Tactical Review: On the Plains near Spikehole

MIKE:

I gave Tim a whooping!  A whooping that won’t be forgotten for a long time (at least by me anyway).

The Skaven are fast becoming my second favourite army they are durable, tough and quick.  With a unit of Gutter Runners they are a match for anyone I think.  The plague furnace was truly epic and it wiped out a horde of zombies in one turn of combat, creating a truly awesome +25 combat resolution in my favour.  I love these little rat men.  To be fair both Tim and I played really well, we both rolled well and Tim’s magic was always a threat it was just the number of Skaven far outweighed that of the Undead. 

TIM:

Chuffing ‘eck! I got my ass kicked but good there! Why does this keep happening to me?

Could it be because I am a terrible player? Maybe…

So what did I do right? And what wrong?

 First of all I utilised my Black Coach, Vargulf and Cairn Wraiths well. They worked well together and with the addition of Vanhel’s Danse Macabre giving rerolls to hit and Always Strikes First, they did me very proud.

In the centre and at the other side of the battle things did not go well, but I’m not sure how I would have acted differently – even now. Mike’s Plague Furnace unit was unbeatably good and I found myself playing fearfully around it. His Skaven leadership values, enhanced by their rank bonus withstood my fear and I got nowhere near as many spells off as I could have done with. I was experimenting with the lesser used spells available which meant I wasn’t summoning extra zombies so much. That certainly would have helped me I think.

This was the first game we’ve played where the Skaven really had a horde, but at 3,000 points, the Vampire Counts didn’t have any more troops than usual. The extra points were swallowed up by Nagash, meaning I was overwhelmed on numbers.

At 700 points, Nagash is a tricky model to have. I’ve been using the excellent stats on Zombie Squig’s Dark Hordes of Nagashizzar site but he has failed me twice in a row now. Partly this is due to inexperience on my part but maybe his points need tweaking a bit. Also, although powerful characters are cool, I always wonder whether it would be better to have 175 zombies or 87.5 skeletons.

In this battle, Nagash was doing well actually. He got killed through the extra wounds caused by combat resolution in a double combat. If he hadn’t been in combat alongside a unit of zombies he would have been fine because he did very well himself. A lesson learned for the future.

I want to keep using Nagash from time to time but the need to play 2,800 point games when I do and the limitations he imposes can be annoyingly limiting.

With only two Vampire Counts armies left I have to play it safe from now on I think.