December 2011 Archives

Scenario was from sr2012 beta, destructible objectives, second one appears after destroying the first, armorer ability on caster.

I had the same irusk list i took last time i went to a 50pt tourney, just cause that was a list already in my phone that worked with what I had in the box (forgot to bring the gold box plvlad yet again).

pIrusk
Spriggan
Destroyer
Wishnaylrr
eEiryss
Saxon
Kovnik Jo
aiyana and holt
bears
max kayazy + boss
max wgi + ua + 1 rocket

Opponent had
eThagrosh
Scythean
Carnivean
Angelius
shredders and stingers to taste
succubus
2 forsaken
2 shepherds
legionaires

This was probably the most interesting game I've played in quite a while. Quite a few mistakes on my part, but I feel like I learned a lot.

Left side (my initial objective target) was legionnaires vs wgi.
Right side (his initial objective target) was his beasts and thags vs kayazy.
Spriggan and destroyer in the middle with bears backing them up.

On the right side Destro utterly failed to kill any forsaken on several consecutive turns, so I ran a couple of sacrificial kayazy up into melee with the beasts, trying to bait out a bomb. He ended up feating instead and trying to melee them with MD and the extra attacks. This left enough kayazy alive to get a charge into his beasts on my feat turn, one leading kayazy killed one of the forsaken and the blight bomb from the other left a few alive after toughing, so I was happy enough with that. Major mistake here was not sniping spiny growth off of the carni, I had moved eiryss over earlier but forgot about her, so the carni lived and would feature as a game winner. I think i need to paint eiryss, the all black primer blends in with terrain too well.

Over on the left side his legionaires had hung back while a bunch of lessers tied up winterguard. The WGI sprayed and/or meleed them, but left quite a few of them on a couple of wounds. This allowed the legionaires to get into melee; they couldn't really hit the wgi once iron flesh had been swapped to them, but I didn't really want to risk them rolling on free strikes to bob & weave out (why? would have been a 9, with multiple legos per wgi due to reach). I was a little too focused on shooting; in retrospect if I wanted to play it safe and tarpit them battle lust would have taken care of it even with arm 18, especially if I could have disengaged one of them to hit him with aiyana's harm.

In the meantime in the middle he had put a hurt on the spriggan with the angel due to poor positioning on my part with regards to an obstruction that didn't really block LOS. Bears ate the angel in return, scythean charged the bears but was only able to get one in due to not wanting a free strike from the spriggan. Bears killed the scythean, spriggan limped into melee with the carni but I had forgotten to snipe off spiny yet again, which rolled enough to finish the spriggan.

This put me in a bad situation, next turn it was going to be thags and a torn up carnivean vs 2 bears and 2 kayazy, with a destro a little too far back to be effective at melee or blocking. I tried to finish the carni with destros gun and failed. Had the option to make thag and carni take a free strike from one kayazy each or try to block off the bears, elected to block the carnivean's lane to the bears with 2 kayazy arranged such that a trample (hopefully) wouldn't have had clearance (spray might have been able to take them though). In retrospect it would have been better to engage the carni with the kayazy, because it was able to kill the objective next turn, and forcing a trample instead of a charge probably would have saved it. Thags was able to kill the kayazy and bears, but left himself on 1 fury.

I was out of heavy hitters, and figured the smart thing to do was to allocate to destro and run to retreat, but thought it would be more interesting to see if I could get the assassination. I screwed up the order of things due to forgetting about thag's free lesser; I eliminated the two remaining transfer targets (carni and a lesser) rather than forcing the initial transfer to use the fury up, and obviously failed once he popped the lesser. Even talking about it after the fact, due to thag's clouds, my available attacks were 3 focus on destro that was just outside of walk into melee range, eiryss shooting, saxon shooting, irusk grind + s&p + boosted damage. Problem was that the only ones that were likely to do good damage were destro and grind, and unless destro went first thag's lesser was going to block the lane and force a trample instead of a charge. But if destro went first, the other shooting/magic wasn't likely to hit thags behind a cloud and engaged in melee.

