Showing posts with label campaign. Show all posts
Showing posts with label campaign. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Occupied Llael - The End.

What a great campaign! I honestly thought it would have gone a bit pear-shaped with people dropping out at the beginning, but it turned out to be a success. In the end, I finished in fourth (or joint third would sound better) out of a field of ten. I’m not going to pick on what I did wrong or what I should have done as it was a smoothly run thing. The rounds were quick enough to keep interest while some special scenarios were made up to keep things spicy. The committee Members (Tom and Marcus) really made it an awesome couple of months.
Thanks guys! Can’t wait for the next one!

Wednesday, 3 November 2010

My fire wasn't quite hot enough - Occupied Llael round 5.

Last night saw my Silent Bob take on Sorscha in a club campaign game last night. This was a tough game against a fairly new member of the club, Jaden. We agreed on a 35 point game but still ended up running out of time in our session, meaning we only played 3 turns each.


Jaden took (adding additional points for territories owned):

Kommander Sorscha (*5pts)
* Beast-09 (11pts)
* War dog (1pts)
Great Bears of Gallowswood (5pts)
Winter Guard Infantry (Leader and 6 Grunts) (4pts)
* Winter Guard Infantry Officer & Standard (2pts)
* 3 Winter Guard Infantry Rocketeers (3pts)
Fenris (5pts)
Kovnik Jozef Grigorovich (2pts)
Kovnik Markov (4pts)
Man-o-war Drakhun (with dismount) (5pts)

To which I answered with (again with additional points for territories):

The High Reclaimer (*6pts)
* Crusader (6pts)
* Vanquisher (8pts)
Exemplar Errants (Leader and 9 Grunts) (8pts)
* Exemplar Errant Officer & Standard Bearer (2pts)
Flameguard Cleansers (Leader and 5 Grunts) (5pts)
Holy Zealots (Leader and 9 Grunts) (6pts)
* Holy Zealot Monolith Bearer (2pts)
Holy Zealots (Leader and 5 Grunts) (4pts)
Vassal of Menoth (2pts)

Having barely won the roll for deployment, I let Jaden set up and go first. He set up his Fenris and Beast to my left and his Drakhun and Markov to my left in menacing flanking manoeuvres. The Winter Guard were set in front of the Great Bears while Sorscha and her War Dog sat behind slightly.
For me, I set up a brick of Zealots (the larger unit) with UA and Vanquisher to keep an eye on the Fenris and warjack. Near my centre I placed my Cleansers just ahead of my smaller unit of Zealots. Then I put the Errants and UA to cover the other flank, utilising the woods on that side. Silent Bob and his bonded Crusader sat behind the brick to my left.

First turn saw a general advance on Jaden’s part with the Rocketeers taking first blood, but wasn’t able to do much else. I mirrored the general advance with the Errants taking position in the woods ahead of them and keeping an eye on Markov and the Drakhun.

Next turn saw Markov come down the extreme flank looking to pull away my Errants. The Rocketeers took a few more casualties while everything else shuffled forward slightly. My turn came around and I had to get the Errants to charge Markov, which they did with ease. The Vanq pressed forward and took aim at the War Dog hoping to catch Sorscha behind it. I scored a hit and put it and Sorscha on fire but didn’t do damage to either. The Vassal gave the Vanq another go and this time went for Beast who also caught fire but with minimal damage. The Zealots moved forward to plug the gap between the ruins to their left and the Vanquisher and popped their mini-feat. This was to prevent the nasty Fenris from charging my caster. The Cleansers started to spray the Winter Guard with Menoth’s Fury and were largely unsuccessful, though they managed to set a few on fire.

The third turn saw the continuous effects cause very little damage. Sorscha suffered only one point, the War Dog suffered three while the Beast started the turn unscathed. The Winter Guard also suffered a few casualties in the same way, but they also made a couple of Tough rolls. Sorscha kicked things off by pooping her feat making a lot of my force stationary (over half of the larger unit of Zealots, the Vanquisher and Vassal, and half of the Cleanser and smaller Zealot units), before using Windrush to jump back to safety. The Winter Guard advanced to within shooting range of the Cleansers and managed to gun them all down and also take aim at the Vassal who, unfortunately, was not in B2B contact with the Vanq in order to get a DEF/ARM buff. It was time for Beast to come out and play and it promptly smashed the Vanq to pieces. Fenris just sat behind Beast as he had nothing he could go for. Drakhun took advantage of the open area that now appeared and moved close to Silent Bob and just look threateningly at him. This was looking a bit bad for me as I had lost a lot of troopers. Bob started the turn, now with a total of 18 focus, and feated bringing back 5 Zealots back from the dead. He then proceeded to cast Ashes to Ashes and put heavy damage on Drakhun and some Winter Guard. The Drakhun’s mount then perished to a well aimed swipe from the Crusader, but the Drakhun himself survived. The Zealots who came back to life went to work on the remainder of the Winter Guard and killed a few more. The Errants came towards the centre of the field and got rid of a couple more Winter Guard.

This is where we ran out of time and called it a draw.

