Strike, Raptor!

Speedy and I finally sat down for our second game of Warcaster. Needless to say I had to read the rules again seeing as it's been over a year since our first game. Our lists were a little larger this time; I was running:
Artemis Fang hero solo
Coalition Weaver solo
Hunter solo x2
Ranger Fire Team sqaud
Ranger Infiltrators squad (proxied with G.U.A.R.D. Exo-Armours)
Dusk Wolf light warjack (Talon Rocket Pod, Battle Rifle, Ripper Saw, Neural Net cortex)
Strike Raptor heavy warjack (Railgun, Railgun, Battle Rifle, Battle Rifle, Ace cortex)

Speedy had:
Justicar Voss hero solo
Paladin Weaver solo
Paladin Commander solo
Paladin Seigebreaker solo
Paladin Enforcers squad
Palading Defenders squad
Firebrand light warjack (Harbringer Cannon, Fusion Glaive, Repuslor Shield, Jack Hunter cortex)
Morningstar heavy warjack (Gate Crasher, Maelstrom, Heavy Fusion Glaive, Dauntless cortex)


Pre-Game
We played Skirmish (so three pulse rounds of three turns each) and rolled the first mission, with three objectives. BTW I was using the WNM card tokens, but to avoid mixing my tokens with his Speedy agreed to use some WMH acrylic tokens (Focus tokens were Arc, spell tokens were used for activation markers). We used the pulse round tracker to track turns, with a dice tracking the rounds. Speedy won the roll-off and chose to go first. He deployed his Weaver behind the close objective on my left, and his Morningstar behind the central objective on my right. I mirrored his deployment with my Strike Raptor and a Hunter. I put the Strike Raptor behind cover, but with LOS to the objective.

Pulse 1.1
Speedy advanced his Weaver a few inches to the objective. He charged his Morningstar, advanced it, and used the Gatecrasher to put down a gate with three Arc. In the Deployment phase he summoned a Firebrand and Justicar Voss from the new gate, which collapsed. He then summoned a new gate from Voss (seems I took the photo before he put the gate down). I charged my Strike Raptor and started putting shots into the Firebrand, but couldn't kill it. The Hunter advanced slightly, but stayed out of LOS. I put down a gate with four Arc next to the Hunter.
Pulse 1.2
Speedy pushed the Firebrand and Voss right into the Strike Raptor's face, but Voss couldn't get into melee range and thanks to cover the Firebrand wasn't able to do much. Finally he deployed his Seigebreaker and Enforcers from the new gate, which collapsed. All my units had activation tokens, so I was able to clear the tokens and activate again. I put a second Arc on my Strike Raptor and continued to fail to kill the Firebrand (on account of him benefitting from the same cover as I was). The Hunter started to make his way towards Speedy's objective, but was able to kill an Enforcer on the way. In the deployment phase I deployed my Weaver, Dusk Wolf, and Artemis Fang next to my objective, collapsing the gate.

Pulse 1.3
Speedy cleared the activation token off of Voss using a Cypher, allowing Voss to finally get in and start doing damage. He also activated his Enforcers, but they weren't able to do very much. Finally he put down a gate.

I finally brought the Strike Raptor up to 3 Arc. I took a couple of shots with Artemis Fang before repositioning her, but she whiffed, leaving cleanup duty to the Dusk Wolf. Between them they only managed to kill two Enforcers. Finally I put down a gate in a protected spot near the center of the table.

Pulse 2.1
I don't remember exactly what happened here, I think Speedy might have continued to try to kill the Strike Raptor, but at +3 DEF he was proving stubborn. Anyway, Voss repositioned towards my objective, then Speedy brought in his Defenders (again, photos are out of sync with the action).

My Strike Raptor rolled hot and finally took out the Firebrand, then started to make his way towards the objective.

Looking at the photos now, I probably should have spiked for Flight as that would have let the Strike Raptor score this turn, but I had spent the entirety of last pulse round charging him up so I was reluctant to part with the Arc now. My Hunter repositioned and whiffed a shot at something. I deployed my Ranger Fire Team and then put down another Gate towards the Morningstar.

Pulse 2.2
The Morningstar advanced to the objective, shooting at my Strike Raptor but not managing to kill him (I think a Cypher was used here?). So instead Voss went back and slammed my Strike Raptor off the table (luckily only a couple of weapons and an arm broke off when he hit the floor... j/k). The Defenders put some damage onto my Dusk Wolf and Weaver, but couldn't clear my objective.
I think I charged the Dusk Wolf. My Weaver and Dusk Wolf killed a couple of Defenders but couldn't clear the unit, so they couldn't score. I deployed my Infiltrators and my second Hunter, collapsing my Gate, but then I placed a new one even closer to the Morningstar.

Pulse 2.3
Speedy finally activated the Seigebreaker, who killed my Dusk Wolf. I believe he also scored with his Weaver.
I killed his final Defender with Artemis Fang, then moved my Fire Team up to block the Seigebreaker's access to my objective. I considered using their grenades to try to collapse his gate, but instead decided to focus-fire on his Seigebreaker; that thing can put out a lot of damage. I used a Cypher to move my Infiltrators up to his Weaver so he wouldn't be able to score at the start of next turn. Finally I deployed my Strike Raptor again.

