Wednesday 25 February 2015

Battlecrying

Oh the humanity. I yet again wallow around in the midfield standings of an event, having only clocked 2 wins and 2 losses at the recent one-dayer at Battlecry. Yet, I'm not as frustrated with myself as I may have been previously, and part of that is identifying where things went wrong (the greater part was actually having pretty decent games, even when I was busy sabotaging myself or getting my shit pushed in). A series of hurdles and handicaps tripped me up leading up to and during the day, and while it might not be entertaining reading the reflections of a middle-road drop out, that's all I got. Go here if you want to read accounts of someone who plays proficiently and who podiums.

So my first issue; I scuttled myself in list creation. Instead of working on the Skorne pairing I have harped about previously, I worked myself in to a bit of a confused position where I wanted to try out an eXerxis list that I had been mulling over, and then the announcement was made to make the painting comp based off a single warbeast/jack. so I wanted to parade around my freshly painted Mammoth.

This meant I had backed myself into a bit of a corner; I had one list I was experimenting with, with another list that was built around a Gargantuan, that some how ended up being my general drop due to some malfunction in my thinking. Taking the Mammoth, I tried to build a shooty-bricky pXerxis list, adding to the durability of the mammoth with defensive buffs, and bringing the guns to deal with multiple troops with AOEs and what not. Its a list that has some legs, but there were instances where it got completely rolled, and I don't think the eXerxis list would have faired much better either. Yet I still ended up with a bit of a dud pairing going into Battlecry, all because of experimenting and wanting to win a painting comp.

At least I got the painting prize ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

oh mammoth <3

The games I lost at Battlecry were both with pXerxis. First, I had to grind through the eGaspy gauntlet. things pretty much went as expected, with me bricking up out of fear of all the weapon-masters heading my way, while Peter hunter danced gaspy around the board claiming CPs. I had fun with my first ever swipe though, claiming something like 7 Bane Knights before gaspy feated them all back and turned the mammoth into a red smear. 

thug

I brought a knife to a gun fight, and paid for it. ELich is still the bees knees, surprise surprise.

My other loss I will attribute to two big mistakes I made; 1) pushing my Raider too far forward and losing him trivially, and 2) herpa-derping my Mammoth into a charge it never had. If I had done either of those things differently, the game would be a totally different mess. As it was, my opponent Chris capitalized masterfully on my mistakes and managed to get a bead onto Xerxis, popping him with two weapon master shots. Well done sir.

gangs

But something I wasn't expecting came out of the experimentation; I began looking at my eXerxis list to replace my pXerxis list, and pair with Mordikaar. Part of this is the rose-tinted glow I got winning the games I did with him. Another part of that is how I've been discussing and building the list with him for a couple of weeks now, and I feel things are now in a space where I can field him confidently.

This also excites me as my opinion on this guy has changed yet again, from initially being excited, to being totally ambivalent and actually quite bummed out about to the guy, to now feeling again he has a decent game. eXerxis is warlock I feel I am fleshing out well, and its through collusion with friends and my own design, not just conforming to some net-list.

The list as it stands looks like this:
Xerxis, Fury of Halaak 
- Molik Karn 
- Archidon 
- Cyclops Brute 
- Cyclops Brute
- Cyclops Brute 
- Cyclops Shaman 

Extoller Soulward 
Mortitheurge Willbreaker 
Mortitheurge Willbreaker 
Orin Midwinter, Rogue Inquisitor 
Tyrant Rhadeim 

Min Paingiver Beast Handlers 
Min Paingiver Beast Handlers 

The idea is a to have a mobile battlegroup that darts in and out, chipping away at key pieces till its time to go all in on the feat. I keep saying that I got the idea for this after watching people play Vayl, so the idea was to replicate a part of that plan. It also is my answer to the Bradigus question. It so happens that the eXerxis games at battle cry were against these two warlocks, and the list performed well. Against Brad, it was a matter of knocking out stones and Woldwatchers, till Molik drew a bead on Bradigus. Against Vayl, the key moment for me was when I managed to get off a Stranglehold against a threatening Angelius, allowing me to comfortably setup my board position from that point forward. Yo-yoing beasts around the board is fun, and I feel the list is in a solid space at the moment. There will need to be more practice, but the list is so damn fun to wrap my head around. Mordikaar also feels like a nice drop to off-set eXerxis' weaknesses, where he can cover the cryx/troop spam scenarios. I initially thought eXerxis wouldn't have the punch needed to break armour, but my thoughts on that are changing now.

Coming out of Battlecry, I definitely didn't have the outcome I was hoping for. But I'm pretty excited moving forward with what I've learnt over the last couple of weeks. 

Before signing off, big ups to Daryl P for putting on Battlecry and organising things so 25 man-children could spend a Sunday pushing dollies about. Good fucking show champ. Also congrats to Luke Brimblecombe, Nikola Jaksic, and David Stent for coming first, second and third respectively. 


