Lord of the Rings, 10/9/2012

This was another match in Simon's campaign, this time playing Simon himself. The latter fact alone kind of makes this whole post a bit redundant; you always lose against Simon, right?

Actually, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be...

OK for those of you who are interested, a bit of background - I've known Simon for a while, since I've worked at Games Workshop and I saw him around afterwards as well. He's one of these power gamers that I don't have a lot of patience with, so I rarely play him by choice. Other than that he's a really nice kid, and we get on well. He's put a lot of effort into organising this campaign, and while I still think he's got a lot to learn in terms of what does and doesn't work in a shop environment, I felt obliged to play him as a reward, with me using my Harad, and Simon using his Dwarves.

By nature of being Dwarves Simon's army had high levels of defence, and Simon had used the rules imposed on the campaign to make them even harder to hurt. They'd take a while to get to me, but they more than made up for it by having a Balista there as well. With Gimli and Durin as his special characters, I was in for a rough ride, especially since I had to kill 75% of his models in order to win and that would have to have included at least one of the characters...

It was never going to end well for me, was it?

Daunting task though that was, I was as surprised as anyone when my archers, in an uncharacteristic display of professionalism, managed to take out four dwarves in the first couple of turns. Simon chose that point to move the dwarves behind the ruins, forcing me to take the fight to them. Unfortunately it wasn't going to happen, as I had Gimli and Durin to deal with...

Far more typically of me I failed to wound either of them. I did try Sap Will on Durin, which I couldn't even get off, and then I tried to Black Dart him, which was a waste of time because I'd forgotten that he was defence 10 and therefore needed a lot higher than the usual 3+ to score the wound. Having shot half of my army to pieces with his Balista, and munched most of the rest with the Dwarves, Simon called the game to a halt at the point my army broke. Strictly speaking it should have gone on longer, but it was over by then and we both knew it.

Simon's asked me for a rematch and I don't know if I want to oblige; the fact is my army's not powerful enough to deal with him and I don't think it'll be much fun if I get involved with another game that I obviously haven't got a hope of winning.

Still, I'm going back to Workshop on Monday Night so we'll find out what happens then...

Lord of the Rings: 20/8/2012

This was part of Simon's campaign where I found my forces of Harad - now with the same number of bows as spears - taking on my old friend Jaques' Spirit force, lead by the Witch King of Angmar. I'd elected to attack Jaques because he was getting a little too close to my territory for comfort...

Now that I'd added the extra models to my army I had some 21 models to bring to the fight. Jaques had 9. We both rolled the same mission, which was to kill 75% of one another's forces. As I only had to kill 7 models in order to do this, I definitely had the advantage of numbers. However, armies with small numbers tend to have high defence, and this army was no exception; I think the lowest defence was 6. I deployed my army in a bow line that would have allowed me to volley fire should I wish, made sure I was within 24" of Jaques' line, and began...

There was a ruined building in the middle of the board which I fully expected Jaques to take. I also knew that his army was far better in combat than mine so I elected to take a 'Stand and Shoot' approach. My rolling was, as ever, abysmal, and after 2 turns of concentrated fire I only managed to take down 1 of the spirits. I was not tempted to try a volley fire; maybe if Jaques had more numbers I might have tried that but as his high defence meant that I was going to have to be very lucky to score a wound, I saw no sense in making it even harder for me to hit than it already was. Still, one was down. There was just the rather pressing matter of the Witch King approaching me...

I really don't know as much as I should about what the Ringwraiths are capable of, but I knew that the Witch King could do me some serious harm if I allowed him to get close enough. I therefore turned my attentions, and my bows, over to him; moving back 3 inches per turn and pouring shot after shot into hi,. Whether it was tactically a mistake to do this I don't know, but even without my archers missing almost every shot they made, his defence of 8 made him almost impossible to hurt once I hit. I did manage it a couple of times, but Jaques made use of his Might and Fate points to keep the Ringwraith alive long enough to get close enough to start using his spells.



The Witch King: he will MAUL your shit...

