The Corroad Goes Ever On and On: FactoruM January GT

Welcome to 2022, everyone! Last time we looked back at my final event for 2021, the Leicester City GT, and cursed the kind of poor play that saw the final game slide agonisingly into a loss and an undefeated supermajor run slip away.

With the intervention of Christmas and New Year, that was pretty much that for my gaming over the last couple of months – I’ve played a couple of test games for our Adeptus Custodes and Genestealer Cults reviews, and a bit of Blood Bowl, but only a single proper 40k game with my Drukhari. With the Beachhead Brawl and the Warhammer-Tournaments International Team Tournament coming up in February, I wanted to get some games in to get my head back into things, and what better way to do that than enter a local GT? Luckily for me, FactoruM were running just such an event last weekend. The store has gone from strength to strength in the last six months, with even more table space and work done to make it a really nice, comfortable place to game, and it’s around 50 minutes from my front door so an excellent place to head off and play games for a weekend without completely abandoning my family.

Usual TO Stephen Box of Vanguard Tactics fame was off in Las Vegas, putting in a strong showing with his Adeptus Custodes, and so Liam Dempsey of DZTV stepped in as the organiser. He did a great job all weekend, so thanks to him!

The event was not using the new Chapter Approved 2022 missions but was using the Adeptus Custodes points changes as published on Warcom the other day, which makes it a bit liminal as an experience, with a combination of armies and missions that will probably be unique in this edition. Terrain-wise it was the standard-issue for FactoruM events, with every table using the Vanguard Tactics terrain sets with set layouts for each mission. I’ve clearly gotten rusty over the winter because I almost entirely forgot about taking pictures of my games, so I apologise for that because it makes things a lot harder to follow, but broadly you can assume terrain is symmetrical, with a large L block and two smaller ones (or one L and one U) in each deployment, and then another ruin and some crates elsewhere, with most boards having some dense/difficult on the flanks. I’ll include the few pictures I did take so you can get a better idea of it, but they’re broadly similar to the maps we used for the Goonhammer Opens last year.

FactoruM GT Drukhari List - Click to Expand

List-wise, pretty similar to the last outing – the main change is the Patrol having some Talos in so that I could have the Ravager and it benefit from the Realspace Raid. I realised early in game 1 that I was overthinking this and should have just used some Kabalites instead of the Wracks and made it a Black Heart Patrol, or just not worried about the random 40pt unit of Wracks getting their faction trait, since it meant two Talos couldn’t benefit from Raid Mastermind and I had to keep reminding both myself and my opponents of this fact. Otherwise the plan remains the same – use the speed and deadliness of the various cheap trade units to eliminate key targets, while shoving 6 Talos out to grab control of the board and squeeze hard. Let’s see how that went.

Game 1: Jake, Genestealer Cults

Mission: Scorched Earth
My Secondaries: Herd the Prey, Retrieve Octarius Data, Assassination
His Secondaries: Psychic Interrogation, Retrieve Octarius Data, Engage on All Fronts

Jake's Genestealer Cults List - Click to Expand

Jake is a member of the Vanguard Tactics team and also a member of Sternguard Tactics, our team for the International Team Tournament at the end of February; we’d met a couple of times but not yet actually played. For this event he was trying out the Genestealer Cults, since that’s what he’s expecting to play for that tournament and he needed to get some games in to get a feel for the army. The list is built around the Pauper Princes trait, with big squads taking advantage of the 5+ invulnerable save aura to become much more resilient than you’d expect them to be.

GSC are of course pretty strong and Jake’s a good player, but I definitely had the advantage here – this was his first game playing the new codex, and his list was partly dictated by what was already painted for the VT studio, with a notable lack of Purestrain Genestealers. Meanwhile I’ve played against them already as well as having a practice game playing as them, so if anyone was likely to be surprised by what the army could do, it was more likely to be Jake than me!

That’s pretty much how it played out on the table – Jake went first and pushed his Jackals forward onto midfield objectives, trying for a cheeky demo charge against a Raider in the process, but they didn’t do much and I ate them in return (well, one squad – the other was protected by the 5+ invulnerable and ended up just getting wrapped in the mid-board instead). Both Goliaths died to heat lance and dark lance fire, dumping his Metamorphs onto the table, and with all his fast stuff dead the game devolved quickly into a grind of Drukhari pushing through waves of Cultists. The left flank collapsed first, with Drazhar, the Incubi, the Archon, and the Talos beating Neophytes and assorted characters to death, while on the right the Acolyte Hybrids made a crucial charge… only for us to realise they were forced to go through difficult ground to make it, and had failed, leaving them sitting ducks for the Succubus to clear out. Jake scored ok on primary through turns 2 and 3 thanks to having big blocks to hold the objectives on his side, and managed to pull off ROD, but it wasn’t enough and the Drukhari swept to a 97-62 win.