Monday 16 February 2015

M3G4 B4TTTLLZ!!!11! 200pt throwdown

After a couple of years collecting warmahordes, you tend to find you've amassed quite a few models. Particularly as this hobby lends itself to a certainly sort of OCD-level-got-to-collect-them-all mentality. While running 50pt games is the norm in NZ, often times I get the itch to scratch two 'casters/'locks together to see what happens. Probably a hangover from my old 40k days.

So every once in a while, Luke likes to challenge someone to a large 100+ points game, so people have a chance to get all their toys out. Now that I pause to think about it, he's the only I know that bothers to rabble-rouse people into playing games of this size. With the space that I have and still being relatively care-free (fingers crossed that doesn't change too drastically once my internship starts), I should be able to hustle some others into playing a massive meat-grinder.
I understand people's hesitance to take this on though. For many, the appeal of WM/H is that the game actually can be played within a couple of hours, a time allotment that people can generally organise around. Playing these games really does require the sacrifice of a good chunk of the day, as well as a fair amount of patience to wait on your opponent during their turns. But with a bit of organisation and discussion between the two players, there's no reason this can't work.

blargh

The lists are long rambling documents that I won't bother recounting here; you can probably gauge what we had by examining the photo above. Basically we chucked in everything we could stuff into 200pts, and our Warlock choices were pMorvhanna, eKaya, Kromac, and Bradigus for Luke, and Rasheth, Zaal, pMakeda, and eXerxis for moi. Initially, Luke wanted to try play a 150pt game, but I think he hadn't realised how many Skorne models I had squirreled away. And placing the lion's share of my models into a 7" deployment zone highlighted a quality of the Skorne faction; our dearth of Advance-Deploy models. I had to mush everything in there and account for potential traffic jamming. A problem not shared by the opposing Circle force. While we could have played on a larger table, I don't believe this has actually ever really been a problem in previous high-point games. There's actually a sort of simple elegance to how the forces tend to establish themselves into different waves that you send in, rather than peeling off warlocks away from the conflict and essentially having to just play 4 regular 50pt games simultaneously.

Anyways; we agreed on an amended version of Outflank for the scenario, where we could only score 1CP per turn max, for dominating the zones. We started with a 3hr deathclock each, but that graduated to a 4hr deathclock during the course of the game. Setting that time limit is important, else we could play on into the night quite easily. There was just so much shit going on. From the relative orderliness of the above photo, things descended into a messy mash of troops scrambling through rift templates and druid clouds, Circle beasts yo-yo-ing around, and the Skorne military complex slowly trundling forward.

Having pushed up into the middle I thought it was a good time to pop Makeda's feat.
I netted a grand total of two Nihilators to bring back  
ಠ_ಠ 

You notice that wee under-coated Nihilator in the foreground? 
They need to label some sort of disorder for warmachine players 
who forget to move models turn-after-turn.

More photos and Luke's synopsis of the game can be watched on the youtubes here. I recommend losing yourself in the smooth silky tones of the VaulSC commentary. Go chuck that stuff into your earholes.

Instead of running through a blow-by-blow of the game, I'll just share some highlights and observations. I'm also reusing Luke's photos that he has posted elsewhere, mainly as ways to illustrate the clutch moments of the game, as well as to actually have pics of models from my actual games for once.

Anywho; highlights.

  • Probably old hat for everyone else, but Regrowth on Zombified Bloodtrackers is fucking obscene. Those ladies were responsible for eroding my left flank, and got so much work done. I think by the end they were back to full strength, sans Nuala. Nuts. I would have thought that alone would be reason enough to use Morvhanna1.
  • Even without the Sentry Stone bullshit of the Bradigus tier, that boy still has a decent denial game; in the instance there isn't easy access to pathfinder, Rifts can really shut units down.
  • Remembering your medium based models block LOS from your Gargantuan to small based models is a thing. Also making sure you examine the board to see if there's other targets of opportunity helps. Still the Mammoth got to gat some fools. I'm loving that model more every day.
  • My Mammoth getting stalled by a Muzzle from Kaya, plinking him for a point despite having Inviolable Resolve on him and being at ARM22. hmph.
  • Xerxis feat is pretty ridiculous at this level. I popped it in a turn I though I needed to grind things down a bit, so it wasn't like it was used totally optimally, but it still accounted for a lot of stray shots to hit things they had no right hitting and damaging. I think I also got the chance to "choose which dice to discard" in cases where my own Nihilators missed their mates in the middle of berserking.
  • Once Makeda's feat was done, Stalkers with Blessed mowed through the Cetrati like they were nothing. Not really used to that :s
  • More love to the Gatorman Bokur and Swamp Shamblers. Chucking Ignite onto him, Pain-Driving the unit and slapping on a Blood Mark (arc-ed through the Bokur no less), saw the end to Megalith, in revenge for the Circle heavy fisting Tiberion from behind. After Tibbers had bonked both a Wold Guardian and Wold Warden. Such trade. Much exchange. wow.
Tibbers just after bopping a Wold, but before the Megalith MegafistingTM.
  • Bradigus' sweet moves to slam Molik back and open a landing zone for the Wold Wrath to put an end to his shenanigans. That'll serve me to get excited maxing him out on attacks, and forget Fate Walker.
  • Mammoth getting revenge for Molik, netting himself a Stalker, Celestial Fulcrim, and the Wold Wrath, under both Rasheth's and Zaal's feat. I forget the Mammoth has Assault yet again. Note to self; Zaal's feat is as nuts as you can imagine at this points level.

