Battle Mechanik

Game 3 my opponent was on call and had to leave, so I got to watch TorkaThor get beaten by Nick's skorne (who would end up winning the overall qualifier... even though he didn't have a wooden avatar!)

Game 4 was a rematch of the space city con pvlad player, although this time he dropped conquest for another gun carriage and beast.

He used his feat to stuff beast into the uhlans who were hiding behind a wall; I tried to clear him off with markov, but didn't get the crit knockdown.

Uhlans that were out of beast's reach went and killed one GC, the nyss annoyed the other who would eventually get taken out by drago.

He was able to clear my infantry out pretty well, by the time I used my feat, one uhlan was pointing the wrong way to get to beast, so the other had to go kill valachev and threaten vlad. I had an opportunity to get a CP since behemoth was out, but a single feated uhlan plus a backstabbing kayazy wasnt going to be enough to get beast, and I didn't want to commit vlad.

He switched up to BoK at an appropriate time to reduce the effectiveness of the (non-feated) uhlan and eliminator who got in on him. He still tried to hand me the game when he charged beast into eVlad and failed to kill him (I personally would have S&P instead of BoK at that point, imprinted and rolled 4 dice to hit). behemoth stood still to finish drago. Instead of blocking a charge lane, a mech went over to try and heal beast, and he bumped behemoth over in the process; I said no way, you moved behemoth, there was a clear charge lane from eVlad to pVlad.

I already had martial paragon up from the previous turn, I had 8 focus because of beast's attacks, I was at evlad hulk out level2.

Charged pvlad, had 4 chances to roll an 11 on 4 dice, didn't get it.

He tried yet again to give me the game by moving pvlad up into his non-reach melee range, I hit him with the defensive strike since i'm still rolling 3 even out of activation and his BoK wasn't up. I ask him how much damage I need to roll to kill him, he says 6. Rolled a 4 and a 1.

Clearly there were things I could have done better earlier in the match (split the uhlans up more, go all out for vlad instead of messing with his heavies at all, make sure he was actually in the killbox turn 2)... but at some point, the dice just say no.

i rolled dice for my list, came up evlad. opponent had
siege
stormwall
hunter
gunmages
black13th
squire
arlan
couple stormcallers

Scenario was supply and demand, which I'm not sure if I've played but maybe once. It didn't really sink in to me how winnable it was by just jamming and controlling your zone while running a model in to touch their objective, and by the time I realized it and started grabbing CP, I was already down on attrition.

To be fair, we both made quite a few other mistakes. I epically failed against his gunmages with my HoF nyss early on, tried to rely on hand of fate to roll 9s for me instead of CRAing and didn't kill but maybe 1 or 2 of them. I knew I could get 2 uhlans in on his stormwall turn 2, but was about 1/4" out on the third one; probably should have saved the feat. He counterfeated and removed most of the remaining uhlans, but wasn't able to take out important systems on drago.

I used markov to remove a model that was blocking LoS to siege, and moved eiryss up to take a shot at him. Ended up being out of range due to covering fire reducing how far I could move up. I had been planning to cra him with the nyss just to get some damage on him, but an onlooker pointed out that cylena was one of the models I had derpily lost to blasts by clumping her up too much the turn before. Drago on his own did an amazing amount of damage to stormwall due to getting a crit amputation; if I had shot him with eiryss and charged him with markov as well, it could have finished him.

I finally had the presence of mind to control my objective with vlad and grab a CP; but over the next 2 turns he was able to start getting CP and destroy the rest of my army. I realized I probably could have killed the objective with vlad (hey, its not an attack, so he would still have gotten stat bonuses from being damaged by the explosion), but he said he probably would have just force hammered me off of the zone if I had. Vlad ended up killing stormwall just to get a pyhrric victory, lost on CP.

Moral of this story is I need to make sure I play all of the scenarios more often, even the un-fun ones like this.

