Tales of Fire and Ice: Apocalypse Now (Yesterday!)

Yesterday marked the second Apocalypse 40k game at Battlefront Gaming. It was freaking amazing. There were two teams of three with ~3000 points each. I was with the Forces of Disorder and had the Titan Maniple you see in the first pic, my teammates had 3k of Imperial Guard/Chaos Space Marines, and ORKS! The orks did infinitely better than I ever imagined they would. Especially that squad of Grotz, who just would not die (vs a Dreadnought!) Unfortunately, I didn't get good pictures of that side of the battlefield, as I was slightly preoccupied with my end. My worthy adversaries included another Titan Princeps, commanding a single Warlord and a handful of Stormtalon reinforcements, (who was actually kind enough to allow me the use of a Reaver!) a Tau player who felt the need to NOT run the "cheese list" he came up with with tremendous amounts of Rail Weapons (including Area Denial Nodes, which could have gotten NASTY.) and a Space Marines player (he calls them Salamanders, but they aren't green yet... :P )

Now on to the breakdown of turns:

Turn one was Nightfighting, so there was a whole lotta nothing going on. Our worthy adversaries had the Initiative, and so took first turn. The Tau player did his D3+1 Auto-Markerlight Hits on one of My Warhounds and launched 3 Seeker Missiles at it and knocked off a Void Shield. The Marine player moved his Land Raiders up which brought them into range of the searchlights on our vehicles... the Marine also had a Lucius Pattern Drop Pod with a Dreadnought in it come in on turn one due to Careful Planning which ended up getting locked in combat with the Grotz of Steel! for the better part of three turns. It was awesome!

Our turn one started off with a Chimera searchlighting one of the Landraiders and a Hellbrute searchlighting the other. After that, the Titans dropped them like a bad habit. I think there was also a Devilfish that ended up getting searchlighted and subsequently Vulcan Mega-Bolter'd to death. There was a squad of terminators in each Raider, which were forced to come out of their destroyed transports, and one of them was escorting a Lysander/Tu Shan model. This squad ate 7 Str D large blasts and I think lost 3 models total. Freaking Storm Shields. They then got charged by some Chaos Possessed.

Turn two rolls around and the Warlord does exactly what it was designed to do... KILL STUFF! The Warlord dropped a Vortex Missile (I'm glad they can only fire once!) and knocked my Warhound down to 1 Hull point... not Structure, Hull! It was then smacked the Warhound with a Str D Template which (with a lucky 6) made the Warhound's reactor go Nuclear taking out half the terrain and a large chunk of our army in our deployment zone. The Reaver also took a major beating (being dropped down to 1 Structure point and one Hull point and having 2 out of 3 guns shaken so they couldn't fire during our turn) There was other stuff going on, but I was a bit distracted but the Warhound and the unmitigated nuclear disaster that happened! During their assault phase, the Grotz of Steel spent the turn keeping the Dreadnought locked in combat, and the Possessed ended up dying just in time for us to continue shooting at the Lysander squad (which, remarkably enough only had three models left after the assault!)

Our turn two. We wrecked the Warlord's face! I think all told we ended up taking 6 Void Shields off and knocking off what amounted to 22 Hull points (7 Structure plus on extra hull point) off from a combination of Leman Russ battletanks and an IG Veteran Meltagunner Squad (And all available Str D weaponry we had!). It was awesome, and we also stunned all the weapons for the next turn so it was effectively out of the battle from that point on (Though it did turn around and stomp a Terminator to death, not that it made any difference.) I'm pretty sure this was when the Orks started to get into the good scraps, but alas, I didn't pay close enough attention, so I can only give vague details. The Grotz of Steel may or may not have finally been overrun at this point, but again, I lost track.

Turn three, there was some shooting that didn't scare me because nothing could reach my Titans, and some other stuff. This is when the Warlord (who couldn't shoot this turn) assaulted the Terminator squad and stomped one of them to death. The remaining models do their mandatory break off and that ends the turn, again Good Orky scraps on the other side of the table, but nothing I can give any good details about.

Our turn three was a matter of moving Chaos Rhinos up and in position to grab objectives on turn 4, and dropping template after template on the remaining infantry squads (after the Veterans ended up Melta-ing the Warlord to death, leaving it a wreck, no explosion). More Orky scraps... Orkz orkz orkz orkz!

By the end of the top of turn 4, we realized that our team had already won, and due to the fact that multiple participants had to leave, we ended up calling it at the end of their turn. The game was incredible, and I can't believe how well the three smaller Titans did versus the one Warlord!

Now for the pictures I promised... not nearly enough, because I kept forgetting to take pictures, but at least it's something. *Obligatory disclaimer about crappy cellphone pictures and whatnot.*:

The one on the right looks like it tripped and was about to fall flat on it's face... which it did couple times. I've fixed it since...

This is just after deployment on turn 1, which happened to be nightfighting. Also, that's Yancy in the middle of the picture.

What it looked like from my opponent's point of view.

WE PARKED THE WARHOUND HERE, I SWEAR!!!

The poor thing went Nuclear and took a whole lotta stuff with it!

This thing is not nearly as overly-tall as it can appear in pictures. (It's about 26" tall, but the lack of width makes it look significantly taller.)

It's a blob of Chaos Marine Heroes about to run over Lysander/Tu Shan who only had one wound left from 3 Titans dropping everything they had at him and his squad. It was nuts!