Jake finished 20th and ended up on two wins and three losses, managing to lose 87-88 in round 2 and 93-95 in round 4 – agonising, but games he’d probably have managed to close out if this wasn’t his first weekend playing the army!

Game 2: Jay, Grey Knights

Mission: Sweep and Clear
My Secondaries: Herd the Prey, Retrieve Octarius Data, Abhor the Witch
His Secondaries: Purifying Ritual, Engage on All Fronts, Retrieve Octarius Data

Jay's Grey Knights List - Click to Expand

Like Jake, Jay is part of my team for the International Team Tournament at the end of February, as well as one of my regular opponents at home. If for some reason you’re looking up lists in the event and wondering why Jay’s says it’s Imperial Knights, it’s because he is the world’s most indecisive list writer – at a tournament a few years ago with on-the-day list submission, he turned up with about 6,000pts of stuff and 3 or 4 separate army lists and only decided which one he was playing when he dropped it in the box. Nevertheless, this weekend he was back to the Grey Knights, as has been his regular army for most of the last few months. You may recall that back in October we played at Cadian Catastrophe, also in the second round and also with Talos into Grey Knights. That one was a pretty convincing win for the Drukhari; how did it play out this time?

At least initially it looked better for the Grey Knights. Sweep and Clear is a good mission for them, since my deployment compresses me to just the one home objective, and he can put pressure on the middle with most of his army while Gate and shunting stuff lets him more rapidly cover the flanks. He also went first, and pushed two Dreadknights into my deployment, including the Swordbearers Grand Master with the 3+ invulnerable. That’s a spicy start, and he used it to destroy both my Raiders behind my home ruin, leaving the Incubi and Trueborn to run around on foot. He’d also placed them so that the Talos were a bit too far away to really get in there and beat them up, which made me clearing them out a difficult prospect.

Or so he thought. I had a truly ridiculous first turn, with my shooting killing one Dreadknight while the rest of the army made a series of charges into the guy with the 3+, including both my Archon and a unit of Talos busting 11″ charges to fly into combat and beat him to death. The game wasn’t over here – I was still in my DZ with him in a much stronger position for objective play – but he’d traded 420pts of Dreadknights for 210pts of Raiders, and thanks to those big charge rolls I’d gotten further out than planned.

He kept the pressure on through turns 2 and 3, with an additional Dreadknight showing up to shoot my Ravager hiding in the backfield while the Razorbacks and the other ‘knights battered the Talos, but nothing quite went his way, and meanwhile some Talos shot a Dreadknight standing in Dense Cover and one-shotted it with heat lances. Going into my turn 3 I felt like I could grind out a win but it was quite fragile, and then all of a sudden it was just there on a plate; a combat on the central objective saw both Drazhar and the Succubus bounce off a Sanctuary-buffed Strike Squad before the Talos ate them, which seemed like a reprieve for his other Grand Master Dreadknight until the Archon blew his fight again and jabbed him to death with the Djinn Blade. Meanwhile another Talos had bounced out of combat and killed his Librarian on his backfield objective, and Razorbacks and Strikes were going down all over the board, and he just didn’t have anything left to try and contest the score. A last-minute jump from the Interceptors let him claim 4pts for RoD in my back quarter, but otherwise the game was over for the Knights of Titan and finished 93-74.

Jay finished 8th after also losing against our other teammate for the ITT, Liam Callebout, in the 4th round – such is the way of local GTs.

Game 3: Jack, Adeptus Custodes

Mission: Vital Intelligence
My Secondaries: Herd the Prey, Retrieve Octarius Data, Data Intercept
His Secondaries: Data Intercept, Grind Them Down, Retrieve Octarius Data

Jack's Adeptus Custodes List - Click to Expand

With two big wins it was time to take on some of the new Adeptus Custodes! Vital Intelligence is an interesting mission to play against Custodes; from a secondaries point of view it’s tough, because you already struggle for a good third pick and the mission doesn’t really help you out, but the primary is arguably hard for them – they’re not fast enough to hit one side of the board hard and then swing around (especially as the bikes no longer have Objective Secured), but they don’t really want to have to split up and fight effectively two separate battles either. That’s more or less what Jack plumped for, though, with Trajann, the Dreadnought, the Aquilons, and one squad of bikes + Captain going to my right, and the Allarus Captain, shield Guard, the other squad of bikes, and the Sagittarum going to my left.

