Taking Host In Burningham

New Burningham, ready for razing

It’s been a while boys n' gals of the DzC community! After the busyness of the last few months, I decided to take a sabbatical from games in general for a couple of weeks, a time to refresh you might say. In fact, I would say. Because I did. So yeh.

Anyway, the expo. Wow. It was just buckets of awesome. Maybe around thirty, to thirty one buckets worth of sludgy, liquid awesomeness (that’s a lot of awesomeness for those of you un-familiar with awesomeness measurement). It was very literally everything it was billed to be; two and a half solid days of gaming!

I do have one small regret from the weekend though, which ironically was competing in the Dropzone tournament. Weird, for someone who lives and breathes DzC right? It’s not that I didn’t have good games, and it’s really nothing to do with my placement (which was 5^th in the end, even though I won all my games. I think we worked out in the MSS I would have won, but I would be a hypocrite to moan about that). It was that I just perhaps felt like I should be doing something else; maybe a little roleplaying, perhaps a smidgen of playtesting new games, possibly a dash of meeting new and interesting people. With so much going on around me, playing a game which I play week in and week out seemed like a bit like a misuse of time.

A quick pray to the Dice Gods helped my
Destroyers become crack objective searchers

Having said this, the tourney was terrific and had a great turnout of twenty two (I think in the end), and everybody brought their A-game. I had three tricky match ups, with Adam ‘First Wave’ Reeve’s Resistance in ToO (a duel Alex demo list), another Resistance army belonging to a gent who's name I don't remember, but who I'd instantly know by face in Ground Control+ (who’d have thought four units of Freeriders would be so good in that mission?!?) and Tech Boy’s PHR ‘kill the alien’ list in Secure the Flanks (six Helios are a nightmare to play against with Scourge!). Each of these builds were a hard counter to the mission or my list, so all things considered I’m happy with my outcome of the event. I made some good moves, some bad moves (especially in that first game, but that's what playing Blood Bowl Team Manager till 2:30 in the morning will do to you...), and had some good luck and bad luck, but I felt all tournament there was one glaring issue which I had to suffer through.

My list.

It's my own fault, I wanted to play with four Reavers, and actively ignored the mini-Dan in the back of my mind jumping up and down screaming 'YOU KNOW FOUR IS TOO MANY, THREE IS OPTIMAL YOU GIANT IDIOT!'. Mini-Dan is usually right, but he's a jerk so I decided not to listen and to go for something 'fun'. And four Reavers is fun, until you lose to one to AA from a Battle Bus, and suddenly you're down a sixth of your commited AT, and then you start to worry that your alpha strike won't be strong enough... It feels like someone has plucked a thread on your jumper, and is pulling and slowly unravelling it before you can cut it away. Maybe it's just me. I am Cautious Cates after all. Also I had too much AA, but I wasn't to know I would play two armies where it literally would have nothing do but shoot two Cyclones. That's the way of the draw!

A bit of a re-think is needed for September and Invasion. As cheeky as Stalkers can be, and boy are they cheeky, I miss my six Hunters being able to zip round a corner and blast the panties of my enemies. I really lacked speed and profile on the ground which can be a huge issue with focal point missions, and there are bound to be a few of those crop up in most tourneys. I also lacked demo, but I didn't really miss this as the opportunity to use it never really cropped up, and that's not really my style of play anyway.

Yeeeeeeeehaw!

AA posses a problem too. We predicted an increase in the amount of AA needed, and I still think this is correct, but I played three games where it just did nothing. Maybe I need to tone it down a little, but then I remember Shaltari, Scourge and UCM Air Wings and humph to myself. Tricky decisions to make for sure. I like the idea of six Reapers, but with the Vampires reportedly being an AA unit I think I'll wait before committing myself to anything.

All of these changes, however, will have to wait. This will be one of my last Scourge posts for the summer (sorry Jellyheads) as Fury Road Resistance are well and truly on the agenda. My first game with the death cult will be next week against Epitude Rusk (our newest member of the team, with his own blog- check it out! I will warn you though, it features heretical/un-pure games...) and I'll be rolling out a naughty Thunderstorm/Alexander list.

You can look forward to a Scourge unit overview (it's about time we did one) and also an epiphany I had one night after the expo, which is potentially very interesting. Very interesting indeed...