For months I had had a secret. Despite all my big talk I had secretly bought myself a Cygnar Caster. It made sense as I love playing with Gun Mages and Long Gunners, so why not field a Caster where I can use both? I went with Caine because I liked the miniature and just like Ashlynn he is a squishy caster who has to be in the middle of the action.
How would he fair in his first battle?
I took great pleasure in pulling out my fully painted Caster and Cygnar Jack and watching the realisation slowly dawn on Lano's face that he was going to get shot up . . . . . A LOT.
Thankfully for Lano he was fielding a couple of mental armour (22) warbeasts.
I bring everyone forward and make a pigs ear of my target selection (pun intended) and range, as well as wasting two focus which would have saved my arse later in the game (spoiler alert!).
The armour 22 behemoths run forward to close the range as soon as possible. I have to decide whether I can even dent these beasts.
I decide to just push the Warhog back. Unfortunately for me it is currently immune to knockdowns. Sod it!
My Long gunners go to town on the Farrow infantry before they are incinerated.
My Cyclone rolls a full quota of shots and also goes to town of the figures surrounding the Farrow Caster. The Warlock is sitting on silly armour or I would have gone for him instead.
As you can see below, the barrage of fire was more then effective! If only I had something to crack the armour 22 beasties, or should I have concentrated all the fire on one beast and tried to scratch one to death?
Now it's Lano turn. In comes the hog and once again it hits like a truck!
Thats pure damage!
and so is this!
No surprise my Jack is wrecked in a single round of combat. Maybe I need to buy some Khador Jacks?
Next the flamer pig moves in and flames through its own Warhog to try to hit Caine. Caine is in by bloody milimeters !!!!!
Lano still needs to hit and JUST rolls the twelve needed (off three dice to get the hit!). If I had cast 'blur' on myself in the first turn instead of wasting two focus on my Jack, I would have been sitting on defence TWENTY and would have been pretty untouchable to ranged attacks.
Lano rolls a bucket load of damage despite the focus buff to my armour. Unfortunatley the flames fail to go out so Lano gets to roll another load of damage in my control phase! This is against my base armour!
Another high roll sees Caine burnt to a crisp and once again Lano taking the win.
LESSONS LEARNT
1) cast 'blur' as soon as possible on my caster and upkeep it.
2) I need to use Caine's feat to remove all the infantry and then teleport out of the way so the rest of my forces can go the town on the Warlock or Warbeast.
3) Because of this I maybe should have gone for the 'death of a thousand cuts' on the Warbeasts but it was just too much fun blasting his little pigs to kingdom come!
Its always difficult to take the death by a thousand cuts route isn't it. The worry is that you fail to kill anything, while if you can polish off the lesser foes at least you feel you have achieved something. I'm not a big warmahordes player, is there some way of restricting the effectiveness of the 2 large nasty critters? Smashing looking game by the way :-)
ReplyDeleteVery true it was more compelling to flick his cannon fodder off the table in quick succession rather then watch a beastie walk forward for 3 turns like the terminator for three turns!
DeleteThe armour buffs were due to 'animus' cast by the warlock. The fact I could knock them down really hamstrung me as it's a powerful weapon in Warmahordes. The truth is a wasted opportunities and should have selected a hard hitting Jack rather then a low power gattling gun jack to take care of the beasties. I also failed to make any use of Gorman until too late.
Lano is just a really strong player and rarely makes mistakes.