Cold Blood vs Old Bones

I ventured out to a chum's place for a quick game of WFB last night. We both work in the same school and, as a result, are both knackered: as such we cracked out the beers, ordered some pizzas and knocked together some army lists.

As my Dark Elves are still Missing In Action a year after the house move I used his Lizardmen. Given that I started with 3rd editon and he quite like the End Times rules, we decided to bin off the force composition requirements and both ploughed a huge number of points into our respective generals*.

So here are my forces arrayed for battle. I love his painting style - much more blocked colour than mine but so vivid and it requires a huge amount of brush control and precision.

As time was short we just went for a straight scrap (I normally prefer scenario based play but we were both rushing to beat the onset of yawning).

My basic plan was to launch my heavy hitters (Saurus Warriors and cold one riders) down the centre while flanking with my skinks down the right (they're so generally useless that the best way to deploy them is to use them to attack an already engaged unit to boost combat resolution). The Flying Cicus of the Terradons would be used to hold up the Hexwraiths who I regard as one of the most deadly units the undead can field; I regarded that as sacrifice similar to a chess move - I didn't dare allow those ghost riders in the sky to reach my army core. My general, mounted on a humongous dinosaur is the same Skink Priest that destroyed my whole army with one spell last time we played.

Turn one, and the undead summoned a whopping great block of skeletons in the centre of the field. This is one of those fascinating pivot points as it ended up bogging down the core of the army. I started with a Cold One charge into these after the cold ones survived a nasty cloud of death spell. 

I have a long history with Cold ones. Who doesn't love do dinosaur cavalry? In my dark elf army I spent ages scouring ebay to find the right riders and the right out of production cold ones to create a unit round which to build my army. I played them half a dozen times and not once - not once - did they ever do anything useful. Instead they always failed their stupidity tests and ended up gazing in awe and wonder at a daisy on the battlefield.

Guess what happened here?

Yes, it must have been a very lovely daisy. 

Stubbornly unattacked skeletons blocking the movement of my hardest hitting unit. 

(I've always had bad luck with dice rolls and bizarrely seems I operate as a good luck charm for my opponents. As an example on the cloud spell mentioned earlier, the rules informed us it would inflict 3d6 hits. This is what he rolled:

See?)

Thankfully my big Flappyosaurs did their job and pinned down the Hexwraiths:

And then the huge Engine of the Gods on the back of the Stegodon let rip. This is a very nice bit of kit and, were I a lizardman player, I'd probably field two. In one shot it took out half the skeletons, half the ghouls and seriously wounded the Vargulf. 

In the next round the vicious undead Necromancer, scourge of the living and defiler of the dead, totally forgot his magic phase. 

He instead launched his general and Vargulf at my general. And started hacking at the dinosaur - the brute!

The noble steed could not withstand this assault and fell over leaving my opponent crowing like a cut price Legolas. I charged in my Saurus Warriors for a flanking attack while the Cold Ones - finally! - smashed into the side of the Vargulf. 

A alas, at this point it was pushing 11 and, aware that the Small People would be waking me at around 4, I called it a night at this point. Aside from anything else, even though I had wiped out quite a few of his units the points value of the Stegadin meant he had easily won

Another fun game. The current edition of WFB has its faults - most of the structural in the way armies are organised and designed - but at around 1000pts it does run quite fast and smoothly for a mass battle game. 

I think we'll be having another WFB next week and then it'll be either LOTR or - if I can get the retinues finished - some Lio Rampant. 

Til then, dear readers, farewell. 

*I recall a 3rd edition Chaos army I had where over half the points total was in my general and standard bearer. Built with the Realms of Chaos books, that one chap took out a 2000pt Skaven army single handedly. 

The 'Battle' of Nebelheim

Conrad von Krapp, Master of the Black Arts, Raiser of the Dead, Lord of the Ten Towns, Wielder of the Dark Flame of Canduin, leaned forward and glared at the messenger, his eyes blazing red. "Say what?"

The messenger sighed inwardly. "My Lord, through a series of unlikely events that don't really need to be explored at this juncture, a force of Lizardmen has invaded the hamlet of Nebelheim."

Von Krapp leaned back in his throne and steepled his bony fingers. "The bloody cheek!" He muttered.  "Bloody dinosaurs trampling all over my food sou-- I mean, my noble peasants whom I am sworn to protect!" He glanced around, hoping nobody had caught his little slip. 

The courtiers shifted uncomfortably, trying not to catch his burning eye and pretending not to notice the way the candlelight reflected from his fangs. 

