I learned an important lesson yesterday. Okay, I fought the battle yesterday, I learned the lesson today, but leave us not split hairs.
Here is the set up, Darthweasel has a unit of 10 Chaos Warriors just outside the corner of a wood. I have a mixed unit of 10 Skinks and 1 Kroxigor on that flank of the warriors. I get another unit of 10 Skinks in front of him angled in such a way that I can hit him with my 8" range javelins, but because he will have to wheel to make the charge he will not make it when he tries the following turn.
I get my shooting in which does 1 wound which doesn't get saved. There may have been more wounds, but if so they were saved. On his turn he tries to charge and falls just short, so moves 4", lining him up perfectly for my flank charge. I declare my Skink/Krox unit is charging him in the flank and then I make the mistake that probably cost me the game (okay, one of the two). I then declare that my ten man skink unit will charge him in the front. I was thinking I wanted to get as many units in as possible and do the damage. I now see that Skinks should flee from any other unit in the game including goblins unless there is something else in the unit with them. You see, I started the combat 4 ahead. I got bonuses for flanking, outnumbering, having a standard, and having a rank bonus. He got no bonuses. I lost five guys from the 10 man skink unit and did nothing with my attacks. I may have done one or two had I remembered at this point that the Kroxigor has a Great Weapon giving his attacks S6, but I definitely won if I just left the stupid second unit out. All of my bonuses came from the flanking unit. Had I taken in that unit alone, the best he could have managed would be a draw. He probably would have taken the break test instead of me. He might have lost his unit to the overrun instead of me. I might have killed his commander and acheived my objective instead of him wiping out my army and acheiving his.
The morals of this story are two-fold. More guys in the combat are not always better, and NEVER EVER, under any circumstances, use weak units to hold the front of an enemy unit.
Imperial Guard get their first run
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Took what will eventually be my Cadian 317th Regiment "The Lost and
Forlorn" out for their first game last night. Went up against a fun
Genestealer cult l...
6 years ago
8 comments:
nice write up
well said. I was trying to explain to Space Monkey and Fixed Dice why I thought you should not have put them in and could not say it clearly enough. You did a great job of it. Shooting units like the skinks with little to no chance of actually doing damage in hand to hand should never do anything but shoot...especially with their sick poison ability. That is how you will do the most possible damage. Look forward to our next game.
Sorry to say Darth Weasel that was a conversation you and I did not carry. Must be your old age catching up with you.
must have been after you lefty then, just Fullur and I
One person said that Fullur should have spent the whole game shooting, and never engaged period. Fullur said he (Fullur) never should have used a weak H2H unit to engage an enemy in H2H in the front. He and I discussed it for quite some time to decide which tactic had the best chance of succeeding, and agreed that giving sacrificial maidens (skinks) is NEVER a good idea, especially if you give them to the largest possible amount of enemy attacks! Apparently, Chaos Warriors are great skink hunters and have insatiable appetites for fresh skink meat! Also, Strength 3 8" ranged attacks with no armour save modifier are NOT good for hunting Heavily Armored Tough enemies. Who woulda thunkit? ;)
Ah, but his shooting is POISON. Since with the way he uses them he generally needs a 6 to hit anyway, not having to roll to wound is surprisingly powerful and I am seeing more and more how powerful it is. Wound a T6 dragon without having to roll? No problem. Wound a T8 Kholek with a S3 model? Easy money. Poison is POWERFUL. Yeah, I know, I still haev a chance to save...I think we all saw how that worked. :-)
Yes, we saw how that worked. You took two total wounds in the battle out of about 7 or 8 that got to that point. Your rolling was kinda bad on Armor saves. Having a 16% (roughly) of failure when your opponent has only a 16% chance of making you take the test (less if I have to roll to wound) you theoretically almost never wound. It doesn't help that if I am in range to shoot, you are in range to charge unless I do some incredible or lucky maneuvering like in that last battle.
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