Last week the Company of Mimos, as my halflings are now officially titled, had their first, and only practice game, ahead of the Birmingham Bull run in March. Now I have less opportunities to play there’s definitely more excitement in each game, but it makes major tweaks to the list a bit more of a step into the dark.
There has been something else to consider as well. Not only command dice, but also a recent tweak to command dice from the games I played at the end of last year. I understand that command dice have now been amended so that players get 3 red dice for free rather than a red, white and blue. Additional dice have to be bought.
To test my list I was going to be able to take another proverbial swing at the nasty Ratkin Slave army that tore me to shreds at the end of the Hinckley Heist. I always find moving from a 2,300 to 2,000 point list harder than going the other way. It’s much easier to find toys to add in than take out. With my rats I tend to design completely different lists, building from the ground up, but with my Halflings I don’t have the luxury of 6,000 plus points painted to do that. I’m fine with that though for a couple of reasons:
1 – I love the units I have and think they’ll work really well together
2 – the efficiency savings I took to Hinckley, such as reducing the number and mobility of saucerors worked really well so it means there’s an easy candidate for deselection.
After a good think it became apparent that there really was only one way to cut down the current list to a not so big list, and that was to remove the Jugger horde. I’m not super happy about it because it is such a cool unit to have on the table, but it does mean that I have a pretty solid core of an army as a starting point and enough spare points for command dice without having to think too much.
That being said though I decided to make another couple of tweaks. I’ve been thinking a lot about my Stalwarts and the Harvester. I love the units but given the way I play I just don’t think they’re quite the right pieces. I like having a chaff horde, and Stalwarts aren’t that. I also find the Harvester needs a little thought when I play it because of the exposed flank and the chariot base. With the resulting juggling of points, I have enough to replace the Stalwarts with Braves and the Harvester with another Iron Pig (if it works well, it means I have a pig to paint up!). I also decided to take a white command dice and throw the Brew of Haste onto the Muster Captain on the Winged Aralez.
This time around the game went significantly better. Remembering just how devastating both the Impalers and the Nightmares could be I deployed far more sensibly. All my fliers went on my left flank with the cavalry. The pigs and braves went in the centre with the trolls and Greedyguts covered the right flank.
One of the great things about the downsized slave list was that there were less Impalers, 2 instead of 4, and the nightmares were broken up, 2 hordes in the middle and 1 on my right flank. I breathed a sigh of relief. Also, the massive flying thing had vanished.
We played Stockpile with loot counters on both sides of the table. This time everything went pretty much to plan. My flying chaff disrupted the Impalers and Golekh, allowing my Juggers to grind them down one at a time before turning their attentions to the centre. On my right Greedyguts munched his way through a regiment of slaves, nibbled at a slave driver, before tearing chunks out of a slave horde and then consuming another slave driver and his chariot. It was a glorious sight to behold. Supported by the trolls and one of the pigs the right flank quickly fell.
In the centre there had been no hurry to engage, but an opportunity in the shape of a saucery fuelled flank charge on some Nightmares with the other pig threw a massive spanner in the rat’s evil works. They found themselves having choose between supporting the Impalers on the left and the slave horde in the centre and at this point things started to fall apart for them. The game ended with all the rats removed from the table.
Being completely honest I don’t think the slave list was as scary as it could have been, it was a first attempt. The most recent version I’ve seen is far more problematic. That being said I was pretty happy with how everything performed, and I can’t see myself making too many more changes.
What was interesting though was the new command dice dynamic. Previously I found the dice to be pretty reliable, which worked well for Halflings because they have some very useful tools. What’s more the amount of iron resolve, rallying and lifeleech in the army makes the capacity to recover a point of nerve a turn pretty meaningful. In previous games I could plan to have a unit with stealthy or additional thunderous every turn. However, with 3 red and a single white dice those four points were much harder to come by. My initial observation is that this is an attempt to balance dice for those armies that have powers they absolutely want to access and those that aren’t bothered. For this game the dice powers were a nice to have and I only managed to pull off two of the big hitters, stealthy on Greedyguts as he made his way towards some Nightmares and extra thunderous on some Juggers. Given the overall flow of the game my first thoughts were that I wasn’t particularly bothered whether those two had come up or not, so did I really want to bother with the extra white command dice at all. I think that’s a reasonable position to hold immediately after a pretty solid victory. However, the more I think about it the more I get that mind worm wriggling around saying “What if… what if?” and I’m starting to think it might just have a point, after all I have a 20 point item I didn’t get to use all game and an extra point of thunderous on just about anything is nothing to be sneezed at.
Have a great week peeps.
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