Season 3: Clash of Catastrophies

[yabbadabba]

So a little while ago I posted a couple of battle reports of a map based campaign involving my friend's Greenskins and my Empire. We are now half way through the third season and this Sunday we played the first game with the new Empire book. I won.

The game was 3.5k of Empire vs 3k of O+Gs. I had had to rewrite all my army lists, but my friend was using an army he had used before which had some casualties and a veteran unit. We went for a variation on a pitched battle of a river crossing called Orc's Drift. The only scenery rules was for the river being dangerous terrain, but we allowed armour saves to reduce the impact. The random scenery set up was not kind to either of us, and we had 2 woods, one of which we declared as blocking TLOS and the other needing a 4+ to be "open".

It was a very one sided battle but mostly because of our gaming trademark; bad dice rolls. This time it was my friend. He had his level 4 and his Level 23 Night Gobbo shamen miscast, followed by the Big UN unit his level 4 was in failing all its Ld tests and running off the board. My Outriders, Helblaster caused a fair bit of damage, and my IC knights saw off a unit or Orcs. My 2 cannons killed a giant and took an Arachnarok down to 1 wound. On the other hand his veteran BlOrc unit (Hatred, causes Fear) walked through almost 40 Spearmen like they were not there - the spearmen did not cause a single wound, let alone unsaved wounds and lost 16 in return. A good shot with the Stonechukka took out my Hurricanum before it did anything, and the Arachnarok ate my Reiksguard Knights (but after they had delayed it a turn which was important) and that was about it.

So on reflection I didn't really see how the new book worked, and I definitely didn't win; more like some truly awful dice rolls by my opponent defeated himself. However as I had lost about 5-6 games in a row, I wasn't too sympathetic .

We have two more turns this Season and then we are looking at Season 4; we are rewriting the campaign rules, house ruling the rule book a little, and looking to incorporate Storm of Magic. Knowing our dice rolls I anticipate a mighty battle between two armies of very surprised frogs.....

If anyone wants my army list, let me know. Thanks for reading.

[punygreenskins]

Looking back my army was not quite right to deal with so much successful shooting. Normally by the second turn some of your Empire Cannons have blown up!
The Lvl 4 Shaman miscast was a disaster - not only did the foot of gork miss target, but then proceeded to Stomp on my own units. However I did enjoy using the Squig Hoppers and may get some more of them.

The Black Orcs have been the one constant through out the battles we have fought - every single time they have proved their worth taking out all manner of stuff shrugging off Gunpowder weapons as they go.

[Valaraukar]

Sounds like a great campaign, lots of fun! Hopefully you'll get a better read on the new book in your coming games though not just how 'relatively' lucky your dice were. Definitely post the list up as if it's a campaign we may be able to help you tweak it over the course of your games to get the best out of them.

I've only had one game with the new book so far but got absolutely stomped by ogres but in a similar manner to your game it came down to the dice gods in large part plus being outdeployed, I have another game this weekend and hope to likewise get a better read on the book.