As it was, the stinger that thags popped out was able to roll exactly what it needed to kill irusk on the charge. The legos would have been able to kill the objective anyway, since WGI had gotten out of position to kill one of the available lesser transfer targets.

So to recap -
destro is the least valuable player of this game. His gun did nothing, and a real melee jack would have been able to finish thags on his own.
leading with just a few kayazy worked well, even though it didn't bait the forsaken it let enough of the trailing unit survive to be effective.
high arm tarpits are reasonably effective against wgi, but remember to battle lust them too if necessary.
remember to use eiryss.
still need to work on troop positioning to protect jacks, didn't need to lose spriggan the way I did.
remember that ethags will poop out a lesser.

Forgot to bring pVlad in his gold box ( I think I'm just going to keep him in the gold box I got him in from the model exchange, it's too funny), so I proxied him. Just grabbed some randomish stuff to play him with

pVlad
spriggan
destroyer
aiyana and holt
wgi + ua
min nyss + valachev

Opponent had
ashlynn
mariner
atgm + ua
mule
dougal
taryn
precursor knights
eiryss

Opp didnt want to play scenario, terrain was two small forests, a wall, and hill, more or less in a square with a clearing in the middle.

He went first, moved up very concerned about threat ranges and shieldwalled the precursors. I ran the wgi behind the wall, stuck the nyss in a forest that was really too small to conceal them effectively.

All but one nyss got shot next turn thanks to artillerist and true sight on the gun mage ua. Rest of his army more or less stayed where it was.

It seemed like he didnt want to engage, well, vlad can do ranged too. I looked at the distance from destroyer to ashlynn, who was up on the hill but not within 1" of a screening model. It was pretty far, but the feat would get him in range, so I thought it'd be funny to use the feat for ranged instead of a charge. Destroyer got two, vlad S&Ped and popped feat, destroyer moved up 8" and shot ashlynn. Missed by 1, scatter of 1 put it still on her. Boosted the blast damage and halfway killed her under s&p. The last nyss charged eiryss and killed her, spriggan moved up and shot at some gun mages but didnt kill many.

I expected to lose one or both jacks, but he seemed content to push them away with gun mages, shoot at the destroyer with his jacks and taryn (which did maybe a total of 8 points, but threw him back with a crit from the mule). Precursors stayed where they were.

I figured this was more or less a gift, if he wanted to keep shooting I'd just put vlad next to the jacks and wind wall, and kill as many gun mages as I could. So i did.

He managed to kill a surprising number of bobbing and weaving wgi behind the wall, thankfully I had moved a&h out of blast damage's way. He moved ashlynn up again, not sure why, I guess it was necessary for his next turn plan or something.

I figured fortune favors the bold, S&P again and move vlad back behind the wall, walk destro up into range and shoot her in the face. Needed a 15, rolled a 17 on boosted hit dice under S&P for a direct hit, boosted damage easily killed her.

I don't imagine that was the most fun game, seeing as how I made only three attack rolls, but vlad's offense is gross. I need to get the behemoth built, using the feat for additional shooting range rather than a charge could mean threat ranges that surpass even something like elylth feat + ravagore.

Decided to see if vlad could redeem himself with another game, same stuff

pvlad
destroyer
spriggan
max nyss + valachev
max wgi + ua + 1 rocket

Opponent switched up to his own pvlad,

pvlad
devastator
spriggan
torch
mechaniks
would have needed something else but I forget what, did doomies get shot in the face again?

Anyway, he moved his jacks up with the mechaniks in front B2B. I shot most of em dead at range despite the defense buff, since S&P is gross.

He windwalled the jacks and moved up some more, I feated and wrecked torch with my spriggan and tore both arms off his spriggan with charging nyss. Bobbed and weaved the wgi into a ridiculous mob in front of vlad, pretty much shutting down any trample shenanigans.

His vlad decided to go out with a bang and see if he could wreck my spriggan under BoK and came up considerably short. I considered seeing if vlad could take him, but decided to play it safe. S&P, Spriggan boosted headbutt knocked him down, WGI CRA put him in the dirt.

