Battle Report #354: Sloan vs Kaelyssa

:: Prologue ::

Yesterday's last game! Playing Sloan vs Kaelyssa. Should be interesting, right? It sure was...

:: Lists ::

Cygnar:

Sloan
- 5x Hunter
- 2x Grenadier
- Reinholdt
GMCA
Arlan
Max. Trenchers

Opponent:

Kaelyssa
- Hyperion
Elara
- Discordia
2x Arcanist
Skeryth
Lanyssa
Max Sentinels
- UA
Electrobros

:: Pre-Battle Thoughts & Deployment ::

We are playing Extraction and Retribution get first turn. Cool. Not. I really wanted to establish myself far up the field here. Anyway, it is what it is. I want to demolish sentinels asap and deal with the rest later. Hyperion can be jammed, infantry cannot.

:: Game ::

Sentinels run up and take the hill. Blur from Kaelyssa.

I try and take pot-shots at Sentinels with Guided Fire but what do you know? Hitting is hard. With Fire Group I stay out of jam range. The rest keep safe from Hyperion's threat ranges.

Sentinels move up and take Trench + Cover with Skeryth behind.

Feat turn incoming! I have to remove Sentinels. However my battlegroup does not agree. I miss attack rolls left right and center. I was hoping I'd get to start working on Hyperion or electrobros or whatever but lol no forget about that. I didn't even wipe the Sentinels...

The struggle is real, however the retaliation isn't really all that much.

I kill the Sentinel and start working on Discordia. Turns out killing Discordia is hard, as my left-most Hunter finds out as he misses it in the back arc with flare. It does indeed go down but I have nothing left for Hyperion.

Kaelyssa makes a tactical mistake as she does not move Hyperion into melee with me. Mistakes were made...

I load up the Grenadiers and shoot Hyperion with everything I've got. I should do 60-ish boxes on average, I do around 40 (one side more or less fully intact).

As the picture below shows I charged Trenchers as well. Dice off 8 can quickly translate into a few more boxes. In this case, it did not. I also forgot to move one of them so as to contest. This would've lost me the game so we minifeated him a couple of inches further up. My opponent called this a win so I guess I lost the game here.

Playing out the Grind: Hyperion tramples to kill my objective and lock down jacks.

I kill Hyperion and jam his flag with as many jacks as I can.

Retribution is unable to score the last CP needed.

Victory to the Swans!

:: Evaluation ::

My first two games with Sloan were againts Rahn. I had some pretty shit dice there. Like, dice happen, but when they are consistently bad it's just plain annoying, not least because I want to see what this list is capable of and it's really hard to evaluate what it really -can- do when it's this bad.

Anyway, one thing is for sure: I need Rangers. There are no two ways about it. This is an experimental list anyway so I expect to make changes a lot more frequently than I do with my Haleys.

Retribution's biggest problem here is a very, very typical strategical mistake people make vs gunlines: When the Sentinels run up his entire army should be gunning full speed ahead. Imagine Hyperion and Disco up in the middle of the table together with the Sentinels at this point in time. It's basically game over right there. The hesitation nets me exactly what I need: Time. That time eventually translated into an attrition win, despite dice being all over the place.