Last week saw the
beginning of our club’s Journeyman league. It’s a league designed
to get you to try Warmachine/Hordes with a starter box and build up
from there. You even get points if your models started off unpainted
and you paint them over the course of the league. I’d played
Warmachine a couple of times in the current edition and found it a
bit of an uphill struggle so this league seemed perfect to get to
grips with things.
For those who aren’t
familiar with Warmachine; it’s a game where you are a Warcaster
(kind of a nasty wizard) who controls a small skirmish scale force
consisting of a handful of mechanical monstrosities a bit like steam
powered dreadnoughts, some infantry (if you want) and solo
characters. The aim of the game is to kill your opponents Warcaster.
Your warcaster gets
focus points which allow you to cast spells. Some spells do damage,
some do buffs to your stuff or debuffs to the enemy and some do more
exotic things like make one of your models ghostly and able to walk
through other models and terrain, even out of combat. Warcasters also
each get a Feat, which is a once per game ability that usually has a
game wide effect. You normally pop your Feat on the turn in which you
expect to make a big push.
Warjacks can be
allocated some of your caster’s focus so that they can boost their
to hit rolls or damage rolls or do other things like charge or run.
Boosting means you get to roll an extra dice to hit or to wound.
Basics of how combat
works in Warmachine
Your model’s basic
statline consists of a move speed, MAT (melee attack), RAT (ranged
attack), Strength, Defence (Def) and armour. There are other stats
like Focus or Cmd but I won’t go into this.
When you declare an
attack on a model you compare your MAT if in melee or RAT if shooting
to your opponents Def, normally your MAT will be a fair bit lower
than the Def. You then roll 2 d6 (or 3d6 if boosting) and add your
MAT, if you equal or beat the Def then you have hit.
Then to damage your
opponent you compare the strength of your weapon you’re hitting
with to their armour. The weapon’s strength is represented by P+S
on your models stats. You roll 2d6 (3d6 if boosted) and add your P+S.
How much you beat their armour by is how much damage you’ve done.
E.g. a P+S weapon with strength of 16 hits a jack with armour 20, you
roll 12 so the jack takes 8 damage.
The League
I’ve already got a
Cryx army, I just don’t know how to use it. To start in the league
I needed to buy the starter Cryx box anyway as I didn’t have those
models. My starter set consisted of Denegra as my warcaster, a slayer
jack, 2 ripper jacks (death chickens) and a defiler. I’ve never
used Denegra before so I went into the league pretty much as a new
player. The 3 little chicken jacks act as arc nodes, meaning I can
cast spells as if they’re coming from the jack instead of my
caster.
Looking at the spells
that Denegra could cast for the first time, I found she does some
nasty stuff. She has an ability called Crippling Grasp which can nerf
a heap of an enemy’s stats by 2, making it a lot easier to kill.
She can cast Ghost Walk on one of your models which lets them move
through terrain or models without problems. Her Feat is amazing, all
enemies within her control area (14 inches around her) suffer from -2
to their speed, MAT, RAT, strength, armour, Focus and they can’t
charge.
Week 1 – Starter
boxes only
Game 1
My first game of the
league was against Dave Bartley and his Menoth. I won this but can’t
actually remember what I did lol. It was a learning experience to get
to grips with my caster. I do remember using a combo strike with my
slayer jack to great effect.
Game 2
This game was against
David Copperwheat’s Skorne hordes army. We had a building in the
middle of the table and both of our forces moved up and hid on
opposite sides of it. With my arc nodes though I had the advantage of
casting spells round corners. I won by using crippling grasp on his
caster and Ghost walk on one of my jacks so that it could charge
through his big beasty and straight into combat with his caster to
squish it.
Week 2 – 15 points
but must include starter box
For most players the 15
points allowed them to add a solo or small squad. For my Cryx I only
had 1 point to play with and only 1 model that costs 1 point, so I
added a machine wraith to my list.
Game 3
This time I was against
Martin Copperwheat’s Khador, basically a caster, 2 big jacks and
some sniper dudes. I managed to get my shooty death chicken to vomit
acid on his caster and rolled a 12 for damage leaving him with only 4
health. In the next turn I again Ghost Walked one of my jacks to
charge straight through and squish his caster. He made a mistake in
moving his caster nearer to me and running away his big jack that
wasn’t stuck in combat.
Game 4
Barry Wardle used a
bunch of Hordes crocodile things against me. This bunch just walked all over me.
He had a buff on his big beasty that made it nigh on impossible for
me to hurt it and I took D3 damage whent I tried, it moved up and I charged it but couldn’t scratch
it. My Crippling grasp failed to work twice due to high Def stats.
He cast his feat which
knocked down everything I had, he then shot my caster who’s Def was
reduced significantly due to being knocked down, my caster nearly
died. He then didn’t something beyond what I thought was possible.
He charged his other large beast into combat with the first one, he
then picked it up and threw it at my caster and she died. It was
dirty, very dirty lol. :(
After much thought I
think the only way of countering his force is to spread everything
far apart and try to pick things off individually, maybe even just
ignoring the big beasts as they’re so hard to hurt.
Now I just need to get
my stuff painted to get some journeyman points for the league. I know
who my opponents are next week. Ian is using his trollbloods and Carl
is using Cryx. I expect some dirty shenanigans from Carl as he’s
very experienced in doing hard and nasty things in whatever game.
I have to work out how
best to spend my 11 points, so many choices.
Edit: I found out that the feat-puddle combo can't work as you can't place them on top of other models. It would have been increadibly overpowered otherwise.
Edit: I found out that the feat-puddle combo can't work as you can't place them on top of other models. It would have been increadibly overpowered otherwise.
