The ETC in Review (Part One)

The ETC is done for another year, a year of test matches, matchup analysis, training montages and frantic last minute painting is once again complete, thankfully to be replaced by another year of exactly the same thing :)

This is going to be a multi-part post. There is a whole heap of stuff I want to discuss about the ETC including giving you guys a run down of my games, discuss how our team went over the weekend and give my thoughts on the event itself in 2014. Thankfully I pre-wrote almost the entire set of posts during the ETC awards ceremony, which only ended today.


Part One: Lead up, Practice and The Ashes.

As a team we really concentrated on our lead up to the tournament this year. We put a lot of effort into testing lists, coming up with new ideas and honing established ones. We started practicing and testing early in the piece, but we weren't scared to make late changes if they were required and good reasoning could be given. We had two late reshuffles of our army set with myself moving to WE and some other players shifting around to accommodate this. Late in the piece Jamie also switched from Bretonnia to Daemons due to the potentially negative environment for Bretonnia after the drop of the new Wood Elf book.

Our final line up was:
Akhter (c): Orcs & Goblins
Ivan: Empire
Mick: High Elves
Alex: Skaven
Jamie: Daemons of Chaos
Nick L: Dark Elves
Sam: Chaos Dwarfs

and myself with Wood Elves.

Going into the event I believed us to have one of the top list sets in the event, and the quality of our set was remarked upon by a number of people. In hindsight there were some issues that we hadn't identified, and these caused us a bit of grief over the weekend.

For reference, my full list was:

Nick "Father of Lies" Hoen, Wood Elves
Spellweaver on Elven Steed: General, Lvl 4, Death, Obsidian Lodestone, Dispel Scroll, 310
Glade Captain on Elven Steed: BSB, Asrai Spear, Starfire Shafts, Hail of Doom Arrow, Enchanted Shield, Dragonbane Gem, 156
10 Glade Guard: Musician, Trueflight Arrows, 160
10 Glade Guard: Musician, Trueflight Arrows, 160
10 Glade Guard: Musician, Trueflight Arrows, 160
5 Glade Riders: Starfire Shafts, Musician, 125
8 Wild Riders: Shields, 224
7 Wild Riders: Shields, 196
6 Wild Riders: 156
7 Sisters of the Thorn: Standard of Discipline, Standard Bearer, 207
3 Warhawk Riders: Windrider, 145
8 Waywatchers: 160
7 Waywatchers: 140
1 Great Eagle: 50
1 Great Eagle: 50
Total: 2399

On the list, I think it represents a really good balance of elements. The Wood Elf book particularly with the ETC comp is all about getting the right mix of effective shooting, speed, problem solvers and combat power into the list. For me this meant not wasting points on any shooting that wasn't top notch, so I stuck to trueflights and waywatchers for the majority of it. I hit the ETC limit on those, and could have had more normal shooting to go with it, however the issue was less about the comp on the shooting and more about the points I would have to spend. The problem solvers are the lvl 4 and the warhawk riders. Two issues with the list are high toughness units that can shrug off the shooting and a wild rider charge. Things like beasts of nurgle, plague drones, trolls etc. Between soulblight and purple sun the mage gives me options for dealing with these.

Something else I identified was that a large number of small-medium combat units was a potential issue for my list. The army does well focusing on the major targets one at a time and eliminating them, but units like screamers, chariots, small cavalry units etc had the potential to come in under the radar and be a problem. The Warhawks are one of my favourite units in the lists. They can be used as a stubborn blocker in a forest, they can go after war machines, they can handle a lot of medium-light units in combat and if really needed can just be a diverter. They were consistently useful all weekend, and I'm very glad I took them.

In Serbia we played three practice games. Two were just internal team practice, I 20'd Sam in three turns to give him a display of what the Wood Elf book could do, and rolled some sweet dice against Legrand to put him down 16-4. In our practice round against Spain I again played through a quick 3 turn 20, so I had some good form going into the ashes. Overall it looked like things were coming together fairly well, we drew with Spain who are decent opposition and everyone seemed to be playing alright.

Myself setting up during our round against Spain.

Ashes 2014.

Match ups were interesting. According to our ratings their list mix edged ours, with our pre-pairing predicted score being somewhere around 77/160. I felt we got the best of the match ups, at the very worst they were a tie, with a few players in good match ups and not very many poor ones.

Match ups were:
Myself vs Dan Thomas (Empire). Down as a small to medium positive.
Nick L (DE) vs Daemons: Down as a small positive
Sam (ChD) vs ChD: Mirror, down as a draw.
Jamie (DoC) vs WoC: down as a small positive
Mick (HE) vs O&G: down as a small negative
Akhter (O&G) vs DE: down as a small to medium negative.
Ivan (Empire) vs Lizards, down as a small positive
Alex (Skaven) vs Skaven: Mirror, down as a draw.

So mostly positives with a couple of draws and a couple of negs.

Dan was running empire with heavens and light lvl 4's, a halberdier block, some archers, 5 + 4 demigryph, a tank, a cannon and a hurricanum.

