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!

5/12/2011: Lord of the Rings: Warriors of Minas Tirith

A bit late posting this but my internet was playing up yesterday...

These guys were a bit of a funny bunch for me because I painted them almost entirely in Games Workshop on Monday Nights when I've been going in, so I didn't do anything at home at all other than the undercoat. Actually the Dudley store is not a bad place to paint because the air in there tends to be quite dry, and therefore the paint and even the washes tend to be dry by the time you get to the end of the batch. The lighting's good as well, or at least I think it is. A career painter probably wouldn't but my alternative is the energy-saving lightbulbs at home, which do the job but it is true, they do distort the colours slightly!

here they are, resplendent in all their glory - my soldiers of Gondor. What made me want to do Gondor? Well, when I've collected armies in the past, and I'm talking specifically about when I worked for Games Workshop, I tended to just buy whatever I felt like and figure out how it was going to work in the army later. With Lord of the Rings, my army is Harad, and I didn't really know how to put an army together in the usual sense; War of the Ring was coming out and I wanted to do an army no one else was doing and use Mumaks. So far, I win about as many games as I lose, but I was always inspired by the Gondor army in the War of the Ring rules, and how they'd used a relatively limited pallette (We're talking 50+ colours I've used for painting my Harad,) to create an army that looks quite good.

What I didn't want to do was plan out my army list. Not being funny but I find that quite constricting. I also didn't want to put together an army on an ad hoc basis because it almost always turns out to be next to useless when I put it out on the gaming table. With the Gondor army, I've gone for the middle ground in between - I know what I want and don't want in the army, and I know where I'm going with it, but in the meantime buy whatever I feel like from the Gondor range and build the army up that way. It's hardly wrong to add more core choices to a War of the Ring army...

For painting them, I largely followed the guide in the Lord of the Rings rulebook. The more interesting parts are starting them off from a basecoat of Tin Bitz, to the point where one of the GW staffers thought I was literally doing the whole army in bronze. Actually, drybrushing Boltgun Metal over this and highlighting it with Chainmail creates a nice rusty effect, giving the impression of seasoned campaigners who've been in the forces a while, have been round the block and know the game. The other cool trick from the guide, which is conducive to the same effect, was to paint their sheilds a very dark grey rather than black, to give a worn impression. To be honest, black is rarely a good colour to use anyway if you're going for realism, and that's quite important in Lord of the Rings where the models themselves are true scale rather than heroic. Realistic is a rather flexible term to use when applied to models, but the LotR models do take themselves a bit more seriously than the Warhammer ones or 40K.

The one place where I deviated slightly from the guide was with the faces. For those, I used Tallarn Flesh, washed down with Ogryn Flesh, Dwarf Flesh for the mid-tone, Elf Flesh for the highlight and then a neat little trick that Griff taught me ages ago where you water down some more Ogryn flesh and glaze the face, which ties all the highlights together. Bearing in mind that a lot of those colours, plus some others used elsewhere on the models, were released after the Lord of the Rings rulebook was published, I think it goes to show that I've been learning quite a bit! Which is good because I find faces very hard to get right. Especially when most of them are covered with helmets...

That's about all I'm going to say about them. So, am I collecting these for Lord of the Rings or War of the Ring? The movement trays would suggest the latter, though if I'm honest I'm a fan of both. I'm thinking of Lord of the Rings at the moment, simply because I could play a simple game with the stuff I've got now; they just need a few additions like a banner and a hero. And on that note, the next step for the army is Faramir, who I'm painting now, and the Command secion, who I've just ordered.

Whether or not I'll get any games in is anybody's guess; the 82s are starting back up again soon so Monday Nights will become busy for me again before too long. If I get a night off then maybe.

28/3/11: Lord of the Rings

This was a part of Stevie T's 'Becoming Legendary' campaign, and it got me into an interesting battle with a young Dwarf player this evening. So that the rest of the blog makes sense, it's 150 points per side, with no characters (named or otherwise) and a small amount of might, will and fate to dish out to various members of the warband. We play 10-turn games with objectives that are kept hidden from our opponents, or at least that's the theory, and the winner gains experience points and hopefully some skills later on. The latter I'm not too sure about, but here's how the game went:

I set up the 4'x4' board giving a couple of buildings and a fence to one corner, and hills/trees/another couple of buildings dotted in various places around the board. It took me somewhat by surprise, therefore, when my opponent picked the table edge a long way from said corner, giving me plenty of opportunity to sieze defensive positions. A good thing too, since my secret mission was Band of Brothers, which meant that I had to finish the game with at least half the number of models that I started with. I'd literally lined up a spearwall across the walls of the small village I was defending, and had my banners well in range. With no idea of what my opponent's mission might be, we began...

I rolled badly for priority in the first couple of turns and my opponent got to move first on several occasions, however I was in a good position as Dwarves aren't all that fast and he'd have to spend much of the game running across the battlefield in order to meet me. It was therefore an archery contest for the first 5 turns, with my archers doing appalingly and my opponent's rather more accurate dwarves manageing to shoot a couple of them down. I was very disappointed when one of the people he shot down included one of my Serpent Riders, who I'd deployed there as an ambush just in case he was thinking of taking the fight to me. This left one Serpent Rider out on his own, who proceeded to charge a pack of 4 Dwarves. He killed one, and was made short work of by the remaining three, unsurprising really since they consisted of a Vault Warden team.

Elsewhere, the main body of the Dwarves were still a long way from my army 8 turns in, and I decided to bring my Serpent Guard out to meet them. I recognise that this wasn't a sound tactic - my opponent's objective clearly involved killing at least some of my models so I was far better off playing a defensive game - but do you know what? If I'm playing a war game, I want to see a fight! So my Serpent guard pounced on his Khazad Guard, and one of them died almost straight away. However, Harad aren't reknowned for their small-but-elite forces, and there are plenty more where he came from. I moved my banner in to range and tried to take out my opponent's banner and some of his archers; he actually ended up killing more than me and the banner bearer survived. In desperation, he also decided to attack the wall I was defending, a brave move but unfortunately it didn't come off.

8 of my men had to survive, and 10 of them did, so I'd achieved my objective. It transpired that my opponent's objective was to kill 3 of my men with the same nominated model, and he actually got surprisingly close; he chose a dwarf with a bow and he took one of my warriors out at long range, and killed a Serpent Guard in close combat. He actually survived the battle, but with only 2 men killed, it was too little too late for him.

Next time I won't be so quick to try and ambush my opponent's army without support; flinging those two Serpent Riders out into the open was a basic mistake and very costly. I'd have been better off waiting until the fighting started and gone for the banner bearer, this might have given me the edge that I needed in the last few turns of the game.

Not hard to link the story to where it left off last time I played a Rings game, which was when I won a village off Gondor. A small detatchment of Haradrim Warriors had been left behind to keep the village secure, and were joined by an elite company of Serpent Guard. It's been a couple of months since then so the scenario fits as well; having been in one another's company for a long time they will naturally have an affinity with each other and want to keep as many of their friends alive as possible. This wasn't apparently shared by the Serpent Guard, who, when a company of Dwarves arrived to try to regain the town and prove the might of one of their number, decided to jump out from the relative safety of the other side of the wall to show the other guys how it's done. The fact that most of them died successfully proved the Warrior's point. Having defended their village successfully from the Dwarves, it will be interesting to see where their adventures lead them to next time...