Regnum Aeternum - Written Battle Reports for KoW 3rd Edition

Battle Reports / Games
304

You had some though routs in that game. Your brutes having to go over an obstacle didn’t help either. Unfavourable terrain can really ruin The Herd’s game.

Agree on bringing the 3 hordes of brutes to bear. Being aggressive and instigating early in also a good insight.
My nightstalkers are also set up to be aggressive and I have found that I do much better if I go for it.

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305

Fun game that swung back and forth. The skeleton regiments are just beefy enough at -/15 they take intention to kill. Makes for a fun way to run the Undead. I agree re Zuinok. Fun character and fun stats, but the actual performance has been somewhat lackluster.

Also agree on wights and soul reavers, but I feel like Undead have to decide between shambling and non shambling or you’re paying a heavy surge tax you can’t fully use.

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That went well!
Going through woods rather than over obstacles made a huge difference. The guardians work well in pairs, so finding something else for the 3rd horde to do (or at least another angle to attack from) makes it much more worthwhile.

One tricky thing I’ve found with undead is that the low value units really just take up space. Hordes of zombies (for example) chaff and score fine, but they don’t make a flank much stronger offensively.
So it can feel like you have lots of units on a flank, but in reality half of them don’t really count.

In this game most of the Undead’s offensive power was contained in the centre and not supportedor supporting.

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Thanks gents. Been a busy start to the year and I have kept on top of nothing, but very much appreciate the comments and feedback.

I do enjoy my struggles with trying to learn the Herd. The Halfling game was rough, but I was feeling like a pro against the Undead. The mid-range approach like this is difficult, as the Herd doesn’t have a lot of options besides charging. The next versions of this style list drops some Brutes and picks up Forest Shamblers and the Stampede, and I’ve slowly-but-surely been repairing my Lycan hordes over the last few months and want to try them out, especially with the performance of DarkBlack’s Werewolves recently!

I’m committed to running the Undead in a GT the weekend of the 20th. Two oddball test games will hopefully ready to post by the end of the weekend, and then (gasp) 5 more tournament games to post hopefully by the end of the month.

Definitely agree. With typically just heroes to unlock, I actually think the Undead can do without the sprawling hordes. While I haven’t had a chance to test them, I think Revenant regiments at -/17 could be really run to play around with in a Surge-centric list, and also think that clever troop play could be a lot of fun as well alongside Wights and such, as you can have a lot of Fearless chaff running around, gumming things up and enabling Surge Charges. More to come from the Undead from me!

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308

On to the undead games!

Well done! Nice to see a list work as envisaged.

I’m not keen on that dwarf list. Despite the game being quite close at the end.
I learnt the hard way that dwarfs have De in spades, so the worry becomes damage output and threat projection.
This list does neither well.
One Golloch’s Fury can only do so much.
The artefacts on the Lords on Large Beast seem like a lot of points to buff 7 attacks. Brew of Sharpness should idealy be getting a unit to 10+ expected damage vs De 5+, but these only have 7 attacks.
They’re durable scenario units, but not hammers.

Interesting to compare notes!

Nice that your surge into the iceblade worked. :unamused:

You were more right about killing that cavern dweller in one go that you should have been. That was quite the comeback, hearthguard are the unit you want left for a comeback.

Since soul reavers got toned down, they’re only slightly more dangerous than wights. Harder to deliver though.
Wights can see and charge over infantry.
Mainly a matter of theme for me tbh.

Your burrowing worms keep tempting me to get one for myself! :sweat_smile:

On the wraiths: even the troops can hold well against low damage units/chaff.
De 4+ without CS needs 12 attacks to do 1 damage at the odds, which life leeches back. 9 for Me 3+
Anything with decent attacks will get through -/12 easy though.
The regiments are 1 nerve from ironguard durability before factoring in life leech.

I see what you were getting at with the command orders.
Using werewolves as flankers means that shambling hasn’t been an issue, but for wraiths of revenant cavalry The Master’s will is amazing.
As is the extra drain life.

@Cartwright how did you like the Heal Ice Queen vs the Celestial Restoration Ice Queen?

