Hi all,
I know that there have been a lot of these. But hey, the more the merrier eh?
My game was against beasts of chaos against a friend of mine at the flgs. He took (roughly):
A Great Bray Shaman with lore of beasts (0246 for spells I think)
Beast lord with ward, armor and not much killy
Minotaur BSB with ward, armor and a little bit of killy
8(!) Minotaurs with a banner and great weapons
3x25 Gor herds with extra hand weapons
3 Spawn
pumbagor
2x10 ungor skirmishers
some dogs
some scouting harpies
My list is posted in the armies forum, but a brief over view:
Lvl 4 killy vampire lord with lots of protection and the hat of even-more-broken
Wight king bsb with sword of kings and armor
Necro with feedback scroll (love this thing!), danse and invokation
Necro with dispel scroll and invokation
3x24 Ghouls with ghast
2x4 Wolves
2x24 Grave Guard with GWs, one w/the royal standard of strigos, the other barrows
Black Coach (!!!!!)
So, the field was kind of fun. We played the "3" scenario where you deploy on the length of the table. This was rolled after the terrain was placed. There was some nice looking woods and hills and other junk, but only 2 pieces actually mattered. One was a dwarf pub and the other was some kind of evil rock of doom where all of your to wound rolls got a +1 within 6". Ew. They were placed 6" apart from one another in the middle of the table (the evil statue makes you sad, so you go buy a dwarf beer in the pub. Brilliant marketing!). This meant that there was going to be a bloodbath in the middle.
I wanted to keep my opponent away from the pub, since beastmen are know to be rowdy even when "sober", but they were less likely to have the grinding advantage if I could keep them away from that feature. In addition, the rock of doom (as it will henceforth be called) didn't change much in terms of combat resolution. My ghouls were at a small disadvantage because their poison made less of a difference, but in the end, the grinding would be sped up, but not significantly changed. My grave guard, however, did not like the idea of s3 gors wounding on 4s (rhymes! My battle reports are poetry), but there were few options, so I figured I could let some buff magic go off without worrying about it affecting the grinding game (notice a trend here?).
On to deployment:
I had 5 big 6-wide units and only 48" to deploy in. I had no idea the 1" rule would be such a pain! In the end I made it all work with grave guard units flanking the pub, ghouls out on both flanks with attendant wolves, and a unit of ghouls babysitting the necromancers in between the blocks of grave guard (they did very little all game, except for heroically holding the pub against a ravening horde of 5 harpies). The wight king went in the barrows GG and the vampire went into the hating GG. The coach went next to the barrows GG to give marching capability to the lower half of my line.
His deploy was similar:
Minotaurs in the middle, 2 herds on either side of the rock of doom, one more herd at the bottom of the table, dogs and skirmishers scattered here and there and spawn positioned in the front ready to hold stuff up. The BSB was in the minotaur unit and the beast lord was with the herd next to those minos. Scouting harpies ran around my back field flinging dirt clods and insults with alacrity.
Turn 1: Vampires
With very little idea of what was going on, I pushed my toy soldiers forward. I had a vague notion that I wanted my grave guard units to hold or break the gor blocks (depending on size and proximity to LD 10) long enough for the ghoul units to flank. Or it could go the other way round, but I expected my opponent to go balls to the wall for the GG unit, since they are pretty squishy, worth lots of points and held my 2 most important characters. I also knew that the minotaurs were scary and I didn't want to deal with them. I figured my coach and a unit of ghouls could be pretty self-sufficient in the bottom part of the line, and might make themselves useful later on. My dogs were distracted by the harpies and started yipping at them.
Magic was a blast (literally!) I rolled up 10 dice, which gave my opponent 5 and me 10. My coach decided that it was only a little bit hungry and ate 2 dice. With my 8 dice, I was at a loss for what to do. I didn't need to boost anyone with invokation, I didn't really want to run up unsupported with VDM, so I noticed a very interesting little spell called "gaze of nagash". Really? We have a direct damage spell? I never knew! So I point it at the minotaurs. And roll 10 on 2d6. But that makes it a 14. My opponent confidently picks up 3 dice and proceeds to roll 1-1-2. Nice! Let the blasty begin! Through a fluke of epic proportions, I killed 3 minotaurs. Wow. I like this spell. The rest of the magic phase was an uneventful assortment of zombie raisings around the table.
Turn 1: Beasts
Not wanting to waste any time, he surges forward and the spawn take a mad dash at my ghoul units, setting himself up for flank charges with 2 spawn on the uppermost ghoul unit, basically on the table edge. The wizard hid, the minos moved forward a little and the harpies (one unit of 10) charged a unit of dogs. Well and good.
