Warmachine Battrep!

Haven't been painting or playing much recently. Between halloween and an inconveniently placed company event, I haven't been able to go to my local game store as much. I did go again last friday, which means I have another battle to blog about, and some upcoming painting projects to present.

I played a 50pts Warmachine Battle friday against Niek and his "Ocean's" list. It's a list that uses pSorcha, a Behemoth and a whole bu 1nch of mercenaries. The original creator of the list called it Ocean's 18 as it used exactly 18 models at the time, but Niek's version has since made various alterations to the lineup. Aside from pSorcha and the Behemoth he used Cylena Reafyll & Nyss Hunters, eAlexia, pEiryss, Gorman, Dougal MacNaile, Rorsh and Brine and a unit of Greylord Outriders. It's a really tough list to beat for the ammount of high damage output models that are coming at you at the same time. It's a list he's taken to tournaments before and this time he'd be using it against my most recent pMagnus list.

Because I wanted to use my new Galleon and I have a fairly limited mercenary collection, I used the following: pMagnus, 2 Renegades, a Galleon, Gorman, Dougal MacNaile, Orin Midwinter, Stannis Brocker, a full unit of Croe's Cutthroats and a full unit of Steelhead Halberdiers.

After deployment our set-up looked something like this:

Start of Turn 1

We were playing a steamroller scenario with objectives (the blue markers), but neither of us paid much attention to it, so I won't bother anyone with the details here. The first turns started out ok, with Niek mostly just moving forward and me making some early game mistakes. After Niek's advance deployments of Eiryss I wasn't happy with the positioning of my solo's, so I decided to do some run moves in a couple of wierd directions. In hindsight I should've just stuck to my original plan for the solo's as in turn 2, none of them were where I wanted them to be either.

Start of Turn 2.

During turn 2, Niek made some aggressive moves with his Greylords to take out most of my Halberdiers and used Rorsh and Brine to take out Stannis. His Nyss Hunters and Eyriss took out a couple of my Cutthroats, but nothing else major was accomplished. Things looked to be getting tough for me in turn 3 though, unless I managed to pull of something genius. In an effort to take out the Greylords (I've become very afraid of stationary effects), I decided to use the Galleon in melee. In hindsight, this was also a mistake.

After this game I need to remember that the Galleon is much better used for shooting and taking damage in the early turns. Even if it's the only thing that can kill a certain enemy unit. I tried to use what remained of my Cutthroats and Halberdiers to damage Rorsh and the Nyss Hunters, but bad dice put a stop to that rather quickly. I fired off my obliterator missiles at the Behemoth (which was useful at least) and at Alexia, who I almost boxed. Long story short: turn 2 should have been a critical turn for me, but due to some bad strategy and bad luck I was not prepared for the turn 3 that was to come.

Start of turn 3.

Niek's turn 3 was suprisingly light on the damage part. He mopped up the last of the halberdiers and did a lot of damage to my Galleon, but I didn't lose a lot of actual models. Despite all of this his board position was very strong by the end of the turn and there were almost no positions in which I could keep Magnus safe if I didn't somehow kill a lot of very tough models. In my turn I decided to go for broke and try an attempt at killing Sorcha. The only way to do it (we found after much discussion and calculation) was to roll consistently above average with my Galleon's cannons. It only took me two dice rolls to crush these feeble hopes. After that, turn 4 saw the end of the Traitor.

What was good about this battle is that I learned a lot about how to use the Galleon as well as that I need more units that are either very good on their own, or have actually useful combo's going on between them. An Ocean's list is very much about the points-efficiency and individual power of each model. If I ever plan to counter that I'll need to either have a lists that works together or has equally efficient units/solo's.

What's next?

Next week I'm going to help a friend start up a new 40k campaign at our local gamestore and make an attempt at finishing my UE.net's painting vows for this month. Hopefully I can stay committed and not get distracted by all the fantastic games coming out this month. Assassin's Creed Unity, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Pokémon Alpha Saphire are all looking to be competing for my free time these weeks.

Speaking of Pokémon: I'm also attempting to finish White 2 in time for the new games since I've never gotten around to doing so. Anyway, so far I've found that warmachine casters make some of the best nicknames ever!

My team so far.

Death to the False Emperor.