Back in austin after the SA tourney, painted pVlad's maiden voyage

pvlad
destroyer
spriggan
max nyss + valachev
max wgi + ua + 1 rocket

eIrusk
torch
demo corps
shocktroopers
corbeau
doom reavers + ua
kayazy eliminators?

Doomies ran and got shot in the face like always, shocktroopers advanced with demo corps behind, torch got on the far flank.

I moved vlad up a little too far for S&P, nyss killed most of the demo corps, torch set vlad on fire via charging a wgi + spraying, irusk feated.

I figured I needed to kill irusk or I had a chance of dying to fire next turn. So I S&Ped, moved the nyss up despite the feat. Not sure if they should have gotten their reduced movement plus the full 3" from the zephyr, in retrospect, it shouldnt have mattered because I would have been able to shoot over the wall of shocktroopers due to being on the hill; as it was I moved around it. Had to kill one demo corps to get him out of the way, missed a couple of the shots on irusk so he was still alive. Destroyer had to advance slightly to get him in range, wasnt sure if corbeau was close enough to another trooper sucker the hit onto him instead of irusk, decided not to risk it and shot irusk. Missed by 1, so would have hit corbeau, turns out she was out of range to the other trooper, so it would have hit irusk. Would have been better to shoot her with one of the nyss earlier to find out. Spriggan charged torch, but with most of my focus going in to the s&p plus 2 for bombards, he wasnt going to wreck him.

Next turn torch got energizered (its almost like my opponent had been reading my blog or something, grin) away from spriggan to get a trample angle on vlad, the free strike didnt take out anything important so bye bye vlad.

Main thing I think here was not protecting vlad sufficiently, I think playing irusk camping the back of his deployment zone has made me somewhat lazy.

Scenario was two rectangular zones, score on the far one on your left. Used reinforcements.

Opponent had
eLylyth
Ravagore
Bolt Thrower
Teraph
forsaken
shredder
stinger
anyssa
raptors
deathstalker
Reinforcements were another bolt thrower and a shepherd.

I won the roll, elected to take second and choice of board side because one of the zones had a wall just inside its near edge and i wanted to be defending that one. (the ginormous obstruction you see in the other zone in the photo wasnt there initially, it was a small building that the PG swapped out).

Having never actually played against eLylyth before, my number one priority was not getting assassinated, and that's usually easy enough to do with my trademark chicken irusk. He spent almost the whole game literally on the back of the table, to the point he and wishnailer kept falling off the table when my jacket brushed the edge.

Anyway, opponent moved up and didn't have much to shoot at first turn since eiryss is my only AD piece and she was hiding as best she could. Kayazy ran towards his army, wgi and the rest towards the zone I needed to defend.

Raptors, deathstalker and anyssa did what they could against the WGI but they made 3 tough rolls. Forsaken filled up on fury and got ready to blow up the kayazy next turn. He got fairly unlucky on ravagore and teraph deviation, a trend that would continue throughout the game. He also forgot about reinforcements, so the far zone was undefended.

My nyss reinforced into a backstrike position on the raptors and anyssa and murderized them, eiryss moved up into the zone I needed to score on getting me a CP, and shot at the forsaken, but was short by half an inch. That pretty much meant the kayazy were going to die next turn and they did.

He spent time killing off the kayazy and finishing those that didn't get caught by the forsaken bomb, and I think he was so involved with that that he forgot to reinforce yet again, until the end of his turn when it was too late. He had killed eiryss so the zone was empty, but he didn't have anything in it either.

So I said "Hey, its 2 control points to win, right?" "Yeah...." "Ok, spriggan gets one focus, upkeep superiority so he's speed 6, he runs 12" into the corner of the zone. Good game." We started packing up.

...but the PG wandered by, we asked him and he told us it was 3 cp to win.