Magic time! My opponent picks up is dice and rolls a 12! Good god! No need to channel then...well, let's see what the coach wants to do. Evidently it was getting bored, so it sucked up 4 dice in a wonderful display of post-mortem initiative and creative thinking. With his 8 dice, my opponent cast a hex on my engaged dogs. It gave them -1 to hit. Fine. Have it. He, however, had chucked 4 dice at the spell. I was under the impression that doing so was a poor choice to to the likelihood of epic failure (i.e. blasting a crater in the midst of your army), so I jumped on the chance to use the feedback scroll, since I figured the only other spell that would be cast with that many dice would be transformation, and t3 is more useful against t4 than t10. 2 Wounds later, this little beauty has earned a place in my list in perpetuity. The last 4 dice went to a damage spell but was dispelled with my 6 dice.
Shooting did nothing interesting.
Combat time: I expected my dogs to be mercilessly overrun. I seriously under-estimated their vim and vigor, and they lost only one (to 15 attack!) and managed to kill 2 back tieing up the combat.
Vampires 2:
Some charges to do! Nothing particularly interesting, some ghouls into some dogs, some ghouls into some spawn, some dogs into some other harpies, the coach into the pumba gor etc.
Other moves consisted of the grave guard sneaking past the dogs engaged with ghouls and the other unit slipping around the rock of doom. A point that I'd like to make here is that the new march blocking rules are great for our units with characters, but a ghoul unit only has ld 5, so count on them being marchblocked if they are out of the general's ld bubble.
Resolving charges was not all that interesting, the harpies, dogs and spawn held and we went in with no problems, but the pumba gor failed its rerollable ld 9 terror test against the flying coach of doom and legged it off the field! The coach had rolled poorly for its charge (2-3-3) so was only able to go 3".
Magic say 8 pd (after drain/channeling) vs 5 dd. My vampire lord thought it would be fun to spam vdm, and spam he did. 4 attempts at 2 dice each saw 4 successful castings, two of which were dispelled. Both guard units moved forward.
Combat saw the lower harpies busting out their ninja skills and killing all 5 dogs before the poor varmits had the chance to attack. The lower ghouls poisoned the lower spawn to death and the upper ones ran over the chaos dogs. The upper dogs decided to avenge their brethren by killing 2 harpies for no losses (failed fear test), but the harpies held.
Beasts 2:
It was well and truly time for VC bashing. Charges went off on the vampire's guard (gors), the wight king's guard (BSB, gors, beast lord), necros' ghouls (harpies) and upper ghouls (spawn in the flank). Oh dear...
There was very little other movement to do, mostly chaff getting into/out of the way.
Magic was going to be scary. The roll came up as 4 PD (2-2) though, so I was quite happy. No channeling and no dice suction meant that my opponent would get one spell off. He decided to unit-buff the gors fighting the vampire. My 2 DD didn't stop his 4 from making that happen. Oh well.
Combat time:
The fight up top between chaff units saw one on each side die. It was beginning to get comical how inept both units were. The ghouls (only 4 because of the flank charge) were able to do 2 wounds to the spawn and suffer minor damage in return. The necros' ghouls scared away the harpies with minor damage.
Now for the interesting fights: my opponent chose to do the vampire lord fight first. Fine by me. With this order of combat, I was hoping to break the gors and have the helm free for the wight king and co. beset by all kinds of nasty. The vampire lord killed 6, thanks to red fury, the sword of might, hatred and +1 to wound from the rock of doom. The gors were not to be out done and killed 5 grave guard. The Grave Guard were likewise incensed and killed another 7 (!) gors. With 13 dead, I was able to claim a victory and deny stubborn, so the unit ran off again. Unfortunately, I did have the hatred banner and was forced to pursue. I rolled a huge number (9+) which, combined with angles/charge paths etc. put me into the flank of the now-depleted minotaurs. Great for the fact that I would break them and potentially over run into the rear of the beast lord's unit, unfortunate in that the helm was now tied up. Bugger.
The lonely wight king and his friends would be hard put to fend off the ravening bestial horde. The order of attacks went something like hero-herd-king-lord-guard. Not good. The mino hero threw everything at the wight king. 3/3 with hatred saw 4 wounds incoming. 3 5+ saves later (magic attack for -1 armor or some such) the king was still standing (but not in btb with the beast lord). The king took a swipe at the BSB, needing 3/4 to cause wounds, I figured over the course of a couple of turns I could kill it. Not so, unfortunately. He had a LOT of armor, and it just so happened that he was able to make extra attacks based on the number of saves he made. 3 attacks back at the wight king saw another wound taken. Yikes! The gors killed a couple of guard, as did the beast lord.
