Breakthrough!

The other day more troops for my Empire army rolled of the production line; the first two regiments of Horse - Pistoliers and knights of the White Wolf , and some reinforcements for the infantry and artillery. The guns were brand new, the rest had been waiting for attention for quite a while, and included some of the first figures I bought for my Empire Army...some twenty -odd years ago!  There are still a few more units to paint- Knights of the Blazing Sun, Knights Panther, a Steam Tank, and a few more heroes, but it felt like a milestone of sorts had been reached, which could mean only three things: First, a celebratory cuppa. Secondly, some pics should be taken, and thirdly, the Empire must go to war!  A challenge was laid down, and Chris foolishly accepted !

Pistoliers and knights of the White Wolf- the Pistoliers Standard has to
set some kind of record for longest time taken over the simplest conversion:
the  pistol was cut to make way for the staff 20 years ago. The staff was added
last week!

The entire force arrayed

 So, to war!  We agreed to play a 2500 point game, with no special characters. Scenario selected on the night was Breakthrough, with me attacking, and we rolled 5 turns.

 I wanted to fit in as many of my painted units as possible, so I chose all of them , and then worked out what heroes I could have with my remaining points. I ended up with the following:

Captain-General von Drakmoor w/ Runefang, Armour of Fortune, pistol, barded warhorse.
Sergeant-at-arms Owen Grimace ;  Battle standard w/ Warbanner, heavy armour, pistol, barded warhorse
Hildegard, Archsorceress of the Menificent Order of the Umpth Wuncicle: wizard, level 3, warhorse.
Knights of the White Wolf ,5 inc Standard bearer w/ Standard of Shielding, Champion w/ Jade Amulet.
The Nordreik Horse; 9 Pistoliers, inc standard.
The Werberg Regt. of Foot: 25 halberdiers, inc standard, musician and champion
The Innleigh Guard: 15 halberdiers, inc standard, musician and champion
Freikorps,  16 inc musician (count as halberdiers)
The Soerheim Company of Archers, 21 inc standard.
The Froddasheim Greatswords, 12 inc standard, musician and champion.
Borther Stumptickles Company; 18 dwarf crossbows, inc standard and musician.
2 greatcannons
1 mortar
1 hellblaster

The Chaos Horde deploys whilst its commander contemplates his
'blurred hands' mutation.

 The Chaos Horde (all 37 of them !) consisted of
A lord of Slannesh on chariot  (the big palanquin thing)
a daemon prince
two units of 10 warriors
5 knights
10 horsemen

The chaos force was deployed across the road to Hargendorf, covering their brethren in the siege lines encircling that town. Von Drakmoor has been tasked with breaking through , and raising the siege!

The first turn was awfully dull. Von Drakmoor ordered a general advance, but none of the artillery found it's mark. The Chaos force retreated slightly. Magic played little part, but the Nordreik Horse caught some sort of pox that made it hard to walk !

Encouraged by the lack of inappropriate behaviour from the frottage squad the Imperial advance continued, the artillery finding the range and sending the marauder horse flying from the field. Archsorceress Hildegard spurred her horse forward and hurled a fireball at the chaos knights. To a cry of "I'm not wasting a dispel on a power 1 spell!" all but one of the regiment was immolated!

In retaliation a large pink daemon prince dropped from the sky in front of her, keen to avenge the fallen and find out what a Wuncicle was when it was at home; distracting the giant pervert with a well timed "look; behind you !" the Archsorceress rode safely away, and the Imperial line wavered, but held firm under their commanders eye !

That'll be Terror tests all round then?

 The great cannons roared, their shot tearing the Princely One asunder, but it was able to Escape! and staggered back on to the battlefield to general dismay!  The Chaos Lord rode in to the fray, scattering the Soerheim Archers, shrugging off  their attempts to slow it down!

chap with wings, five rounds rapid!

 The hedonistic headcase rode on in to the Innleigh Guard, but received a flank charge from the mighty Knights of the White Wolf. A spirited duel began between the knights champion, and the chaos lord. The rest of the Imperial troops turned his pimped up ride into firewood. Enraged by this vandalism he refused to flee!

