Kill Team battle report

A local store was running a kill team tournament that I decided to attend recently.  I like kill team.  The fast paced games can be a lot of fun, and the skirmish scale makes for totally different strategies than normal games of 40k.  The store was using the standard rules out of the Battle Missions book, but disallowed the use of vehicles and added a 45 minute time limit.  They also added an additional goal to the mission, to get a massacre you needed to have one model in you opponents deployment zone when the game ended.  The previous Kill Team tournament that I saw was extremely lopsided in favor of Dreadnoughts and the like, and they wanted to avoid that.  I chose to run my orks, mainly because I have the force I want completely painted.  Ork's low leadership is a bit of a disadvantage in Kill team, they leave pretty much as soon as they start taking break tests.

My list consisted of a 6 man squad of lootas.  I upgraded 3 of them to meks with big shootas and left the other 3 with their deffguns.  I also had a 15 strong group of shoota boyz with a nob with heavy armour and 1 big shoota.  That gave me 21 models, 3 with deffguns, 4 with big shootas, and the rest with shootas.  Thanks to my high model count it would take killing 11 models before I even started taking tests.  For special rules I gave relentless and slow and purposeful to 2 of my lootas, and feel no pain to the nob.

Game 1:
My opponent was a newer player who was fielding 4 wolfguard with 2 claws each.  I've found that close combat oriented forces don't do well in kill team events.  I set up a firing line and waiting for him to come to me, while running one boy into his deployment zone.  I ended up needing to feed a boy into his troops to draw them out to be torn apart by my shooting.  He passed enough leadership tests that I had to kill him to the last man to win.  We had a chat after regarding effective strategies, so hopefully next time he'll fair a little better.  Nice guy, easy victory. Result: massacre.

Game 2:
I was up against 3 heavy bolter attack bikes and 5 scouts with sniper rifles.  I was a little worried about how much firepower my opponent could throw at me with those heavy bolters.  It turns out I didn't need to be.  I dropped 2 attack bikes and put a wound on the third in my first shooting phase thanks to awful rolling on my opponents part.  He then tried to head back to the safety of his line and failed a difficult terrain check losing the last bike.  After that it was just walking forward to clean out the scouts.  Result: massacre.

Game 3:
I hate it when there's an odd number of people.  Since they weren't doing pairing by standing, I ended up drawing the null opponent this round.  Oh well.

Game 4:
I ended up against 8 sternguard this round.  I was very concerned about this match.  The dragonfire rounds were wipe out my orks pretty quickly.  Thankfully there was a lot of LoS blocking terrain and I was able to avoid a lot of fire until I could get closer.  My opponent could have played a more conservative game and probably could have made this a brutal uphill struggle for me, but instead he decided to make it a bit more fun and came at me.  I made that decision pretty costly for him, but not enough to matter.  He'd taken 2 break test and passed both when time was called.  I had lost 6 orks, more than any other game that day.  Another turn or 2 and I would have had the massacre.
Result: draw.

Game 5:
My opponent was fielding 4 necron destroyers.  This one ended fairly quickly.  I threw down with enough shots to make his life interesting, and he eventually failed enough saves to start taking tests.  My opponent made the mistake of closing to within 18 inches of my force.  He should have been sitting at max range to stop me from being able to open fire with my complete force.  I was unable to get any of my force into his deployment zone by game end though.  Result: Victory.

Game 6:
This ended up being my shortest game of the day.  I was up against 8 ork warbikers.  I went first and didn't have line of sight on anything, so I just hung back in cover and waited.  He rushed forward and fired off a bunch of shots, putting wounds on a few guys.  I saved them all by going to ground.  During my second shooting I opened up with my whole force and killed off 5 out of his 8 bikers.  My rolling was outrageous.  I did way more damage than should have been possible.  He failed his leadership test on his turn and that was the end of it.  Kinda disappointing and not particularly fun for either of us.  I didn't manage to get anywhere close to his deployment zone obviously.  Result: Victory.

Tournament wrap up:
I ended up getting second overall and third on battle points.  My round 4 opponent got best overall, and my round 2 opponent managed to edge me out for best general.  I had a wonderful time however and look forward to the next event that store runs.  I'm planning to bring my daemons to their 1500 point tournament later this month.  As for my list, I'm pretty pleased with it.  The biggest issue was how long it took me to move all my models.  Next time I play a kill team event I will probably try to run my witch hunters, with 2 squads of 5 IQ stormtroopers, with 3 plasmaguns between them, and a squad of 5 celestians with a heavy bolter.  That gives me a decent model count, better armour saves than the orks, and powerful shooting with the plasma weapons.  The only reason I didn't use that this time was lack of painted models.  I just don't have enough sisters with paint on them yet.