An early In Which Kaylee Decides

I'm in Pittsburgh now, preparing to go hide in Amishland, PA for a week and gathering all of my belongings in preparation for a move to Oklahoma City.  Because I'm a heartless bastard, I had to leave Kaylee behind with a boarding service.  She didn't want to be left behind.  She wanted to come with us:

In Which Kaylee Decides to Come to Pittsburgh (click to embiggen)

I miss my kitty.

This week in In Which Kaylee Decides

I doubt this will become a weekly thing. But I do hope so. We can at least pretend that it is a weekly thing. Without further ado, here's this week's In Which Kaylee Decides:


In which Kaylee decides to sit in a trash can:

Rolling Dice

Everyone loves to roll dice.  It's in our very nature (well, at least my very nature).  However, sometimes rolling dice is not the best tactical decision.

I was over at Miniwargaming's website watching the Tyranids and Salamanders slaughter each other in an epic 3000 point Apocalypse mission (Eldrad was there to make sure that the terminators were all rolling ones for their armor saves).  Coming down to turn 7, each player held three objectives.  The entire board, once filled with swarms of gargoyles and termagaunts, had been whittled down to one unit per objective.  However, in one corner of the board, the Tryanids were launching an assault.  It looked like this:

That rhino is full of marines bee tee dubs.

After careful consideration, the Salamander player decided to disembark his marines, move them forward to block the movement, and rapid fire into the gargoyles.  He was reminded that both the warrior and the gargoyles were winged, so any left over could fly over his marines in order to get to the objective.  It should also be noted that since this was Apocalypse, all vehicles are scoring, so he still was holding the objective.

Fracking toasters gargoyles.   

This allowed the last Tyranid Warrior to fly next to the rhino, assault it, and contest the objective within only a couple of millimeters to spare.  On a side note, let this be a lesson to all you Space Marine players; rhinos are just under three inches wide.  Don't let this happen to you!

  Objective contested!  All ur biomass r belong to nids!

This was a bad tactical decision on the part of the Space Marine player.  Because the Warrior was hiding behind cover, there was no way that he could have removed both threats in the same turn, especially while he had to stay close to the objective.  As much as I despise Space Marines, they do do one thing exceptionally well; they're very hard to kill.  And you need to take advantage of that.  He should have realized early on that there was no way that he could remove the threat.  However, there are other things that you can do in order to solidify your position without rolling dice.

Here are some rules to keep in mind:

1. Enemy units, unless assaulting, must remain 1" away from your units.
2. Jump infantry, while they can move over units during the movement phase, follow all movement rules for infantry during assault.  They cannot move through enemy units and can only move through gaps wider than their bases.
3. To initiate an assault, the closest two models are moved together first.

Keeping that in mind, you have several objectives you need to accomplish during your main phase.  First, you have to make sure that the pesky flying type units cannot land behind you to contest the objective.  In essence, this means that you have to force units out of the 3" capture zone around the objective by spreading out your marines.  Second, you have to make sure that no models can move through your lines in order to come into base to base contact with models in the back.  This makes it so they can't contest just with an assault move.  Third, you have to make sure that your models are staying close enough to the objective to hold it at the end of the turn.  This is my solution.

If you squint, it looks like a turtle!

With this setup, if the marines are assaulted, then their pile-in move leaves the second row of marines to be just holding the objective.  The rhino is in a much better position because it's forcing any other units from that side at least 5 inches from the objective.  I've also placed some marines behind the rhino in order to try to block a consolidation move if the rhino is destroyed.

As I've mentioned, this takes out a lot of the probability and randomness of the game.  Which is great if you want to win.  The first person's strategy depended on being able to kill all of the gargoyles, which had a decent probability of succeeding.  Nevertheless, if there is a way to win the game without rolling any dice, you should take it.

As an added bonus, 7 of the marines were in rapid fire range of the gargoyles in my deployment.  Which is still a decent number of dead gargoyles.

Patrick Rothfuss

I hope you read his blog. In fact, I hope you read his books.  If not, you should. Anyways, in his latest post he says:

They e-mail me with their theories and their hopes. They want X to hook up with Y. They want Z to get his comeuppance. They want such and such story tied up in a certain way….

As a mathematician, it irks me to see variables unsolved for. So I'll solve for Z, just for fun. I'll leave X and Y for now because it's the summer. And I'm lazy.  See: unsolved Price is Right problem.


Theorem: Z=Ambrose. ■

Proof: Duh. ■