I set up in a position where my archers would have shots on most of the unarmored stuff, with some Wild Riders and the hawks in a position to go down the flank. I moved up cautiously, and knew I was in for a tough one after watching Dan's first movement phase. Sometimes you can just tell a player is really good based on how they move their units, and Dan's movement was precise, purposeful and well thought out. Game on. We also discussed the match up and were fairly open with the fact that it was edged my way, I was looking to expand on it and Dan was looking to contain.

The break came when I got a purple sun off with IF, killing the steam tank. I lost the spell but didn't mind that, although I was less thrilled with losing Doom and Darkness. From here I had a path into his back line and got the cannon with my hawks. It was all fairly safe from here, although I did make a stupid mistake in choosing the order of combats in the late game. I elected to resolve my warhawks vs his bunker first, in an attempt to kill his general (i got excited) which failed. This allowed the halberdiers to reform and get their BSB into range of the 5 Demigryph. I then resolved the charge of my WR and Sister units against the Demigryph, and while he didn't hold despite the BSB re roll (testing on a 3 or something), I missed out on the overrun into the flank of the Halberdiers which I could have had otherwise.

Dan holds up his Steam Tank after I remove it from play.

Thankfully Dan failed a clutch redirect test with his unit, which meant he couldn't claw back any points in the final turns.

Result: 18-2 win.
Team Result: very little to quite a lot. We got capped :(

Tbh I still don't know what happened. According to our players, my own gut feel and a lot of people in Aus and the UK we had a good set of matches which should have carried us through. We just couldn't execute the plan. Akhter, myself and Mick all improved on our predictions, Alex was set for a safe 12 but got asked to push after we were well down while Ivan and Jamie dropped points for a pair of 8's. Nick got 20'd in a positive match up, and Sam got 20'd in the mirror.

England win the Ashes... again.

Afterwards I was absolutely gutted, the last two ashes had been so close, it was all set up this year and just came crashing down big time. Its amazing what an effect two big losses in the 8 games can have. I was shattered, the team was pretty disconsolate, but we knew we'd have to pick ourselves up for the next days games.

Personally I want to thank a lot of the people back at home. We got a lot of messages of support from the community back at home and that really lifted me for the next day. You guys were really great all weekend, and while we might ignore you when we are winning and having a good time, when things are down the stuff you all say really helps. In the morning I was ready to kick some ass (as opposed to contemplating knocking over my toys and having a tantrum the night before) and got up early to plan my match ups against the Swiss.

Terrain from Hippos

Owen over at Terrain for Hippos is making us some terrain for the Face/Off tournament. This will represent an Earth Blood Mere, I can't wait to see the rest of the table once it has been completed!

Less than two weeks until Face/Off! Time to get excited...

Western Smash - Easter Gaming

Not going to write a full blown review of this event as I'm conscious of the fact that I never did finish that NZTC report, which is unfortunate. Maybe I will get to it. This event was also much lower key, and not really as interesting as the NZTC.

Format was 5 games over two days, 2400pts with panel comp. The comp was a little bit all over the place, but this owed more to the implementation of the scores provided by the panel rather than poor marking. Scenarios were pretty normal, the player pack was a bit weird in parts (hills blocked LoS, but you got half points for fleeing units and strangely got points if you killed one part of a ridden monster, something that didn't really effect me due to a distinct lack of ridden monsters. That old Egg Chris Cousens was not quite so lucky, he tallied up that he lost about 1200 points over the weekend because of "Ivan's stupid player pack" as he so aptly put it. Pretty big impact if you consider that to be about 6 battle points, but its not really a valid point because:

A) Everyone knew what the pack was going into the event
B) Cousens is shit.

I used a fairly mid strength (I think) Lizard list. I had Psuedo'Echo which dialled up the raw power of my list a little, but chose a fairly inoffensive lore (Metal) to make up for it. The rest of my list included an Old Blood and two Scar Veterans on cold ones, 2 skink skirmisher units, 2 skink cohorts, a skink kroxigor unit, 22 movement banner temple guard, an ancient stegadon and a salamander. Nothing too over the top, but not a particularly weak list either. I was probably pitching at about a 3 or a 4 for comp, got a 4 so in the range I thought it would fall.

Game 1 I got to play "Joanne" Scherpenderwerpenwerpen with his wood elves. Same comp, great match up. Killed 3 treemen in 2 turns (shockingly only one with searing doom, the other two broke from combat) and was looking good for a big win. Treekin wouldn't die though and started killing my stuff, taking out a scar vet and (more disappointingly) my old blood. Got a break bottom of the six when his lvl 4 miscast and took a wound, then got killed by one temple guard in the final combat of the game. Skizzles. 15-5 up, solid start.

This was just before all the treemen died.

Round 2 brought Lachy  Mulcahy to the table with his blatant attempt at stealth cheese. Pretty strong dark elf gunline with 700 points spent on Sisters of Slaughter and Black Guard to try and slip it past the panel. Comp 3 probably about right despite Lachy's attempts to convince everyone otherwise, probably could have gone to a 4. This was set up to be pretty cagey, I thought Lachy had left his black guard a bit isolated so pushed hard at them. I failed an easy dispel on a comet though which was then placed directly between our armies, so I just stopped moving for two turns waiting for the damn thing to land. I did close the gap between us by dropping a comet of my own inside Lachy's army, which meant he had to push towards me. I got lucky early with a failed panic netting me some points, but I misplayed my Stegadon and got it killed. 10-10 in the end, so a crushing 10.5-9.5 once comp was factored in.