And this is where it really started to get nasty. Ringwraiths have a spell called Sap Will. If they cast it on a character with Will points, the effect of the spell is that it reduces that character's will points down to 0. It doesn't usually do any direct damage to the character, but it does leave them unable to resist more damaging magic attacks later on. If Ringwraiths start casting it on each other, the effect can be devastating. Remember that Ringwraiths need at least 1 point of Will to remain in the game; if they're ever reduced to 0 they're removed as a casualty. If the spell is cast on a Ringwraith - which Jaques did to me, twice - and you don't manage to resist it, then all you can do is use however many Will points you failed the roll by to bring the resist roll up to where you need it. As you can imagine, it did not go particularly well for me. I responded with Black Dart - I only needed to wound him once now to finish him off - but I'd forgotten that as Black Dart is a magical attack, he can resist it with Will points, of which the Witch King has a lot. He succesfully cast Sap Will on me one more time and as I was down to 1 will point by then, I lost the Betrayer and the special rule he confered on my bows.

While all this was going on Jaques had been slowly moving his Spirits out of the cover of the ruins towards me. They have a special rule which allows them to command my models if they fail a Courage check, and with the Witch King so near, this was an almost certainty. He seperated the components of my army apart, and destroyed them piecemeal with the Ringwraith and the Spirits. I called time on the game a couple of turns after my force broke and handed the game to Jaques.

So, what went wrong?

Well, I can blame it all on bad luck but the fact of the matter is I was in way over my head taking on Jaques. My army just wasn't strong enough to match his power. Strategically, the lessons I had learned last week did the job, but with such a high defence and my army having to take courage checks if they wanted to charge anything at all in the army, it was always going to be an uphill struggle for me.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of things I might need to think about should such a situation arise again:

1. I set a lot of store by destroying the Ringwraith, and that wasn't necessarily the best thing to do. Even with their high defence, the Spirits would have been easier to destroy than the Ringwraith and as I needed to take out 7 of them to win the game, my efforts might have been better directed there. Granted, they were in cover, and the Witch King would have blocked my line of sight to at least some of them, but it might have tipped the battle in my favour, or at least made that last combat less painful.
2. Regardless of whether I attacked the Ringwraith or the Spirits, two turns in was not the time to change tac. I needed to commit to one or the other right from the start in order to get the job done. If I'd attacked the Witch King straight away I'd have had another two turns of shooting at him before he got close enough to use his powers; I don't know if it would have made much difference but all the Will points in the world won't help you if I've shot you to pieces before you get a chance to use them. (Unless you're running The Undying.)
3. I also need to be far more aware of what it means to cast the different spells in the game. I really needed to know what Sap Will did, and got in with that first. Then again, would that really have helped? A wizard's duel between Ringwraiths is basically going to be a battle of attrition, with the prize going to the Ringwraith with the highest Will Points, in this case the Witch King. Probably would have been better to take on the Witch King purely with conventional weapons

Basically, I think that battle was going to come down to whosever Ringwraith was still alive by the the end of the game. Jaques needed his to keep my Courage down to allow his Spirits to use their command rules, I needed mine because that was basically the only thing in my army that had a hope of hurting the Spirits.

Lessons learned, and there are battles still to be had. Not next week though. As it's Bank Holiday Monday, the shop will close at 6 so there'll be no campaign that night. Maybe the week after...

Lord of the Rings, 13/8/2012

It had been a long time since I'd played a proper game of Lord of the Rings, and as Simon is running a campaign in the shop now is probably a really good time to try to get some games in. As much as I would like to have made this post a little more colourful, unfortunately I forgot my camera so I couldn't get any shots of the battle. Also I'm going to avoid mentioning the name of my opponent, who was quite young and inexperienced, and needed a bit of help with the rules to the game.

Because of the way the battles are organised, what we had was 300 points my army of Harad taking on a similar sized army of Goblins of Moria. Our objectives were different; my Harad had to kill more than 75% of the goblin army, whereas the Goblins had to kill the commander of my army, The Betrayer. My army consisted of several bows, quite a few spearmen, a captain, a banner and a couple of Serpent Guard. Under the advice of Simon, the goblins were all Blackshields, they had with them a shaman, a troll and a warg marauder. Terrain consisted of a Realm of Battle Hill on my side of the board, and a group of trees somewhere in the middle; this was to have some serious consequences on the outcome of the battle.

