Battle Report: US Open 2023 Tacoma - Occultaris Campaign M4 - Tyranids

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After a crushing defeat that left their war materiel sabotaged, Faustus and his command had finally found the vaults and precious relics of Occultaris, but the way was blocked by xenos.

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Battle Report:

Ruleset: 2023 Tenth Edition Leviathan US Open Narrative Missions, Tyrannic War Crusade
Mission: Empty the Vaults

Points: 1000

Mission Objectives

At the end of each battle round, each player scores 5 VP for each of the following conditions:

• They control one or more objective markers.
• They control two or more objective markers.

At the end of each battle round, the player who controls the most objective markers also scores an additional 10 VP

My Forces:

+ Leaders +

• Primus Leo Exevio Faustus - Captain in Terminator Armour: Warlord - Enhancement: Artificer Armour, Crusade Relic: Artificer Weapon: Power Fist, Brutal Heirloom Storm Bolter

+ (Elites) +

• Squad Tourbillion - 5 man Terminator Squad: Teleport Homer, Power sword, Storm bolter, Assault cannon, 3x Chainfist, Power fist
• Squad Lazarus- 5 man Assault Squad w/ Jump Packs: Bolt Pistols, Chainswords, 1x Grav-pistol, 1x Power Fist
• Squad Uzziel - 5 man Tyrannic War Veterans: Boltguns, Bolt pistols, combat weapons

+ (Heavy Support) +

• Squad Nero - 5 man Devastator Squad: Power sword, plasma pistol, 3x Lascannon, Missile Launcher
• Land Raider One - Land Raider - Twin Heavy Bolter, 2x Godhammer Lascannons - Reinforced Superstructure

+ (Fast Attack) +

• "One Charlie" - Land Speeder Tornado: Heavy flamer, Multi-melta, Finely Balanced, Precise Multi-melta

Takeaways & Analysis

This was quite a punishing game for both sides, lots of units killed.  The mission "Auto-seal Protocols" are a bit of a let down though because whichever side gets their objective marker randomly removed is put at a disadvantage pretty hard.  I think the mission would be designed a lot better if it was an even removal of objectives that either progressively funnel you into the center, or to one of the sides.  As such, I lost out on the removal of the first objective and it was pretty hard to recover from that with only 1000 points of units.  

My opponent was still learning the game a bit so we were going a bit slow and only got to finish battle round 3.  Still it was a good game where we traded big monsters/vehicles and had a brawl in the center.

But Brother Sergeant Lazarus, last of his squad, will forever be remembered for throwing a melta grenade at the Malwoc that dealt 6 mortal wounds!  This day, 4536022.M42 will be marked on his service record!

Additionally, it was great to see Squad Uzziel, the Tyrannic War Veterans, be put to their maximum use.  They were quite effective when they were able to get into range to shoot, and actually they provided a lot of menace to my opponent, who actually elected to use the 'sabotaged' bonus against them from the faction victory from the previous game.  It might have been better off to have loaded them into the Land Raider and send them into the middle and then beam in the Terminators, but it was tricky with so few units to cover the objectives.

Also, I didn't capitalize so well on the focus fire from Oath of Moment with all of my big guns - but it was hard to do given the layout.  I was able to destroy several monsters, but he had 3 big shooty monsters to my one plus one shooty squad.

After finishing off the swarm of hormagaunts that wouldn't die I conceded since we ran out of time.  There wasn't much of a way to climb back through either points or killing everything: the Land Raider had died and he still had a lot of units.