  • I try to pull off the Krea assault on Ghetorix, having her flank with the Drake under Zaal's feat. That flops spectacularly. Kreas now join Gladiators as being the most over-rated beasts in the Skorne stable. At least the Gladiator redeemed itself by pummeling Ghetorix into the dirt.
  • Kromac gets Blessed and charges a Defender's Warded Makeda I had stupidly moved up for no good reason. He hacks into her with reckless abandon, and with no transfer targets and with DW ignored, the Skorne empire loses its Big Cheese. Whoops.
Sorry guys, the invasion is cancelled.
  • In retaliation, Rasheth pops Paralytic Aura, moves into range of Kromac, and sticks him with a Blood Mark, leaving Xerxis to go to town him. A knockdown impact attack and two initials gets it done.

  • Stacking feats is fun.  
That last note deserves a bit more discussion; If you've watched the video, Luke discusses how this match up wasn't very balanced in terms of Warlock-choice. We tried to mitigate this, where we went through a process of sharing our lists before hand and gauging what sort of game we wanted to play with our respective forces. We either didn't have the foresight, or didn't actually examine closely enough our choices to actually realise what they brought to the table. On his side, he had feats with rather mild movement or denial effects at best. On my side I had feats that stacked hitting accuracy and power, and played into the Skorne attrition game of taking a hit and hitting back harder. This is a format where I guess the latter approach shines as well, something that is making me consider Skorne's relevance at events such as Iron Gauntlet; 75pts for a Zaal or eXerxis list? mmmmmmmmm. NZ pls haz IG and Masters ADR. I digress: the point on our caster-choices shows the importance of communication and openness in approaching games of this size. 

Ultimately, I lost the game when I clocked out. My 4 hour timer was up, it was around 7 at night, and we had been at it for about 7 hours and change. However, I was up several control points and was definitely up attritionally. A lot of fruity stuff had happened throughout the game, and I guess that's the point of it all. Afterwards, Luke and I had another discussion about how playing like this will benefit from having several win conditions to simultaneously work towards, instead of just winning by whoever hits a particular win condition first. Instead of waiting for someone to score their 5th CP, or for their clock to run out, you just time the game, and at the end tally up all those points. It still gives the game a direction, and moves the action into the center of the table, but takes the pressure off trying to 'win'. Hard, competitive win factors mean little in this context, when all you're doing is taking all your models out for a spin, and to spend a day with a pal.


Ahhh bromance <3.

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Bradinerf

You just had to ruin it for everyone else, didn't you Brad?



Well that was weird; I post about my first game against Bradigus, and then the next morning the entire Circle faction takes a flick to the nuts with a new restriction to the shifting stones.

For those that haven't accessed the errata document yet, you can find it here.

The change to only one teleport per model is making me a lot more excited and happy than I would have expected. The whole thing was a surprise to awake to I guess, and that it applies to more than just the problem Bradigus posed makes me even more giggly. Part of that is being an outsider looking in, anticipating an onslaught of discussion and opinions, ranging across the spectrum of chicken-little doom-and-gloom, to attempts of cautious optimism and rationalism. This is something that has been dropped into the laps of Circle players worldwide, and it will be interesting to see just WHAT the actual impact on people's games will be.

One thing that potentially could happen is that Circle players leave the game en masse. This is just a consideration I have in light of how people leave the GW systems on a regular basis due to rules changes and other things. I doubt this will happen, but is an outcome I entertain. Comparing the trends and precedents established by the players of other systems I also find interesting to consider as it again reminds me why I play this game in favour of others.

Now Privateer Press give eMorghul his feat back plz k thnx ^_^

Biting off more than you can chew is actually ok, so long as you have a plate to spit the excess on to.

I should know, I eat a lot of noodles. I've also decided to take on what I guess was my first actual commission painting job, getting Nikola's Legion up to scratch. So far I've managed to nut off the cavalry solo, eVayl, a Naga and Zuriel, and am still deciding whether I'm getting horror flashbacks from when I painted my old Tyranid army, or nestling into the groove of painting flesh and chitin once more.