The Betrayer - Not my model; the GW promo pics.

The army list was, in and of itself, worrying - with the majority of the models in the Goblin army being defence 6 and my highest strength not much higher than 3, this was going to be a tough nut to crack. What worried me more was their objective: Ringwraiths have to use their Will points to be fully effective, but if they run out - remember, they lose one Will point every time they get into a fight - they are banished and effectively destroyed. With the destruction of my commander being the Goblin's objective, putting the responsibility for staying alive on a Ringwraith is a very risky business indeed.

For that reason I decided to make the best use I could find of the defensive position on the hill; spearmen in front to take the inevitable charge, bowmen on the hilltop where they had a good vantage point, Betrayer behind them to make the best use of the Master of Poisons rule. Here came my first mistake of the game - I decided to drop the spearmen down the hill to the slope running down. My idea was to meet the Goblin army head on. Quite apart from the fact that I failed a jump roll and sent one of the spearmen tumbling to his death, it didn't make much tactical sense either since I could now no longer make use of the defensive position afforded by the hill. Still, it freed up some some room for the later battle.

My opponent surprised me by marching his army towards me. Given that my objective was to kill 75% of his models, and the Harad rules for bows (they're allowed to take half their army with bows rather than the usual third) making an advance close to suicide, he'd have been better of skirting around the edge of the trees, which would have forced me to take the battle to him. As it turned out it didn't affect matters too much because my shooting was absolutely atrocious, and on the few occasions when I did manage to hit something, I almost always failed my wound rolls.

This all changed when for some reason my opponent stuck his Warg Marauder out in front. Despite the fact that the lower defence actually shouldn't have made a difference (strength 2 bows need a 6 to wound against defence 5 or 6) I managed to dispatch it pretty quickly. The goblins were proving problematic, as my opponent had also cast Fury on them giving them a '6+ save' against taking a wound, which he was extraordinarily lucky with. The practical upshot of all of this was when the battle lines finally met, we hadn't been able to do much to each other's armies. This was going to be a long battle...

The battle itself wasn't all that interesting. The goblin's low skill gave me the upper hand in combat, but my warrior's low strength made them horribly ineffective. There were times when I was very glad of my banner - Harad are all but useless without it - but they very rarely rolled high enough on the Strike roll to kill many goblins. It truly was a battle of attrition.

Things got bit more interesting when the Cave Troll of all things snuck around the battle lines and made a break for the Betrayer. Despite his entourage of bowmen actually doing more damage to each other than they did to the troll, the Ringwraith managed to Black Dart the troll enough times to kill it. At that point, the battle was over; all it was going to be after that was a long hard slog with each other's infantry. If it had gone on, I think I would probably have won it simply by having my commander at the back rather than the front. However, as my opponent had run out of time, we had to call it a draw at that point.

The result is that I now have an extra 25 points to add to my army. How will I change the list? Read on...

After every battle, it pays to reflect for a few moments on what you could and should have done differently. I've already mentioned my mistake in abandoning my defensive position. Also, and I keep forgetting to do this with Harad, there is absolutely no point in deploying my spearmen ahead of the bowmen. The whole point of spears it to use them as supporting weapons. Bowmen are all but useless as archers once the battle lines meet, but all Haradrim Warriors have hand weapons by default. So by deploying my spearmen behind them, I've effectively doubled the amount of attacks I can bring to a combat, which might just give me a better edge than a one-on-one slugfest that I got involved with in that last battle. They have no better defence to bring to the battle so I may as well.

That being the case, I'm going to use my extra points to compliment this, and try to design an army that has at least as many bows as close combat orientated troops. The effectiveness of the bows depends on luck as much as anything else, but I can find other uses for them...

In the campaign, I've got a long way to go to catch up with the people who are already ahead, but that's not going to stop me trying. If I come across Simon or Jaques, it's going to be a painful battle as they are absolutely brutal players, but I will at least try to make a game of it as they're nice kids, Simon in particular has gone to a lot of trouble to organise this so I think I owe him a game.

See you next Monday, hopefully!