I'd lost about 7 by this point. Still enough for full attacks back! I directed 4 attacks at the beast lord and 8 at the unit. Needing 3/2 to wound the herd, I killed 5. The lord was another story all together. Initially I thought I could have 6-6 on the unit/lord, but on closed examination it proved untrue. So no guts no glory. The guard hit twice and KB'd once. A failed 4+ ward save later and my opponent chose to throw in the towel. In the next turn I would be in the rear of his gor unit with a full GG unit with vampire lord support and most likely enough dice to either VDM both units or to heal up the grave guard. All of a sudden summon undead horde is a FANTASTIC spell, seeing as you get 3 dice of raising for 3 dice to cast. It's a great deal, esp. considering invkation is now 2 to cast for one to raise.
That was that. A bunch of luck on my part and hesitation on the part of my opponent certainly helped me win. I'm not sure of the power scale of beasts of chaos, but it seemed like he had tools to deal with me, and I wasn't using any of the "cheese" that has been bandied about the forums. Just lots of infantry. The coach is a crazy-good keeper. Much more durable than the wraiths, it also gets powered up much faster this edition making it tougher and more mobile than a varghulf, hitting only slightly less (one s5 attack traded for 2 s4).
I like the new edition. Tactics now consist of "how do I get these large infantry units to support one another without compromising themselves" instead of the nit-picking detail required of 7th. It was a lot of fun rolling buckets of dice and taking off handfulls of figures, both mine and my opponents. Since I started with larger units and had reliable raising, I didn't really mind the massive numbers of casualties going on. I'm sure as I play more, I'll have a better understanding of how things are supposed to work and may develop more nuance to my game. That being said, there are only 3 kinds of units in my army, so there's not a whole lot that can be done to change the general play style of the army.
Beyond that, I'm loving my list. It's not broken, and is somewhat dice dependent in terms of magic, but it is "HARD AS HELL" in the wise words of my opponent. All that really needs to happen is fine tuning of the characters and banners on my units (barrows is HUGELY better than hatred now, given that we're dealing with massed protracted fights). So far so good with this new edition.
Cheers,
ETHD
I know that there have been a lot of these. But hey, the more the merrier eh?
My game was against beasts of chaos against a friend of mine at the flgs. He took (roughly):
A Great Bray Shaman with lore of beasts (0246 for spells I think)
Beast lord with ward, armor and not much killy
Minotaur BSB with ward, armor and a little bit of killy
8(!) Minotaurs with a banner and great weapons
3x25 Gor herds with extra hand weapons
3 Spawn
pumbagor
2x10 ungor skirmishers
some dogs
some scouting harpies
My list is posted in the armies forum, but a brief over view:
Lvl 4 killy vampire lord with lots of protection and the hat of even-more-broken
Wight king bsb with sword of kings and armor
Necro with feedback scroll (love this thing!), danse and invokation
Necro with dispel scroll and invokation
3x24 Ghouls with ghast
2x4 Wolves
2x24 Grave Guard with GWs, one w/the royal standard of strigos, the other barrows
Black Coach (!!!!!)
So, the field was kind of fun. We played the "3" scenario where you deploy on the length of the table. This was rolled after the terrain was placed. There was some nice looking woods and hills and other junk, but only 2 pieces actually mattered. One was a dwarf pub and the other was some kind of evil rock of doom where all of your to wound rolls got a +1 within 6". Ew. They were placed 6" apart from one another in the middle of the table (the evil statue makes you sad, so you go buy a dwarf beer in the pub. Brilliant marketing!). This meant that there was going to be a bloodbath in the middle.
I wanted to keep my opponent away from the pub, since beastmen are know to be rowdy even when "sober", but they were less likely to have the grinding advantage if I could keep them away from that feature. In addition, the rock of doom (as it will henceforth be called) didn't change much in terms of combat resolution. My ghouls were at a small disadvantage because their poison made less of a difference, but in the end, the grinding would be sped up, but not significantly changed. My grave guard, however, did not like the idea of s3 gors wounding on 4s (rhymes! My battle reports are poetry), but there were few options, so I figured I could let some buff magic go off without worrying about it affecting the grinding game (notice a trend here?).