I deployed with the Talos ready to threaten the right-hand pair of objectives, while the Raiders were deployed behind a ruin, away from salvo launcher fire and with one eye on being able to spring out and head left to secure the left-hand side of the board if possible, while being able to go right to help out over there if the Talos couldn’t handle it. The Mandrakes were up in the top-left corner, securing the far-left objective and locking it so that at the very least he had to put a unit on there to claim it back.

This time around I went first, having an unexciting first turn of not going anywhere very much, with one big exception, which was the Ravager jumping out and one-shotting the Achillus before fading back behind a ruin. Clearing the Dread early was a big help, since it weakened his right flank significantly and at no real cost to me.

Jack fought back with the Aquilons and Trajann jumping on a set of Talos which had floated forwards onto an objective just to make him have to actually step on and take it. They annihilated them in short order, but were left exposed and were crushed in return by a weighty charge of Talos, Archon, and some Wracks. A Raider, meanwhile, flew its way into Jack’s back line to engage the Allarus Captain and prevent him jumping into combat with the Praetorian Plate. Even better, it managed to actually survive!

With the Aquilons down, the right flank was looking distinctly dangerous for the Custodes. Trajann took a bit longer to die, and did some damage in the process, but the bikers and Captain were ground out on that side of the board while on the other Drazhar, the Incubi, and the Succubus ran riot, tearing Praetors from bikes, spin-kicking Sagittarum in the teeth, Klaiveing Custodians to death, so on and so forth. By the time my turn 4 rolled around it was all over; he never scored any primary points, and only managed a single turn of Engage and 4 points’ worth of Data Intercept for his home objective, and the game ended with a crushing 89-29.

Jack bounced back to finish 7th with 4 overall wins – that scoreline really hurt him, since the strong scores in his other games put him in touching distance of 3rd place.

Game 4: Chris, Adeptus Custodes

Mission: Priority Target
My Secondaries: Herd the Prey, Retrieve Octarius Data, Priority Targets
His Secondaries: Priority Targets, Grind Them Down, Retrieve Octarius Data

Chris' Adeptus Custodes List - Click to Expand

Tables weren’t ranked and pairings were done on the Sunday morning, so overnight there was a bit of guesswork involved trying to work out the standings and what I was likely to play. Chris was on a comfortable 3-0 and a likely contender, and once again playing Adeptus Custodes; his list was a little broader than Jack’s, with more foot Guard and a three sets of Allarus of increasing size.

Priority Target is much more favourable to play into Custodes, being both Take & Hold and also having the game’s easiest secondary. It also has good potential for making their game harder if the deployment roll goes your way, which it did; I let Chris pick first and he moved his home objective to safety, and I responded by pulling the two corners towards me, in a similar move to game 4 against Tom back at the Leicester GT. This immediately put things in my favour, since Chris’ slower moving army had further to go to try and score primary points.

With this in mind going first wasn’t ideal; I tried the same trick again with shooting the Achillus, but only took 5 wounds off this time in what is probably a more realistic round of shooting for a single Ravager. The rest of his army was hidden away, including a brick of Guard and Terminators plus Trajann and the Champion in my left hand ruin. He didn’t have a way to screen out the sides, however, and my Wyches were able to arrive and ROD and take the far right objective at the same time on turn 2. Things didn’t go all my way; he used both Arcane Genetic Alchemy and Emperor’s Auspice on his left flank Praetors to keep them alive an aggregate 6 wounds remaining, which wasn’t ideal. To add on to that, in the middle I slightly misplaced my Incubi in melee with some Custodian Guard, meaning I had to fight with the suboptimal unit first which let him interrupt and kill the before they swung. On the plus side, my Succubus and a unit of Talos charged his three-model Allarus and the Succubus was able to pick them up even through Arcane Genetic Alchemy, pinging herself backwards to relative safety from the counter-punch. I also managed to pull the same trick as the previous game with a Raider, throwing it into the Allarus Captain to keep him out of things.

