After the Tournament

Well, I took the Army from the last post to the local 2000+ Purge the Alien tournament.  I got 4th (out of 9) place.  I didn't take pictures, and I'm not going to do any battle reports, but I wanted to post some thoughts and lessons learned.

The list rocked against slow armies.  All foot armies (which is what I expected to face) got torn apart.  Against fast armies, there were 2 major weaknesses:

1. Lack of counter charge - in several games, I didn't lose any vehicles to shooting, but they (everything except the land raiders) got torn apart in hand to hand, and even using blocking, and channeling terrain very proficiently, I couldn't stop some armies from getting to me on turn 2.

2. Range - Knowing I was going to be weak against melee, I was happy to see 2 of the missions with long table edges.  The problem was that I didn't have the range to take advantage of the extra distance - I still had to line up right on the edge of deployment zone to be able to shoot (the one time I didn't, I lost a land raider to a lucky las cannon shot that I was playing catch up the whole game - I didn't).  Granted, my opponent rolled more than his share of 6s, but the effectiveness of his cyclone missile launchers is making me eye my tactical marines again (they did as much damage to my land raider as my las cannons did to his land raider).

So, the Leman Russes did very well, but not well enough to stop hard, fast units from getting to me.  The executioner was an all-star however, in every game.  I don't know if I am going to keep them, because I feel I need more range, but the battle cannons are only AP 3 (which defeats the reason I took them LR in the first place).  Also, they NEED some strong melee unit nearby, although even then, there are so many ways to get melta and and power fists really close, really fast (Drop Pods, demolition packs dropping out of vendettas, bikes, etc).