The weather in the UK has been a bit warm, you might have heard. The club where I would get my more competitive games has no Air Con 

 

So I only got one more practice game in this week against Necrons. In brief

 

Kroot vs Necrons (Recon vs Take and Hold)

 

Turn 1 and 2

 

I rolled to go first (I would rather go second in this mission but its fine) and I set up to play a game of spreading my opponent out. Infiltrate put Farstalkers on both expansion objectives and scout moved up units to reinforce them. I started throwing chaff out into table quarters to score

 

The necrons did what they do which is refuse to die while only being moderately killy themselves. On turn 2 they drew A Tempting Target and I chose the expansion objective off to the flank where the C'tan was. This successfully lured the C'tan out wide on the table

 

Turn 3

 

My go turn. I jumped out a lot of krootox riders and rampagers and went to work on the central objective, taking off the Reanimator and the big block of warriors with buffing character. I jumped out on his backline to play my usual snatching game on his home objective with both kroot and vespid. 

 

The necrons are eating my my kroot pretty steadily but now they are struggling to hold onto their scoring long enough. My units keep blocking his movement so his C'tan cannot get into a better position.

 

Turns 4 & 5

I blow it on the Beacon secondary because I drew it when I had no Vespid on the table. Oops. I could have scored small on this but got greedy and ended up scoring nothing. I had a tricky choice between spreading my attacks to deny him primary while attacking the C'tan or going all in on the C'tan - I spread me attacks and fell 2 wounds short of getting Bring it Down on the C'tan because he used the strat to regenerate midway between activations. Sigh

 

The Necron player is killing my stuff well enough but is also running out of units. By turn 5 he has a doomsday ark, the C'tan and his big blob of Canoptek Wraiths - I have killed everything else and am move blocking him from good secondary scores with those.

 

Lessons learned

 

Outside of the scoring I realised as I was playing that I am not fluent enough with the Piranhas. They slow my thinking down, they fill whole staging areas and complicate my movement as a result. I can't afford anything that slows me down and might cause me to clock out.

 

The decision to restrict his scoring and gamble on still taking down the C'tan did not work but also I took 8VP off him with that for the loss of 5VP to me. So not a disaster. It was an interesting tactical decision to make and I had to go with gut feeling. It did hurt me on turn 5 when the  C'tan wrecked stuff but I think he only scored what he was always going to score on that turn.

 

So I return to things I feel more fluent with and can play almost on instinct. Shadowsun because she has CP gen and  lone op and more Vespid because they are consistently all-stars for me. Rather than post the detailed list I'm going to post my hobby progress pictures. I have been touching up models, fixing up basing issues and magnetising all of the bases so I can put them in magnetised tray boxes for much easier access in the tournament. I have plenty of KR cases but I have always found those spiky kroot awkward in any sort of foam case. Magnets are the way 

 

The attached album shows the full army all ready to go. In short it is

Shadowsun

3 Lone spears

2 War Shapers

6 x 10 Carnivores

2 x Farstalkers

2 x Pathfinders (one Ion one Rail)

Kroot hounds x5 and x10

3 x 3 Krootox Riders

2 x 3 Rampagers

Vespid  2 x 5 and 1 x 10

 

I only really present 2 target profiles to an opponent here

 

Mid-sized targets T5/6 W5/6 5++

Chaff targets T3 with 4+ or 5++

 

Lots of Stealth. Everything has one of Scout, Infiltrate or Uppy-downy Deep Strike. Everything. My key buffing units are all lone op.

 

Any weapons not good into those profiles are just not good against me. Anti-tank is wasted points and I will give no priority to removing it. This is what I spent 10th playing and I just feel very relaxed playing this.

 

And that is it. I hope to get at least one more practice game but the list is now submitted and I don't intend to change it. Time matters, chess clocks are a thing, I need to play what I feel relaxed and easy playing rather than do what might be better in theory but I lack practice time to get that fluency with.