Someone remarked that it looked like we were playing battle for the pass. I blame Lachy and his stupid comet.

Joanne got to play Sam Morgan and watch all three of his treemen get shot off by a skullcannon or metal magic, which I'm sure was fun for him.

Game 3 I was up against that old egg the Crack'n. Interesting list, mixed arms HE with a cav bus, a lvl 4 on metal, some archers, a dragon mage, a frostie and then the obligatory 4 bolt throwers. Battle for the pass, I sat in a building. Chris likes to play an aggressive game so I didn't let him and he didn't know what to do. Comet wrecked a bunch of his shit, and I brought down the thunder on the frostie to take that out. Not a lot went on, and I got a 12-8 when it was all said and done.

The Stegadon tried to rush the bolt throwers, perhaps unsurprisingly it just got shot.

Pew pew pew motherfucker!!!

Day 1 over and everyone was grumpy and tired and went home. I'm not going to question the orga's or their budgeting or anything like that because they put the effort in to run the event so they can do what they want. But from my perspective if I'm paying $50 (a cost I would normally associate with a premium event) to play at a tourney I really do expect a chair to sit on. Standing up for 9 hours playing warhammer is not fun, particularly in a two day event where you have to come back and do it again the next day. Yes I'm having a massive whinge, but my legs hurt and it made me enjoy my warhammer less.

Missing presumed forgotten.

First game day two I had Greg Greenfield with Dark Elves. Another fairly mixed list, double dreadlord, 2 lvl 2's and a unit of warlocks for magic, a bsb, two units of dark riders, some knights, crossbowmen, 10 shades and bolt throwers. Could be dangerous because of its speed, and those dreadlords could cause problems. I vanguarded a sally central to pressure the shooting, and Greg was nice to me and vanguarded up his Warlocks into range of 2 skink cohorts, so I just shot them off turn 1. Salamander went nuts in its advanced roll, killing a bolt thrower and the majority of 10 dark riders, a mage and almost panicking the crossbowmen off the table. Highlights from this game include shades fleeing into a blood forest, getting hit by a thunderbolt from 46 inches away and being taken down to below 25% by the forest. Also psuedo'echo going nuts and miscasting 4 times in 5 turns, eventually killing himself with a two dice iceshard blizzard. I think Greg got too close to my army, he had the range on me but was pushing within 12 with his dark riders to get better shots. This meant I could return fire, and where he had 20 dark rider models I had 80 skinks to trade wounds with. Got one of the dreadlords in the last turn, didn't lost a lot of stuff so got a decent 15-5 win which had me in a good position.

The warlocks didn't last all that long... Pew pew pew.

This Salamander wrecked up the joint.

Gentile had the lead going into the last game, with Ivan and I 4 or 5 points behind him. Gentile had the misfortune of playing Ivan's boring gamey empire army, I got to play Chris Penwarden with his "Khorne" daemons.

The stakes were high in round 5 between Bubbles and Ivan.

Chris made two key mistakes which invoked the disfavour of Khorne. Firstly he took the blue scribes in an otherwise all khorne army, secondly he deployed his whole army in a corne Khorner. This was a good match up, and it got better when my Stegadon ran over his Bloodthirster. Turns out Chris hadn't played the new lizards and didn't know what sharpened horns did. Potentially it was slightly negligent of me not to have told him, but he didn't ask or mention he hadn't played the new lizards, so it never really occurred to me. Too little too late for the thirster though. Tetto'ekko miscast twice in successive turns and killed himself again casting iceshard on very few dice. I was up early and kept pushing as I expected a fairly big result from the top table and had to play catch up. In the end I tabled Chris, lost a bit of stuff doing it but pretty happy with the 17-3.

I'm really glad Chris had to deploy first, because I legitimately thought that I would be the one cornerhammering rather than the other way around.

Ivan is a jammy git and wrecked Gentile's hobby. He just didn't do it enough and ended up losing top spot by half a point. Suck it.

I got the win, can't be unhappy with that. Mulcahy did pretty well to take out third. Would have been good if I could have wailed on Ivan myself, but he managed to dodge me.

This was Ivan when he thought he'd won the event. He did not.

Good fun for the weekend, enjoyed all my games but would have liked a goddamn chair. We hit the city after the event and sang some amazing songs, both at the Karaoke joint and then later on at the bar. Amazeballs. Random american guy singing a heavily mexican accented rendition of You've Lost That Loving Feeling was probably the highlight of the night. Respect.

 I took a bunch of photos, didn't have room for them all in the report so I'll just leave them all here...

