My second event of fourth edition was Bannerhall. An absolute stonker of an event in Cheltenham. Rich, the fantastic host, served up a wide range of sweet treats, and for the periods in between rounds of donuts there was the odd game.
At this point fourth edition is still very much bedding in. I think I’m there or there abouts with the rules, but when it comes to army lists, I’m still none the wiser. I do like my list, but I have no idea if it’s where I need it to be. Buoyed by going 2 wins to 1 at the last event I decided I must be onto something with my Basilean army and took pretty much the same list. The only change was to drop 30 points of items and turn the Sisterhood Scout troop into a regiment.
Going into the event I felt good, although I haven’t played my Basileans since the last tournament because I’ve been dabbling with the Halflings and Ratkin. Even so, I felt as though I was in a good place.
My first game was against a Halfling army, playing Control. I really love playing against armies I also play. It’s great to see how other people use them and workout if there’s any ideas I can borrow. This list had a reasonable amount of shooting, loads of drops and lots of Brutal. I thought it would be an interesting matchup because whilst I didn’t think the shooting would count for much because of my healing, and I’m not massively convinced by saucery (or any of the commands to be fair), I knew Brutal could, given the right circumstances, be a problem. What I was concerned about though was the number of drops. At 17 I suspected I would be hard pressed to keep up with all of them.
The Halfling shooting, as predicted, didn’t do huge amounts. Early on the little people tried to bag a Phoenix with the combined shooting of an Iron Beast and three rifle regiments. Despite a great volley from the pig, the rifles came up short, the Phoenix just about survived, and went on to heal back to full health by the end of the game.
It was a fantastically close game from the start. I wanted to focus on taking the scoring areas in the centre and on the right-hand side. I figured the number of cheap mobile units my opponent had on the table meant they would easily be able to secure table segments, so I had to pick the units I wanted to hold and focus on them.
Things went pretty well on the right. The table sections were largely cleared out in the first half of the game by the Elohi and Phoenix, however the centre was not quite as straight forward. Whilst the Halflings died pretty easily, I just couldn’t get hold of things to kill quickly enough. My opponent masterfully piloted his various tinker contraptions and in the end I just couldn’t swat enough them in the time we had. As a result, the Halflings took the win and the Basileans headed off for their next donut break.
Game 2 was against the undead, playing Pieces of Eight. My last game against the undead had been something of an uphill struggle. Munching through zombies is always a challenge, and a thankless one when you have wights and werewolves for afters. Although my shooters made some decent headway into the zombies a theme was starting to develop. Although this army had less drops than mine progress was slow as 3 hordes and a legion of zombies do tend to hang around. Add to that the amount of healing the army had was just enough to keep its horrific hammers going despite some decent chip damage.
I definitely made an error with my Elohi, sending them into a space I thought they would be invisible in, only to then realise the new line of sight rules made them sitting ducks for wights with the Brew of Sharpness. Amazingly they survived one round of combat, but the angels fluffed their next rolls and failed to get the damaged unit off the table in one go. They didn’t get another chance.
Whilst I made a pretty decent job of clearing out the centre and securing both 2-point tokens there was still quite a lot of undead on the board. In a truly cinematic style, the accursed creatures of the night started to move, inexorably in towards me, overwhelming the righteous and dragging my brave warriors to their deaths.
The result was a win for the undead, although I did manage to hang onto three points.
The final game was Pillage, against the Northern Alliance, and it did not go well. After a promising start clearing out my left flank and securing a loot counter the solid wall of northerners that ranged from the centre to my right refused to budge as I tried to break into the middle. With some decent layering of punchy units, it didn’t take long for the Elohi to meet their demise, swiftly followed by the Paladins and then more of my core units. For the third game in a row I felt I just didn’t have enough punch to break through the opposition, and so they wore me down quicker than I could do to them, and the result was another loss.
Despite the results the games, and the day itself, were brilliant fun. My opponents we’re absolutely brilliant. The cherry on the top was that I hadn’t played any of my three opponents before, which always makes for great games. I’m still on a learning curve with the new edition, and specifically with army lists. Because of this I decided to have a quick look at the top six lists to see if there were some general principles I could steal. I’m not a mathhammer type, I tend to be strictly vibes when it comes to army development.
What was interesting was that all the lists in the top six places had at least 15 drops and generally only had a couple of units worth over 200 points. Whilst I’m not saying there is a right and wrong way to build lists, the thought of having an extra unit certainly tallied back to my feeling of just not having enough in the tank. I’ve also been wondering if the Elohi are a bit of a single point of dependency. As a general point of order, it seems to be the case that the more the Elohi do, the better the game tends to turn out. So, because of this I’ve decided to rethink the army, in addition I understand that they may be in the next army book which is due in the next couple of months, all of which means I’ve decided to give the Hegemony a bit of a break and run a very different rat list at the next event in Plymouth next weekend.
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