Demolished – Continued Thoughts
I cannot get good pictures of any of my newly painted models land I can’t figure out whats causing me to have this mindshattering issue. Its stalling a couple pages I have in the works. I want to do Unit Spotlights on models as I paint them, instead of just extolling the virtues of my own painting.
Instead, today I’m just gonna continue my thoughts on the game on Saturday. Its had time to percolate through my head, and I am trying to get a grasp on a couple things I may have done, either good or bad.
As I mentioned in the original afterthoughts, I am convinced that I deployed poorly. If I’d have been able to take advantage of the screening woods on the right flank to try and hide/protect the Quartermaster better, I may have been able to get more work out of both him and the pirates. Having the two units of Mechanithralls on either side of the board made it so that the Necrosurgeons could not reinforce whichever side needed it, and were limited only to their side of the board. Additionally, they couldn’t compound forces and try to sweep a zone with the exponential force that 20 Mechanithralls would bring. Speaking of the Necrosurgeons, I think I really was to giddy to get them adding models that can then charge. Instead, I should have been trying to plop them down and make it just harder to eliminate.
I also has some serious issues with order of activation issues, that started with deployment. I’d deployed my Scarlock behind the Mechanithrall unit I needed to Ghost walk, and had to activate in a strange sequence in order to get the spell where I needed it. At least twice more I was forced to activate units I didn’t want to in order to get units I needed to to work correctly. Ghost Walk, from either arcnodes or the Scarlock, can complicate things a bit, especially when I need it on every model in the army.
To compound the order of activation issues, I had some substantial play errors that could have resulted in some spectacular, and in some cases did, failures. the biggest one was not holding my arc nodes a touch back.I don’t think it would have saved my leftmost arcnode from that drastic scatter – He was in the right place, but it would have made it so that I could have gone towards the center (away from the field gun) in order to get the Demolisher that Nightmare failed to move into correctly.
There is also my personal issue with Bulldoze: I just don’t know anything about how it works. I know how to read the rule, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve just never been able to get my head around how people do the things they do with it. Many times I have just let people do what they want with that rule specifically because I’m not comprehending how they do what they do with it. Its extremely frustrating because, for the most part, I am very good with the rules, the interactions, and I firmly believe that knowing your opponents rules really can push some of the harder matches into manageable territory. Any army with Bulldoze has an automatic leg up on me because I just can’t understand what to do to minimize it.
I also think that the terrain heavily favored the Harkevich list, but I don’t know if either of us really thought about it at the start. With Field Marshal [Pathfinder] the majority of his army was able to pretend the terrain didn’t exist, but I had to go through a lot of finagling in order to work with the terrain on the board. having speed 6 clamjacks that can wander through terrain with impunity is a pretty large boost.
Beyond the 17 points of worthless in my list, I think I made some additional list construction issues. I has always subscribed to the thought that the quartermaster needs an Ogrun Bokur in order to work correctly and that somehow slipped my mind. I also forgot to bring my all time favorite solo, Saxon Orrik, and with the amount of pathfinderless troops in my army, I really needed an additional method to ignore terrain Ghost Walk may be available at all time from Deneghra, but at 3 focus, it better be worth it.
Ok. The elephant in the room time: Pirates.
I can see what they are designed to do, but I don’t think there is any place for them in the faction. as midlevel defense clearers, they have a decent job, but biles do the infantry clearing both better – auto hitting pow 12’s? yes please! – and cheaper at 5 points for a min unit. The unit also suffers from the Mark I holdover of the unit leader containing a lot of power. Its just so hard to protect specific models from getting busted, and the MK II edition acknowledged that in changing how the unit leader functioned. Still, though, there were a pair of holdovers that really rely on the unit leader staying alive through the game, and they are Cryx’s least enjoyed units – Revenant Crew and Cephalyx. I really hope that there is some day fixed.
One Comment
Moondog
Regarding Bulldoze: the biggest ways to mitigate it in my experience are layering models and Reach.
Layering models can either make it so that Bulldoze can’t happen in the first place (since a Pushed model stops if it contacts another model) or it can minimize how much the Bulldoze moves your models. In this particular fight, that was a less desirable option due to blast templates and lots of ARM 12, but when those are less of a concern I’ve seen this technique work very well.
Reach is also another way to mitigate Bulldoze shenanigans. If a model has Reach, a Bulldoze push can’t get you out of combat, so if your opponent is trying to run shenanigans they’ll still be eating a freestrike if the try to get out of combat.
Another factor with Bulldoze is that a model must be pushed directly away from the Bulldozing model. So if your opponent is trying to engineer getting a model in a certain place/moving it in a certain direction, they need to move in a specific way for that to happen.
I’ve found that Bulldoze is easiest to leverage when you’re either advancing or running, because in those cases you’re able to adjust how the Bulldozer is moving to push models the way you want to. It’s much harder to do much with it when making Charges or Slams, because your movement is linear (so if a model is directly in your way, Bulldoze is just going to push them forward more.)
One of the things I like most about this Harkevich list is how much it can make use of Bulldoze. Escort gives a little extra movement to make it easier to get the bump where you want it, Pathfinder helps with terrain, and ARM 25 takes the fear of most freestrikes off the table. In that regard, it’s probably one of the best and worst lists you could play if you want to learn more about how to deal with Bulldoze. 😉
Also, regarding terrain: even though I was able to move through it easily, I feel like it helped me about as much as it hurt me. The forest on the right was big enough that I had a really hard time getting LOS through it on a number of occasions, and it’s one of the main reasons I had such a hard time getting Rengrave off the table (that and poor game decisions, but who’s tracking those?)
Just my $0.02. 🙂