Day Of The Beast

It wouldn't be proper to play a game of Warmachine on Friday the 13th (again) without running Khador's very own Jason Voorhees: Beast 09. Unfortunately for me he wasn't on my side...

Ah-hem. So I threw together a couple of 30 point lists for a second game against Fuzzy (who I mixed up with Saint while writing a previous battle report in a rush; that has now been fixed). I took Andy out for a spin, bringing a Decimator (because I think the model works with him) and a Kodiak (because I was feeling too lazy to dig out the Juggernaut arms). The Wardog was there to deliver Fighting Dirty, and a Koldun Lord would help with damage.
Malakov2
- Decimator
- Kodiak
- Wardog
Nyss Hunters
- Valachev
Koldun Lord

I gave Fuzzy the original battlebox caster, Sorscha1, because she's a lot of fun. She can be a bit focus starved if she wants her jacks to do work, so the Forgeseer seemed to be a good support piece.
Sorscha1
- Beast 09
- Spriggan
- Sylyss
Croe's Cutthroats
Greylord Forgeseer


Pre-Game:
The table had just been used for 40K; I figured playing on the same terrain would demonstrate that Warmachine does not need flat terrain (it seems I had given people the impression that it didn't work with regular terrain). Rather than roll for a scenario or something I decided to just put two "flags" (the Butcher and Mechanic models seen below) in the middle of the table (they are a little to the side, but I figured that was the part of the table we would actually use considering our low model count). I decided to stick to the basic scoring system from the rulebook, so any model in base contact can score, any model within 4" contests, and first to 5 wins.

I won the roll and chose to go first. Fuzzy chose the Decimator as the Cutthroat's Prey target.


Deployment:
I deployed my battlegroup facing the rightmost flag and the Nyss to my left. Fuzzy deployed most of his forces to my left.

Round 1:
Malakov cast Escort and put Repo on the Decimator, then walked forwards, gave himself Prowl and threw a cloud over himself. The Decimator trampled then repo'ed forwards for a total of 12", matching the Kodiak's run. The Nyss Hunters ran forwards. My solos joined Malakov in the cloud.

The Cutthroats walked forwards and started shooting at my Nyss Hunters. Needing mostly 9's, they somehow managed to kill 5 Nyss before repositioning backwards. Beast09 and the Spriggan ran towards the flags. Sorscha put up Fog of War.

Round 2:
The Kodiak ran to base the flag. The Decimator took a couple of shots at the Spriggan for very little damage (I didn't allocate enough focus; with Fog of War even a Spriggan is hard for a Decimator to hit unboosted!) then tried to bodyblock the flag. The Nyss walked and Zephyred into range of the stealthy Cutthroats, killing I think 4 of them. On Nyss Hunter based the flag, while Valachev hugged a wall for cover.

Between aiming Cutthroats and an always-angry Beast09 (those Nyss kids were having too much fun!) Fuzzy took out all my Nyss Hunters, leaving a lonely Valachev wondering what had just happened. Sylyss ran to base the flag, while the Spriggan ran away from my jacks. Scoring began this turn so we both scored a point.

Round 3:
I put the Decimator into the Spriggan, taking about half his boxes but not crippling anything. The Kodiak stayed back to guard the flag, venting steam to help hide my squishies. The Wardog ran forwards in order to be able to apply Fighting Dirty next turn if I saw an opening. Valachev walked over to base the flag on the left and killed Sylyss with an ice shotgun. This prevented Fuzzy from scoring this turn, getting me a point up.

Sorscha cast Boundless Charge on Beast09 and the Forgeseer handed out some focus. The Spriggan softened up the Decimator, then Beast09 came in and finished it off. The Cutthroats killed the dog and based the flag. We both scored, bringing the score to 3:2 to me.

Round 4:
I dropped all my upkeeps for focus. The Koldun Lord cast Brittle Frost on the Spriggan - I would have preferred to use it on Beast09 but he's immune... The Kodiak charged in to the Spriggan, finishing it with his initials. I had actually hoped to be able to throw it into Beast09. Oh well. He then bought a couple of attacks on Beast09, completely whiffing his damage rolls...

The Kodiak used Vent Steam. Malakov feated; with the steam cloud in place the Kodiak (who I think was the new Prey target) would be able to walk behind it after Beast hit him, where he couldn't be targeted anymore. I bought an extra attack with Open Fire, which at least did a bit of damage. Malakov also shot at Beast09, managing only to hit the Kodiak in the back. At least he didn't actually do any damage.  We both scored, but as I was ahead at 4 points I would win next turn if Fuzzy didn't contest.

At this point I thought it was a good idea to explain Sorscha's feat and other abilities to Fuzzy. While doing so we realised that Malakov was inside Sorscha's threat range. So she Wind-Rushed forwards, popped feat to freeze all my models, then charged Malakov and killed him with two hits.

Post-Mortem
I actually did not realise that Malakov was that close to Sorscha. Clearly I'm still rusty. I also realised today that Sorscha's feat counters Malakov's pretty well; his feat says nothing about ignoring Stationary after all.

