Bad day for Ultramarines

This is the army I played last night. You'll need army builder to open it.

So, what went wrong? Well, first of all, I didn't expect to win. I hadn't played marines for awhile. I was trying out the honor guard. There were a lot of reasons that this army shouldn't have worked.

Here's the thing though, I'm not convinced that my fatalistic attitude in playing the army contributed to the loss. I could have won.

I was fighting Eldar. Avatar, two wraithlords, warlock and 4 wraithguard, five harlequines decked out, five scorpions, five dire avengers, 2 big squads of guardians with star cannons, and a falcon.

Here's what I did. I held my Land Raider out of sight for the first turn. On the second turn, everything became available and I did deep strike with everything. That allowed me to surround everything, jump out rapid firing, and etc.. This was my tactic. I pulled it off, and it failed.

The problem in a nut shell is this, a bunch of bolters rapid firing is scary. That's true. But it's not scary enough. I couldn't, for instance, kill an entire squad. I couldn't kill the Wraithlords, I couldn't kill the Avatar. The Assault cannon on the dreadnought is nasty, but it's not going to destroy any of the aforementioned stuff, even in combo with two las-cannons on the Land Raider (one being fired by the machine spirit). The counter attack on all this is brutal. The avatar charges the dreadnought, the wraithlords charge the marine units (who cannot fight back with the lightening claws). It didn't help that the falcon got off a lucky shot destroying the land raider, but even if it hadn't, I'm not sure I could have turned the defeat into victory even with a squad of power weapons re-rolling misses. The problem is strength against a wraithlord, wraithguard, or the avatar, and four strength power weapons just aren't enough.

So, toe to toe, best of possible worlds, I failed horribly.

What should I have done? I think power fists instead of lightening claws for one. I'm not against the land raider (there are those who are), but as it was centralized, there wasn't a real "choose a target" kind of scenario. My new opinion is that I should have made each of the marines a formidable unit on its own--and not because of rapid fire. I should have then dropped them on hard to reach parts of the board opposite that of the land raider. This would have made his forces have to come after me. With a few heavy bolters or missile launchers that would have taken care of much of the problem. I think if you're going to do the whole, "charge out of the land raider" thing, you need to do it and do it quickly. No waiting for the perfect moment because there's just too much risk that the Land Raider will get popped--which is precisely what happenned.

Ultimately though, what I think I did wrong, was I fought the enemy rather than trying to achieve objectives, which I might have very easilly done given the extreme mobility of an all deep striking army.