NZTC Report - Game 4

Apologies for the crazy delay between this post and the last one. Real life has caught up with my since I got back from my holiday and things have been somewhat hectic. Lots of work, lots of real life stuff, and lots of warhammer. The Dwellers Below (the podcast I am a part of) have launched our first tournament, ETC preparations are hotting up and I've been trying to do lots of painting on my lizardmen with the aim of using them at Western Smash in a couple of weeks. However the show must go on, so here is game 4 from the NZTC.

After the third game we took the chance to socialise the the locals at a nearby pub. Highlights included winding up Pete Dunn about comp systems, discussing tournament admin and ranking systems with Pete and the rest of the Dunn family, Sam missing out on a fantastic burger and vowing he would come back tomorrow to make up for it, heading into the city and catching up with the Kiwihammer lads and making sure Lachy (from team Panel Comp FTW) had way too much to drink. Eventually we stumbled to bed about 3am for a short kip before it was go time again the next morning.

Round 4 vs Team Shirts Off Warhammer.

James and Mal forgot not to wear shirts. But James did have a very cool captains hat...

The next obstacle in our path involved 4 disgusting nerds without their shirts on. To be fair they're lovely gents, but there is only so much warhammer player nipple I can handle. They were rocking a filthy Orc & Goblin gunline that had absolutely nothing interesting in it, a very nice mixed High Elf list that had good potential both offensively and defensively, a cloud Lizardmen list with a metal Slann and finally a Slaanesh DP choir bomb WoC list with most of the usual suspects; bloodcrushers, exalteds with ridiculous ward saves and a bunch of chariots.

A somewhat understated but very nice unit of Skullcrushers.

With an army like this it was no surprise that Sam Whitt took out he best painted award.

Last round they had beaten our aussie brothers, their WoC scoring a huge win against the Dark Elves and the Lizards grinding out a score against the Empire. The lizards were pretty threatening for my high elves, what would normally be a good matchup is altered significantly by the presence of searing doom, and I didn't really want to go near the Orcs. Other than that there were no match ups we desperately needed to avoid, so we were fairly confident going into the match up process. Honestly I can't remember how the match ups played out, I remember thinking that they might have outmanoeuvred us at one stage, but I was pretty happy with the final matches. They were:

Me vs James Milner (High Elves)
Greg vs Ben Wadsworth (Orcs & Goblins)
James vs Mal Patel (Lizardmen)
Sam vs Sam Whitt (Warriors of Chaos)

The way I saw it I had a game somewhat in my favour, as did Greg against the Orcs. James was once again tasked with taking a  draw from his game to give us something to build on and Sam had a match up that could go either way.

James' list, which I am a big fan of, contained:

Prince: Barded Steed, Giant Blade, Dragon Armour, Enchanted Shield, Dawn Stone
Archmage: Elven Steed, Level 4 (Death), Book of Hoeth, Khaine's Ring of Fury
Noble: Barded Steed, Starlance, Halberd, Other Tricketer's Shard, Charmed Shield, BSB, Dragon Armour
Mage: Elven Steed, Level 2 (Fire), Dispel Scroll, Ironcurse Icon

14 Silver Helms: Full Command, Shields,
3*5 Ellyrion Reavers: Bows
9 Dragon Princes: Full Command, Banner of the World Dragon
1 Frost Pheonix
3 Repeater Bolt Throwers
5 Sisters of Avelorn

Very flexible, dangerous in all phases and very manoeuvrable. A great list for teams events.

I deployed fairly evenly across the board, James had more drops than I did because of the reavers so I had to spread out. On the left I had a reaver unit, then my Silver Helms, my Dragon and a pheonix in the middle and the dragon princes, reavers and the second pheonix on the right. James focused his forces on my left, deploying the prince on his own far left, the silver helms and dragon prince bus middling left while his shooting was spread around the board. His pheonix remained relatively central, eyeing off its two brethren on the other side of the battlefield.

James won the first turn and moved up a bit, his magic was ineffective, I let a Doom and Darkness through on my dragon as he was unlikely to take a panic test, and with shooting I think James killed 1 dragon prince. In my turn I measured a few things and noticed his dragon prince bus 21 inches from my Star Dragon. 

So this happened:

Shit gets real!

Boom, charges were declared, skippies were rolled and suddenly things looked *very* bad for James. The dragon princes also succeeded in a 20 inch charge onto a reaver unit, which meant I was crossing the table extraordinarily quickly.

Things got a bit worrying in the magic phase though when I rolled a pair of ones and couldn't dispel doom and darkness. Thankfully I passed the ld7 test on the dragon thanks to the stubbornness afforded to me by James' banner of the world dragon. For the record I did not have a re roll.

James tried to do the only thing he could think of to kill my dragon that was about to start shredding his characters. He 6 diced a purple sun, thankfully I still had a dispel scroll so managed to keep the sun at bay for a turn. The rest of James' turn was unexciting, he was in no way prepared to be in combat so quickly and had to spend the turn re-adjusting his lines.

In my turn the silver helms went into his dragon princes, while my dragon princes faffed around in the forest trying to chase down reaver units. Over the course of the game they managed to kill two reaver units and a bolt thrower, but got utterly shot to bits in the process and ended up full of holes. The silver helms broke through the dragon princes, and the green pheonix in the centre of the board tied up the silver helms.

