A teacher of mine at junior school told me once of the 6P principle – proper planning prevents pathetically poor performances. Unfortunately, the officer commanding the Neotian Saints did not prepare well and the performance was, well, predictable.
My first big mistake was putting my Tank Commander – a Leman Russ with the Hammer of Sunderance – front and centre. It was destroyed immediately by a charging Helbrute. Until the Greater Good came out, I was in the habit of running a Tank Commander with a Punisher gatling gun, which has a ran of 24″ and so it would generally sit there to deal with any infantry rushing up the board (or, frankly, with forty gatling gun shots and nine heavy bolter rounds, anything at all rushing up the board). As currently equipped with the Hammer of Sunderance, though, it has a range of 72″. It can reach across most of the battlefield and blow stuff up from a great distance. Given the investment in points and that I was planning to pour command points in to make maximum use of the big gun on top, losing it first turn was a big blow.
That leads me on to the second and third points. One is that I didn’t have a backup plan for losing such a bit asset. There’s no good way or time to lose something so valuable, but it’s likely to happen. The other is that I really didn’t think in advance how I could spend my big stack of command points. Part of that is that I forgot to bring my reference cards – it sounds stupid, but having a stack of cards is a big help and rushing around to get ready to head out meant that I forgot to bring them. Even so, I should have had an idea of what I was going to be spending them on and, indeed, what I could spend them on. Normally, I wouldn’t use the stratagem to automatically pass morale tests as it wasn’t worth the CP, but it changes when you’re halfway through a battle and you still have eight left.
My opponent did well, aside from some confusion with the rules, and both made the opening and then took advantage of it. The Armoured Sentinels performed well again. I needed to move them and a line of infantry forward more aggressively; I lost the match 13-4 because I wasn’t taking the objective markers (obviously). I’m going to need to rethink how I’m deploying at the start of the game. All the above said, my troops held on pretty well. The Scions didn’t last that long – I may actually start with them on the board and see how they do instead of dropping them in from orbit.
I have a friendly game before round 2 of the tournament, so I’ll try tweaking a few things.