The look of the game might have changed in the next turn with a lot of Continuous Fire on several models, most notably Sorscha and her Dog. The Dog would have died while the caster would have suffered 2d6-2 damage which would have left her very vulnerable. Drakhun would have kept the Crusader engaged while Beast could have gone after the Zealots next to him. This could have left Fenris with a good opportunity to come and engage Bob (the way Bob was positioned, he couldn’t have been charged anyway). What was left of the Winter Guard would probably aimed at the smaller Zealot unit and softened them up for the Great Bears, who smartly stayed clear of the action. But then my Errants could have covered the Zealots and give the Bears a fight.
Once again, I was very pleased with my force composition, so I will now briefly rate my force:
High Reclaimer - did well with his spells and moved away from trouble.
Crusader - didn't see much action apart from squishing Drakhun's mount.
Vanquisher - set things on fire and provided a nice distraction (there was nothing he could have done about Beast '09).
Zealots (max) + UA - blocked vital charge lane and made Jaden think about waht he wanted to do with Beast and Fenris.
Zealots (min) - took out some Winter Guard only after they had come back from the dead. I had hoped to keep them behind the Cleansers and launch bombs over them towards the enemy (it helps that the Cleansers are immune to Fire).
Cleansers - put some Winter Guard on fire but didn't have the chance to shine before they were wiped out.
Errants + UA - were pulled out of position by Markov (who paid for this dearly) and then came towards the fray and took down a few Winter Guard.
Vassal - did what he had to twice by urging the Vanq to take extra shots.

I do wish we had not taken so long in each turn, so we could have found a winner. So neither of us gained territory or lost it either. This is a shame as I had my eye on a particular piece of Jaden’s land.

Next game: more Khador under the command of my nemesis, Marcus.

Thursday, 21 October 2010

The start of Round 4 of our campaign would see me get a large, and I mean mega, dose of Circle Orboros.

So for the first week of round 4, I was challenged by Martin and a Kromac led list featuring mostly pretty much all beasts. There were some hairy moments especially when a Pureblood took out a total of 12 Zealots and a Monolith Bearer. But the Menites prevailed dealing heavy damage on the three large wolves. With things looking iffy for Martin, he decided to wait until the High Reclaimer wasn’t buffed with over a dozen souls before making an assassination run. The Lord of the Feast caused little damage due to bad dice while Kromac weighed and took Silent Bob down to three boxes left. It was now up to The servant of Menoth, now boosted by a few more souls, to lash out at the Circle ‘caster. The first attack failed, but the second and third attacks didn’t giving me the win by ‘caster kill.


The second week saw me challenge Nick and his Moshar led force. I took pretty much my standard Bob plus two full units of Zealots, Crusader and Avatar of Menoth. I changed a couple of bits from last week taking out the Knights Exemplar and something else I’ve forgotten and replacing them with a minimum unit of Errants plus UA. We both tried to dictate the way each other played by trying some flanking moves. My Errants speeding down my right and the AoM traipsing up the left. The Errants had better luck but did nothing all game going down Nicks extreme flank, while the AoM Was hindered by not only a unit of Bloodtrackers, but by Moshar’s Pillars of Salt. In the end it was put out of it’s misery by a giant wolf of some description (my mind just cannot retain names). This left my core quite vulnerable to Nick other beast’s whom suffered a lot of damage between them, but not enough to put sown one or more of them. I did however manage to keep them on fire at one point or another in the game which was enjoyable if not effective enough. Nick was shrewd enough no to kill too many of my Zealots enabling the High Reclaimer to collect souls and give himself a nice pile of Focus for more spells/overboosting powerfield. This enabled him to give me more than enough threats to put me in check, and go on a successful assassination run.
The only saving grace from this game is that the Crusader survived, thus keeping up his bond with Silent Bob. But the worst thing was actually not killing any of Nick’s force.

Bob has really grown on me during this campaign and is now one of my favourite Menoth ‘casters. I have found him fairly easy to use and love taking the mandatory 20 Zealots and Monolith Bearer. I am now not sure whether Vindictus will make an appearance in the last round of the campaign having only featured once, so I’ll be wanting a strong finish from the High Reclaimer.

Tuesday, 19 October 2010

Occupied Llael - Round 3

This round saw me pitched against Carlos and his Cryx and Nat and his Menoth. I have a 50/50 record against Carlos and lost the only time I played Nat, so this was something I would be looking to remedy with my new ‘casters. Unfortunately, Carlos had to leave the campaign which left me with a free night. With all the crap that I caused between me and the missus, I thought I would at least try and make up for it by taking her out instead.

But the next week I was back at the club with some HOT (haha) Menoth on Menoth action. As usual I fielded the High Reclaimer and an infantry heavy list. Nat decided to bring pKreoss to face me. We both bought similar forces with some minor differences between the sides. Our game was pretty smooth as we obviously knew each others forces and what they could do, although at some points decisions were hard because of this. I keep saying that I should keep notes from the game and maybe take some pics as it would mean that I have some documentary evidence for you. But alas, I don’t. You’ll have to take my word that it was a great game. After much symmetrical manoeuvring, we both ended up in the middle of the table where Nat was the first one to feel brave enough for an assassination run. He came up a little short and nearly took out his frustration on my Crusader. This left the High Reclaimer to saunter over, loaded up with plenty of Focus from loyal souls, and stick it to Kreoss and kill him in two hits. A win here meant that I could take a couple of Nat territories for the campaign, which replaced the ones that were taken from me.