CHARGE!

The Pistoliers came under attack from the injured Daemon Prince ,but despite its only having one wound their pistols were unable to find their mark . With chaos halberdiers loitering with intent on the far side of the village the advance of the  Freikorps and Greatswords was suitably cautious.

Freikorps on a pub crawl  

  The Werberg Regt. charged the last chaos knight, hoping to break it and thus hasten their egress. Alas, even a single chaos knight was a match for an entire regiment of men, and they were soon outflanked, and destroyed.  Meanwhile, the Chaos Lord had felled the Knights champion , and turned his unwanted attention on Von Drakmoor, who whacked him mightily with his Runefang! The gods of chaos attempted to resurrect the chaos knights, but there some sort of administrative error and three the Nordreik Horse staggered back to their feet and returned to the fight, albeit briefly!

 Seeing the horrific fate of the Werbergers, Hildebrand spurred forward once more , incinerating the last chaos knight. Sporadic shooting accounted for a few more chaos warriors, the last Pistolier held his ground, and von Drakmoor tried to finish off his opponent but only managed to tickle him with his mighty weapon!   But the followers of Slaanesh had had enough; realizing a break through was inevitable, they fell back in good order to buy what time they could for the besiegers of Hargendorf.

I love the smell of burning chaos knights in the morning ...
smells like...my wifes cooking.

And that was it. A 10-6 victory for The Empire ! Though Chris loudly proclaimed a moral victory (on the grounds that I'm immoral ) ...until he realised he hadn't paid for a retinue for the Daemon Prince and his army was technically illegal ...whoops.

So, after all that...time for a campaign I think.

The Gathering Darkness

A recurring and much loved topic of discussion amongst the gang is that of  "Edition wars", the endless and near pointless back and forth over which version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle was the best ever.  It was during one such conversation that Rick declared he really liked "the one that had the lizards in it" and that we should play a big game of that edition.  Nevermind that none of us had played 5th edition for decades, and that it was never the quickest system ever to fight a battle to some kind of conclusion, we agreed a date and to bring every model we had within certain parameters. We ended up deciding on a Chaos V Undead bash, with a few allies.

Chris and I would ally our Chaos armies together. Mine was a bit on the small side so I decided to invite my Orcs of the Skullsmasha Legion to the party.  Rick and his sprog Ben would command the Undead. My own undead army was added , and allies came in the form of Skaven!

We decided to play everything more or less Wysiwyg, with only a few "counts as" for some of the more obscure stuff that hadn't existed in 5th edition. Some stuff was simply ported in "as is" from 4th and 6th editions, and this didn't appear to cause any problems!

Little attempt was made to make sure the sides were even, and both forces were simply plonked down. At a guess I'd estimate the forces to be around 10000 points but they were very different forces. Ricks undead were somewhat character heavy, almost as many Vampires in his army as we had any sort of characters!  I counted at least 4 special characters amongst the ranks, including both Von Carstein and Nagash, By contrast we had almost no heroes, and only a few big hitting monsters, but the quality of our infantry was somewhat higher overall.

We let the special characters keep their allocated magic items, and decided to randomly distribute the magic item cards from the 5th edition boxed set. I forget most of who got what, but my Orc Warlord on a Wyvern got the Blade of Ensorcelled Iron for a +1 to hit, the Boarboys got a Warbanner and the Hero leading my Marauders got the Blade of Leaping Bronze for +2 attacks.

Took a few pics, so I'll let them do the talking...

My Orc and Chaos combined armies.

Ricks Undead and Skaven

The Forces of Chaoticness...

The Undead forming up properly .

The battle lines arrayed!

The four biscuit-loving Champions of Order and Chaos put their game faces on...

And the ref blows the whistle, and their off! With just 6 hours of game time to go!

The massed undead lancers look for an opening on the flank whilst a vampire on
Zombie Dragon gets the drop on my Chaos Dragon!  The chaos dragon was badly
wounded, but managed to eat the Vampire, causing the Zombie Dragon to take to the skies.
Our Victory was short lived when the Vampire "escaped!" and returned to hunt down
and finish off the Chaos Dragon later in the game!

