Road to Apocalypse: 6. Reflections of a Warboss
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| I'm FINKING!!!!!! |
That Meat Grinder mission felt brutal.... our Council of Warbosses discussed it afterward, and we all felt like the battle was going pretty well. The Orks were largely in control of the objectives, we'd killed off a fair number of the enemy. We probably weren't going to win after our Super Heavies exploded and took out most of the Deffskullz, but for the score to end up as 8-4 didn't really seem to reflect how we felt the battle had gone. It felt like a draw or a narrow loss, rather than the Marines getting double our score! So what went wrong?
I think that Orks have a really tough match-up against Space Marines in Apocalypse. The Marine shooting is so effective compared to ours - everything on base 3+ to hit, easily boosted to 2+ on Aimed Fire orders (which is possible from Turn 1 because everything is starting within 24"). And on top of that they have plenty of characters buffing them with re-rolling 1's or re-rolling misses. They can start pouring highly effective fire onto our troops straight away, whereas we have to be quite kunnin' to pull off a first turn charge - either through lucky Stompa deployment or picking Da Jump psychic power. All the time they are pouring accurate firepower onto the Orks, they have a chance of putting a few blast markers on here and there, even with low strength weapons.
Then that leads to the next Ork problem - morale. All it takes is one or two blast markers on a unit in the first turn, and the Orks are likely to fail their leadership test and take additional damage from morale. Conversely, I don't remember the Marines failing a single morale check in all the Apocalypse games we've been playing. Yeah, that's good and fluffy as they are the Emperor's Chosen and all that, but it does seem pretty tough on the Orks to have no way to avoid your units just bleeding away.
Of course, we have the numbers. Who cares if that unit of weedy Grots runs away, we've always got more of them, and here comes some Meganobz too! That's great, it's the Ork way - life is cheap, there's always more, why send one Dredd when three would do. We can choke the objectives with bodies and still give the enemy a good kicking when they get close enough. But that doesn't work in Meat Grinder. Because it is counted in 'number of units destroyed', it is easy for the Marines to kill off some chaff units that don't matter, but end up killing more units in the turn so getting the points for that. And, in this mission, they get 2 VP per turn for doing that. It's quite brutal when controlling the objectives only gives 1 VP.
In this particular game, 1 VP is also awarded per Super Heavy that is destroyed. To my surprise, Gorkanauts and Morkanauts are 'Super Heavy'... some other units that are just as big don't seem to have the same keyword. Likewise, the Impulsor Primaris Tank doesn't have the Super Heavy keyword, but the firepower it can dish out is obscene, and definitely comparable to some Super Heavy vehicles. It wouldn't matter, but because of the VPs awarded for destroying Super Heavies, the Space Marines have an opportunity to get a few more points by focusing their fire on our walkers - and the Gorkanaut isn't particularly survivable (and also suffers from the morale issues mentioned above). It almost feels like including the Super Heavies in this sort of mission is giving the Marines more targets to get VPs from... but what is Apocalypse without huge vehicles?
Funnily enough, in the previous mission against Tris (4. Junkyard Brawl), my use of big walkers really worked well for me. He struggled to deal with them. Perhaps he would have done better to focus some of his small arms fire on the smaller walkers, as just a few blast markers on a Deff Dredd can take it out. But that game did feel a bit like he had brought a knife to a gun fight, particularly once the Stompa had chopped up his Hellhammer. I think he felt that game was pretty unbalanced and an uphill struggle for him due to our list choices. I guess it has felt a bit the other way in the larger games we've played so far, where the Orks are always on the back foot and struggling to deal with the Marines. Perhaps in the smaller game, it accentuated the Rock, Paper, Scissors aspect because we both had smaller forces. If Tris used the force he had against an infantry-heavy Ork army, he would have come out on top quite easily. Alternatively, if he had a vehicle-heavy Marine force that was dedicated to killing armour, he could have wiped out my Dredd Mob. In the bigger games, we've had a much wider selection, and the shooting ability of the Marines has really come to the fore.
In the Meat Grinder, things were much more even apart from when it came to the score. It struck me that there should be a better reward for holding the objectives - perhaps boosting the score for holding most objectives to 2 VP a turn would redress the balance and make it more worthwhile to chase board control? If that had been the case in this game then the Marines still would have won, but only just!
The other weird thing with objectives in this game was the fact there were only 4, and the Defender gained the points in the case of a tie. That makes no sense to me. The Defender is the force with the lower PL total, which could just be 1 or 2 PL - not enough to make any difference to the force balance, but gives a big advantage when working out victory points. Having a fifth objective to allow a proper majority would be good. I also think that it would be better to have some fixed locations for objectives, rather than placing them wherever you want. I think it's supposed to encourage moving into the centre of the table and having a proper fight, but the Marines were able to just sit tight on their objectives in their deployment zone and let us get to them - I mean, yeah of course we wanted to get to them for some proper fighting, but in terms of game balance it makes things feel like an uphill struggle to advance into the teeth of all that shooting to try and steal the objectives.
I know that Apocalypse is based on the old Epic 40K ruleset. I wonder if it would work better at that smaller scale because there would be more movement involved, rather than just sitting and putting Aimed Fire orders on detachments from Turn 1 (which is a bit boring!). But I do love the opportunity to get some big models on the table! There are many things in the Apocalypse ruleset that I like (alternative detachment activation, the blast marker mechanics so everything gets to activate, the streamlined rules compared to normal 40K), but there are some things that I think could be tweaked to make it feel a bit more fair. It's all just about fun, moving big models around and chucking dice, but it is better when it feels that both sides have the opportunity to win with a bit of luck and kunnin'. I'll definitely be looking to play more Apocalypse in the future, possibly giving the One Page Rules version a shot at some point. The even more simplified rules might make it more possible to finish a game - the most we've managed so far is 3 turns. I do wonder if the Meat Grinder mission might have ended differently if we had finished all 5 turns... if we could have kept our stranglehold on the objectives, returned a detachment or two to the table (bringing back Ghazghkull and the Stompa!), perhaps we would have been able to get the win. The length of time to play these games is pretty prohibitive, it would be brilliant to play somewhere where it could be set up all weekend to come back to the following day. We're doing better now we're more familiar with the rules, but it is still quite a long process to get through the Damage and Morale phases and get any more than three turns out of the game.
It really has been good to get locked into one game for a while and focus on it so much, learning how it works and being inspired to get more things painted up that have been sitting in boxes for a long time. I think the final battle at Midhurst should be quite a spectacle!
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