On to deployment:
I had 5 big 6-wide units and only 48" to deploy in. I had no idea the 1" rule would be such a pain! In the end I made it all work with grave guard units flanking the pub, ghouls out on both flanks with attendant wolves, and a unit of ghouls babysitting the necromancers in between the blocks of grave guard (they did very little all game, except for heroically holding the pub against a ravening horde of 5 harpies). The wight king went in the barrows GG and the vampire went into the hating GG. The coach went next to the barrows GG to give marching capability to the lower half of my line.
His deploy was similar:
Minotaurs in the middle, 2 herds on either side of the rock of doom, one more herd at the bottom of the table, dogs and skirmishers scattered here and there and spawn positioned in the front ready to hold stuff up. The BSB was in the minotaur unit and the beast lord was with the herd next to those minos. Scouting harpies ran around my back field flinging dirt clods and insults with alacrity.
Turn 1: Vampires
With very little idea of what was going on, I pushed my toy soldiers forward. I had a vague notion that I wanted my grave guard units to hold or break the gor blocks (depending on size and proximity to LD 10) long enough for the ghoul units to flank. Or it could go the other way round, but I expected my opponent to go balls to the wall for the GG unit, since they are pretty squishy, worth lots of points and held my 2 most important characters. I also knew that the minotaurs were scary and I didn't want to deal with them. I figured my coach and a unit of ghouls could be pretty self-sufficient in the bottom part of the line, and might make themselves useful later on. My dogs were distracted by the harpies and started yipping at them.
Magic was a blast (literally!) I rolled up 10 dice, which gave my opponent 5 and me 10. My coach decided that it was only a little bit hungry and ate 2 dice. With my 8 dice, I was at a loss for what to do. I didn't need to boost anyone with invokation, I didn't really want to run up unsupported with VDM, so I noticed a very interesting little spell called "gaze of nagash". Really? We have a direct damage spell? I never knew! So I point it at the minotaurs. And roll 10 on 2d6. But that makes it a 14. My opponent confidently picks up 3 dice and proceeds to roll 1-1-2. Nice! Let the blasty begin! Through a fluke of epic proportions, I killed 3 minotaurs. Wow. I like this spell. The rest of the magic phase was an uneventful assortment of zombie raisings around the table.
Turn 1: Beasts
Not wanting to waste any time, he surges forward and the spawn take a mad dash at my ghoul units, setting himself up for flank charges with 2 spawn on the uppermost ghoul unit, basically on the table edge. The wizard hid, the minos moved forward a little and the harpies (one unit of 10) charged a unit of dogs. Well and good.
Magic time! My opponent picks up is dice and rolls a 12! Good god! No need to channel then...well, let's see what the coach wants to do. Evidently it was getting bored, so it sucked up 4 dice in a wonderful display of post-mortem initiative and creative thinking. With his 8 dice, my opponent cast a hex on my engaged dogs. It gave them -1 to hit. Fine. Have it. He, however, had chucked 4 dice at the spell. I was under the impression that doing so was a poor choice to to the likelihood of epic failure (i.e. blasting a crater in the midst of your army), so I jumped on the chance to use the feedback scroll, since I figured the only other spell that would be cast with that many dice would be transformation, and t3 is more useful against t4 than t10. 2 Wounds later, this little beauty has earned a place in my list in perpetuity. The last 4 dice went to a damage spell but was dispelled with my 6 dice.
Shooting did nothing interesting.
Combat time: I expected my dogs to be mercilessly overrun. I seriously under-estimated their vim and vigor, and they lost only one (to 15 attack!) and managed to kill 2 back tieing up the combat.
Vampires 2:
Some charges to do! Nothing particularly interesting, some ghouls into some dogs, some ghouls into some spawn, some dogs into some other harpies, the coach into the pumba gor etc.
Other moves consisted of the grave guard sneaking past the dogs engaged with ghouls and the other unit slipping around the rock of doom. A point that I'd like to make here is that the new march blocking rules are great for our units with characters, but a ghoul unit only has ld 5, so count on them being marchblocked if they are out of the general's ld bubble.
Resolving charges was not all that interesting, the harpies, dogs and spawn held and we went in with no problems, but the pumba gor failed its rerollable ld 9 terror test against the flying coach of doom and legged it off the field! The coach had rolled poorly for its charge (2-3-3) so was only able to go 3".
Magic say 8 pd (after drain/channeling) vs 5 dd. My vampire lord thought it would be fun to spam vdm, and spam he did. 4 attempts at 2 dice each saw 4 successful castings, two of which were dispelled. Both guard units moved forward.
Combat saw the lower harpies busting out their ninja skills and killing all 5 dogs before the poor varmits had the chance to attack. The lower ghouls poisoned the lower spawn to death and the upper ones ran over the chaos dogs. The upper dogs decided to avenge their brethren by killing 2 harpies for no losses (failed fear test), but the harpies held.
