Battle breakdown Part 1

Ok I meant to write this a week ago and I wish I had as I've played 3 games of Warhammer this week meaning I have even more to write. But following is Part 1 of a breakdown of the 11 games I've played so far in 8^th edition, all with my Lizardmen.

Games 1 & 2

These were both 600pt games against Simon, a trainee manager working in the Poole store who was kind enough to give me a couple introductory games. I was using a unit of 18 Saurus, 5 Cold ones and some Skink skirmishers with a Champion model representing my Scar Vet. The first game was against Skaven using the Watchtower scenario. Not the most useful 1^st game, Skaven struggle with watchtower at best of times. Basically my Saurus got in the tower they were occupying and didn't budge. Only other thing of note was my 5 Cav (no command btw) battling a Doomwheel, they successfully chased it off but provided no other useful part in the battle before it ended.

The Second Game Was against High Elves, his army was something along the lines of two Units of 10 or so Sword Masters, a noble and some Sea Guard filling up the core. This was the Dawn attack scenario but only playing on a 4' by 4' board meant it didn't have much effect. Long story short, I lost this one. One unit of Sword Masters chopped up my cav without an attack back. My Saurus soaked up enough casualties to be able to return attacks against the same unit destroying it. However, there were now too few of them to be able to deal with the second unit and were horribly butchered.

Things I learnt: Stupidity, Fear! Must remember both. Don't think I made a single stupidity check, I'm a lot better at this now and always tell my opponent at the start so hopefully he can remind me if I get. Same with fear, it can be a long shot especially against high leadership units like High Elves, but you can take so many leadership checks over the course of a game that they're bound to fail it sometime. My Cold ones may not have died if I had remembered this against the Sword Masters (although I wouldn't be willing to put money on it).

I had intended not to use my Temple Guard until I got a unit of 20, in fact I hadn't even assembled them at this point. After seeing the Elven units run effectively at 10 models, after these games I decided to use them to get my army up to 1000pts as opposed to my original plan of getting a Stegadon at this point.

Games 3

This was my first 'proper' game, and I can't remember the guys name. I played him in game 4 as well...I want to say Matt. I apologise to him anyway, on the off chance he sees this. Once again it was against High Elves but this time at 1000pts in Battleline. Relatively new player as well and after the game realised he had made a mistake on his army list, taking a Mage on his list but treating him as a level 4 Archmage. He had also taken a Prince. I did question this early in the Battle but he assured me the mage only cost 100pts, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He had warned me before hand he wasn't good at maths and didn't have a 1000pt list prepared so had to write one quickly before the game. He definitely didn't make this mistake on purpose, but it did teach me that I should have trust my instincts and checked his army book there and then. Never mind I can't remember the mage doing anything spectacular anyway apart from making my priest completely irrelevant.

Anyway, I had just brought a Scar Vet model and a Skink Priest so at 1000pts my army consisted of a bare bones Scar Vet and Lvl 1 Priest, 20 Saurus, 10 Skink Skirmishers, 10 Temple Guard, and 7 Cavalry. Basically everything you saw in the pictures in the previous posts. His Army if I remember right was 20 Sword Masters with Prince, 20 Sea Guard with the Archmage in the centre and 2 Bolt Throwers one on either flank. I feel like I'm forgetting something. Anyway my Skinks and Cav advanced on opposite flanks and quickly neutralised his bolt throwers. I took out his Sea Guard pretty easily, I forget now with which unit, I think it may have been the Cold Ones before they reached the bolt Thrower. However, his Sword Masters managed pretty much destroy my whole army piecemeal, first the temple guard, then the Saurus (who had been whittled down by magic) then my Cavalry once they had turned around and returned to the main battle.

What I learnt: I lost this one, I would like to say that was due to his points advantage but it really boiled down to me not effectively dealing with his Sword Masters, I should have dealt with them first, ganged up on them and then mopped up the rest of his army after as opposed to trying to do it the other way around.

Game 4

The following week I played against the same guy this time using Ogres. This was the first game in a new Campaign being run by the GW store, a Border Princes Campaign from the old Generals Compendium. The scenario was Battle for the Pass, I was using the same army as the previous week. His army was a Unit of Bulls, a Unit of Iron cuts (I forget exact numbers I think maybe 6 in both, maybe 8 in the Bulls) a Tyrant in the Larger Unit, and two units of two Lead Belchers.

