Mordheim – Part Two
25/11/2012 4 Comments
Game 2:
So after my game aganist Anthony, he took on Jim who was fielding a Skaven warband. Skaven are quite tricky to deal with when you have new warbands as they often come en-masse. (Apologies for the quality or lack there of, of the photos, light levels remain terrible here needing lights on almost all day round at the moment)
And so it proved. Anthony set up a firing line high up in the buildings, and advanced his warriors and Warlock into the centre of the board.
Only for the Skaven to come at them from both sides, and cause a lot of casualties. His archers not having good lines of sight as they were too far back.
And so Anthony did a quick sharp exit. And found that his Captain would be missing for the next three games, so went back to the start and set up a new warband – Dwarves.
Game 3:
Jim and I next had a game – and I tried to learn from Anthony’s mistakes. So I sent four combat guys rounds the edges of buildings, whilst my archers (all two of them tred to get a bit further foward to target the Skaven.
Only to find that one of Jim’s Heroes had got the Sprint skill, giving him a charge range of 18″ meaning he got into combat with my centre group…whilst the rest of his warband mobbed my combat guys. I came away relatively unscathed.
Three games, and its 4pm, so Anthony and I gang up on the ascendant Skaven in a roughly evenly matched game…
Game 4:
We set up on the raised area of the board:
Yet again, we were encircled and picked off by the Skaven and their pesky slings. Even before we could react, I’d lost 4 men, and utterly failed my bottle test.
The Dwarves (mostly Long Drong’s Slayer Pirate figures, plus an antique Grenadier model) decided to cut and run shortly afterwards.
Summary:
- We had forgotten most of the rules !
- …and the tactics…
- What we did remember was used in good stead
- Skaven are very good when it is low level warbands
- They won’t get away with that again !
- Its still a really fun game and you can pack loads of jokes into your warbands and their names.
The Lost City of Carcosa 
(Jim says) Playing out a pre-planned strategy around an army/warband/gang customised to that strategy actually worked! Let me explain:-
I had forgotten most of the rules and so scanned through them the morning before the game – I noticed that ganging up on individuals seemed to have several rule advantages. So I built a gang around that concept going for lots of very poorly equipped basic skaven ie just armed with a cheap-as-chips sling and simple club in addition to their free knives. Whereas Giles and Anthony had paid for fancy pistols and armour and so on.
My plan was to get into combat with as many of my skaven as I could as quick as I could against as few of the enemy as I could….the ratmen are not know for fighting fair.
During the first 2 games I played, I stuck to the pre-planed strategy and clumped my ratmen into groups of 3 very near each other so that could be quickly combined to groups of 6 or more based around wherever the enemy was in small numbers. The group of six would attack a couple of Anthony’s or Giles and quickly finish them off, swinging the odds even more in my favour.
What most pleased me was to see that I was able to implement my pre-game strateging and to see it work so well. In the last few years of playing warhammer I have devised many sneaky schemes and tricksy traps but only a few turned out as I planned: sometimes others would disagree with the interpretation of the rules I was planning on, more often during deployment something would go awry with the enemy setting up different to how I anticipated or me failing to allow enough room to quite squeeze on the key unit where I had planned it meaning I never even got to try the strategem I had so carefully devised, and sometimes the strategy just not working out as well as I planned!
“I love it when a plan comes together!”, {cue A-Team music}….
Jim’s right to an extent that Anthony and I loaded up on shiney stuff too much – my henchmen shouldn’t have had light armour, so I could have saved 50GC and had another marksman instead. I only had my Captain sporting pistols.
The sheer number of Skaven was the key, and I don’t think the scenarios we rolled for helped either. Other than that, fair play he chose tactics and stuck top them.
Hi Giles – I’ve put you up for a Liebster Award, should you wish to acept it! http://hereford1938.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/id-like-to-thank-my-parents-my-agent-my.html
Gosh thanks – umm might be hard pressed to nominate 5 blogs myself, other than yourself, Morts and errr….oh ok Roaurigh’s effort….watch this space…