I brought my standard irusk and evlad lists.

game one opponent had cryx, scenario was bunkers. I normally like vlad on flank scenarios, but I went with irusk instead because he's solid enough and has enough stuff in his list that debuffs arent as much of an issue.

Opponent had
eDenny
reaper
Deathjack
bonechicken
flying bonechicken
bane thralls
biles
gorman
midwinter
scarlock
2xwarwitches
satyxis solo since he had forgotten a model
leviathan
necrotech + scrap

We talked through edennys feat, since its a pulse, it shouldn't affect reinforcements who get brought on during the next turn. Because of that, he didn't feat turn 2. I considered waiting a turn to bring the kayazy on, since it'd let me deny the feat and I wasn't quite sure if they'd be in run-to-engage range of the biles that were waiting for them. I decided to go ahead anyway and blow up as many biles as possible with behemoth. big B did an admirable job, one of the kayazy ran into irusk's feat bubble and the others were able to charge the remaining front biles. Only one survived who was hiding way in the back, and he was only able to purge a couple of kayazy. IFP held down the middle with iron flesh against the banes, wgi held the left zone against DJ and the leviathan.

He had accidentally gotten dj out of his control area when he moved back after feating, so he wasnt able to cast any spells and had to settle for noming on the couple of wgi he could get to. banes pretty much bounced off of the ifp, gorman snuck up and balck oiled behemoth which really sucks since with the feat big B couldnt even walk over to engage him next turn. flying bonechicken went over to flail uselessly at the kayazy, reaper tried to kill the uhlans that had charged him earlier but they toughed.

So basically my feat had kept him from doing much of anything, but how much would his feat hurt me? I was a little worried about being able to hold the left zone. Luckily one of my bears was out of the bubble and was able to run over there. DJ got harmed by aiyana, the wgi bobbed around him into the zone and laserbeamed off one of his arms, jo yelled tough at them. I figured that many models with tough, plus the no-knockdown tough great bear would be enough to hold that zone, but I sswapped IF to the wgi just to make sure. Ifp stabbed at the banes that were already engaged with them, half of the kayazy were out of the bubble and ran around to be threatening.

He concentrated on the left side where his scoring zone was, but wasnt able to kill all of the wgi, although he did get DJ into the bear and finally killed him. Gorman black oiled behemoth yet again. Lacking IF, he was finally able to do some solid damage to the IFP, but again not much to the kayazy.

Once I was finally out of the feat turn, I basically blew all his stuff up. Kayazy got battle lusted and backstabbed the reaper and bonechicken, clearing that zone (although I had no scorable models in it). DJ moving over to get the one bear meant he was in charge range of the remaining 2 bears, who ate his face. WGI mobbed up his bonechicken and leviathan and sprayed down a bunch of the banes.

He ended up having to turn denny incorporeal and run her over to hold his zone, the bears blew up the leviathan and bonechicken in my zone. The remaining IFP were probably enough to hold off the remnants of the banes, but I ran a couple of mechaniks in between them and irusk just to be sure. Behemoth started making his way towards the zone I needed to score on.

Once denny finally turned corporeal again, she was camping full focus in her zone, but behemoth slammed her out of it for the final point.

Honestly irusk is so solid against traditional cryx lists, as long as he has enough range (hello behemoth) to deal with biles. I think I would have been better off holding the uhlans in reserve on the left side, out of denny's feat bubble and ready to charge in to wreck whatever came into my zone. As I played them in the middle, they were limited by a wall in how many could get in on the reaper.

had my regular eVlad list, opponent had

kaelyssa
banshee
phoenix
mhsf
2x mha
sentinels
cav solo
arcanist & etc.

Scenario was 3 flags. He used his feat turn 2, but didn't push far enough towards the flags to really cause me much scenario pressure. I basically just repositioned my uhlans between the middle and left flag that remained, pushed my kayazy into his sentinels and my nyss into his MHSF. I ran the eliminators over the top of everything to go engage his banshee and a clump of MHSF.