Pulse 3.1
The Morningstar moved in to melee with my Strike Raptor, managing to do some damage and inflict a System Failure. Luckily we rolled melee weapons, of which my Strike Raptor had none. He also used the Gatecrasher to put down a Gate behind my Strike Raptor. The Seigebreaker killed off my Weaver and Fire Team. I think we hadn't yet adapted to the fact that you can shoot THEN move, as looking at the photos now I suspect he could have scored this activated if he had done so. Speedy collapsed his Gate to summon a Paladin Commander behind his Seigebreaker.

I moved Artemis Fang between the Commander and my objective, putting some shots into the Seigebreaker and also scoring. My Infiltrators took down Speedy's Weaver and scored on that side too. I deployed a Weaver behind my Strike Raptor, collapsing that Gate, but then put down a new one between Artemis and the Commander.

Pulse 3.2
Voss advanced and scored the centeral objective. The Commander advanced and tried to destroy my Gate; I think he might have knocked an arc off it, but I don't really remember.

I charged my Strike Raptor, then cleared Artemis Fang's activation token with a Cypher. She put 4 attacks into the Siegebreaker, finally managing to finish him off. The Strike Raptor Spiked to fly over to the objective, putting all his attacks into Justicar Voss. Only the last attack actually hit, and Voss Spiked to ignore the damage. Finally I deployed my Fire Team and second Hunter, trying to use them to body-block the Commander from reaching my objective. In retrospect I should have been able to put down a couple of gates to make it even harder... oh well.


Pulse 3.3
I believe I was up by one here; Speedy had already scored the centeral objective, so he would need to score one of the remaining objectives, both of which were surrounded by my models. So he used a cypher to give his Morningstar +2 speed and Flight, moving it up to shoot at Artemis and my Hunter, but he whiffed his rolls. The commander was able to move around my models and reach the objective, but he failed to kill Artemis and so couldn't score, leaving me with the win.

Post-Mortem
I don't really remember what happened last time, but I feel like the game went better this time, with us understanding and using more of the rules. Obviously we still made a TON of mistakes, and looking back I can see how we could have played various turns better, but I still feel things came together better this time, and I was able to get a better sense of the flow of the game. Things like the dice system being more swingy than I expected, Arc being harder to get out and keep on your models than I had realised, and Gates just popping up ALL OVER the place! I was surprised by how quickly Speedy was able to bring in a whole bunch of reinforcements, while I literall wasn't able to activate any new models until the last turn of the first pulse round; that Gatecrasher is pretty cool!

I went into the game planning on putting all my resources into the Strike Raptor, to take advantage of the offensive and defensive bonuses it gets when charged, so I spent the entire first pulse round charging it up. It ended up doing less damage offensively than I expected, partly because I allowed my targets to get cover in order to stay in cover myself. It did prove very resilient, but that was in large part because I messed up the rules and was rolling extra Power dice instead of extra Action dice for the extra defense from the Arc. Which reminds me: I wish PP marked the rules with Power dice and Action dice icons the way they do sometimes in the Monsterpocalypse rulebook, as-is it's too easy to read a rule in a hurry and not pay attention to which kind of dice you are supposed to add.

On a related note I felt Artemis also under-performed slightly on the offensive front, but overperformed defensively - which got me the win, so no complaints I suppose. I was actually rolling lots of Blast damage attacks with Artermis, and a few with the Dusk Wolf, but we completely forget about the ISA's Compound Armour. I actually found summoning too many units was a problem, because I believe there was at least one instance near the end where I would have been able to clear my activation tokens and gain an advantage if I didn't have my useless Weaver sitting around un-activated. The activation system does take some getting used to. Speaking of, so far the most useful Cyphers I've found were ones that cleared activation tokens. I really didn't get too much value out of my Cyphers this game. And for some reason I really don't like Furies; yes, they are free attacks, and that's fine, but... they are a little limited, and a free attack just doesn't feel that interesting. Well, it's partly my fault for not spending any time on building my Rack.

Overall it was a very close game right to the end (that probably would have gone to Speedy if we hadn't messed up so many rules), and it was a lot of fun. But it was also kind of exhausting. Obviously not knowing the rules well enough or being familiar enough with the game overall was a big factor here, but also the constant back-and-forth activations with very little down-time, the complexity of the turn and activation system, models popping up all over the place all the time, and the back-and-forth flow of Arc made it a whole lot more mentally taxing than Monsterpocalypse (which, while deep, still seems easier to "autopilot" if you don't feel like thinking too much).

It also made it much harder to write a battle report for! There's so many more turns in WNM than in WMH, with models not just being taken off the table, but also contantly being placed back on! Gates can be placed, used to deploy models, and then collapse all between photos! Arc can be allocated to almost any model, and then cleared in that same turn. Cyphers can allow models that shouldn't have been able to activate move around and kill things. All in all it's a lot harder to decipher the photos and remember exactly what happened when compared to Warmachine. I don't know if I'm going to be able to write up this sort of blow-by-blow after every game!