This was a really close game, my Cold Ones took out one unit of Lead Belchers, and my Skinks took out the other unit (finishing them in close combat no less!). Our two mainline units paired off against each other in the centre. His Tyrant led unit killed my Temple guard along with my General. My Saurus and his Iron guts whittled each other down. The Tyrant and unit, after chasing down my Temple Guard managed to turn a rear charge my Saurus. My Saurus Lost and fled through his Iron Guts but neither unit caught them and they managed to rally. My Cold One cavalry were manoeuvring to get back into the fight leaving their flank exposed, however due to all of our units being bunched up at this point I knew he wouldn't be able to charge them as there wasn't room. However, I forgot to account for my magic and shooting, killing enough ogres, the unit was now small enough to charge through the gap. His Tyrants unit charged my Cold ones and the remaining Iron Guts charged the newly reformed Saurus. The Saurus won finishing off the Iron Guts unit. The Cold Ones survived and reformed to face the Ogres. At this point all he had left was his Tyrant and 2 Bulls. After their success against the Lead Belchers I charged the Skinks into the Flank of his unit, gambling on their high Initiative, decent numbers and the fact that only one Ogre could attack them to see them through. The following turn I managed to get the remainder of my Saurus into their rear.

At the end of the game the Saurus had been killed, the Cold Ones and Skinks were still alive, the Tyrant was still there and all that remained of the unit was a single Ogre on a single wound!

I lost the game by literally 99 points making it the closest draw possible. If I could have taken just one more wound off of the Ogres I would have won, if I hadn't charged the Saurus in...well I may have just lost the Cold Ones instead but if not I would have won also. Once I got home I realised that I had in fact lost as we had forgotten to factor in the 100pts for killing my general...still very close game.

What I learnt:I also made a pretty large rules mistake to the detriment of the ogres. I thought that to work out 25% of a unit you counted the number of wounds in the unit but its not its whole models. This didn't have massive effect although I got one of his Leadbelcher units to take a panic check (which they passed) when they should have. More importantly his surviving Leadbelcher on the opposite flank, which the Cold Ones had chased off but not chased down, was only rallying on double 1's when it should have been normal leadership. I would have killed it quick enough anyway I'm sure but it would have prevented the Cold Ones getting back to the main fight for at least a turn.

I also decided after this fight I needed a better general, for two reasons. First for fighting things like the Tyrant which in this game I really had no answer for. Although I almost wiped his unit out, I think I only managed to take one wound off of him. The Second reason is that although he is T5 with a 3+ save he only has two wounds, so even though he's only 93 points, its a pretty easy 193 points to give away to the enemy.

So after this game I upped the Points of my army to 1200pts, made the Priest a level 2 (as the level 1 wasn't doing all that much) and Upgraded my Scar Vet to an Old blood loaded with Magic Items. He has Glittering Scales and Talisman of protection and the Sword of Anti-heroes. Ok so he costs 251 pts now so a potential 351 Victory Points but with -1 to hit in Combat, T5, a 2+ Armour Save, a 4+ ward and 3 wounds so those are 351 victory the enemy shouldn't be getting.

Come back soon to see how this new Build gets on, I've talked long enough for now.

More Pics

Not had a chance to write up my battle reports just yet. Been painting a new Salamander today, not quite finished it yet. I would have been painting up two of them, I brought two from the store Thursday, when I got them open on Saturday I discovered one was missing a head! Unfortunately its quite a trek back to the store for me, plus a train fare, but fair play to the Owen the manager of the Poole store, he's got onto mail order and they're sending me one direct, I've just got to take the old one back Thursday when I go there to game anyway. Was tempted to paint up the Skinks or something in the mean time but then there's always the chance the new one might not turn up by Thursday...never mind its not like 3 skinks would take long anyway.

So although I've not had time to write up my battle reports I have had a chance to takes some pictures of the rest of my army:

So here it is in all its glory. It currently stands at 1200pts but that's using the Priest as a level 2 and the Character as a tooled up Old Blood rather than Scar-vet. Taking the Characters bare bones as a lvl 1 and Scar-Vet the Army is about 1000pts. Not bad for just a battalion box and 2 Characters.

Here are my Skink Skirmishers, I definitely want more of these guys and some of the Chameleon variety as well. I've made a skirmish tray for them. All my trays are GW modular trays, the Skirmish ones use cork for the spacers. This one wasn't cut so neatly so the Skinks don't sit snugly in the tray, but it still works in gaming terms. I've just made a new one today to fit 10 Skinks rather than 12 as that's how I tend to take them.



My Cold One Cavalry have surprised me with how well they've done, they can easily go toe to toe with small ranked up core units. I'll talk about them more in my next post. The models were a pain though, when I got to painting these I had just finished the Saurus and Skinks in a pretty short space of time and I think I was getting painting fatigued. I think it didn't help that as I was painting them I didn't think I'd be using them much so in some ways it felt like a pointless exercise. Also the cold one models themselves are pretty awful, their not so bad in the pictures and to be fair on the table top they're fine too, but the underbelly of them isn't moulded well. It's really square and you can't tell where the arms end and the belly begins. It's difficult to explain. Doesn't bother me using them so with that in mind if I paint more I imagine it wont be so much of a chore. I only tend to use 7 of them, I run them wide and they have a movement tray to match that.





