Posts Tagged ‘tactics’
Beasts from the East – One Man And His Lord Tyrant
As well as running a friendly, well-stocked brick-and-mortar and online shop (for all your guilt management needs), the good people at Dark Sphere Games have a rather spiffy gaming space that’s half an hour’s walk from my place and draws a decent Warmahordes crowd of a Monday night. It’d be churlish of me not to give it a go, really, and so I’ve popped up and been rocking the Skorne for a couple of games. One of these was my first with the good Lord Tyrant Hexeris since, umm, actually since I acquired him two and a half years ago, and it proved to be a strange experience after Morghoul.
WFB – All Aboard the Clapham Omnibus
I live in London now. This is presumably a good thing, although I haven’t had the chance to do masses of exploring just yet, as it’s still busy busy busy research season and I have nine days to produce something like eleven thousand words of material. No pressure, then.
However, last night I did manage to sneak out and pay a visit to some nice chaps who claim to be the Clapham War Gamers. Rain very nearly stopped play (ten minutes into the walk, the heavens opened and I spent fifteen further minutes cowering in a bus stop) but I just about made it in time to play some WFB against a nice enthusiastic chap of Teutonic extraction (hi Max!) and his nasty Skaven (boo, Skaven!).
WFB: The Lizard Mysteries
With the review of the basics of eighth edition complete, I decided it was high time for my Lizardmen to start making back the seventy quid I spent on them (ignoring the irony that I had a very similar army to this back in fifth edition and if I’d just NOT SOLD THEM… yes, well, we live and learn and in my defence I really wanted some Vampire Counts at the time). First thing I needed to do was actually put the big lads on bases and sort out the mis-based Saurus (ah, the happy days of yore, when we guessed at how many dudes our dudes were in combat with, and ‘ranking up’ was a thing that only Dwarfs were capable of). I’m too cheap to buy chariot bases at the list price, so instead I spent £2.50 on a packet of balsa wood and walked out with enough for my Slann, both Stegadons, and movement trays for everything in my army. The bases are holding up well – witness!
The trays are a bit more fragile and some of the wood in the middle of the pack appeared to have split during transit. Not to worry though, they’re back in one piece now.
Next, I’d need… hmm. Opposition. My old mate BlackHeart (of Grumpy Gamers – Reviews fame) was free that day and he has an Empire army (I know this because I sold it to him). He doesn’t like eighth edition at all – the Warrior Priests that used to guarantee some resilience for his army by praying for Unbreakability are now far too easy to shut down (one dispel die will do it), and he’s of the opinion that putting Empire soldiery into horde formation just makes them die faster. He agreed to play a game regardless, because he’s such a nice chap, on the condition that I’d play him at his favourite Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game the day after.
In accordance with the principles of Warhammer for Adults (since, ostensibly at least, we are adults…), we decided to hang the notion of ‘army lists’ and ‘worrying about balance’ and just dump our entire collections down on the board to see if they’d fit. As a result, I had lots of long lines of Skinks and Saurus, with the two Stegadons on the flanks and the Slann parked firmly in the middle, waving his rod of toadly might about, while Blackheart had his customary blocks of ‘elite’ human infantry (I use the term somewhat guardedly), led by mighty heroes of the realm. This is a roundabout way of saying ‘he had more characters than me but I had a very big lizard wizard’.
I won’t bother with a full-on report or anything because a) I can’t be bothered and b) we were far too busy trying to learn/remember how our armies worked and make sure we were playing eighth edition at least vaguely right to go messing about with photography or note-taking or anything like that. I was trying to concentrate on learning and implementing strategeries and tic-tacs too, though, so here are some thoughts thereon:
Ask Uncle Von: Double Your Debuffs, Triple Your Fun
Quoth Frank, in commentary on a previous emission:
Uncle Von! I’m a newbie Cryx player–could you please explain that triple-dip in more detail? I’m not understanding it and would really like to. Thanks!
Quoth Von: absolutely! Allow me to demonstrate through the magic of pictures.
Observe: one Cryxian warcaster, one Skarlock, one Deathripper, one token representing an upkeepable spell, and three targets.
Strategery and Tic-Tacs
A little thought experiment for you lovely people, while I’m working for the next couple of days. I would like you to consider the following map. You don’t have to know anything about the game that it’s from: in fact, it’s probably an advantage if you don’t, as you won’t have any preconceived notions cluttering up your participation. Suffice to say that you start in either the top left or bottom right, you have fifteen playable units that are most conveniently arranged into groups of five, and your objective is to accumulate points by taking and holding the five numbered objectives around the middle. The more objectives you hold, and for longer, the more points you accumulate. Objective four is raised up and it’s technically possible to see most of the field from there, objective two is sunken down.
This isn’t an experiment in build optimisation; it’s about fieldwork and control. Tear your eyes away from the foxy undead lady on the right and ask yourself how you would approach this map.