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It’s really hard for anything to kill a cavern dweller 1 on 1. It’s at best a 50-50 chance with a lot of downside.

I’m leaning towards heal instead of celestial restoration. Heal 5 with staff and command orders becomes effectively heal 7, and if on the Naiads a heal 8-9 because of frostbound. If the Naiads and cavern dweller are near each other, that’s an incredibly grindy middle.,I’ve debated putting blizzard on the queen to give the ability to clear chaff, but that probably would mean dropping the wings from the ice blade and I’m really reluctant to do that.

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The New Year just won’t let up, but I’m still getting games in and still (mostly) keeping on top of reporting. Up now are two more Undead reports! Both were against the Northern Alliance of @Cartwright. The Northern Alliance has always been neat; the revamp a few years ago gave them some really nice options and I’m really digging his recent lists. While I like Celestial Restoration conceptually, it’s been hard to efficiently pull off. I think the Healing Ice Queen is stronger, and I am going the same route with my own Liche (Celestial Resto > Drain Life > the normal Heal).

Battle 107 was Push.

Battle 108 was Compass Points.

We’re both gearing up for the Northwoods GT. I decided on some Undead MMU, but was having trouble narrowing down some heroic choices. Lacking the time (and patience) to tweak half a dozen things with 5-10 points differences, I chose to change gears completely, running a bunch of Ghouls and then jamming in a bunch of heroic choices so I could everything all at once.

  • Ghoul troops were neat. Speed 6 and a d3 Wild Charge means they have quite the threat range. They aren’t going to break anything, but can definitely gum things up. Being non-Shambling units means they can also play objective and such nicely. These seemed very popular in 2nd Edition, but seem to have fallen out of favor in 3rd, but taking a few units seems viable.
  • Ghoul regiments were less neat. They are just taking up space, and their only edge is speed. I think hordes are going to be similarly underwhelming
  • Ghoul Ghast was a neat hero, since the TC Aura is included now. I wanted 2 in these lists with so many other Ghouls around! It’s a fun pick, but probably not a really competitive one.
  • Lykanis was a fun hero. I aimed to use them as deterrence, threatening long charges but rarely committing. In this role they worked well. Getting into fights, with just 5 attacks, they struggled at times, even against chaff.
  • Liches are cool. As mentioned here and in DarkBlack’s reporting thread, I think these are a really fun unit since it can be highly personalized. I’m going to go with Heal and Scorched Earth for the tournament, since it’s running more terrain than usual.
  • Mhorgoth is really strong and lived up to the hype after a few turns of stumbling to understand him. Two casts, casting at the double and with Fly and a Dread bubble is just bonkers. He made me appreciate the Herd’s Chieftain with the Horn of Great Migration more, as the Dread bubble was nice in helping to swing combats since I wasn’t competing with Brutal here. Very expensive, but very useful.

Thanks to Cartwright for the games! I’m switching back and taking the Skeleton Warrior Undead to a tournament this weekend, so more to come from the Undead soon! I also got one other random game in with Kingdoms of Men and their Command Dice this past weekend, and I will try to get that posted before the tournament.

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311

…and we’re all caught up before the tournament!

My schedule has been just too much recently, but I had enough time for a one-game meetup this last weekend, and jumped at the chance … to run something completely different than the tournament list.

Battle 109
Battle 1091920×1440 186 KB

Battle 109 was Kingdoms of Men vs Brothermark, since I’ve actually yet to run the Men with the new Command Orders. I wasn’t a big fan of the list, and was really stretching things to just have a fun one-off game and explore as much as I could.

