Shout out to Team O.M.E.N. and Empire REPRESENT!

Hi all,

So NZTC finished....6 games in 2 days...4 on one day...

First of all a big shout out to  Team O.M.E.N. You guys rock. Lots of fun pre tournament scheming and it was great to have a shared experience of the joys of winning and the pains of losing. Also it was great to be one of two teams (Nerdymen the other) to have team tops.

And thanks to Pete for organising, Locky for TO'ing, Ryan for ref'ing and assembling Shoota boyz for me, and congrats to the Von Trapp Family for winning the first ever NZTC.

So how did it go:
I think we all learnt the hard way how to do team match ups. On the whole I think we did alright with this most of the time, however there was the odd one (or two) where we got it a little wrong and it cost us.

End of round 5 we were sitting on 5th and a decent result last round would have either resulted in holding or rising up the table...nope. 7th Place was a little disappointing, but I think it puts us in good stead for next year when we return battle hardened. At the end of the day, we had a great event and the played the top 3 teams so we must have been there, or there abouts for most of the event.

What worked:
James getting drunk. Seriously-the more booze in that guy the better he gets. We planned for armour heavy armies and I think we were rewarded with plenty of offerings each round. Choosing me and my army to be the "fall guy" was also a good choice. Empire are an army that can play big, but are better at playing small and hard to get points out of unless something goes terribly wrong and/or the cannons fail me.

What I would do differently next time:
Next time I would not bring 3 high risk/reward armies. Vamps are too reliant on the Vamp lord not dying, Dragons are reliant on the dragon...well, 'dragoning", and the Cold One bus was a little reliant on getting a chaff free match up. We also assumed there would be more LOS blocking terrain on the boards (like there are at local events). I suspect this was due to needing more tables and only playing battleline, but it was suprising to have such open tables. I only had 1 game from 6 where the terrain had an actual effect on how the game was played.

Based on our experience next time I would see Sam's Dark Elf Coldone bus list  being our main threat army (or a WoC list with new book), 1 "play for a draw" (me),  an OnG waaaagh-tillery + Savage Orc bus/trolls list or Chaos Dwarfs "bring it on" list, and a high Elf chaff list (4 eagles, archer core, 2 units of reavors, Wlions etc)

The match up process is very hard to get right and I'm not sure I would have done anything differently here. One team suggested putting up the army with a bad match up so it could avoid it, so maybe that is an idea.


EMPIRE REPRESENT!

There is nothing more exciting (in warhammer...) than seeing other Empire players at an event. It is situations like this:

(Demigryphs charge into Sam's coldone knight bus) that only Empire players understand. Heck-he even won the game so it worked!

So shout out to the Arch Lectors

and the manly men of the Empire!

BATTLE REPORTS TO COME
Yes, I remembered to take pics, so battle reports to come. Sam over at Hashuts right hand video diaried our experiences and they should be up soon too.