Battle Report: Road to Glory Battle 1 - Orks

My orky opponent for the Road to Glory Campaign was kind enough to do a writeup of the first battle as seen from his side of the table. I think it's important to analyze the battles you lose even more than the battles you win. It's also interesting for me to see what my opponent's plan was and what they think the major turning points in the battle were.

So without further ado, here's the message of the day from the orks.

Pre-Battle Thoughts

My plan was to have superior mobility and use that to mass my forces on the enemy’s flank. In a 500 point game, if you can kill even one unit without many losses to yourself, that can stack things against your opponent in a way that’s very hard to fight back from. I ended up deploying first and was able to put my entire army on, despite Dawn of War deployment restrictions. I placed everything in the center, as close to the opposing table edge as possible. My vehicles were close enough for the opponent to be able to walk on and shoot at them, but Mega-Nobz and a 12-man Boyz unit would not make it across the board if they were forced to walk from further away, so I just hoped that the Battle-Wagon at least would resist the first turn salvo. After that, rush toward whatever’s toughest, kill it early and hope that my opponent has a harder time whittling away my forces without their ace unit.

Then the battle happened.

Post-Battle Thoughts

Drat. Both vehicles were stunned on the first turn; no moving or shooting, so my slow-and-purposeful Mega-Nobz and small Boyz mob would have to walk from the half-way point. Fortunately, it was turn two so the waaagh helped me get some of them across. I prioritized the Daemon Prince because of its deadliness and mobility. I did manage to kill it, though my Boyz were also killed. With just Mega-Nobz left, chaos had no problem out-pacing me. The Mega-Nobz did survive a lot of shooting, but this wasn’t a kill-point game. I think if I was to summarize my mistakes, it would be that I was trying to play a 500 pt Objectives match as though it were 1500 pts. With so few units, running away or at least keeping 50% of my forces back should’ve ranked higher on my battle strategy list. Instead I attacked like an Ork ought to, and the Chaos Space Marines were all-too-ready.