Burning Sands 3 - Adeptus Titanicus Tournament Report

Hello!

It's been a little while since I've been able to play some AdTit, and Grim Dice provided the opportunity to do so with a tournament on a day that I wasn't at work! So I jumped at the chance (or more accurately, I bought a ticket), and tried to remember what I was doing. It has to be said that matched play has kind of passed me by in Titanicus, so I had not actually seen the Matched Play Guide until I bought it for the day, so I wasn't really expecting to win anything. That said, Titanicus is a narrative focused, very swingy game so I was expecting some silly chain reactions and huge explosions and the dice generally causing carnage.

I was running my Mortis engines, and decided to keep it fairly simple with an Axiom maniple, all guns and no melee (I've seen it's strong but it's always gone badly for me), with fairly minimal upgrades aside from some corruption on the Warlord to make it even tougher. I did make the mistake of taking the Warmaster's Beneficence upgrade on three Titans, and then forgetting to use it in every single game!

Anyway, the first thing I noticed when I walked in was that the tables looked really cool. A few borrowed bits from 40k scale stuff but also a lot of appropriately sized city buildings set out on appropriately coloured matts. Not the default L ruins of 40k tournaments at all!

First game was against Stuart (I think - I didn't take photos of the score cards for this one so memory is a bit hazy on player names) with a beautiful Mechanicus Knight force, full of lots of scary guns with loads of templates and some nasty melee options. We both had to grab an objective in the opponent's corner but also kill or protect certain units for secondary points.

The game was a total bloodbath, with neither of us achieving out primary objective and only one Knight Lancer and a few Armigers surviving. A narrow loss based on secondary points but a very enjoyable time! Highlights for me were an over eager Warhound getting surrounded and then exploding, the Warlord shrugging off massive firepower in the first couple of turns with some unreasonably good void shield saves, and then the Melta cannon Reaver doing some serious work with fusion shots on knights melting through them!

Game two was against Dave (again - I think!) with a stunning Legio Solaria Warhound based force. We both had to retrieve an objective from the centre line, while also eliminating certain enemy targets.

Again this was carnage, with a lot of chain reacting catastrophic damages, including my melta Reaver getting a magazine detonation to hit four or five other titans and both my Warhounds getting engine kills by picking up the pieces. In the end we both achieved our primary objective (in spite of the Dire Wolf trying to stun my warhound carrying it) but I was unable to finish either of the priority targets, compared to losing my secondary one, so once again a close loss.

Final game was against Gordon (pretty sure this time - recency bias) with a cool melee focused traitor titans list. For the final game our objectives pretty much boiled down to kill each other.

Good use of stratagems (and poor from me) allowed the enemy engines to close in without taking too much damage and get into the perfect positions for some melee action. I wiped some Knights but this one was much more one sided as the chain fist Reavers chopped through my forces, eventually ending with my last Reaver collapsing onto my last Warhound, hilarously destroying it as well. Tabled for a solid zero points.

With that, I secured the coveted wooden spoon (in this event taking the form of a tub of gravy, obviously) and some good experience going forward. Regardless of results, I had a great time. Titanicus is always a bit of a laugh and the 'competitive' game is still fun with a lot relying on the dice rolls. Not to say of course that I wasn't outplayed - I was, but in AdTit the dice can turn an absolute stomping into an exciting, and potentially close game. I would definitely go again if I can get to the next one, and hopefully I can play some more in the not too distant future! Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, and stay safe out there.