At this point I felt like I was in control of the game, but things were still relatively fragile; if Chris had a good turn he could pull it back. Unfortunately for him he had an abysmal turn, with the Blade Champion failing a re-rollable 7″ charge into the Succubus, the bikes failing a 6″ charge, and Trajann and some Guard grinding through a single Talos between them. From there it really didn’t get much better; I picked up Trajann, the three Guard, the wounded bikes, and the Achillus (left on a single wound after a swing and a miss from the Incubi), and the Wyches trapped the Allarus again – and then didn’t even die, as his swings killed just one of them.

Chris did his best to fight back into it, and his second unit of Praetors tried to be heroes and tanked every shot thrown at them for a turn, but he just didn’t have enough resources left to get back into the game. The Allarus Captain took three rounds of combat just to shrug off the Wyches attacking him, taking 4 wounds in the process, and by that point the Archon was able to cross the table and finish him off. With just a handful of models left the game was done, and we finished 92-69.

Chris finished 10th after running face-first into the other Drukhari player at the event in his final game, with what looked like a decent points lead evaporating as he was tabled on the final turn and his opponent immediately scored 8 for Herd the Prey, swinging the game. An extremely fair and balanced secondary.

Game 5: Kev, Chaos Knights

Mission: Retrieval Mission
My Secondaries: Herd the Prey, Retrieve Octarius Data, Bring it Down
His Secondaries: Stranglehold, Grind Them Down, Assassination

Kev's Chaos Knights List - Click to Expand

With four games down, there was just one to go. There were three of us undefeated, so it wasn’t absolutely wrapped up on this table, but Kev and I were drawn on points and reasonably far ahead of 3rd place so it seemed likely the winner would be decided here.

Kev’s list is an interesting one which poses quite a different challenge to the others that are out there right now. The murder Succubus has nearly no value in this game, since she’s reduced to fishing for 6s, and the Wracks aren’t up to much offensively either. It makes for an interesting game, and particularly so because of the mission and map – we’re playing Retrieval Mission on a map that’s quite open in the middle, so I have a long way to go to reach him, and the Talos do not love an army full of thermal spears which can draw los to them across most of the board. For primary scoring, his back three objectives are pretty much safe, and he can rush one or two War Dogs (with their fresh new Objective Secured from the Balance Dataslate) forward per turn to knock my primary down and try to score Stranglehold. Doing that means I’m forced to devote reasonable resources to guaranteeing the kills to keep up tempo on Herd the Prey, while the bulk of his army can sit far enough back that it’s difficult for me to reach them in a single turn, so I have to endure at least one round of his firepower in the open.

It’s a good game plan for him, but he does still have to do enough to punish my army to prevent it from rolling forwards and beating sufficient War Dogs to death that he runs out of resources. Arguably I have the better angle on passive scoring from Herd, and it’s easier for me to rack up Bring It Down than for him to get either or both of Grind/Assassination, though I do end up missing 4pts on Retrieve Octarius Data because I end up going first and the sheer mass of Knights still in his half blocks my little ROD units from arriving where they want to go (to even score the 8pts on it I have to use Swift Outflanking and Murderous Descent to dump the Trueborn in his backfield in turn 5).

My turns 1 and 2 are very quiet – as mentioned, I go first, which I really don’t want because I can’t do much offensively and there’s not much incentive to expose anything for little gain. Wracks and Mandrakes do go forwards just to claim some objectives and try and get my primary scoring, and he isn’t quite able to reach my table edge or kill all five Wracks on my left hand side and so I can pick up 10 and keep him off Grind/Strangle for a turn.

On turn 2 I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decide if I’m going to move or not and end up not doing it, mainly focusing on just holding objectives to stop him scoring 15 on primary immediately. He puts more War Dogs forwards down both flanks, comfortably scoring Strangle and picking up Grind as well.

Turn 3 ends up being a very weird one – I make a big mistake, jumping the Incubi and Draz out and placing them terribly, for no particular reason. I had a vague idea they’d need to help kill one of the four War Dogs I’m targeting this turn, but I kill all four with shooting and even if I hadn’t gotten them all I could have finished the nearest ones with Talos. I am predictably rewarded for my poor play with the first couple of War Dogs shooting and 9/10 Incubi getting picked up, and then from that point onwards Kev has one of the worst shooting phases I’ve ever seen anyone have. 8 War Dogs shoot at the Talos squads and between them I think they end up doing only 3 wounds total, and one of those is with a stubber. The thermal spears simply could not hit, even with the re-rolls, and the few times they did they would then fail to wound. At one point a War Dog gets a bit overeager and manages to put two hits and two wounds through and I roll a double 6 for the invulnerable save. I was expecting to come through battered but with a winnable game in hand, but it was quite something to be looking at the table and all the Talos still hanging out as if nothing had happened.