I love these models. I didn't realise till I got them that they were bigger then regular Saurus, not massively, but noticeably so. They're pretty awesome in game too, I can't wait to get them up to 20 models. At first glance at rules in the book I didn't think they looked all that much better rules wise then regular Saurus. An extra point of WS and I, Light Armour, and Halberd. Didn't seem like much too me on paper but it soon adds up. The WS and +1 S make all the difference. They're only really downfall at the moment is they don't last long, what with there only being 10 of them. The run on a 6x4 movement tray that looks a little silly at the moment, but they'll fill it once I get an extra 10 and throw a Slann in there as well.


And finally my two Characters (I'm not going to re-post pics of my Saurus check out my last post if you haven't already) My original plan after the battalion box was to buy a Stegaddon and to use the Skink Priest as my General to make up my 1000pts (I originally wasn't going to include my Temple Guard until I got more of them). However, I discovered that you have to use the Generals Leadership if you are within 12", its not a matter of choice. This isn't generally going to be an issue but a Skink Priest's Leadership is only a 6! So yeah I was going to have to buy my self a proper general. I want to get some names for these guys. I found a Lizardman name generator a while back a wrote down some possibilities, but I've now lost the bit of paper I wrote them on! The problem with Lizardmen names is, being all Aztecy and all, they're not the easiest to pronounce and don't exactly roll off the tongue!

So that's it for now, will be back with those Battle run downs I promised, I think I'll go through each unit one at a time and talk about how well they've done so far and what I think their future role in my army will be.

Which Army?

I've been really eager to get back into Warhammer since 8th edition came out so starting a new Warhammer army seemed the appropriate way to start applying this new philosophy.

So which army? I struggled for a few months deciding which army to collect. I'm not quite so into the fluff of Warhammer as I am 40k so no army instantly jumps out at me. I did develop a number of criteria though while I was making up my mind. The first was I didn't want a horde army. As much as I like the back ground to Skaven, for example, the idea of painting a couple of hundred models to get a reasonable army was too daunting and I figured I would probably doom myself to failure as far as painting them goes just by the shear mountain I'd have to climb.

A similar logic went into discounting Vampires. This was the last army I played for Warhammer and to be honest I didn't get on with them. I like the fluff of Undead but I didn't enjoy playing Vampires, I'm not entirely sure why, maybe I just wasn't very good with them. I did consider them under 8^th but figured I'd have to buy 2-3 times as many basic troops for the army to get it working under 8^th (my old army was very character heavy) so again the whole horde thing put me off again. I quite fancy Tomb Kings at some point, but I discounted them at the time for having such an out of date army book.

So basically I was looking for a small elite army. I considered high elves, what with all the new models coming out, but what with the army becoming so common after the Island of Blood came out I decided against them. I like the idea of Wood Elves, I've always quite fancied a shooty army, but from my research it appeared shooty armies suffered a lot under this edition, plus again Wood Elves is a very old army book with a play style not designed for 8^th. While I still want to give them a go at some point I'm treating myself as a beginner for this army and I wouldn't call Wood Elves a beginners army.

The final choice in my mind came down to Dwarfs or Lizardmen. Both are tough armies with good leadership so I figured they could be quite forgiving. I've already got a Dwarf battalion so this made them a very tempting choice. What swung it for the Lizards though was magic, basically I wanted to give it a go, and as a beginners choice Lizardmen are good because they can compete in every phase of the game which in my mind is the best way for learning the rules.

So it was that I got the Battalion at Christmas, although it was probably about mid to late January that I started building and painting the army. This was also around the time I should have started this blog and thus I wouldn't be doing so much back tracking, but like I said previously I was getting so much painting done that I didn't want to disrupt my flow. It took me about 6-7 weeks to get painted the Battalion and 2 Characters giving me a 1200pt army here's a pic of the first unit I got painted:

Camera work isn't the best, its something I need to work on and I'll try and get pictures up of the rest of my army soon. I've gone with the GW style of painting Lizardmen, and part of me thinks I'm being boring by doing that, but hell I like the colour scheme. Not so sure I'll paint the other creatures such as Salamanders and Steggadons as GW have, or Chameleon Skinks either but that's a thought for another time.

So far I've played 9 Games with these. My next post will be a brief run down of these games, I may go into more detail about the two most recent as they are fresh in my mind. The main thing I'll focus on is what I've learnt through these games and how they've shaped my thinking on where to take the army next.

A New Hope

Ok I was gonna title this first post as 'a new gaming philosophy' but the nerd in me couldn't resist a new hope.