The Lancers on the Edge of Time get the better of the Skeleton Horsemen,
 the Giant heads to the Pub

The Slannesh Priest on his panaquin (counting as a chariot today)
gets bogged down by rats, who dismantle his chariot...

The Orc Warlord takes the fight to the plague monks!

The Chaos centre as the zombies approach, the thugs using their bows to
good effect, and nearly killing one...

The battle lines vie for the charge!

My orcs get fed up of waiting for the Chaos knights to get our of the way
and maneuver around them.

The giants pubcrawl is disturbed some annoying little twerps. So he jumps
up and down on them for a bit to teach them a lesson...

The winds of magic just arent blowing strong enough for Nagash,
who is struggling to Raise Dead fast enough to replenish the thinning ranks

Two units of mounted wights caused panic in the chaos lines , with unit after unit
routing, but the undead were too slow to capitalise on this, and the counter attack
defeated both attacks. 

The undead horde is reduced to a mob of unkillable vampires who roll nothing but ones...

The Giant spots more victims!

Well that was a lot of fun, with a convincing victory for the Forces of Chaos!  So what went wrong for Nagash and his minions?  Well, Rick, as the commander in chief of the undead forces was happy to take all the blame and dump it on his son Ben for rolling nothing but ones for the entire game, and doing all the actual dice rolling to boot! We fully expected the Vampire to take a heavy toll on our infantry as we had little capable of taking them in a unit v unit melee, but every time one stepped up to fight they promptly dropped their swords, fell over their own feet and were generally useless. Even Vlad took 4 rounds of combat to deal with someone he should have been able to kill with his little toe!  Apart from killing my Dragon (at the second attempt!) most of them barely landed a blow! Ricks other primary excuse was the pitiful winds of magic rolls. Before the Game I had suggested we make it a 4d6 roll, but Rick was concerned that might allow magic to dominate(!) too much, and eventually we compromised on 3d6+1 cards each turn. He did have a pretty low turn with a mere 5 cards rolled at a critical point of the game, but I thought we had plenty of magic to go around the rest of the time. I felt he was tending to try and power up single spells too much and would have been better with more less powerful spells to draw out the dispel cards. As it was my own Chaos Sorcerer pretty much had Nagash sewn up for the entire game, dispelling almost everything that came his way and planting a few good doses of Soul Drain on key units , which they were unable to recover from before a general melee ensued.

At the end of the game our mass of infantry was engaged with almost none of the skeletons, most of whom were already destroyed but were generally facing a scattering of vampires, wraiths and wights. We had been very luck with the Vampires poor showing thus far, and had only held our own by virtue of skeletons being really squishy! In a hypothetical next turn, with no more skeletons to hit, and with some decent rolls on the vampires and wraiths (being too tough or too ethereal for our infantry to hurt) the out come could have been rather different. 

Anyway that was great and I hope we can do it again soon!

Warmaster 2! Warmasteryier...

Last night I played my first game of Warmaster!  My order from Pendraken had arrived and had been painted and this (with some borrowed bears and a few magical toys ) brought my army up to near 1500 points.
My Force consisted of:
General with Orb of Majesty
Hero with sword of might
Hero with Bear
Wizard with dispel scroll
3 units of Lancers (1 with a magic banner)
3 units of Horse Archers
2 units of Archers
2 units of Axemen
1 Warwagon
1 unit of Borrowed Bears

These faced Geoffs High Elves!
2 Units of Silver Helms
2 units of Reavers
2 units of Chariots
4 units of Spearmen
3 units of Archers
1 battery of bolt throwers
General, hero and wizard

The General and the Kislevite centre

The Elf centre.  

The Elven Right .

The Kislevite left,

The Lancers 

The Kislevite Light Cavalry Brigade mix it up with the Reavers and Silver Helms. They destroyed the Reavers, but only bagged one stand of silver helms before the brigade was lost. Still, their charge caused Chaos in the elven lines...

In response the rest of the Elven wing went and stood on a hill for a bit.

Last stand of the Horse Archers

The Lancers try out a lance formation. They'd lost three stands when they got
charged by the chariots, but they destroyed the chariots in turn. Pity they spent
most of the game just standing there.

