Leviathan 2008

Well took along the goblins (formerly run by Sart) to Leviathan. With zero practice games under the belt and it being my first tourney for the year I spent the first two games finding my feet (which I ironically won) then watching the dice pendulum swing back.

The 2500 point army was 4 characters, 6 night goblin blocks with fanatics, 4 artillery pieces, trolls and fast cav.

I ended up on 59/100 battle points on 3 wins from 5 games, above average but not great. I’m going to focus on the two games lost and the lessons learnt about A) my tactics b) my army composition and c) vampire counts.

My first loss came against Andrew Galea who was playing mixed orcs and goblins. From a tactical stand point in this I took too many risks with what was designed to be a defensive risk adverse army. I sent the hoppers screaming down each flank which leads to them dying, I also intended to pit 80% of my army against 30% of his and hope to win the trade off but with the speed of his Wyvern (and my artillery being wildly ineffective) this was futile.

Dice did play some part with seemingly every critical animosity, panic and misfires failing and ensuring that any plan I had never got put into play but in hindsight I should have hung back and forced his elite units to fight their way through a checker board formation whilst I bombarded with the artillery. This would have mitigated the effect of the dice.

This game also taught me that I had too many fanatics to be effective. I couldn’t control their release or my charge angles after they were and it ended up really hurting me in this game and many others. I essentially had spent to hinder myself or wasted about 100 points

The second loss was to Matt Purling’s VC army the game reinforced all my conceptions about the new VC list. Now I’ll admit Matt’s is more towards the abusive end of the spectrum and may be a harsh example to use when forming an opinion.

He had 3 corpse carts, 2 terror causers (black coach and vargulf), book of arkan, +1 to cast and dispel, 2 grave guard units and 8 power dice (so ~13+ dice after bounds).

I gave Matt the lowest possible comp score for this army at 13 dice, +1 to cast, up to -3 to cast against, +1 to dispel, with magical movement everywhere and rock hard units I felt this was justified. Matt also felt my army justified the lowest comp score for whatever his own reasons were.

When deploying I thought about it and realised I simply could not, with out an extreme amount of luck, actually do anything more than 600 points or so of damage to him simply because of the ability to attempt to heal the units 7 times a phase would completely negate my shooting phase and fanatics (which it did) and if his fully ranked units started getting amongst it I’d be in trouble. Never mind the two terror causers against my ld8 army.

This prediction was spot on. I felt Matt made a couple of mistakes essentially throwing his black coach away and splitting his force allowing me a chance to capture a key unit. I made one mistake throwing my trolls into the grave guard. Still I never looked like actually doing any damage as he re-healed back to full strength every magic phase.

But having two terror causers eventually did the trick killing well over 1000 points in the fifth turn and then allowing a set up for another 500 odd in the 6th.

In terms of the army going forward I desperately need to increase the leadership and magic defence of the army so will be introducing orcs into the fold to bump to LD9 and get a little more control over the army as a whole.

I’m also cutting down the fanatics as I felt that during the games where things were going wrong these guys were the biggest culprits.

Then finally I’ll switch hoppers for herders and throw in a giant to give me something terrifying at last.

With the tweaking I should end up with something that deals out less potential damage but with greater reliability and staying power that, most importantly, can step up in the opponent’s magic phase.