MHSF with 3man CMA and backstrike bonus couldn't get rid of the eliminators, banshee ended up doing the job himself. He later realized that eliminator free strikes arent exactly fearsome, so he could have walked away as long as he either left banshee within no-charge range, or got kaelyssa far enough away from the feat range of the eliminators. He did his best to get rid of the kayazy, but phoenix was only able to combust a couple of them, and sentinels didn't roll 9s. More or less hid kaelyssa behind the cav solo.

I wasn't exactly sure how many kayazy were going to be able to get in - one was definitely in, and there were two more that were questionable. I feated on em all, they all had the range, that's all she wrote.

I think the thing for him to do would be push harder on the scenario if he was going to feat turn two; otherwise give me one of his jacks early in exchange for my feat, counter-feat and kill as much of my stuff as possible.

battlebox pkaya vs baldur, megalith, woldguardian, woldwarden

positioning only let me yoyo one heavy at a time. forgot to warp for strength first time, had to warp for speed second time. derped and didn't pull any fury off, had stealth on feral instead of kaya. got 2 earth spikes to the face.

I had evlad left, opponent had pvlad, a&h with valachev, behemoth, conquest, guncarriage. scenario was overrun.

He got crit dev on my uhlans hiding behind a wall top of turn 2, which rather screwed things up for me - not so much the loss of the one that was directly hit, but having to waste a turn standing them all back up and repositioning them. I think I would have been better off moving them the full 8 inches rather than setting them up again behind the wall, because Conquest was getting eryiss bombed that next turn anyway and wouldn't have been able to boost against them; as it was, he had to waste all his attacks trying to get rid of eiryss + as many kayazy as he could.

I had at least one or two kayazy left in feated range of pvlad, but derped and feated before moving up so didn't catch as many as I should have, charged one in and ran the other one in to threaten him. Uhlans occupied conquest, nyss continued to draw the attention of behemoth and the GC. He tried to kill off the kayazy with BoK vlad, but the boss survived. I could have (and probably should have) used transference to fully boost both of the boss' attacks, but instead gambled that conquest would miss one of the uhlans with a free strike and put HoF up on them, since pow 16 is much much better for cracking arm than a non-gang pow 10. Conquest splattered them. I got one more chance on him the last turn with a Hand of Fated markov, but the dice weren't with me. Conquest finally got to eVlad and splattered him.

Given my later experience against this same player with basically the same list, I'm thinking that against this low of a model count, the thing to do is just ignore it all and run after vlad as fast as possible, leaving one or two infantry in b2b with the big guys to stop em from getting the aiming bonus or moving & shooting.

I got a bye game 2, so by this time I was just inclined to kind of mess around. Opponent had eHaley + stormwall + hunter + gunmages + the stormguys with reach, the scenario was the radial one (sacrifice i believe) with one large circular zone and an objective on the opposite side.

I almost never cast inhospitable ground, but in this case there was a house inside the zone that I could just hide irusk behind and spam inhospitable, so I decided to see how that worked. His gunmages shot up my ifp, my wgi sprayed down his stormguys, stormwall camped on the edge of the zone and tried to pod my dudes, behemoth hid behind a wall at def 16 (even hunter was missing him, hahaha) and shot stuff. Neither one of our feats had much impact because we were both being relatively cautious and just hanging back.

Haley finally moved up a little bit, so behemoth hopped over the wall and into the zone, dropped two boosted bombards her way but didn't hit her. My bears got in position to counterattack if stormwall went after behemoth, dice down was called. The zone wasn't marked except in the center, and I had one wgi rocketeer outside the zone, so lost on points in the zone. My opponent was pretty confident he would have been able to take behemoth, but I don't think it's a given against a superiorityed behemoth who was basically fully healthy.

Moral of that story is inhospitable still isn't all that great except against really skewed matchups - it basically just bogged down his infantry a bit - and that marking zones is extremely helpful.

My 3 lists were my standard evlad and irusk lists, with karchev t4 as the third.