  • Precise Thrust // Ordered March. I like this order. Ordered March can be strong if you can put yourself in a flanking position with it, and I like that you can target such a wide variety of units and unit sizes with the order. Unfortunately, very little use for it this game.
  • Run Them Down // Ferocious Charge. The Herd shares this Command, and I do not like it in either army. Neither army is elite, and can really run the smaller units effectively. The humans struggle even more due to all the unit type and size limitations. A blanket +1 to hit on a unit is big, so all the limitations are definitely warranted, but this feels like an Order given to these armies without really thinking it through, and I think the Order as a whole needs a rework.
  • The Militia horde was a neat unit. It’s actually cheaper than a horde of Zombies, but doesn’t unlock. I could see a mix-and-match list with Beast Cav to smash and Militia to hold ground as a potential avenue to explore in the future.
  • Pole-Arms continue to have the worst luck and bad performances. I want to like the unit as cheaper CS seems strong, but they have just never performed well for me (though due largely to my own errors).
  • Monarch rallying Knights and Foot Guard was a neat idea, but not executed well. The Foot Guard don’t quite have the stats to be rockstar regiments, so this could be neat and very fluffy for some armies, but probably not going to be a mainstay of my KoM style. The Monarch is neat with the customizability, but is not a 4th Giant, as it lacks Strider, and that’s a pretty important facet of what makes Giants work.
  • Rampage Giants flubbed it, but I did not have units to help them start fights safely, and overall did not support them well. These are all lesson’s I’ve learned before, and had to just cross my fingers about due to all the other directions the list was going in, and they did not luck out.

The game was still quite enjoyable, and was played against the TO of the tournament coming up this weekend, so I got some good insight about the tourney even though I wasn’t playing my list. The big tourney takeaways for me were:

  • Clocks are going to be an issue. We have an hour each, and this game took 3. We’re social gamers, him especially, but yeah, I think folks are going to be clocking out, so I will need to be very aware of the clock this weekend.
  • The boards all get a 3rd forest, sometimes at the expense of one of the Height 0 Difficult Terrain pieces, sometimes in addition to all the usual stuff. Even without the Herd, I think my Undead will have some good tools for this event.

More to come on the tournament games soon!

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312

I really appreciate the reports, been a rough week for me with this head cold but starting the day with a batrep certainly helps :people_hugging:

I definitely prefer your skeleton bonk regiment spam to the ghoulsploration, but can’t fault you for giving them a try. I’ve run into a few weirdos in 3E that use ghoul troops, and have been interested in a tooled up horde before, however the ghast seems like the winner of the lot. And even then a rarity, as a vamp on horse isn’t wildly different and low key better at the same jobs.

Few thoughts / rules things from Game 107:

  • I don’t understand the mace + blade in Trevor’s list, that seems like an automatic red die to me (or +10 pt item to the birds or mindfog for the queen or so on).
  • If you kill a loot holder in melee, you must take the token onto one of your victorious units. You can then drop it into their footprint when reforming or backing up or whatever, but it can’t be left in the enemy footprint ala shooting death.
  • “The upcoming tournament has an extra forest for thematic reasons, so while I am not well-versed in spells, my thinking was that Scorched Earth’s utility starts to increase.” Maybe the ‘removing pathfinder’ part when it comes to moving at the double but the hindering effect probably decreases, as scorched earth causes unhindered charges to be hindered. If you’re playing with more difficult terrain, the enemy is more likely to be hindered, so less likely to be affected by scorching. Unless you’re suggesting people are going to be bringing more pathfinder / strider units in response to the extra wood, in which case sure, the scorched earth could be more annoying as it strips those rules …
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Thanks Boss. Always appreciate the rules insights.

I don’t know if he’ll be able to post his thoughts before the tournament. The Northern Alliance list was close to, but not the final list. The Blade / Mace were on the chopping block, and some other items and such were still being considered. Brutal on the Frostclaws could be worth considering in the future.

With my Scorched Earth choice, I definitely have some weird, semi-circular logic going and also just phrased it all quite poorly. With more difficult terrain and forests and such on the board, yes, we should generally have more hindered charges than usual. I am taking it to confound J Boots, and anyone with Pathfinding or Striding charges (like the Halflings from our club), or to mess with any clear charges that folks are working harder to get. I basically want every charge into me Hindered, if possible. I’m taking a number of Wraiths and two Burrower Wyrms, so I’ll have striding charge options, but I am taking the spell to try and make fights asymmetric.

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314

I ended up dropping it in the final version. With blue, white, red (2), I get pretty consistent 4 or so CP each turn. The mace plus 1 CP and sword plus 1 CP means I can double-dip if they’re in combat constantly. I ended up not having them in combat enough to justify the blade/mace and instead dropped and will rely on CP for the boost.