My left flank- at this point with a briagde gone, and still outnumbered I
moved the lancers closer to my centre for mutual support

Meanwhile in the centre- the Kislevites have taken their time over laagering,
luckily the elvish brigades here were taking orders from an wizard, and spent
most of the time just faffing about.  The Bears are sent in to cause more chaos.

The Elvish archery eventually deals with the bears and they steady their lines only
for the Lancers to arrive, coming down the hillside (and presumably with Sabaton
providing the soundtrack...), and were driven back, despite the Kislevites only being
armed with rubber lances....

The game didn't quite end there - The silver helms managed to catch my two under strength lancer units unawares and destroyed them. This should have ended the game but I miscounted and didn't realise I'd reached half strength! Pressing on, my remaining lancers charged the two spearmen units that had survived their previous charge, and wiped them out , breaking the Elf army as well...whoops!


So whats the verdict? It was a great game, though I need more units: I was a bit out numbered, and even just 4 units less in such a small game meant I was somewhat stretched. Need to get my General to where the action is as well, the first half of the game was all about the cavalry engagement on my left, but the general was miles away, and the two heroes commanding Brigades there were out of their depth!  And wizards are no substitute for a proper commander.  Never got to see what the Infantry could do, once they'd laargered they were rather static! They shot up any elves that came near quite well, but we never got to test Geoff's assertion that they were unassailable once formed up. But the fact he was reluctant to engage them suggests more warwagons might be worth it. 

Most of the rules of the game I very much like, but  I was a little dissatisfied with the melee mechanic were you keep fighting round after round till one side is defeated. Theres something funny about it, but I can't quite decide what it is. More testing required.

Anyway, heres some random shots of the whole force.  Think it needs more Horse.  A lot more Horse...

Warmaster!

This post should have probably been the Gauntlet18 report...a rundown of the huge and epic and massively overly complicated game of Frostgrave... and I'll get round to it one day, but this hobby butterfly has seen something shiny...

The other week at the club, whilst my Orks were giving Phils Imperial Guard a good going over, I espied in the corner of the room, a game using tiddly little figures- Warmaster!  I'd long coveted this game that has been described as one of the best wargames ever written, and I already loved its cousins (Hail Ceaser, Black Powder and Pike and Shotte), and golly, did it look fun. So I decided I was in, and that I would collect Kislevites!  With the only slight hitch that they didnt make 'em anymore, I headed for ebay, took one look at the prices and headed for Pendraken Miniatures to buy a bunch of their Renaissance Polish!  And Whilst I was awaiting their arrival I started work on terrain!

Pretty much my entire terrain collection is for 28mm scale so I'd be starting from scratch and needing everything.  Firstly I went looking for buildings. Attempts to scratchbuild were unsatisfactory, so I turned to the internet and looked for the free stuff that could be downloaded.
 I found this castle : http://www.toshachminiatures.com/castles.htm  which is very nice, and an easy build, and this model village  https://www.grundschule-pretzschendorf.de/Werken/Weihnachtsberg/weihnachtsberg.html.   The buildings in the latter are a bit modern looking but I copied them into MS paint and modified them a bit before I printed them out.
A visit to the Works turned up 50 small fir trees for a mere £10 and all they needed was quick brush with green paint. I also remembered I had already bought one piece of terrain, many years ago with 10mm gaming in mind, and it was gather dust on a shelf. It was a model of an ancient ruined temple, bought whilst visiting the Parthenon on my honeymoon, for a mere 2 euros. This was given a scenic base and a coat of paint. A cardboard tube became a wizards tower, some foam board became some hills, and then the figures arrived, a small packet to see how things went, and enough to make a unit of Winged Hussars, 3 of Horse Archers, and 2 of Axemen. A Bear was found in the spares pile to provide a lancer with a mount. And thus in a mere 2 weeks I've produced a pile of terrain, and 600points or thereabouts of Kislevites, ready for battle. Reinforcements are already on their way...

PS:
After writing this I was looking for something to do with my day when I realised I didnt have a wizard!  Well there was only one thing for it...I would have to make one!