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...