The game was far from over, though; we still had two more turns to play. I had much more limited ability to deal with his Knights, because he’d kept his distance well, and he was miles ahead on primary. My shooting was merely ok this turn, killing one War Dog, while the Talos and Drazhar jumped another on his left objective, but he had another toeing onto it and so I didn’t even flip it. He killed Draz and kept me down to just 5 primary for turn 5, and the scoreline was getting very tight. I needed to kill five more War Dogs this turn to be safe – two on my right flank, one on my left objective, and one on each of his backfield objectives. The Archon killed the one on my left, shooting took his right-hand backfield one off, and one squad of Talos annihilated one of the two on my right in melee, but the other two Talos units didn’t get there, leaving him with just enough stuff left that he could have pulled out the win – he needed to get four kills for Grind Them Down, and score Stranglehold and Assassination, and he’d get 9 points and jump to 79. Three of those kills were pretty straightforward – he got a Talos in my turn by swinging back in melee, he was able to pick up the Wyches in my backfield who’d tried and failed to come in from reserve to ROD, and then he could kill off the Ravager which had taken 10 of its 11 earlier in the game and then drifted helplessly away from the pursuing War Dog. The last one he needed was the Haemonculus, which would have given a 6pt double whammy from triggering both Grind and Assassination. Sadly for the forces of Chaos, it was not to be; with a mighty 6 attacks the War Dog missed with three, and the Haemonculus pulled off the saves and Insensible to Pains to only lose a single wound. With that final miss from the Warlord, the scoreline was 78-73.

A really hard-fought and enjoyable game, and a great way to finish the tournament. The tight scoreline and strong results in his previous games kept Kev in a well-deserved second place, while on the other table the other undefeated player, playing down into the 3-1 bracket, lost his final game, leaving me as the sole undefeated player. That, of course, means this was mine:

Unsurprisingly FactoruM make their own trophies, these frankly enormous MDF Rhinos, and having handed a set out for the Goonhammer Open I now have one of my own. It came with some tasty store credit, too, which I suspect is going to get spent on the new Avatar, given the likely price tag on that thing.

The Hatred Eternal/Djinn Blade Archon was definitely the MVP for the weekend; I decided to go all-in on the melee build this time and he rewarded me for it, killing a Dreadknight, Trajann twice, and a War Dog, as well as managing to get through the whole event without either stabbing himself with his sword or failing a shadowfield save. Great job, evil overlord.

Overall a really fun tournament, and a great way to shake off the winter gaming rust. It was nice to give the CA2020/2021 missions one last proper thrashing, but I’m glad to be moving on to a new set – I’ve not played as many games of 9th as some people, but after nearly 100 with this pack it’ll be nice to change things up.

I have a tournament-heavy February coming up, with Beachhead Brawl on the 12th/13th and then the aforementioned ITT on the 26th/27th. I’m unlikely to change things up too much; I might get as much as one game in between now and Beachhead, and that’s not really enough to switch up lists, though I did finally buy the makings of some Grotesques.

… is what I wrote on Thursday when I originally drafted this post, and now of course we’ve had a balance dataslate which has made significant changes to how the list will operate, the biggest of which is taking CORE off Talos (and Cronos) so that they can no longer benefit from Raid Mastermind or the Haemonculus aura, and nerfing Artists of the Flesh to be less impactful. By the time you read this, list submission for Beachhead will be imminent, and so I’m going to have to figure out what to do pretty fast. Wings and I were jamming an Eldar soup list with Brodie Middleton in the Patron Discord the other night which I was tempted to run just for the novelty, and now that the list I’ve been playing for the last few months is dead that looks pretty appealing just to try out. Alternatively, there’s still plenty of depth in Drukhari, and I have a pretty broad collection to pick from there – maybe some units that haven’t hit the table in a while can come back out to play. It leaves me a lot to think about; check back in a couple of weeks to see what I settled on and how it went!