That old cliché, that you learn more about your army by losing than winning applied to me yesterday. Except at no point was I losing. I was either drawing, ahead or drawing. It just felt like I lost.
The reason I say this is because I had one unit left, approximately 10% of my points, against my opponent who had about 70% of his left. After turn one, I had already lost 33% of my army, and so my strategy changed from trying to win, to trying not to lose through turns 2-4 while working towards winning through the back door in turn 5. The sole reason I got a draw was because I was playing to win the set game we had, which was four objectives roughly in a diamond shape,
This was the first outing for my Daemons of Chaos army, using around 98% fully painted models. My opponent used regular marines, but boosted by two Null zones and an army that was tailored for fighting daemons. He had absolutely zero ranged anti tank fire and only one ranged weapon above strength 5. Most armies would have had an easy ride, but mine was a fully foot daemon army with no real protection from Null Zone.
Now I could complain and say that taking Null zone against daemons is bad form and taking two is even worse. However it is a valid option within his codex. This made me think what could I do to counter such units should they reappear in a subsequent game. I also wrote out the whole battle, in a battle report format, for the other members of my gaming group who were absent.
Just taking the time to write down what happened and what I did, allowed me some insight into how my units performed in exceptionally difficult circumstances. It showed that I needed to have some faster moving units in my list. Units that I had either ignored completely, or not been convinced they would add any value to my list. I had made a couple of massive mistakes, that had I won easily, I would be counting as brilliant tactical moves. I had run the numbers in my head before making the concious decision to put all my toughness 5 and 6 models in my first wave, and all my toughness 3 and 4 models in the second. The plan was to drop in, survive a round of shooting, then tie up the enemy until the second half of my army, consisting of mostly troops choices came in to grab the objectives.
As it turns out the one in three chance the wrong half turns up happened. I was stuck with a bunch of easy to kill and expensive models, who virtually all got hosed down on turn one after they deep struck For the entire game, I was playing with two thirds of the points of my opponent. So what to do in the future? Well there is a lot of different things, all of which seem to be a lot better now in hindsight. I could have landed my troops at the back of my deployment zone, weathered a vastly reduced amount of fire, and waited for some of my other units to come down. I could also have deep struck my units all onto one small section of the board, which was my original plan, until the large units came down on the first wave and I didn't want them scattering onto each other.
These two mistakes early cost me the game. I can complain all day long about it being the two Null Zones in operation the entire game, and yes, they didn't help. But neither did me losing most of my army before it could do a single thing.
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