I actually am enjoying this, and ironically, it's motivated me to paint more of my own models. I've been chipping away at my Mammoth on the side. After almost a year and a half sitting around looking like a brown turd, I've done enough where I'm just finishing off some detailing.

Though finishing off detailing on a Mammoth is pretty much the lion's share of the work, I'm realising. Anyways, I'm going to bring that bad boy with me to Battlecry in a couple of week's time. I've decided to take a rather casual approach to what lists I want to bring, which may very well lead to me being frustrated and annoyed at my army being shit. But I really want to do pXerxis with Mammoth and get that fat bubba to ARM24 (or effective 26 vs Hordes with the Agoniser).

squeee!


Speaking of Gargantuans, how about that Templecon eh? New Colossals eh? I was initially stoked at the announcement, the idea of expanding the range of these big models appeals to me, even if it takes me a year and half to paint the fucking things (I'll get to my Kraken too, I promise). People started theorising pretty quickly about the impact these new models will have, the sort of power they may bring, and then what the projected benefits/cons would be. And in general, people seem to be rather skeptical, or maybe erring on the side of caution. Podcast discussion has touched on what happens to the game when you just have so much focus on these large, lumpy pieces that are hard to remove, and how this may skew things away from the all the infantry choices in the game. Others have discussed that in light of the strength of some of the other Colossals, this new wave may be largely underwhelming. While these opinions have coloured my own thoughts. I think I remain optimistic overall,. There's so little information to go on at this juncture.

But Battlecry! I'm getting excited again, because my second list is actually going to be eXerxis - I've fallen in love with that big lug all over again. After getting over my initial grumbling over him I think I've cracked him. This may be blindingly obvious to others, so please bear with me. I tried building lists with a bunch of shooting that would leverage off his feat, thinking that infantry were probably the answer for eXerxis. But watching games people played with eVayl, I got the idea I could mimic part of her game-plan; the whole hit and run, refuge thing. So I built a list with as many light cyclops beasts as I could have, and that seems to be a decent start. There's been a bit of talk from an Aussie Skorne player, David Potts, about his appreciation of a package of 3 Cyclops Brutes in a range of lists. The defensive stats of these 5pt guys, along with shield-guard, is pretty impressive for such expendable pieces. With Xerxis I put them to work, running all over the show at SPD8. along with the Archidon and Molik Karn, I have movement jank a plenty, and being in that mind-set more than anything else has made me happy to play him. Recognising that I had pigeon-holed a particular play-style with Skorne, based around a powerful counter-punch, meant that it was my thinking that had to change when using eXerxis.

Outside of that, matchups are certainly another thing to gauge. I haven't figured out how he handles infantry screens all that well at this stage, having just come home from a game against Luke Harvey's Issyria. I don't feel confident in this matchup and him getting the first turn sealed the deal. But I still learnt from the experience, both realising that I would probably have gone to my other list in the case of the Retribution match up, or what committed differently if I was to play the game again. On the flipside to all this, I had my first game against Bradigus today as well, and felt confident enough about the match up. I still got assassinated to fuck, but it certainly wasn't as lop-sided as I thought. Just need to shuffle a few things around to get that second Extoller in there.

Monday 2 February 2015

Sacral Chode



Having just been put up on the main page of the PP site, I thought I'd take a different tack and discuss something totally unrelated to my current armies. Well, unrelated so far as being able to take them in my lists. I'm sure there will be plenty of getting related with this model, by having this chubby battle engine tearing me a new one.

Or will it? as soon as the rules were revealed, I observed the amount of lamentation at what this model does on the table top, and how this becomes a direct counter to Cryx lists (or at least "traditional" Cryx lists). I didn't really get it though. I'm juggling what I feel is a strange position, where most people are adamantly saying this thing will dominate games, and while I don't totally disagree, I really can't be scared of the thing. A large part of it is based upon the amount of damage output it has. The gun it has is great, and will be fantastic for scalping out clutch solos, but won't have the volume of attacks to really dent much else. Also while being taken in Legion or Circle forces is pretty nuts, I can't shake that it also means these players have to sacrifice a Scythean or Warpwolf Stalker in order to fit this battle engine in.

Of course, this is observing the vault in an absolute vacuum, and there will be a force around the Sacral Vault to deal with, so what happens on the table top will be utterly different from anything I can personally dojo, especially when I'm imagining this with forces I don't personally play or know intimately. I'm actually looking forward to how things play out, and to see if the people saying this thing is OMGNUTZFTW are actually right.

It's also one sexy as fuck model. It mimics the stumpy erection I currently have for this model, its so damned cool; almost worth starting Gators for I reckon.