Slow, slow, slow, quick

Well, apart from this, I made a couple of really stupid errors this week that, although they didn't cost us the game, left us playing catch-up form very early on. Having said that a 10-5 win where two of the opposition kill points came from Lone Wolves that were still alive can't be too bad. In fact, had the game gone another turn, we wouldn't have been that far away from tabling Andy and Graham. However, one of the reasons I started this blog was so that I could point out my mistake, no matter how trivial, in an attempt to learn from them.

Long Fang Placement

Now, in my mind the Space Wolves work better as a proactive army rather than a reactive one but I was still happy enough to give up first turn as it would force Andy into making a decision on where to place his Drop Pod Dreadnought. In Warhammer 40,000, the more decisions you force your opponent to make, the more likely they'll make the wrong one. Andy placed his Drop Pod very sensibly though as he figured I'd wan the hill to place my Long Fangs on. How right he was. The week before, I'd had no raised terrain at all and my Long Fangs hadn't been their normal game changing selves. Still, I figured with two Land Speeders, a Lascannon Razorback and an Assault Cannon Razorback I'd be able to take out the Dreadnought my Long Fangs would be kings of the hill. Was it a risk? Clearly it was. In retrospect I should have placed them on the right flank where they would still have had a good view of the battlefield but the Dreadnought wouldn't have bothered them.

Land Speeders

I had some severe difficulties when I first started using Land Speeders but until recently I'd been having some success with them. Okay, the Baal Predator coming on in turn 2 and on the left flank was unlucky, but in 40K you have to try and mitigate luck as best you can. It was also pretty stupid of me to try and speed down my flank and attack the Squats on the hill as they were bound to take me out before the Speeder got there. The problem was that I'd deployed the Land Speeders to take out the Dreadnought instead of deploying them with their real target in mind - the Land Raider. Multimeltas are the best way to take out AV14 and with 12" move and 12" Melta range, you've got a 24" threat bubble. I think I've said before that it's important to have a plan for every unit and to try and stick to that plan. When I wrote my list the Speeders were to take out AV14 but because of my hill obsession, I deployed them badly and they did practically nothing all game.

So that was 2 of the kill points we conceded. The thing is, if I put my Long Fangs on the right and we'd have put the two Rune Priests in the middle, the Long Fangs would probably have taken out the Airship (S8 against AV12 would have meant more pens and less glances) while the Rune Priest could have cast Living Lighting against the Squats with heavy weapons (and, since they blew up the Razorback, we wouldn't have lost any kill points - gotta love theoryhammer)

On the other side of the table, I have to say that I'm still not convinced that the Squats are killy enough to be honest. Andy's hammer unit were unlucky to lose a couple of members to a stray Plasma Cannon shot and I don't think his Librarian got a power off all game (more power to Michael for making all of those 4+ rolls. I still don't think I've made one since I started playing again)

Still, it felt like once we'd gotten a foothold in the game, there would only be one winner. To be honest though, we had a one man Long Fang pack, a two man Grey Hunter squad and an immobilised Land Speeder (ignoring the fact it should have been destroyed as per previous post)left at the end of the game so that should really have been 3 more kill points conceded. Also, we had a three man Grey Hunter pack and three Rhinos whose paint jobs weren't even scratched. Annihilation is a tricky mission though, it's about finding that balance between racking up the kill points an stopping your enemy doing the same. We Immobilised the Dreadnought, destroyed the Predator and stunned the Airship pretty much all game so I feel that we did the latter and once the enemy gets into that 12"-24" sweet spot, there's no escape from the jaws of the wolf.