So those who know me know I've been intending to start this blog for a couple months now and I'll come onto the reasons for not starting it sooner shortly.

For those who don't know me a bit of introduction is in order and for me to explain the new gaming philosophy I guess I best start by explaining the old one.

I've been playing Games Workshop games since I first got a copy for 40k for my 11^th birthday, almost 17 years ago exactly (not counting Hero quest and Space crusade before that). And in all that time I think I've only ever had one fully painted army and that was my Orks back in 2^nd Edition when I was maybe 12 or 13 and that was only because they didn't allow you to use unpainted miniatures in the GW stores. Thinking about it I think I may have had a fully painted Chaos Marine army around this time too, but then these were the days when a Lord, 5 Terminators, and Dreadnoughts and 10 Berserker made up a 2000pt army. Needless to say however the standard of painting was more than a little piss poor!

My painting has definitely got better. I'm no Golden Daemon winner but I don't think its too much to claim that I have a decent table top standard, but since that time I've never finished an army. My Tau came close but then I didn't play many games with them anyway, soon got bored of them and sold them. I finished painting my Skaven Bloodbowl team, but even that could use a couple more linesmen painted to get it to a full 16 'man' squad, a fact which is particularly bugging me at the moment as I painted them 9 years ago using an article in White Dwarf as a guide and I can't remember how I did it. I remember I didn't undercoat them, which seems silly now, but if I paint more part of me thinks I shouldn't undercoat them to remain consistent...

Anyway I digress...

See I've always had a tendency to buy too many miniatures in one go, particularly when collecting a new army. My Skaven that I got when the previous army book came out for example. I spent 100quid+ on the plastic boxed sets (Just clanrats and night runners at the time) plus a couple characters and weapon teams. This worked out to about 100 models of basic troops, and without any heavy hitters it was pretty useless in battle. Realising I would have to spend a ton more money, which I couldn't afford, to make the army workable and being daunted by the prospect of the 100+ models to paint I soon ditched this army.

Very much a case of jumping in head first, I'm sure many others can relate to this story and its a story that has repeated itself many times during my gaming 'career' (I hate to use that word, if anyone knows a better one let me know). Most recently this has happened with my Tyranids, where slowly over the last couple years I have been trying to amass an Apocalypse army to go along side the tasty Forge World gargantuan creatures I want to buy. My aim was to buy 6 of the battle force boxes (when they still had Carnifex in them), I got to about 4 I think. Basically I have about 100 Gaunts, 50 Genestealers, 12 Warriors, 4 Carnifex, and a Hive Tyrant. None of which are painted. Tactically its not ideal for smaller games either, playing (and losing) several games the end of last year at 1750pts made me realise I need to invest in some of the more specialist Tyranids.

But again I had jumped in head first without thinking about the best way to collect an army. These few games I played last year were a real eye opener to me. I've just moved to a new area and so trying to integrate myself in to a new and much bigger gaming group to what I'm use to. Not only did I learn the tactical limits of my army but to be quite honest I was embarrassed and ashamed of myself. I must have played 5 or 6 games and each army I faced was either fully painted or almost fully painted, compared to my Grey Gaunts and Metalrant.

So when the new year came I decided on setting myself a goal. To get a fully painted army for both Warhammer and 40K by the end of the year. This goal also encompassed a new philosophy to gaming. I was going to build my armies a little piece at a time, play small games with them as I build them up, and...the important one...not buy any new miniatures until I got the new ones painted up!

No a massive goal per say, but a big step for me and more about discipline than anything else.

So this is where the idea for the blog came from, the idea was to chart my progress to 1) encourage myself to keep going and 2) to hopefully encourage some of my friends who have the same problems as me to set similar goals and habits.

The reason I'm only just starting this blog now is because so far I've been successful in this goal. I've always had in my mind what my first few articles would be, that this blog would take a bit of time to start but once it had started updating it would be easier. While I was in the right frame of mind for painting, I wanted to spend more time painting rather than just writing about painting. Now my painting schedule has calmed down I figure I can start this blog (also I figured I best start it soon before I had too much catching up to do).

I realise this is quite a lengthy introduction, but before ending this post I want to quickly talk about the kind or articles you can expect. Well, all sorts is the answer to that I guess. Articles tracking the progress of building an army, assembling and painting, battling with said army and tactical discussions on where to take the army next. I've got the next 3 or 4 posts planned, and they'll be up in the next couple days, so that should give you an idea of what to expect, but I have no strict format at the moment a will write as things occur to me.

I write this blog mostly for myself but if anyone else even gets one thing out of it I'll consider that a win. Also a welcome constructive comments and criticism, with the emphasis of the the constructive part.

This post now stands at around 1000 words, I assure you most of them wont be that long before you get worried :D

Jim