A year with the little ones

Well four tourneys into the season and I’ve gotten a feel for how my O&G list performs and the strategies to use and to avoid if you’re going to eek out a good result.

Leviathan:
This was the opening run for the little guys and because of this my results were fairly mixed as a results with 3 wins from 5 games and about 60% of the total possible battle score.

What this tourney taught me was that you just can’t play in the current environment with leadership 8 non-immune to psych troops. With the plethora of terror causers running around it is near impossible to keep your battle line in tact with a worse than ¾ chance of things sticking around.

It also taught me that the army had a truck load of potential but also a truck load of variability, from the hoppers movement, to stupidity, to animosity to the nets. There was a large amount of potential for a “can go wrong” turn and when these turns happened it was difficult to rebound.

Fortunes:
Another average tourney this time 3 wins, 2 draws and a loss (cumulative 6-2-3). Taking the lessons learnt regarding variability I got rid of the trolls and the hoppers and dropped one of my wizards for a unit of biguns with the spirit totem.

From game to game Is till struggled to get largish wins as the cavalry almost always dies and I had limited means to appropriately release my fanatics. Of course not packing my full army and playing a unit short all weekend probably didn’t help….

So I left another average performance with some new lesson, devise some method of controlling the fanatics release and remember to bring your entire army.

Pilgrimage:
Finally a quality result. This time I chose to go down the route of dropping all the cavalry and instead using two units of short bowmen to screen the army. Their purpose was two fold – one give me a few shots to force maybe a panic check or two on the fast moving fanatic bait and also give me a sturdy front line to launch fanatics through.

The tactic worked well and with animosity not being a massive hindrance in critical moments the boys performed well pulling in 5 wins and a narrow loss (11-2-4) and grabbing a podium slot.

The main thing this taught me was that if animosity didn’t kill you and you could control your fanatic release then you had a shot.

Moab
The anti-pilgrimage. Unfortunately the “if animosity didn’t kill you” problem raised it’s head leaving a fair few points on the table it was frustrating to say the least (I’d hazard a guess at around 20 “easily attainable” points with potential for more). But in the two losses animosity didn’t play a part just poor play from me against match ups I couldn’t afford to play poorly against.
Added to that I found the little fellas struggle from a slight match up problem against armies with cheap skirmishers. These guys get rid of the fanatics and then are in amongst the war machines very quickly.

Still the results sheet looking back was relatively good with 4 wins 2 draws and 2 losses the problem only being that in my wins many points were left waiting in front of units suffering animosity.

I was very disappointed with my comp score for this one. I had deliberately left many things in the box effectiveness wise and yet I got a below average mark from half the judges. My guess is that none of these guys have ever played with an O&G army at a tourney and probably felt my leadership 9 was unfair with goblins.


Overall

The results weren’t too bad, I still won more than my fair share of games with 60% and only lost 24%. If you play enough tourneys you’ll get the four quality results for your ranking as the good animosity tourneys will offset the bad ones.

Also it taught me a lot more patience and defensive style of play than I am accustomed to, plus how to guess ranges with the rock lobber (easily my biggest impact weapon).

Still as far as tourney armies go whilst potentially strong its game to game variability makes it a difficult prospect under it’s current guise.