Escalation Games

[Asuryan]

Who the hell are you playing D&D with where they try and play the biggest hardest characters? You have a DM in that game for a reason, any decent GM will stop a player from getting too powerful?

My GM lets players get as powerful as they want, and fixes it by throwing even stronger monsters at us.

[biffster666]

My bad Pssyche, I in no way meant to diminish the feat. Legendary among my Swordwind sir. I simply wanted to tip the cap without coming across as too much of a fanboy.

The local shop I frequent (Great Escape) will be hosting some Escalation/Stronghold Assault games as part of their open play night. The shop opens at 11am Pacific and I'll be setting up stuff shortly after they open. I'll be playing one of the managers this evening (probably starting between 6-7pm) but I'm sure we'll sneak in an additional game or two, heh heh. I'll post up a battle report and pictures. Based on the reaction when I started dropping stuff off yesterday it should be fun. Looking forward to meeting folks and chatting 40k.

Edit:

I forgot to mention before I head out, feel free to bring your own Escalation force down to the shop for a game! I'm looking forward to seeing some Chaos, Necron and Nid Lords of War!

12/28 Edit:

Wow, just wow. I'm already lagging but I wanted to send a special shout out to Darklink, SomeRandomDude, and Mr. Necron of GE for making it most definitely an epic first Escalation at GE. Darklink can correct me if I'm wrong, but I swear in the span of less than 15min we went from 3500 and then Mr. N says "oh no" as he plops down The "Rev", Cobra, and four Wraithknights and we jump to 6k, no 7.5k, nah 10k!

Anyway, 18ft and 10k a side later...

Iron Hands vs. Eldar (with a splash of AWESOME looking Darklink Draigo wing, don't be a sad panda they got squished!!)

Highlights to follow later today, I gotta get rolling!

[biffster666]

Before I head back to GE I wanted to give one more shout out to the two dudes from Fairfield who stopped by...Post some of those pictures of your Orks dude, they are awesome! Also a shout out to the dude who helped me get stuff into GE yesterday, I owe you a game against your Necron with a T. Ctan! I meant to get some contact info so definitely PM me dudes.

[biffster666]

Greetings again folks. It was kewl to chat more 40k with folks as I started to get things organized so we can start finding our stride this coming Friday. My high level impressions from the last two days.

I'm lucky enough to be in an area that has a large/huge 40k community. 40k is full on generational now. Pretty much the universal comment I got from people after Friday night was "Dude, that was awesome." Ran into SomeRandom and was finally able to chat with him about the game and not just respond "I know! I know!" when he was telling me how awesome army wide FnP and It Will Not Die for the Iron Hands is, heh heh.

Highlights from the game include...

The Rev went down in turn one HARD without firing a shot. I'll let Darklink or SomeRandom go into detail if they'd like since I was 12ft away at the time but it was not a case of Some Random just D'ing it up. As Mr. Necron put it, the Fire Raptor just flew around conducting weapons tests. SomeRandom ramming the Cobra with one of the Land Raiders! A Falcon, 2 squads of Wraithguard and a squad of Guardians being reduced to 3 Guardians and 2 Wraithguard with a quake shell, heh heh. The left 9ft being all kinds of vehicles and mech and the right 9ft being HORDES of Eldar infantry. At the end I was a giggling mess and Mr. Necron (Big Tourney player) is starting to total up kill pts/objectives (he blew up a lot of stuff turn 2, heh heh) and Darklink/SomeRandom have this "what the heck are you talking about?" look on their faces...we happily called it a draw :-)

I still see that 'The Machine" is still feasting on the doom/gloom that 'Tourney play is DOOMED!!!'...it's not, not even close, but more on that in a different thread. A few parting shots...

[DarkLink]

Nice one, Biffster!
What a pity most people slated Escalation without giving it a go.

Superheavies are fine. Str D is a problem, because it just hard-counters any army that doesn't spam infantry (Grey Knights, Deathwing, Land Raiders, vehicle heavy lists, etc), but if you dropped it to Str 10 AP1 Ignores Cover Ordinance or the like, the game would go perfectly smoothly. But just for reference, on my side of the board Str D from the Cobra and Aquila Stronghold thingie killed a unit of Centurions, a Storm Raven, like four Land Raiders, a Revenant (which never got to shoot, or else there would have been much more death), half the hull points on a Warhound, killed 3 Wraithknights, half the unit of Paladins in one shot, an Autarch with the Mantle of the Laughing God, a couple Hornets, a couple War Walkers, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting about.

The Cobra is 675pts, the Stronghold is like 600. That 1300pts killed, in three turns, roughly 4,000pts. The Warhound, on the other hand, was armed with a Plasma Blastgun and Vulkan Megabolter, still killed a lot of stuff, but without the D it killed about what you would expect a 750pt unit to kill. Some Paladins, a few Eldar skimmers, a couple units of Dire Avengers. Pretty reasonable. Tough to kill, but reasonable.

[somerandomidiot]

Definitely an enjoyable game! The STR D on Link's and my side of the table was definitely a force of destruction! I felt like the Warhound Titan with Plasma/Megabolter performed really well, and wasn't nearly as dominant as the STR D. (that, or your invisible warp spiders... those things are maddening when you've got a HUGE piece of terrain to jump around)

[DarkLink]

Warp Spiders are indeed awesome. I was pretty suprised when I added up just how much the cobra and the aquila stronghold killed in so few turns, too.

[biffster666]

I kept looking at SomeRandomDude for like 10 minutes after typing it saying "That's not right dumb***" Yeah, I use the word 'dude' A LOT, heh heh.

We'll definitely scale it back into the 2500-3500pt range the next go around so there will be more method to the madness. The next time we go 10k+ per side it will be an actual Apoc game. It's coming!

[somerandomidiot]

Bring it on! The Mechanicus will gladly assist the Iron Hands whenever the need arises (especially against the filthy Eldar...)!

[Big_Bad12]

Thanks for the insight. I am running a 2500/3000 point game of escalation/stronghold assault tomorrow and would like to get something of an idea as to how it may go over.