[Battle Report] They Came From Beneath The Sea | Eleventh Edition | Dominatus, Incursion | Necrons vs. Space Marines

 It began late at night, perhaps ninety minutes after sunset.

On a clear, warm night, the shorefront would still be busy, with young lovers and old friends, with late-openings at the recreatoria and commissary alike, with canid-walkers and constitution-enjoyers and the occasional brave late-night surfer. One of them might have seen doom coming, walking slowly out of the waves, and an alarm might have been raised, and what transpired might not have been as it was.

On this night, with a chill in the air and rain pattering and blattering down on sand and sea and good firm rockcrete alike, the shorefront was as good as deserted. There was no alarm. When death came, metal-formed and skull-masked, out of the surf and the rain, nobody saw it coming.

By dawn, three hundred and seventy-three thousand people, by and large, had witnessed death. Kasr Dydd had been, in the strict classical sense of the word, decimated.

But with the dawn came salvation, in the form of the Emperor's Angels, and the war for Verwunveld began in earnest.

Sworn Hunters Agenda: Loot & Scoot

The emergent Necrons have, as is their way, begun methodically slaughtering the population of Kasr Dydd as they advance out of the ocean. Eleven hours after the first shots were fired, the Sworn have arrived to secure the shorefront and evacuate any survivors.

(Occupy buildings, protect their occupants while you drive off the attackers. Action, loot counters, big scores at the end.)

Nephrak Dynasty Agenda: Vital Strongpoint

If it were not enough that the primary tomb complex of Corus has sunk beneath the ocean, the humans appear to have built one of their loathsome little warrens atop it. Capture the shorefront, remove the vermin, and clear the ground for the awakening.

(Occupy objectives, but only the ones in enemy territory count. Seizing their home will force a retreat and is worth distinctly more. It might have been sensible for me to look at this before choosing a force mostly composed of infantry, or to have looked up the warzone bonuses and discovered I could Rapid Ingress for free and Ingress early if I felt like it.)

Events

The greater part of the Necron infantry amass on the left flank, intending to roll up the firing lane it represented and clear out the Incursors and Intercessors on holding duty. In this, the thought went, they would be supported by the Tomb Blades and Lokhust Heavy Destroyers currently en route from their messy work elsewhere in the city, who'd be enjoying substantial bonuses to hit on the turn they arrived.

A more token holding force of Warriors sets up on the right flank, enough to Secure an objective or two and - I had hoped - keep the early-drop Scouting Reivers occupied.

Greed, however, got the better of me, and I thought "if I move my Warriors up I can get almost all of them into range, the ones at the front can even Rapid Fire!" That killed all of one Reiver, and a 7" charge meant the Reivers could quite happily kill all but one Warrior, who suddenly felt very lonely on that side of the field. 

He did manage to reanimate an entire friend, fall back, and leave space for the Tomb Blades to arrive and murder another seven Astartes, but further greed elsewhere left my Gauss Immortals with no clear shot and my Tesla Tomb Blades on the wrong side of the nearby forcefield projector, reduced to tickling Intercessors.

This self-inflicted fallow turn would prove to be the Moment That Lost The Game, since the Reivers were able to chill out and score for the duration, while Talassar Kaine and the Assault Intercessors did what they do best, i.e. drop an unnecessary amount of attacks into single wound Necron infantry and delete them without a second thought.

Sans Immortals I was reduced to bringing my Heavy Destroyers on from reserve in the back line, grabbing Garbutt's home objective, and picking up some Intercessors so I could tag his expansion too. 

The pistol-packing Marines up front weren't quite fast enough to chase down the Skyshroud portion of my forces, so after accounting for Szeras they proceeded to rescue every civilian he'd been doing SCIENCE with and call it a day.

Scores on the doors weren't drastically separate until the end-of-game conditions kicked in, and Garbutt swept to a near-perfect game with four out of five "looted" survivors in his hands. That said, the Necrons had broken through the cordon and secured a route out of the city, so it wasn't a complete debacle: Agenda achieved, even if mission failed.