Came from behind!

Unfortunately for said pheonix the dragon failed to pursue into the combat, which meant he (or she) was all alone when James' pheonix turned up in a sexual frenzy of pheonix lust. Unprepared for these attentions my noble beast tried to gracefully flee, but could not prevent the white pheonix from having its way with her. The silver helms could but watch this disgusting display of mystic avian eroticism and slowly bumped slack jawed into the dragon.

The green pheonix tried to run, but there would be no escape!

Blue pheonix felt a stirring within him watching the savage brutality of the white pheonix's display. He surged forward eagerly just as the white pheonix finished with it's mate. The white pheonix frantically flapped around in an attempt to avoid the predations of the blue. 

Not meeeeeee!

Deciding that it did actually prefer doing things face to face the white rallied itself and turned to face the blue. They gazed longingly at one another for a brief moment before proceeding to but into each other ineffectually until it was the blue pheonix's bed time and he had to go home. The silver helms continued to watch this bizarre pheonix love display as they were torn asunder by the dragon, at which point the game was done.

The remaining pheonixes bump uglies.

End Result: 16-4 win. That first turn charge kinda sealed it. James managed to fight back mainly with his shooting and the Pheonix, but it was too little too late. The dice weren't particularly nice to James throughout the game, but we agreed that there really was no valid reason for his DP bus to be within any charge distance at all of my dragon in the first turn. It was a minor error that was punished massively, but things like that will happen. From my perspective I didn't feel I was going to lose out much by failing the charge, and so having a crack at it was a no brainer.

On the table next to me things looked bad for Greg early on. The green gunline was taking his models off at an alarming rate, but he managed to steadily work his way back into the game. Taking out the warmachines massively reduced the damage output of the orc army, and Greg could then chip away at it for a 15-5. 

The Dark Elves run the gauntlet as the green gunline.

James did his job and got a 10-10, potentially he could have pushed for more but that would have opened him up to potentially losing big, and we were happy to take the safe points given the way the other games were going. Sam looked like he was going down to the WoC but picked up some strong points in the last few turns and managed to battle back to a draw.

Team Result: 51-29.

Another strong result against probably our strongest opponents yet. We were still in the 50 club (the only team remaining in fact) and knew that next up we had the noisy neighbours, team Panel Comp FTW.

NZTC Report: Game 3

Sorry this segment has come so long after the last one, has been a busy couple of days but thanks to a public holiday I now have time to write up game 3.

Round 3 presented us with our toughest round for the day against the Wolfpack. Their team contained a number of high ranking NZ players, ETC experience and some pretty nicely written armies. We were up against a herald based daemon list, Skaven with both a bell and a furnace, a solid WoC army with Throgg and a lot of trolls backed up by a couple of tzeentch characters, a hellcannon and some crushers. A fairly standard empire list rounded out their set.

Wolfpack assemble!

Personally this wasn't a team I really wanted to face. The Daemons were a bad one for me, the empire utterly awful. I could handle the WoC and the Skaven but both of them had an artillery piece that could make the game delicate so I would have to play well. Again I took a risk in the match up process by leading myself out, the initial plan had been to lead with Sam on the basis that they were likely to lead Empire, however I had a last minute hunch that it would be the Daemons coming out first, so at the last minute I went out with my HE. This was vindicated when their Daemons popped up, although this late change of plan did get things a little bit muddled. I can't really remember how the rest of the process went down, I know at one point I'd decided that I'd screwed things up royally, but in the end we got away with it. The games this round were:

Greg: Dark Elves vs Daemons
Sam: Daemons vs WoC
James: Empire vs Empire
Myself: High Elves vs Skaven

We came out of it with a decent set of games, Greg was tasked with a minor win/blocking role against the DoC as was James in the Empire mirror match. Sam had a good match up with his combination of death magic and flaming cannons, and I had a delicate if advantageous game against Skaven.

Game 3 vs Locky Reid (Skaven)
Grey Seer: Screaming Bell, Fencers Blades, Earthing Rod, Dragonbane Gem
Plague Priest: Plague Furnace, Dispel Scroll
Chieftan: BSB
Assassin: Weeping Blades, Potion of Strength
Warlock Engineer: Doomrocket

39 Stormvermin: FC, Storm Banner
41 Slaves
41 Slaves
41 Slaves
29 Plague Monks: FC, Plague Banner
Hellpit Abomination
Doomwheel
Warp Lightning Cannon

Locky was running an interesting Skaven list, it had a bunch of the standard toys but differed from the standard build by having a plague monk unit with a furnace. To be entirely honest I don't rate the furnace. It is a seriously unreliable unit in a very reliable list and I intended to to use the furnace as my way into the game.

For spells I rolled up hand of glory and tempest, usually the two worst spells in the deck. I've actually taken quite a liking to tempest since I started using it with my lizardmen, and both spells had the potential to be useful in this game so I kept them. Locky had Plague, Warp Lightning, Vermintide and Crack's call on his Seer with the Plague Priest swapping for Pestilent Breath.