First game, opponent had terminus, the new gaspy, and pdenny. I gambled on karchev, he went with pdenny, and that game went pretty much as you'd expect.

I was able to keep the satyxis from feedbacking me by waling with shocktroopers, then moving the greylords up and spraying them all to death. I even got relatively lucky on the 3 flags, since the middle one didn't disappear. But otherwise, sidearms really doesn't help much against that many debuffs, and I spent my time killing all his nasty support crap (gorman, pistol wraiths, warwitches, etc) while his banes and my jacks whittled each other down. I was actually holding both flags relatively well, until a game-changing turn when he potentially had a charge on karchev with snapjaw. He was going to start the turn with 2 fury on him, but I still didn't want that chance, so I ran a zerker out of the right hand flag area to foul up his charge lane.

His biles on that side were able to kill the juggernaut(!) that remained to hold that side, by rolling a ridiculous amount of 6s for damage on their sprays in addition to parasite. In retrospect, I think I would have been better off camping and taking the charge, healing up with mechanics, and killing snapjaw, because that was his last large point value piece in the middle area, and the zerker would have been able to kill at least a bile or two and help hold the right area. As it was I lost on scenario at dice down, after denny was finally able to get a crippling grasp on karchev who had been hiding at least 10" behind the line of battle the whole game.

Opponent had
pHaley
3 hunters (one on journeyman)
precursors
long gunners

Scenario was 3 flags.

Immediately I thought 3 hunters was going to be a problem. He gave me the solution when he ran all of them turn one, one into a forest, the other two behind a wall. Yeah, protection is good, but HoF widowmakers dont give a crap, and shot the arm off of the one in the forest. My leading great bear was just in range to hit one of the hunters behind the wall, I was able to get 1 feated uhlan to finish it and another feated uhlan to badly damage the other one.

Honestly the game was all but over at that point - he feated and rolled 15 cras with long gunners that did very little against def18-20 uhlans in cover or elevation. precursors got up in the mix and eventually killed some uhlans, but my IFP were able to clear and hold the left flag and drago + bears were able to clear and hold the center flag.

Opponent had
Harkevich
Conquest
Black Ivan
WGI without jo
Dog

Scenario was close quarters.

He was able to drift some aoes onto my widows early and take them out, I need to space them out more.

I had put my uhlans behind a wall in the middle of the board. He charged them with conquest, but was only in range to get one of them on the far right side, at least mostly because he wanted conquest to toe into my zone. There was a bit of an argument about whether i should get the +2 melee defense across the wall, since one of conquest's arcs was unobstructed, The judge ruled against me, then came back later and apologized; ultimately it was not game changing in the slightest since he still had more focus to kill it, and I wish i had just let the matter drop.

He had pretty much given me the game by not stuffing the Uhlans with conquest. There were a couple of WGI in the way between the uhlans and Hark, Markov blew them up with his AoE, charging at an oblique angle so as not to block the lane. Vlad was right behind the uhlans such that he didn't have a clear lane to charge for extra distance, and might not have been able to get his control bubble close enough to hark with an advance, which I really wanted to do in order to get transference. So I then herp-derped and tried to lose the game by saying "vlad runs over here to get distance and feats... oh shit." Even without the feat, one of the uhlans still got in and hurt hark pretty badly despite his feat arm. The rest ran up there and threatened him. After that I did damage control as best I could - drago charged in on black ivan and took out his claw (I neglected a crit, which would have done even more). IFP and bears charged in on conquest to try and keep him occupied.

He was contemplating running away with hark into a nearby forest, but might have boxed himself if he did. The wgi tried to deal with the uhlans and couldn't, conquest swiped a huge swath of my dudes instead of shooting at vlad. Ivan's claw being out meant he didn't bother to go after vlad with that.

Next turn the uhlans got the feat, used markov's elite cadre to maneuver through themselves sufficiently to get 3 of them on hark, killed him.

Really, I got lucky that the failed feat turn didn't screw me, and that he didn't just run conquest up to stuff the uhlans.