"Right, time to teach those scaly buggers a lesson. Assemble my forces!"

***********

It seems only fair to admit something at this point. Many moons ago I used to work for an Unnamed Games Company for whom I wrote rules, editing other writers rules and creating scenarios. In all my years of playtests - many, many playtests - and in all my years of hobby gaming, I have never won a battle.

Not once.


Not even using rules that I wrote.

So you can imagine that my hopes weren't high as I went in to my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle since Skull Pass. I wasn't sure on the new edition rules, I was using someone else's army and my choices were limited by what miniatures they had.

I picked Vampire Counts because... Well, because Undead are cool. Let's not kid ourselves. My general style of play varies depending on the game and army but my basic plan here was to March shambling beasts straight down the throat of the enemy, supported by my Necromancer, while a unit of Hexwraiths* rode backwards and forwards over the rear lines like they'd escaped from Johnny Cash singing Riders In The Sky.

So, I set up the forces like so.

On the other side were... I dunno, some lizards. They had a big looking dinosaur which I figured would cause me some problems and a few Cold One riders**. Oh, and there were some skinks. But come on - they're the Kobolds of Warhammer. How much trouble could they cause me?

So there's the set up. My scaly opponent won the roll to go first, shockingly.

The magic phase arrived and his tiny little skink priest cast a spell which placed a marker on the table. This marker shows where a comet may - or may not - strike at some point in the game depending on a die roll. And, as you can see, he placed it right in front of my main block of troops. Some desultory missile fire which totally missed all of my chaps and that was his turn over.

My turn arrived, and I launched my master plan. The flanking Varghulf - a big monster, quite capable of ripping through a unit of cavalry - was in a position to charge at his Cold One riders.

The huge monster, however, decided that there was a daisy that really needed to be examined somewhere on the floor a few inches in front of it and failed the charge.

My insanely powerful Necromancer then completely failed to cast a spell. I assume he was distracted by a bird, or something. And that was my turn.

So, turn 2. The lizards charge into my main blocks. My plan is working perfectly. The Hexwraiths and Varghulf are still free on the flanks to sweep round the back and take the opposing army roughly from behind. The magic phase arrives and we casually throw a dice for the unlikely event that the comet lands.

It does.

See that green die? That's where it landed. See everything else in the picture? That's in the blast radius. 

Now, I could take you through all the maths on this. And tell you exactly how many hits were smashed into my units and the lizard units that had charged into combat with them.

Instead, I'll just show a picture of all the troops that were killed by the comet cast by the tiny little skink priest standing in front:

For those you keeping count at home, that's over two thirds of all the models on the table - including my general.

Most of the rest of my army promptly crumbled to dust.

Regardless of the outcome, it was a really good game. We spent a lot of time laughing and got a great war story - which is kind of the whole point, isn't it? Had it been a normal game we'd've probably forgot it in a few weeks. As it is, we'll always remember the day a single skink took out an entire undead army.

***********

Ss'lik stared at the massive crater where both armies had been. The gaped at the wisps of smoke that curled up towards the sky that had - just a moment ago - torn open with the fury of the Old Ones but was now blue and calm. He slowly looked down at his finger. 

"Whoah," he said. 





*For those not familiar with the things I'm talking about, Hexwraiths are ethereal cavalry who do damage simply by riding through a unit. Enormous fun - or so it seemed.

**my previous experience of Cold Ones was spending an awful lot of money modelling some really cool looking Dark Elf Cold One Knights who failed their stupidity tests and spent the battle sniffing daisies somewhere on the left flank. In every single battle in which I fielded them. Seriously. Every time.

Painting

Well, we're getting there bit by bit. Via the simple expedient of packing the kids off to nursery I've freed up some hobby time. Slow going on the painting due to being asked to have a game of WFB for the first time in two editions. So that required some hard graft in drawing up an army list.



It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

In other news, I think I've cracked the zombie skin in a way which I'm more or less happy with. Vallejo dead flesh with a wash gives a decent base colour, although a little warm:





 Highlighting with dead flesh/bleached bone cools it down again and restores the slightly sickly hue:





All the base colours are blocked in now, so it's just highlighting and detail work left to do and then we're on to landscaping. As per usual, highlighting black is a joy; I'd sadly forgotten the last lot of painting I'd done in which I'd simply shaded down from grey to get black and painted my Covenanted Men in base black, leaving me the fun (hah!)of mixing various greys and then blacks to shade again. Anyway, they are also done:



I don't think this one will be finished until the end of next week but I have hopes that it will look pretty close to what I had in mind.