Works in progress: Empire

Doing a small empire force for my club's slow grow league.

These moments are when the airbrush pays for itself.

Battle report: Lizardmen rematch

Played against Rich's lizardmen again today, minor tweaks to my list moving the magic items around slightly and dropping a hexwraith in order to field a unit with an even number. I used the points to change my core around slightly. His list was unchanged as far as I know.




Deployment after vanguards looked like this:

Note we are playing on a 4x4 table, which if anything was an advantage for me as it limited his scouting options. We chose to play anyway as we both planned on simply pushing forwards and hoping for a good magic phase.

He took turn one and moved everything up, the magic phase was uninteresting except for the purple sun he cast, then rolled a 2 for the distance. He killed just 4 of his own temple guard. He also got a caress on my general but I let it go, he rolled 5 for the hits (doing nothing to the S5 vampire). The engine of the gods moved up and pulsed 11", removing 5 hexwraiths (!) and a handful of dogs. He moves the skinks in real close on my left and poisons a few dogs.

VC turn one the dogs in the midfield charge the temple guard unit to get out of the way and the knight bus charges the stegadon. On my left I had a unit of 2 wolves, a single lone wolf and the front zombie unit charge the right skink unit, I activate the lone dog first forcing him to waste his stand and shoot. The hexwraiths charge his salamanders to tie them up. All my charges connect. He uses cube of darkness on my first spell, ending my magic phase.
   The hexwraiths win by 1 but he holds, the dogs and zombies break the skinks, dogs run them down while zombies reform. My hero vampire challenges his skink priest (I thought it would be funny) while the vampire lord destroys the Stegadon before it can strike. The vampire is kitted out to duel, so it was relatively one sided. The bus reforms to accept the inevitable double charge, but no more engine pulses to worry about.

I forgot to take pictures for the next 3 turns, so the next picture will be 'after' the big central combat. The hexwraiths hold the salamanders for a turn, break them next turn but they stay on the board, then charge them and run them off the board on turn 5. There is not a lot notable in the central combat, the vampire lord fails to kill his BSB scar veteran in the first round, then on my turn the level 2 vampire kills it with a caress of laniph. Then the level 2 goes for a 6 dice bubble soulblight, I get irresistable force but it ends up a decent trade, I kill 4 or 5 knights but I kill 8 or so temple guard, soulblight his entire army and then cascade off the board. The vampire lord finishes the job and eats the temple guard. The last remaining guard breaks and flees, leaving my vampire, wight and knight champion to face down the saurus. Next round he can't break through my armour and I win, running the saurus down but that last temple guard stays on the board, ending his turn 6 sitting exactly on the board edge.

Meanwhile on the left, the skinks avoid combat and poison the corpse cart off the table. The left hand unit of saurus move down and take on the ghouls. They do well, and even though the zombies pinned the saurus giving me a flank charge, the saurus reform and start going to town on the ghouls. I'm in trouble, he will kill them in one turn and be able to get a turn 6 charge on my bunker, possibly clawing back a lot of points. What to do?

  Note the dead pile is basically everything, the last TG are there, the knights below them, the ghoul/saurus fight and bunker watching with baited breath...

Well the level 3 necromancer decides to do something about it, and casts purple sun. He fails to dispel, I roll 10 for the distance and it hits all but 1 saurus, out of 24 in the unit 4 survive. The lore attribute gives me about 8 power dice and he has no dispel dice left. I raise about 12 ghouls and 3 knights between the two level ones, and the zombies swell in ranks. I then cast doom and darkness on the saurus as the final insult.

Final turn and his temple guard stays on the board, I had 2 dogs on the far left staying out of the way and they we ONE INCH out of charge range on my turn 6. I should have moved them up to threaten, my own stupid fault, I could have forced the temple guard off the board and tabled him. He ended the game with a lone temple guard and 10 chameleon skinks. I lost my level 2 vampire, the corpse cart and 3 units of 5 dogs. A massacre to the vampires!

I won a 15-5 after comp score adjustments (4.4 VC, 6.2 LM) but it's sort of irrelevant :)

Have to give a final shout out to my opponent Rich, a thoroughly good guy to play with and it was a really great game.