That WAS a great battle report! You described it succinctly. Yes, big impressive models always seem to draw the most fire. I've heard of sneaky players who would convert and paint up their dreadnaughts or a vehicle to look intimidating and dangerous as hell but just use the minimal points investment for weapons (but perhaps a bit added in the optional armour department), intending full well from the outset to use them as fire-magnets which they would conspicuously drive up the middle of the table straight toward enemy centre right out in the open, presenting an irresistible target. Meanwhile they had units of unassuming infantry (subtly equipped with an inordinate amount of flamers or melta-guns) sneak through cover to get a nice secure forward position along one flank and some multi-melta equipped fast attack units on the other to pick off specific threats. Suddenly the enemy finds they've spent two or three turns firing at the wrong thing entirely! Of course, I would personally never stoop to employing such cheap underhanded psychological tactics.
"throw whatever you have on the table and have fun"
I've always loved this approach. When I was a teenager I was really a stickler for precisely balancing the points values of all involved forces. Now that I have mellowed with age, I find it far more interesting, not to mention realistic, to ignore points values and just use the models I want to use in a more narrative-based approach to scenarios. Smaller skirmishy battles with a strong plot and good characters are what I like these days. My days of big powerful forces of Ultramarines vs monstrous numbers of Orks and gretchen thrown against one another in a one big apocalyptic day-long battle have given way to strings of much smaller encounters in a linked campaign, with the outcome of the previous battle dictating the plot of the next. These tend to involve a group of roughly ten well-defined low level characters on each side, each with a specialty of some sort. Casualty removal is far more personal that way. It goes from, "Okay I rolled this and rolled that so I remove two marines from this squad" to "Oh horrors! They felled old Zeke the Astropath! Well maybe Sarah with her Medi pack might be able to reach him in the next turn or two... If not maybe he'll survive on the recovery table." I think your force of dreaddiez there would invoke a similar feeling in battle. You
feel the game more when everyone is an interesting character!
You know, now that I think about it, I guess what got the ball rolling for my preference for smaller, more characterful battles was getting the 2nd Edition box set after playing Rogue Trader from '87 to '93. If you flip through the lovely colour pages of the solidly RT-era
Book of Astronomican you can see how each and every figure, even the Squats and Imperial Guardsmen, have loads of defining character sculpted all over them, which helped you to feel their losses and triumphs. I remembered being mortified when the 2E box set came out because the plastic figures looked like cookie-cutter clones of one another - like paper doll chains...
I really thought GW had missed the point entirely fiddling about with new technology options (i.e. making figs in plastic - proving once again that just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean you SHOULD).
Giving even rank & file soldiers some individual character is one of the major qualities that makes the film
Aliens so exciting to watch. The director subtly introduces us to a 'little family' of marines, taking care to get us a bit familiar with each of their quirky personalities first before the action begins. (And only then are they thrown into a hive of hellbeasts exhibiting an existentially distressing parasitism like no one has ever experienced.) This is also the same reason why the film
Galaxy of Terror flops. The protagonists are all very badly defined shallow archetypes (the leader, the girl, the big man, the scientist) and when they walk into their own existentially distressing hive of hellbeasts... you feel nothing!
Note too, how much of an influence the film
Aliens obviously was on the design of some of the RT era figures (particularly IG). They were trying to capture exactly that quality of
feel for the unit from the film. This ethic of character is carried over into all the first edition 40K miniatures and is perhaps arguably the reason why we all frequent this 'Oldhammer' forum even today.
But anyway, thanks for sharing that awesome battle report! I wish I could have been a spectator watching that unfold; particularly when your dreadz got to grips with that lot of Ogryns!