Mark's Kings of War Battle Reports

Result


With 13 points of unit strength in Neil’s half of the board and none in mine, it was a win for me.


We also had to record unit strength killed, in case of any tiebreakers:

Me = 21 points of unit strength killed (Horde 4*3=12, Regiments 3*2=6, Troops 3*1=3)

Neil = 8 points of unit strength killed (horde 1*3=3, Regiments 1*2=2, Troops 3*1=3)


With the Stampede surviving, they were able to roll on the Experience table and gained ‘Skilled’, giving them +2 attacks.

Neil’s nominate unit was destroyed so didn’t gain experience.



This was also the last game to play in our group and in a surprising turn of events, I ended up topping the table. What was especially pleasing was I also cleared up on the damage caused because, let’s be honest, that’s the bit that really matters . So this means both myself and Cormac advance into the draw for the quarter finals.

In case you are wondering about the points. It was 2 for a win and 1 for a draw.

Everyone in the group got a bonus point for playing their first game before the deadline (I think it was the end of May) and all players in the group got a second bonus point for completing all their games before 2 August.



Conclusions


I don’t mind saying I was quite worried at the start of the game. Part of the issue was having played Empire of Dust before and not having read up on what any of his units did beforehand, so I wasn’t sure what I should be the most worried about! This in turn put me a little on the back foot when unexpected things happened such as mages starting to cast two spells each turn and the monolith boosting every spell.

I chose to counter that in the time honoured Herd tradition of stomping everything within range and that worked out pretty well for me!

Neil was always going to be on the back foot with this scenario as getting a large amount of your forces across the table when they can’t move at the double, is a tough order. Then losing the first turn meant I was able to get pretty much into his half of the table straight away and this meant his shooting would have limited time to be effective.


One of the reasons I do enjoy writing these reports up, is I get to review and analyse the battles. When you win it’s harder to do that to your own performance but I didn’t feel I did anything particularly wrong (except not moving the stampede up into the woods but that’s what you get for switching between Warhammer and KOW and forgetting the differences). I should also point out that Neil was also terribly unlucky with some of his rolls. Some of his attack were appalling and how he didn’t remove my Guardian Brutes I will never know!


Neil was quite put out about his overall performance in the competition so I’m going to put down a couple of thoughts of where I think he went wrong (at least in this game). I don’t consider myself a great table top general in any sense but as they say but hindsight is a wonderful thing and I hope these won’t come across in any way arrogant and are taken in the manner they are meant (to hopefully be helpful).


Chaff – I think this is the one thing his army is lacking. I feel chaff is king in this game. The ability to block opponents and allow your own units to get into position is key. The closest unit that fulfils this role in his list is the Swarm but ideally you want something faster moving and nimble. Probably the best option in the EoD army list is a troop of Skeleton Cavalry. Although they are still shambling (so can’t move at the double) they do have a natural movement of 9” and can be surged. The other option is the troops of 3 scavengers. They have the advantage over the cavalry of being able to fly and are not shambling so can move at the double. I’d recommend at least three units of chaff in one form or another.


Shooting – With how I feel about chaff and how I use it, he should have concentrated some of his shooting/magic on removing some/all of my chaff units. As mentioned above, not doing this, allowed me to block his units and position my own hard hitters so I could dictate combat. I can understand why he wanted to remove some of my hordes as they had shot across the table and were probably pretty intimidating. I’m also not sure of the effectiveness of it, especially the war machines (something that I think is a bit of an issue across the board in this version of KOW and hope they fix in the 3rd edition). The two troops put out 16 shots but they only hit on 5’s. Likewise the catapults require 5’s to hit. This makes it unlikely they will hit often. The archers up their chances due to the volume of fire but at 100pts each, I’d want more reliability from the war machines.