My deployment was fairly spread, both Pheonixes were behind hills on either side of the table, the cavalry were in the middle along with the dragon. The reaver units were split onto each flank to protect the monsters from doomwheel shooting and to try and get to the WLC if possible. Locky deployed middling, favouring my right hand side of the table. The furnace was on my left with the HPA while the doomwheel and the bell were on the right hand side.

I won first turn but decided not to do a whole lot with it. The dragon remained in the centre behind a building, and the pheonixes stayed on their respective flanks. The cavalry pushed forward somewhat, but not particularly aggressively.

In Locky's first was pretty cagey as well. The Doomwheel moved up towards the pheonix on my right, and the bell pushed forward along with some slaves while the furnace and HPA stayed back to look after the WLC. Magic and shooting accounted for 6 or 7 silver helms (the doomrocket dropped a touch short) and 4 of the 5 reavers on my right flank.

Turn two I had a look around the tables to see how things were shaping up. Greg hadn't started well, and the Empire mirror match wasn't going anywhere for anyone. Sam knocked out the Hellcannon early, so had started relatively promisingly. I decided not to push too hard and see how the game developed. I moved my reavers on the left up into position to bait/pull the furnace, and swung my line to the left. The dragon joined the pheonix behind the hill, and the right hand pheonix occupied the dragons previous hiding place behind the building, putting some distance between itself and the scary doomwheel. Magic this turn was crucial, I started small with a hand of glory on a pheonix, boosting its movement to 5.  This was crucial to keep its movement up if Locky used his storm banner next turn. I then forced through a tempest onto the slave block in front of his WLC and rolled a hit. This killed 20 or so slaves, meaning they wouldn't be able to tarpit my units nearly as effectively. This would be my way into the game.

At the end of my turn two the battlefield looked like this:

The lone reaver spent the turn distracting the doom wheel that is out of shot to the right.

Locky didn't really have a response to what had just happened. He pretty much kept his line intact although he did try and lock down the dragon princes with a long charge from the bell which was unsuccessful. To be fair there weren't a whole heap of options available to Locky, however I think there may have been some merit in pushing the engineer and slaves forward as far as possible to prevent the overrun into the cannon. Potentially separating the engineer out could have held me up for even longer.

Locky's magic was disappointing and the cannon lacked viable targets. Overall Locky didn't really achieve much this turn, which I was totally ok with.

My third and the game was starting to get going. I debated whether to charge the depleted slaves with the silver helms or the dragon princes. The DP's were further away and would be in a bad position if they failed, but Locky's lack of reaction to the damage I'd done to the slaves left a nagging thought that perhaps there was an assassin in the unit. Eventually I went with the Silver Helms, and this proved the correct decision as no assassin was forthcoming. The reavers moved into position to block/bait the furnace, with the rest of my army moving into position for an assault on the furnace. With magic I kept the movement up on the important pheonix, not sure if i cast anything beyond that. In combat I broke through the slaves easily and got a nice overrun into the WLC.

The gap was open and I was into the back field, never a good thing for a Skaven player.

Locky charged the reavers with the HPA and the furnace given he didn't really have a whole lot of choice in the matter. The bell tried another long charge to block the dragon princes but was again unsuccessful and ended up blocking the slaves from helping out. I'd have considered a swift reform with the slaves (that you can see above) in order to block the DP's, although this would likely only prolong the inevitable. Magic was again ineffective as a Crack's call failed to reach a pheonix. The Silver Helms butchered the WLC in the close combat phase and reformed to face the furnace which had narrowly failed to overrun into the dragon princes.

This was the turn where I really pushed for the big win. The dragon went into the HPA along with a pheonix as the dragon princes and silver helms combo charged into the furnace unit. The remaining pheonix landed in front of the bell to ensure it couldn't interfere, and then it was pretty much straight onto combat. The dragon and pheonix were unfortunate not to kill the HPA, but fortunately it failed its break test and ran off anyway. This let the dragon pursue into the furnace combat. This went about as badly as possible for the plague monks with the furnace and character being killed outright and the monks reduced to about 10 guys who broke and were run down by the silver helms. An expensive turn for Locky, with no casualties suffered by me.

There was a lot still on the table, but at this stage the game was basically done.

Locky decided at this stage to preserve what he could. He didn't risk charging the pheonix with the bell as he would potentially get bogged and surrounded. Instead the bell did an about face and started casting Crack's Call backwards which the pheonix managed to dodge.

In the remaining turns my cavalry eliminated one of the slave units while my monsters flapped away from the bell, which suited Locky fine as the bell ran off into the opposite corner.

Final Result: 16-4 win.

As for the team result; James' game went for about half an hour and finished 11-9 to James, Greg managed to battle back from some early losses and held the DoC to a 10-10 and Sam came through with a big result once again, his game finishing 15-5.

Sam's opponent liked the matchup because of the supposed invincibility of his Tzeentch Disk Lord. Turns out doom and darkness and losing combat can't be stopped with a 3+ ward...

Team Result: 52-28.

Another great win by the team, with each of us doing our jobs really well. Sam and I might get all the glory for our big wins, but Greg and James took the tough armies out of the equation and gave us a great platform to base the result on.

