Ok, here we go. Again, my camera died as I was trying to take a picture of this table at the start of this match. So, I'm sorry but you will just have to make do with a picture of my opponent's army. Here you can find my opponent's army list. He's the Nids player with Swarmlord listed as my Round 2 opponent.
The mission was essentially "your house, my house," with each player putting multiple objectives in their opponent's deployment area. You had to get to your objectives (on the other side of the board) to win.
Cool.
Swarmlord, the Carnifexes and the Trygon set up centrally. The Mawlok started in reserve. The Ravenors were set up on his right (my left) along with the Warriors and the larger unit of Genestealers. The other unit of Genestealers were set up on his left (my right) in cover.
I took the first turn as I recall. I started by putting 4 Multimelta shots into the Trygon from the Longfang Pack, and dropping a Jaws Line on a Carnifex. The Carnifex died and the Trygon took several wounds. I then put enough additional Krak Missiles into the Trygon to take it off the table.
Note: At this point NONE of his monstrous creatures had cover, from each other, from terrain, or from other critters. None.
My Lone Wolves advanced forward through my home side ruins and my Thunderwolf Cavalry moved up and angled slightly towards my right aiming for his Genestealers in his right deployment corner.
On his turn my opponent, still reeling from the initial bloody nose, started to move BACKWARDS and to his right. His Carnifex and Swarmlord retreated around behind his home side ruin. His Ravenors moved up to the midfield line (again on my far left side), and his Harpy jumped out directly ahead of them and dropped a TL Stranglethorn Cannon AND a Cluster Spines shot onto one of my Wolf Guard units. I lost 3 Wolf Guard but made both my Morale and Pinning checks. Whew.
I knew he was baiting me with the Harpy, his Ravenors were in easy assault range behind it. But I figured that was ok. So I moved one of my TWC and one of my Lone Wolves up to within assault range of the Harpy.
My shooting this turn saw me take the Harpy off the board without even charging it. I believe I killed the second Carnifex as well this turn. That left the Swarmlord and his Tyrant Guard, the Genestealers, the Ravenors and the Warriors.
His turn 2 the Mawlok came on. It scattered wide and hit nothing. I was a bit sad by this as I was really hoping the Mawlok would om-nom-nom something and give my opponent a moral victory. My army was chock-full of nice targets for a Mawlok hit. The Swarmlord reversed direction again and started to move forward into midfield. He was in a good position to threaten both of my objectives once I went for them.
The big kicker was when he gave Furious Charge to his unit of Ravenors and charged my Lone Wolf and my Thunderwolf Cavalry on my left. Ouchy. This is something I have been thinking about for a while and seeing it in action cemented my belief that it is solid. 25 attacks rerolling all misses and hitting on Strength 5. My Thunderwolf went down hard, but the Lone Wolf weathered the attacks with 2+ armor and 2 successful Feel No Pain rolls, holding them in place. The Thunderwolf killed one or two Ravenors with his Chainfist.
I had to use most of my shooting to take down the Mawlok. I also threw a couple of frag missiles into his Genestealers (on my right side) who were about to get charged by one of my Thunderwolves, just in case. I think I took down three of them. My Wolf Guard began to move up towards the objectives so that I could reach them by the end of the game.
On the left side of the board my Lone Wolf was still killing Ravenors. On the right I charged his genestealers with one of my Thunderwolves and succesfully cleared that objective. I had a Wolf Guard unit getting pretty close to it by now, but Swarmy was coming.
On his turn his Ravenors finally killed my Lone Wolf and were left standing in front of my left side guns. Not a great place for him to be.
Over the next few turns the battle was essentially over, but played out like this:
I needed my guns available to take down the Genestealers and Warriors that were coming in on my left. As a result I threw two Lone Wolves and Two Thunderwolf Cavalry into the Swarmlord. I succesfully kept him tied up even with his crazy "fuck your Stormshield" rules for a while but ultimately had to throw Logan and friends into the mix, because I knew that he was going to be getting out of combat at the end of my assault phase if I didn't throw some more bodies into the meat-grinder. That would have allowed him to consolidate and then assault into my Wolf Guard squad on the objective, and taken the game from a win to a draw.
In the end I was able to kill everything and with (relatively) minor losses.
Basically everything that I expect to lose every game, I lost: my Lone Wolves, my Cavalry, and Logan.
Everything I like to keep alive, I did: My Wolf Guard Units, my Longfangs and my Rune Priest.
Lessons learned for me: My army is almost unfairly good against this kind of a Nids list. It doesn't hurt that my opponent was clearly unfamiliar with what Wolves are capable of and made some bad mis-steps during the game.
I think it's far more interesting to talk about "lessons learned" from the Nid players perspective. We'll do that in a bit here.
