Battle Report: Red Scorpions vs. Ultramarines

...so lars4life & I made it to the FLGS last weekend to play a game - his Red Scorpions (using vanilla marine rules) vs. my Ultramarines.  we agreed on 1,000 points, since I'm still a n00b & he's still getting the hang of 5th ed. rules.  Unfortunately, we BOTH forgot our cameras (again!) so you'll have to make do with our crappy cell phone pics.

We rolled for the mission and got "seize ground", and rolled for number of objectives and got 5, although we both agreed we should cut it down to 4 since we were playing on a 4'x4' table and there wasn't a logical place to put the fifth one where it would be 12" from a table edge.  We took turns laying terrain and he deployed first - mostly because I asked him to watch my deployment and offer suggestions or point out any potential dumb moves on my part.

The table after terrain & objective placement:

The objectives are the orange disks in each quadrant.  (We both realized that we really need to make some objective markers!)


The units I brought:

-Two tactical squads w/ missile launcher & flamer
-Terminator squad, 4 w/ heavy bolter & power fist, one w/ bolter & power weapon
-Space Marine captain
-Chaplain
-Dreadnought w/ multi-melta & storm bolter
-Vindicator

lars4life's list was actually fairly similar:

-Two tac squads (w/ lascannons, I think?)
-Termie squad w/ assault cannon
-Commander Culn
-Venerable Dreadnought
-Two Razorbacks

Deployment:

We both used similar tactics, leading our troops out behind our vehicles while simultaneously trying to avoid offering side armor shots.

Hey, are you guys in there?

We didn't keep a turn-by-turn record of the game, so I'll just talk about some of the high points:

-lars4life's Terminator doesn't know when to quit: The only Terminator to survive my Vindicator (after he detached his commander) managed to walk all the way across the board and single-handedly destroy my Vindicator.

-Commander Culn is one bad mofo: 

Over the course of two rounds, Commander Culn managed to kill my chaplain and half my tac squad before he went down.

-Dreadnought slap fight!

I guarantee that the phrase "Dreadnought slap fight" will elicit laughs from lars4life & I for a while - our Dreads got into close combat with each other on round two, and then neither of us could do anything.  We both rolled like garbage during this combat for three rounds, resulting in our Dreads standing there slapping each other.

We got past round five, rolled, and the game ended.  The final tally was one objective controlled by each of us, one contested, and one open, so it was a draw.  (although to be fair, lars4life was giving me pointers on tactics the whole time we were playing - I had no concept of a "side armor shot" or how effective many of the weapons were against the different armor types, so if it wasn't for him helping he could have easily mopped me up by round three).  Overall it was a lot of fun, and towards the end I finally started to feel like I was finding my footing with the rules - we only had to ask for help with the rules a couple of times, and they were in fairly complicated situations.  Lars4life also had a co-worker join us to observe, and I think having him there asking questions was actually helping us learn the rules (kind of like someone quizzing you before a test).  He also bought a Chaos Space Marine codex before we left, and is already planning his first army...