Our victorian friends (in the garish purple shirts) crumbled in the face of stiffer opposition, going down to team Shirts Off Warhammer.

Some other results went out way, which meant at the end of day one the leaderboard looked like this:

10 of the 12 players in these three teams are based in Melbourne. Turns out we can play warhammer afterall!

Stay tuned for the first game of day two against the Shirts Off Warhammer team.

NZTC Report: Game 2

This is the second part of my NZTC report. If you've missed out on part one you can read it here.

Round 2 vs The Beauty and the Beasts

Due to our geographical proximity to our Victorian friends who were occupying the top of the table the organisers decided to let us play some people we hadn’t met before, which was a nice gesture although I had a feeling it was likely to be a temporary reprieve and that we would be likely to play them later on anyway.

Beauty and the Beasts offered up a really tough mix of armies. They had a dark elf avoidance army that contained Morathi and two peg riders, with a bit of combat punch coming from a horde of executioners and another of corsairs. Shooting, 4 levels of shadow magic (as it turned out) as well as two soulblights and two doombolts. Their WoC list offered up 23 trolls, a fully kitted slaanesh DP, Throgg, 3+ ward exalted and two skullcrusher units. An Epidemius DoC (basically Sam’s list with Epidemius) and an empire list rounded out their team. This meant there were three armies that worries us match up wise, the Empire (which Sam and I needed to avoid), the DoC (which I couldn’t go anywhere near) and the Dark Elves which could pose us problems with potential access to purple sun, mindrazor as well as soulblight and doombolt.

We went through their likely match up strategies and figured they were likely to lead out with their Daemons who really only had 1 bad match up (our Empire) or with their Empire. With this in mind I gambled a little and lead myself out, this could have gone badly if they retained both the empire and the DoC in their hand, but would give us an advantage if they didn’t. They lead DoC, I lead HE, we offered up DoC and Empire for them to choose from, while I was offered Dark Elves and Empire, the latter of which I declined and bounced down Greg with his DE. They had the tough choice between our empire playing their WoC or their DoC. We were later to find out that they rated the warriors against our empire as a good match up, so they chose that and allowed the two filthy DoC players to play a mirror match.

We took a risk and I think it paid off pretty well. I rated my match as a fairly close one if both players played well, and then we had 3 advantageous match ups. It would be up to me to hold my points and trust in my team to win us the round.

So that left us with:

Myself: High Elves vs Dark Elves

James: Empire vs Warriors of Chaos

Greg: Dark Elves vs Empire

Sam: Daemons of Chaos vs Daemons of Chaos

Game 2 vs Nicholas Jebson

Morathi Master: Dark Pegasus, Lance, Heavy Armour, Sea Dragon Cloak, Charmed Shield, Talisman of Preservation,

Master: Dark Pegasus, Lance, Heavy Armour, Sea Dragon Cloak, Dawnstone

Master: BSB, Sword of Might, Enchanted Shield, Sea Dragon Cloak, Heavy Armour

31 Black Ark Corsairs: Additional Hand Weapons, Full Command, Banner of Discipline

5 Dark Riders: Spears, Crossbows, Light Armour, Shields, Musician

5 Dark Riders: Spears, Crossbows, Light Armour, Shields, Musician
29 Executioners: Full Command, Flaming Banner
3 Reaper Bolt Throwers
5 Shades
2*5 Warlocks

An interesting game that I had rated as a draw when analysing the armies, however this wasn’t going to be a draw where I could sit back and corner-hammer for a 10-10. For one my list doesn’t really do that, with all my ranged damage coming from my mage, but mainly because he’d just shoot a bunch of stuff off from range and I would lose. Realistically I saw myself as being able to kill the executioners and the corsairs as well as a couple of the cavalry units, but be unable to catch most of the army. I’m always likely to take casualties, I just had to ensure I was killing at least as much as I was losing.

Morathi rolled three spells on shadow magic, and got Mindrazor, Pendulum, Enfeebling Foe, her dark magic spell she swapped for Doombolt. This could have been a lot worse, no miasma to swing combats, no pit of shades and no death spells. I got fiery convocation and another spell that doesn’t matter.

I deployed fairly wide across my deployment zone in an attempt to reduce the places Nick could hide his fast cav. A pheonix wide on the left, another closer to the middle, then the dragon princes, the silver helms central and the dragon off to the right. On my left to righ Nick placed his two peg masters, his corsairs in a building, a row of warlocks and two DR units with his executioners, Morathi and a bolt thrower behind them, then a bolt thrower and the second warlock unit up against my dragon. Rather advantageously in this game I won first turn and it was all ahead full ramming speed!

The leftmost Pheonix went up and beside the building to hide from bolt throwers, offering a charge to the masters in attempt to entice them. The rest of my army basically went straight forward as fast as possible, bringing as much pressure on Nick’s main line as possible.

The Ellyrion Reavers provide cover for my Dragon Princes with their bodies.

Magic involved a pair of 6’s to cast Fiery Convocation on the executioners, burning about half the unit and sending my mage into the realm of chaos. Useful damage, although I’d been hoping to scroll the inevitable mindrazor later in the game.

