Photos of 1750pts battle vs Eldar

This evening down at Poole GW I had the great fortitude to stumble upon not only a beautifully painted army to play against but a great opponent!

1750pts was decided upon, which included everything in my case and a few special characters thrown in to make up the points.

I was pleased to see that it wasn't only my deployment zone that resembled a parking lot. My army had 5 Chimera, 1 Medusa, 1 Hellhound, 1 Leman Russ, 1 LR Punisher. His army included 3 wave serpents,  2 falcons, 1 warp hunter and 2 hornets. Tanks galore.

The mission was objectives with one in each of our deployment zones. His army was led by none other than Eldrad Ulthuan himself, while my army featuring both marbo and bastone was of course commanded by the newly painted Colonel Winterborne.

The first 2 turns of shooting saw my massed guns achieve next to nothing, what with the Farseers witch craft, holo fields and cover the big guns managed to kill nothing at all. The only highlight was 2nd squads autcannon which destroyed the warp hunter first turn, then shot down a wave serpent in the next!!! Give that man a promotion. The Veterans led by Bastone were all killed in the second turn by Eldrad and his seer council, their flamer like weapons leaving solely Bastone to face off against them in combat where he succumbed to the eldar attacks.

The following turns saw shot after shot bounce of Eldrad and and his seer council while he unleashed doom and eldritch storm on various units and tanks before smashing the punisher to pieces in combat. Eventually it was left to Colonel Winterborne to engage the Farseer at put the alien to the sword...

In the resulting combat the combined attacks (almost 30 in total...) managed to cause only one unsaved wound. Oh dear. But as luck would have it Eldrad proceeded to fail his leadership test, flee and get caught by the pursuing Command HQ!

With much of the of the fighting centred around the objective in my deployment zone 1st squad and the hellhound had been flanking the Eldar position but soon encountered far superior foes in the form of a number of falcons and wave serpents. 1st squads Chimera was badly damaged and they were forced to footslog it towards the objective.

With their armoured support all but destroyed 1st squad were then engaged by Dire Avengers (rather ineffective Avengers killing only 2 guardsmen!) who tied them up in combat for the remainder of the game.

The game continued a full 7 turns and was hanging in the balance as it approached its conclusion. The remaining guardsman of 2nd squad held my objective while the eldar had a dire avenger lurking in the ruins surrounding their objective. My objective was however contested by an enemt wave serpent that refused to die, krak grenade after krak grenade pumnmeled the tank (there were several penetrating hits!!!) which resulted in it being stunned many times.

With him contesting my objective my only chance lay with what I can only describe as the most disappointing tank of the day. The Medusa. It had fired every turn of the game, scattering away from its intended target without fail almost everytime. The only chance I had was firing a bunker buster shell at the enemy tank on their objective and try to kill the Dire Avenger as well. As luck would have it the shell hit, penetrated the tank, failed cover save and... imobilized it. Meaning that the skimmer that hadn't moved all game couldn't move. Utter failure, and the dire avenger survived.

Unfortunately for me the game ended 1-0 to the Eldar, but it went down to the wire and was great fun to play!  The plaudits must go to my opponent who played a great game and had a fantastic army!

Here are a few close up photos of a few skimmers and Eldrad.