hexmark Destroyer (75 pts)

1x Overlord with Translocation Shroud (85 pts)
• Warlord

1x Plasmancer (80 pts)
• Arisen Tyrant (+25 pts)

1x Royal Warden (65 pts)
• Hyperspatial Transfer Node (+15 pts)

1x Skorpekh Lord (90 pts)

BATTLELINE

10x Immortals (150 pts)
    • 10x Tesla carbine

20x Necron Warriors (200 pts)
    • 20x Gauss reaper

OTHER DATASHEETS

2x Cryptothralls (60 pts)

3x Ophydian Destroyers (80 pts)
  • Plasmacyte

6x Skorpekh Destroyers (180 pts)
  • 2x Plasmacyte

1x Canoptek Doomstalker (140 pts)

1x Monolith (400 pts)
• 4x Death ray

1x Triarch Stalker (110 pts)
• 1x Heat ray

1x Triarch Stalker (110 pts)
• 1x Heavy gauss cannon array

1x Triarch Stalker (110 pts)
• 1x Heavy gauss cannon array 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

The Royal Warden, Plasmancer and Cryptothralls join the Immortals, creating a slightly beefier unit which is guaranteed a 6" advance and thus a 35" threat range on turn one. The Overlord and Chronomancer have similar effects on the Warrior unit, which will have to choose between advancing and shooting but will move after it shoots. The Stalkers, all else being equal, can Scout into a decent firing lane and threaten up to 40" away if they move full pelt (realistically, if I'm hiding them when I set them up, it's more like 32"). 

All of which means I have no excuse to not move forward: that's the gimmick I've built into here, and I don't need to castle up on my home objective and cover the midfield with Overwatch threat: I need to castle up on the middle objective and cover everything with Overwatch threat.

That's a plan worth testing out at some point. 

Now. If you're worried about this recent detour into Sweat Country, have no fear. Comrade Garbutt and I have been discussing the next steps in our Narrative, and found terms from which we might be able to approach Crusade again. With our rosters realigned and dud abilities rejigged by mutual assent, and with New Recruit now supporting a Crusade roster that actually includes all your bells and whistles in one document, we have high hopes of being able to play the bloody thing. We'll talk about that later, assuming that nothing else... exciting... comes up in the meantime.