Did our best to get stuff back out on the table in the same position and keep playing. He offered to let me re-do the beginning of my turn but i kept the spriggan's activation as it was. I was mentally pretty flustered from having thought I had won and relaxed, but eventually calmed down and realized all I had to do was keep him out of my zone to win. I could have moved irusk up if i wanted to get spriggan back in control area, but even if he made it behind the wall I wasn't sure about his chances.

After that it was just a grind - he wasn't moving stuff into his scoring zone, it was filled with bears and wgi hiding behind the wall, so everything was def17-21 and tough to boot. Nyss ran around tying stuff up and dying, wgi bobbed and weaved and died slowly to his missed shots, poor deviation rolls, etc.

He couldn't ignore the spriggan, so he pincushioned it and feated. Wasn't able to kill it, pushed it out of the zone with NBT and put a stinger B2B to try and keep it out. I looked at the situation and realized lylyth had no focus and was within range of the spriggan and at least one or two WGI. The idea of shooting elylyth to death via spriggan flares and wgi, even on extremely long odds, was really funny. So I feated and started bulldozing spriggan in when i realized he was actually in spear range as well, went for that instead and didn't roll the 8 I would have needed to hit. Given focus it would have been a fairly sure thing, but I had never moved irusk up (and don't think I should have, either).

I won on control points at dice down (and would have won on points in the zone too, since spriggan was still alive). There was apparently talk that he would have had me next turn, and I suppose it's possible that's right. It would have largely come down to how quickly he was able to kill the bears behind the wall at range, because they still had a 11" no-go radius set up around my zone, where anything that entered there was going to get a faceful of axe.

My buddy who was playing on the next table said he looked over at one point and thought it was the most russian thing he'd ever seen, irusk standing calmly with hands folded behind him at the back of the battlefield, sending all his troops to die. But, hey, irusk ground out another first place tourney finish. I had a good time with the S.A. crew, and got an awesome pVlad with custom base as my model exchange.

Scenario was the large single central rectangular zone.

Opponent had
pStryker
Defender
Squire
jr warcaster
charger
lancer
gun mages
storm blades
storm caller

I knew sniped defender was going to be able to get me pretty much anywhere on the board, and there wasnt anything for Irusk to hide behind, so I figured i'd park him on a hill for the +2 and do my best to keep him safe.

i flooded the zone with kayazy, WGI went onto the hill to the left with irusk behind, bears and spriggan central.

He only got a couple gun mages and the charger into the zone on his next turn, so I figured I had a chance at a control point early, but 4 kayazy with battle lust didn't bring the charger down. After that it was just slugging it out in the zone, with him moving only as much stuff as he needed in to contest.

bunch of kayazy died to earthquake + gunmage shooting, but the boss toughed two or three times in a row. Eiryss disrupted the defender but died the next turn despite being def 18 on the hill.

His feat turn I basically just camped focus, moved irusk up a bit in order to keep spriggan in range, meatshielded irusk with a couple wgi. threaded the kayazy around the corner of a big obstruction in the zone, got into a couple of solos near stryker but didn't do much. Bears set up for a charge on the defender next turn once the wgi got out of the way, spriggan got at the edge of my control to hold down the space the kayazy vacated.

Irusk got shot by the defender after the stormcaller removed a screening wgi, but the nearly full camp did its job and he only took a couple points. Stryker moved around the corner of the obstruction (I guess to get away from the kayazy) and the Bears started visibly salivating.

I feated and battle lusted the bears, parted the sea of wgi who then sprayed a couple of gun mages out of the way, bears had a clear lane to stryker and ate him despite the arcane shield and a couple focus.

I think my main issues this game were with positioning - I could have spread the kayazy out better against the earthquake, and was kind of undecided about where to send the spriggan and bears (even though the bears ended up being in the right place at the right time, the spriggan was going to be right at the edge of my control range and largely useless). The kayazy failure on the charge against the light jack points out the value of reach to me, if they had been pikemen they would have killed him because I could have gotten 1 more on him due to the angle (nevermind that 4 points more damage would have wrecked him).

