Things were going great and then....

This isn't really a batrep; it's more of a anecdote, so I'm putting it in Discussion rather than batreps though it does have so recounting of battles and some discussion of mission strategy.

Yesterday, four friends and myself ended up playing a team game of the relic, hammer and anvil, with 4000 points on a side. Basically we did empire vs. xenos. Opposing us, we had two vanilla Space Marines and some Grey Knights. On our side, we had Dark Eldar and Tau Empire. We ended up with three pieces of terrain in almost every square, and these were BLOS area terrain ruins, so it looked like a city fight. Plus each side had one Aegis line.

We got first turn, had eleven scoring units, and had a plan. The plan was for the Kroot to infiltrate or scout or whatever they do to move up on the relic to keep the marines off of it. The rest of our troops would move up one of the few avenues in columns to lend the kroot support while the kroot (or whoever had the relic) tried to move it back down the center of the lane to get it behind one of the ruins on our end of the board. Meanwhile, my Archon and Grots would go up the right flank to try to assault while the Riptides and Broadsides advanced up the left side. These maneuvers were to try to pin the marines back in their DZ and prevent them from getting troops into the center third of the board. If possible, my wyches were to try to take out the two land raiders, hopefully creating nice big obstacles to further restrict the enemy lines of advance. My Ravager was to try to pop the Vindicator they brought. It helped us that they deployed in the back of their DZ b/c they wanted to avoid the Tau fire.

For three and turns, this worked fairly well. We immobilized the Vindicators, popped two land raiders, had troops around the relic (though no one survived the turn after touching it), crashed two flyers, and not one enemy infantry model had gotten out of their DZ. I had also put two raiders and a venom across the enemy's lane of advance at 22" from the enemy, blocking them from coming forward. Up to that point, I had had my ravager immobilized and it lost a gun and one raider had also been immobilized. Then in the bottom of T3, enemy shooting exploded on raider, killing most of the troops in it (they were mounted b/c of the splinter racks and night shields). There was a 6" radius so the wyches on the ground between the raiders got hit along with some fire warriors. Next the other raider got exploded, gain slamming the mounted warriors, and it's 5" radius also hit the wyches and s shield drone. The ravager got missiled and glanced to death. then in assault the immobilized raider got thunder hammered and power fisted into exploding. It was not a good turn.

We won the game, however, Because we still had four troops units around the relic and we successfully pinned the enemy in their DZ for the entire game. We also got first blood (at the top of T2 when I assaulted a Land Raider with wyches) and linebreaker.

It was interesting for me to note that it was almost a good thing that the Raiders exploded so easily. With the extremely channeling terrain we had, the exploding vehicles left the lane open albeit as difficult terrain. The hulked Land Raiders ended up preventing the rhinos from getting out of the DZ, creating a massive bottleneck, and forcing the guys in them to walk forward under massed fire from our infantry.