Dwarf Engineer (contest winner)

I spent part of the day at Get Your Game On today hoping for a game of 40k.  In the four or five years that I've been playing 40k, I have fewer than a dozen battles fought.   Today was another, and another notch in the "never won a game of 40k" belt.  More on that in a minute.

First off, though, I'd like to show off the mini that won the Paint Creek "Strategic Redeployment" painting contest when they closed.  50 Dwarf engineers were given out at the ill fated GW store the week before they closed, and they were judged in a painting contest a week later at the new "place" to be, Get Your Game On.  My entry won, and I received a battleforce as my prize (I chose Eldar.)  The engineer is painted in the color scheme of my friend Bill's Dwarf army (a great deal of which I still need to paint for him.)  It also matches (roughly) the University of Michigan school colors, and since Get Your Game On is smack dab in the middle of Ann Arbor I'm guessing that have a soft spot for that color scheme.  I'll be giving this to Bill as a display piece.  I'm quite pleased how it turned out.

So in term of playing 40k, the store was absolutely devoid of warhammer/40k players when Stef and I got there ... roughly 4:00 PM.  I immediately got the "don't want to be here" feelings going, but Stef convinced me to sit and paint for a while.  Less than half an hour later, a fellow named Joe came in with enough Orks to play the 1500 points of marines I had brought.  The fight was on!

Joe had a Goff warband painted much like my own (although he had many, many more models painted.)  We got sieze ground / dawn of war, and I took first turn.  I won't do a play by play, but I did learn a few things I will share.

• When it comes to taking objectives, 4 squads of 5 marines would have been much more useful than 2 squads of 10.  I will be breaking into combat squads in the future.
• Nobs with a painboy are scary even when foot-slogging.  He took mostly huge choppas as wargear, which still allows armor saves but wounding on a 2+ means you are going to take a lot of them.  
• Six sternguard can effectively destroy a mob of 20 boyz holding an objective.  If you are inside 24" those Hellfire rounds just tear anything up.  Once the mob was reduced a bit I got close enough to rapid fire, making him choose between keeping the objective or leaving it to charge at me.
• A Land Raider Crusader can kill an Ork Warboss in the shooting phase, unlike the rest of my army.
• When given the chance, don't forget to contest the objectives.  In the last turn I could have run a dreadnought over to the objective the Nobs were holding and potentially won the game (we drew at 1 objective each.)
• If the Ork Warboss w/ Klaw makes his invulnerable save against your force weapon, prepare to get the big hurt.

And here are a couple more views of the Dwarf Engineer: