Warstore Weekend was, regrettably, a huge bust. Where we had been anticipating 20+ people for the FoW tournaments, we had only 11 for the MW tournament and around 4 for the LW tournament. The Infinity tournaments had more participants than FoW did!
What made the weekend worse for me though was knowing that I could have had a shot at Best General, only to have an opponent and a judge use the "Well I don't play it that way" line to completely screw me out of a game. So in the interest of education, let's all go back to school:
Let me set the stage for you. We are playing Cauldron. On one objective my Stuarts have come in from reserve and are about to wipe-out the platoon defending it. On the other objective I have drawn his Tiger very far out of position, and have hidden my other Stuarts, M10's, and armored rifles behind a hill. Defending the objective is a platoon of Pak40's, screened by a platoon of infantry with HMGs.
The time comes when I'm going to assault. I move my armored rifles and M10's to within assault range of the infantry, and the Stuarts to within assault range of the infantry and Pak40's. My goal is to pin and possibly destroy the Pak40's in the shooting phase, and then assault the infantry with my Stuarts and M10's (specifically targeting the HMGs where possible). Once the HMGs were knocked out, if I still had to clear any infantry then the armored rifles would take care of it. I would use the consolidation moves of the tanks to envelop the guns, who after hopefully falling back from successive assaults wouldn't be able to end their move far away enough from my teams, thereby being destroyed.
Please look at Page 147 of the rule book.
It says that a team must assault an enemy team that was within 8" of the platoon that it shot at. A little ambiguous perhaps? Then just look at the picture below, which clearly shows two British tanks firing at some AT guns behind a grenadier platoon, then assaulting the grenadiers.
So now I have three platoons, the core of my army, in the open and committed to this plan. I shoot and pin the Pak40's. Then I go to assault.
"Wait! You can't assault them - you can only assault who you shot at!" my opponent said. I showed him the rules. He remained obstinate. I asked for a judge to provide a ruling. The Battlefront judge/rep read the rule, looked at the picture, and STILL said basically "I've always played it as you have to charge exactly who you shot at."
Predictably, my platoons, who were now completely out in the open and trained, got massacred next turn. My opponent, who used his Tiger to chase my Stuarts so far as to be completely out of position, who positioned his AT guns so they were blocking each other's line of sight, whom I reminded to re-roll misses with his Tiger ace skill, won Best General.
The tournament was also made worse by the other Battlefront judge/rep, who was absent for 80% of the event, and when he was there he was rude to both the participants and his colleague. I understand that he probably had a late night, and that everyone has bad days, but I left my home at 4:45 in the morning to get to that tournament, only to play two games (sat out the first round because we had an odd number of players), have one of those games blatantly robbed from me (if you're confused about the rule, JUST LOOK AT THE GODDAMN PICTURE!!!!...sorry for the all caps), and then play a great game against a great opponent (thanks, Al). So to the judge who was absent/rude: if you don't want to positively represent Battlefront at these events, I'm sure we can find someone else who will.
Overall I was very disappointed. I spent money to enter the tournament, to build my army, and for the hotel room. I simply expected more from a Battlefront event.
