Baptism of Fire for the Air Cav ...

,,, and it was a bloodbath! For the IG, that is.

A few days ago while painting the last few of the AirCav dudes, I realized two things - the army is more than 80% done, and I don't have many opportunities left to actually game in 2013. So it was decided that the WIP army will go into action last Hobby Night.

First battle was against Subhan's Necrons in a Big Guns Never Tire fight. And it was awesome indeed. I didn't know what to do with the 3 squads that I must deploy on-table (the list was designed in 5th ed, and was designed for the whole army to come in on turn 2, with nothing deployed at turn 1), so I bunched them up in a corner of the field near an objective. When the flyers did come in on Turn 2, one Vendetta squadron immediately came under fire from the Necron's interceptor quad flak weapon. The flight did not flinch, did not evade and the lead Vendetta lost one hull point to a glancing hit. First turn fire from the flyers was not bad, destroying one of his skimmer tanks, and immobilizing and almost destroying one of his walker things (in my excitement, I forgot to target the other skimmer tank thing). The Valkyries unleashed their rockets on the flak battery, killing 6 aliens.

Turn 3 onwards, everything kinda went down hill. Despite the Officer of the Fleet's presence, both Necron flyers came in, shaking destroying one Vendetta, as well as the Valkyrie escorting Straken's ride. In the meantime, I wasn't doing much damage to his army, as the Necrons in the center kept coming back, and the rest of the shooting was also not very well done.

The AirCav really suffered from its infantry being split-deployed, and I was never able to get the infantry together. One of my squads was in a Vendetta that suffered locked velocity, and had no choice but to grav-chute in (luckily they survived). As a result, the Necrons were able to pick off the infantry piece meal. The one saving grace was Straken's nasty squad, which killed 2 tanks in close combat. I conceded in Turn 5 as it was clear that I was running out of troops and not hurting the xenos much.

Vs Tau was much worse. Skyfire and Interceptor units were everywhere, and by the end of Turn 2, half the flyers were gone, and I had the same problem with getting the infantry together.

Some real good lessons were learnt. I will need to figure out how to make sure the infantry fight together and not be spread piece meal like in the first 2 fights. I have some ideas, and I'll be trying it out next time. I've also built an 1850 version of the list. This is simply adding the Basilisk which I painted for Throwdown earlier in the year, and taking out the Office of the Fleet (still got 5 extra points, will figure that out another time). This also means I'll need to paint the crew of the Basilisk - should be fun, with a Nam firebase feel to the artillery crew in mind.

The Hobby Night ended with my Eldar Windriders avenging the AirCav by beating the Tau in a brutal Relic fight, in which both sides suffered some pretty heavy losses.

Looking forward to finishing this army before the year is out!