Beasts 2:
It was well and truly time for VC bashing. Charges went off on the vampire's guard (gors), the wight king's guard (BSB, gors, beast lord), necros' ghouls (harpies) and upper ghouls (spawn in the flank). Oh dear...
There was very little other movement to do, mostly chaff getting into/out of the way.
Magic was going to be scary. The roll came up as 4 PD (2-2) though, so I was quite happy. No channeling and no dice suction meant that my opponent would get one spell off. He decided to unit-buff the gors fighting the vampire. My 2 DD didn't stop his 4 from making that happen. Oh well.
Combat time:
The fight up top between chaff units saw one on each side die. It was beginning to get comical how inept both units were. The ghouls (only 4 because of the flank charge) were able to do 2 wounds to the spawn and suffer minor damage in return. The necros' ghouls scared away the harpies with minor damage.
Now for the interesting fights: my opponent chose to do the vampire lord fight first. Fine by me. With this order of combat, I was hoping to break the gors and have the helm free for the wight king and co. beset by all kinds of nasty. The vampire lord killed 6, thanks to red fury, the sword of might, hatred and +1 to wound from the rock of doom. The gors were not to be out done and killed 5 grave guard. The Grave Guard were likewise incensed and killed another 7 (!) gors. With 13 dead, I was able to claim a victory and deny stubborn, so the unit ran off again. Unfortunately, I did have the hatred banner and was forced to pursue. I rolled a huge number (9+) which, combined with angles/charge paths etc. put me into the flank of the now-depleted minotaurs. Great for the fact that I would break them and potentially over run into the rear of the beast lord's unit, unfortunate in that the helm was now tied up. Bugger.
The lonely wight king and his friends would be hard put to fend off the ravening bestial horde. The order of attacks went something like hero-herd-king-lord-guard. Not good. The mino hero threw everything at the wight king. 3/3 with hatred saw 4 wounds incoming. 3 5+ saves later (magic attack for -1 armor or some such) the king was still standing (but not in btb with the beast lord). The king took a swipe at the BSB, needing 3/4 to cause wounds, I figured over the course of a couple of turns I could kill it. Not so, unfortunately. He had a LOT of armor, and it just so happened that he was able to make extra attacks based on the number of saves he made. 3 attacks back at the wight king saw another wound taken. Yikes! The gors killed a couple of guard, as did the beast lord.
I'd lost about 7 by this point. Still enough for full attacks back! I directed 4 attacks at the beast lord and 8 at the unit. Needing 3/2 to wound the herd, I killed 5. The lord was another story all together. Initially I thought I could have 6-6 on the unit/lord, but on closed examination it proved untrue. So no guts no glory. The guard hit twice and KB'd once. A failed 4+ ward save later and my opponent chose to throw in the towel. In the next turn I would be in the rear of his gor unit with a full GG unit with vampire lord support and most likely enough dice to either VDM both units or to heal up the grave guard. All of a sudden summon undead horde is a FANTASTIC spell, seeing as you get 3 dice of raising for 3 dice to cast. It's a great deal, esp. considering invkation is now 2 to cast for one to raise.
That was that. A bunch of luck on my part and hesitation on the part of my opponent certainly helped me win. I'm not sure of the power scale of beasts of chaos, but it seemed like he had tools to deal with me, and I wasn't using any of the "cheese" that has been bandied about the forums. Just lots of infantry. The coach is a crazy-good keeper. Much more durable than the wraiths, it also gets powered up much faster this edition making it tougher and more mobile than a varghulf, hitting only slightly less (one s5 attack traded for 2 s4).
I like the new edition. Tactics now consist of "how do I get these large infantry units to support one another without compromising themselves" instead of the nit-picking detail required of 7th. It was a lot of fun rolling buckets of dice and taking off handfulls of figures, both mine and my opponents. Since I started with larger units and had reliable raising, I didn't really mind the massive numbers of casualties going on. I'm sure as I play more, I'll have a better understanding of how things are supposed to work and may develop more nuance to my game. That being said, there are only 3 kinds of units in my army, so there's not a whole lot that can be done to change the general play style of the army.
Beyond that, I'm loving my list. It's not broken, and is somewhat dice dependent in terms of magic, but it is "HARD AS HELL" in the wise words of my opponent. All that really needs to happen is fine tuning of the characters and banners on my units (barrows is HUGELY better than hatred now, given that we're dealing with massed protracted fights). So far so good with this new edition.
Cheers,
ETHD