SR2012 35 point tourney with 7 point reinforcements. I didn't have my karchev jack spam built, and had been spending most of my modeling time on painting up thor steinhammer for a gift exchange with the guys in San Antonio. So I decided to just do a single list, pretty much the same pIrusk list as the last time I brought him to a tourney. Lack of saxon might be an issue, but I hadn't seen any huge rivers blocking the whole board last time I was in S.A., and taking saxon instead of eiryss made the points weird.

pIrusk
Spriggan
Wishnailer
eEiryss
kovnik jo
max wgi + ua + 1 rocket
max kayazy +underboss
Reinforcements were min Nyss hunters

First opponent had pigs:
Carver
Targ
War Hog
Gun Boar x 2
razorback artillery crew
bone grinders
brigands

Scenario was the one with two central rectangles, score on the far one, with killbox as a complication.

I parked irusk just inside the killbox behind a forest, and concentrated on the biggest threats to my infantry. Jo and the wgi took out the artillery on the left flank and flooded my zone, kayazy were just in range to run to engage the gunboar and brigands on the right, and got iron flesh through the one hanging back. Spriggan got superiority and ran into my zone, with bears backing him up in charge distance of anything that came after him.

Opponent hadn't fought IF kayazy before, did the "they're def 19?!?" freakout. Managed to kill one of them I think. Next turn they were able to thread their way through the brigands and engage carver who had moved up. Carver turned around to melee them and didn't kill them.

Spriggan bulldozed the gun boar that was engaging him out of the way, charging a brigand and bulldozing him into reach range of carver. Hit the brigand with the shield, hit carver in the back with the spear to get rid of his transfer, kayazy finished him.

I talked with him afterwards about how point-blank rift would have cleared the kayazy out, but given that I had already taken out 2 of his other sources of auto-hitting, it would have been a tough fight still.

Trying out another SR2012 scenario, this time with flank deployment / reinforcements. It was the one with 4 objective markers, where you have to control the near one and contest the far one on the flank opposite your deployment.

I had:
pIrusk
Spriggan
Wishnailer
Saxon
Bears
WGI +UA + Rocket
Jo
Reinforcement was a juggernaut

Opponent had:
pSeverius
avatar
reckoner
book
choir
vassal
wracks
exemplar errants
seneschal
Reinforcement was blessing of vengeance

So, first off, my chalkboard for today:

I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.

will get back to that in a second, but other observations from the game:

It seems like since the two central flags have to be controlled, it's really a center scenario despite the far flags. I got a little too backed up near my deployment, partially because of a forest in the middle, but also because i was thinking I needed to defend the flag nearest my deployment, when in actuality contesting the central flag was all I needed.

Also related to the scenario, it seems like free focus for warjack reinforcements is a trap. He had eiryss on that flank, which means I had to kill her before I could reinforce, and even once I did, our jacks are too slow to make much of a difference - I think i killed a couple of errants at best. His reinforcement jack didn't fare much better, the WGI shot the arc node off it pretty quick.

i sent kayazy after the errants even though they were out-threated, because of mistakes made during my deployment they were the only thing that was going to get there in time. Positioning kept them from being destroyed by blessed crossbows, but I squandered that advantage in 2 ways. First was relying on duelist to keep them alive once they minifeated and ran to engage; sev was able to hit them with death sentence, and errants are accurate enough to have a hope of hitting them if they can reroll enough times. Second mistake was wasting a turn running some of them over to the objective that needed to be contested, instead of just concentrating on cleaning up the errants.

Over on the flank I was defending, I screwed up positioning between spriggan and the avatar, there had been a wall preventing him from charging but I got too close to the edge of the line between them and he was able to kill the spriggan with the avatar. I wrecked it with the great bears next turn (after basing him with 2 wgi to stop enliven) but there was really no reason for the trade, I had wgi in the area that could have shielded him.

Speaking of shielding, next turn he was able to trample the reckoner and just get into the bears. Left two alive until he remembered the vassal, and the ancillary attack got one.