I thought the Koldun Lord would solve Malakov's damage issues, but a) I'm too cagey with him, and b) Beast09 don't give a damn. Actually I could have given the Koldun Lord repo and/or Prowl, and even a cloud, meaning that Malakov might be one of the better casters for keeping him safe even after he uses Brittle Frost. Still, I think Andrei might not be at his best at this point level.

Anyway, this was a fun game, and one that didn't drag out as long as Warmachine sometimes can for a slow player like me. Fuzzy's dice were pretty hot, rolling 9's with surprising ease. But that was pretty fair really, seeing as he'd just come from a game of 40K where his dice were stone cold...

This Is A Test Of The Emergency Zone Raiding System

As mentioned in my last post I was looking forwards to trying Zone Raiders. I put together some profiles based on some models from the Infinity Operation: Cold Front box:

The bruiser

The sniper

And three cheap (identical) grunts.

The idea was to have a few rules to play around with (reloading, mobility, armour piercing), but not too many so we wouldn't be overwhelmed. I duplicated the profiles for both Pan-O and Nomads to make sure there would be no balance issues in these introductory games:

The first game I played with Speedy. He took the blue Pan-O and I ran the red Nomads. We basically didn't bother with any of the mission or environment rules, to keep things simple. I forgot to take pictures until the end, so you'll see the final board state at the top of this post. We used the Cold Front tokens: regular order tokens represent wounds while irregular order tokens tracked command points, face-down tokens stood in for out-of-ammo tokens, and the frowny face indicated downed models. During the game my armour saves were hot; the Mobile Brigada pretty much refused to die until late-game when the Sniper finally managed to take out his armour. I believe my own sniper was taken out a little early though, and eventually my grunts were overwhelmed.

I then played my friend Watcher (who's not into wargames but has been dragged into a couple before). This time my armour saves were not so hot, and perhaps more importantly my survival rolls were cold too, with models often dropping the moment their armour was breached; my Mobile Brigada went down quite quickly due to my overly-aggressive attempts to get him into combat early. Meanwhile his Orc was on a long flank behind the building on my left, so he arrived untouched late in the match and starting punching my last few models to death.

Obviously this simple demo games don't paint the full picture, but I'm liking the game system so far. I quite enjoyed the pacing created by the alternating model activations; it meant each player got constant quick breaks, but never had to sit idle for very long. I did find that constantly passing control back and forth meant that (in addition to really wishing we had a second measuring tape) I sometimes lost track of which of my models had activated in a round; I think we might start using tokens to track activations.

Which is a bit worrying because there's already a lot of tokens on the table, following each model around. I might discuss placing some tokens on the model cards instead of the on the table, but obviously that would make some things easy to forget, so I think it should be for the less important tokens (like the aforementioned activation tokens, and maybe for wounds) if at all. Also, we all agreed that replacing downed models with a token rather than leaving them on the table would be better, making it much easier to take in the table state at a glance. Obviously each model would need a token that's unique to it, but that's easy enough.

One thing that worried me a bit, and still does, is that the large number of possible actions available each activation could make the game harder for new players to pick up. Watcher seemed to be doing OK though, and personally I found it very enjoyable to have those options; I found it far more interesting than the typical "move-attack" pattern of some wargames. The fact that some actions have added restrictions like ending your activation is an added complication, but I think it's an important balancing factor and I don't think it will take too long to get used to.

Command tokens were a surprisingly fun resource management element: having that extra chance to land an important shot or save a model is a comforting ace to have up your sleeve.

The movement system was a bit more restrictive than I had expected, which is not a bad thing because it means choosing armour with better mobility options has genuine value. I'm a fan of games with a lot of movement, so I'm happy that it feels like the movement and elevation rules will lead to some cool three-dimensional gameplay, though obviously you will need the right terrain to support it.

I was initially afraid that having to keep stopping to reload would feel cumbersome, but in practice I found that I didn't actually mind it too much. Activations were quick enough and rounds short enough that having models duck down to reload didn't feel so bad, plus it's kind of cinematic when you think about it. It also creates meaningful decisions in target prioritization and how much to commit to an attack, and I think it can lead to more movement as turns when you can't shoot encourage you to move around, rather than just stand still and keep shooting, which I like.

The rulebook is pretty good, but there is some room for improvement. The lack of a proper index means that some rules can be a bit hard to find, at least mid-game. Obviously the reference pages help a lot, but there were still some rules I couldn't find in the middle of the game and just gave up on searching for.

Also some rules could use some more explicit language, and/or some actual examples. The cover rules, for example, seemed simple at first but we quickly ran into situations that we weren't sure how to resolve. I think we're going to have to discuss some house-rules for a few things, at least until they get clarified by an errata or something (there don't seem to be any forums and I'm not on Facebook so I don't know what kind of official or unofficial rulings might be occurring).


Overall I'm looking forwards to using the rule set to run some narrative campaigns. It's going to take a lot of prep work though, as I'm going to need to put together some terrain and other stuff. Fingers crossed it will all work out, because I have really high hopes for this game system.