Nick wasn’t really sure how to respond to the pressure I was putting him under. His warlocks charged a pheonix and he put some dark riders in front of my screening reaver units as well as my dragon princes. The depleted executioners made a break for the building, but wouldn’t make it until next turn. The reavers did their job of offering cover to my more important cav,  which meant they got shot. Magic was ineffective as Nick opted to dispel fiery convocation, which was exceedingly sensible of him. The combat was between the pheonix and the warlocks was a bit of a stalemate, which offered me a way to open up the game and score some big early points.

In my turn I charged the dark riders with my dragon princes and suicide charged my reavers out of the way of my silver helms. This gave me a narrow charge around some other units into the executioners, which I declared and made. The other pheonix moved up into a position to threaten the executioners if they didn’t break or a bolt thrower if they did. My dragon princes slaughtered the dark riders they were fighting, but narrowly failed the overrun into the warlocks fighting the pheonix. This was a big loss as I had already fought that combat this round; the DP’s would have wiped out the warlocks in Nick’s turn and reformed, giving me a charge on Morathi pretty much wherever she went. Alas it was not to be, but I continued to try and set up two phase combats as a strategy for dealing with the speed of Nick’s army. The silver helms ran down the executions along with Nick’s BSB, and the dragon feasted upon the crew of a bolt thrower.

The Executioners and BSB are run down by the Silver Helms

Things weren’t looking great for Nick, but he had a chance to get some points back this turn. The masters both charged the pheonix fighting the warlocks, while Morathi flew around and cast penumbral pendulum through my dragon princes. A strange move which did no damage, and the dice could have been used for much more worrying spells. I dispelled Morathi’s attempt to enfeeble my pheonix and Nick failed a low dice attempt at soulblight. The pheonix was still in trouble and ended up breaking from combat but escaped his pursuers, with one of the masters getting stuck fighting the dragon princes. Shooting this turn accounted for the rest of my reavers as well as some silver helms.

My turn was fast, the silver helms killed a bolt thrower while the reserve pheonix flew in to the flank of the master. The dragon came back onto the board and started flippedy-flapping back to the interesting fights. The fleeing pheonix gracefully pirouetted in the sky, rallying to face some shades. The combat involving the pheonix, peg master and dragon princes was a draw, but the dragon princes did reform to face the master.

The Master was polite enough to hold for a turn allowing me to reform.

In Nick’s turn he decided to start trying to conserve points, the unengaged peg master began to withdraw, although some Shades moved up to shoot the recently rallied pheonix. Despite his truly beautiful attemt at aerial aerobatics he was brutally gunned down by a boosted doombolt from Morathi who remained lurking behind the building near the silver helms. Crucially in the combat phase the peg master broke after no wounds were caused, allowing me to reform to face Morathi with both the pheonix and the dragon princes.

Credit to the lass she took it on the chin, she probably could have made it to the board edge with a flee, but was generous enough to give my dragon princes the satisfaction of murdering her personally. From then on the game was essentially over. Neither of us had any meaningful magic left, and Nick’s shooting wasn’t ever going to do enough damage to score points. I managed to charge the remaining warlock unit off the board and slay one of the peg masters before the end of the game to seal the win.

End Result: 18-2.

As a team we had another good round. In James’ game he managed to shoot off the Daemon Prince and BSB early, at which point he basically retained points for a moderate win.

James lines up against his WoC opponent in what really was a good match up for him.

Greg pushed early for a small advantage against the empire, using his far superior manoeuvrability to good advantage. A cascading supreme sorceress and his general getting shot off by a cannon cost him some points late in the game, but he still managed a small win.

Perhaps I could have cropped the top of this photo better...

Sam had an interesting mirror match. Both armies were very similar however Sam’s opponent had spent points to put Epidemius in the list, however as Epidemius’ tally special rule augments all nurgle daemons on the table Sam was claiming the advantage as well, and had Epidemius’ points worth of extra struff in his army. Sam was unlucky in the final turns, pushing for a big win he failed to damage the GUO with a couple of skullcannon shots, so charged in with 6 beasts of nurgle to try and bring him down in the last turn. Papa then passed a dodgy leadership on a 6 (due to doom and darkness) before wasting all the beasts with a last turn purple sun. Lots of points down the drain in the last turn, but still a good win.

4 Skullcannons, 2 GUO's, Epidemius, Beasts of Nurgle everywhere. This table was nothing but filth.

Team Result: 58-22 (18, 14, 12, 14)

This score vindicated our strategy in the match up process. James, Greg and Sam all did their job to get winning scores despite some poor late game luck in a couple of the games. This meant that even if I hadn’t scored as strongly as I did we would have won the round. We weren’t looking to rely on any one player to score hugely every round in order to generate large scores, instead if each player could meet their match up expectations only one favourable result would take the teams score from a solid win to an excellent one.

The other victorian team didn’t win all their games 20-0 this round, but they still capped their opponents. We knew we wouldn’t have to play them until sunday, and we soon found out that our next opponents were to be The Wolfpack, a team billed as one of the best in the competition and containing some of the best players NZ had to offer. We were definitely set for an interesting next round.