At this point my number one priority was killing the reckoner, since it was within range of irusk; its gun arm was gone but if he was able to clear the bear (or survive the freestrike) he'd be able to charge irusk, or at least contest the flag. The errants were tied up with kayazy on the other flank, his light jack was pretty shot up and tied up with wgi, so I wasnt overly concerned with them.

I didn't think one bear was going to get it done even with battle lust, and I wanted to kill the jack rather than inhospitable ground or something. SO, i've got wishnailer, grind is pow 14, with signs and portents and a boost it should do enough damage to let the bear finish it off... but with the in combat penalty I might actually miss since reckoner has ashen veil.... so I'll assualt with irusk to prevent the penalty.

So taking as a given that endangering my caster was a bad idea to begin with, I made several other mistakes - not doing grind after the charge movement but before the charge attack, I took out the one extra box of movement that grind would have done. The grind damage roll was abysmally low even with S&P from wishnailer. At that point I kind of panicked, put up iron flesh instead of battle lusting the bear, tried to throw some additional damage on him with jo + wgi. After the bear's attack he was left with 2 boxes, one of cortex and one of melee arm (now you see why I'm writing on the chalkboard). Did exactly enough damage next turn to kill irusk.

I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.
I will remember that great bears have precision strike.

since the battle mechanik officer sculpt was previewed as being THE COOLEST MINI THIS YEAR™, decided to try out a proxy MoW army

me:
eIrusk
behemoth
full shocktroopers
full bombardiers
mortar
mechs + UA

opponent had just gotten his shocks from the 2p battlebox built and painted, had:
eIrusk
wishnailer
corbeau
spriggan
shocktroopers
doomreavers + ua
eliminators
widowmakers
manhunter

my behemoth killed half his widowmakers early, they failed command and were basically useless the rest of the game.

his eliminators got a charge on a shock and killed him, I had forgotten they had spd 7 instead of 6.

my bombardiers failed to kill off the eliminators with like 4 point blank deviated blasts. Guess 5 wounds does matter, one survived long enough to kill 2 of my meks next turn.
I moved my shocks up and feated, thinking I'd catch his front line out of eIrusk's bubble, since I had been cycling FFE between behemoth and mortar, mostly shooting at his irusk from downtown, and knew he'd be in range if he moved up.

But I had forgotten about corbeau, both for shooting at her instead of irusk, and for the extra 1" on the bubble. So his shocks were still in, letting the doomies charge through them into my shocks. Oddly, they all survived - it was partly poor dice rolls, but still shieldwall arm 21 is no joke. Spriggan went over to the left flank and killed the mortar.

Next I cleaned up the doomies, leaving most of his shocks alive, and continued taking potshots at irusk. He finished off my shocks and some more bombardiers, one of my bombardiers one-shotted his shocktrooper on the charge, but it was still down to both of our jacks, a couple of support solos (his doomy UA, my mek officer and one mek), with the balance of 4 shocktroopers vs 2 bombardiers in his favor.

He had tried to hide eirusk within an inch of his shocks, but behemoth was able to trample to get LOS and keep shooting him, didn't finish him. I thought "Oh, irusk has ROF 2, i'll go shoot him in the face to finish him". Except, yknow, its epic irusk, not prime. So my one shot missed, didn't have another one, and was kind of left hanging in the wind. I positioned the mek officer as best I could to stop a slam / charge / trample from spriggan, and prepared to die.

My opponent didn't notice that he could have energized spriggan to get the angle. He ended up charging in his own irusk to finish the job after softening mine up, and didn't get the dice he needed. I tried to kill him with my mechanik for the laughs, but had to finish him with Irusk.

Overall, it was a mistake-prone game on my part, but the mek officer didn't wow me. Granted they lost 2 guys early, but even so they healed maybe 1 extra troopers worth of damage. It just seems like healing a ST doesn't buy you any additional function that turn the way it does a jack with a damaged axe, and chances are fairly good that if something wants to kill it, 1 wound from tough or 1 wound + 1d6 from tough + healing doesn't matter much.