War In the Mortal Realms tournament report

 Yesterday I played in the one day AoS 3 'War in the Mortal Realms' tournament at Bad Moon Cafe in London, so I thought I'd do a quick write up of the event and what I learned from it. I had three really close and fun games, and I think I probably learned about how to play (or not to play!) Sons of Behemat from those games than I had from a number of more casual games previously.

My army

I was playing Sons of Behemat, my list was the following:

Allegiance: Sons of Behemat
- Tribe: Breaker Tribe (Fierce Loathing: Bossy Pants and Clever Clog)
- Grand Strategy: Beast Master
- Triumphs: Inspired

Leaders
Gatebreaker Mega-Gargant (525)*
- General
- Command Trait: Louder than Words
- Artefact: Amulet of Destiny (Universal Artefact)
Warstomper Mega-Gargant (470)

Battleline
3 x Mancrusher Gargant Mob (490)*
1 x Mancrusher Gargants (170)*
1 x Mancrusher Gargants (170)*
1 x Mancrusher Gargants (170)*

Core Battalions
*Battle Regiment

Total: 1995 / 2000
Reinforced Units: 0 / 4
Allies: 0 / 400
Wounds: 142
Drops: 2

My main reason for taking six mancrushers was that I only had two mega-gargants painted, and I wanted to run a fully painted army. I definitely think that three (or even four) mega gargants would have been a stronger list. Essentially the way the list works is that it's very good at holding objectives, because mega gargants count as twenty models on objectives and mancrushers count as ten. It's also pretty good at scoring battle tactics. So generally I want to be scoring lots of points in early battle rounds while doing a respectable amount of damage, and hoping that the gargants high wound count will keep them around long enough that I don't get outscored in later rounds. 

Game 1

In game 1 I played against Ray with a coalesced Seraphon list. He had a lot of shooting, with two bastiladons and four salamanders. Coalesced is a tough match-up for me, because they have an ability that reduces all damage by one to a minimum of one, and most of my attacks do more than one damage.

The scenario was Veins of Ghur, which is similar to Starstrike from AoS 2: you start with no objectives on the board and then they come down at the start of the second and third battle rounds.

We were both two drops, but he won the roll off for deployment so I knew that he'd have choice of turn. With that in mind I deployed quite defensively to limit the potential for me to get shot off the board turn 1. He gave me the first turn, and I did very little. He then targetted my warstomper with most of his shooting, but a lot of it couldn't get in range so the stomper survived ok. For the next couple of turns we traded off: I threw my megas forwards and killed his salamanders and some of his chaff units, but the warstomper and one of the mancrushers died, and my gatebreaker took quite a lot of damage. The megas gave me the advantage on objectives though and I was up on points 14-9 at the end of turn 3. From there it went downhill, however: my gatebreaker whiffed badly against one of the bastiladons and then got killed, and I made a silly mistake where I moved a mancrusher off my back objective to charge some skinks, but forgot to make the charge and then the skinks stole the objective off me. He was able to score all the objectives at the bottom of turn four to take a narrow lead, and then he won the priority into five at which point we called it.

It was a fun game: I'd never played against bastiladons or that many salamanders before, so it was interesting seeing how the list worked. It turned out that the mancrusher gargants were surprisingly good against salamanders, because they were able to kill off the skink handlers with impact hits and the 'stuff em in me bag' rule, and then put their actual attacks into the salamanders.

What I learned:

• Not to move gargants off an objective late in the game! I underestimated his mobility, and it was a chance I didn't need to take.
• Bastiladons are very hard to kill. My gatebreaker put everything he had into one, and did about three wounds - they have a very good save, so you really need some mortal wounds to damage them and reduce their save before you start putting normal attacks into them.

What did I do well?

• I mostly managed my battle tactics well in this game, and had the game gone to turn 5 I'd have had no problem picking a tactic I could have scored.
• I think I managed the deployment quite well, to avoid getting shot off the board early on.

Game 2

In game 2 I played against Rich with Lumineth Realmlords (Teclis, Avalenor, a big unit of wardens, ten sentinels, some bladelords, a Cathallar and a ballista). By coincidence we'd played a practice game with the exact same lists and scenarios about a week earlier, which I had comfortably won, and it rapidly became clear that he had learned more from that experience than I had!

We were playing First Blood, which is a very straightforward scenario with three objectives towards the middle of the board. Again we were both two drops, but this time I won the roll off for first turn and chose to go first, so that I could move up and claim the objectives. On his turn he failed some long charges, but a unit of Bladelords charged the mancrusher mob and nearly killed one of them.

I got the priority for turn 2, and set myself up for an aggressive turn where I hoped that both megas would charge in and start killing things. However, I failed a bunch of charge rolls, and then made the in hindsight bad decision to charge my gatebreaker into a unit of twenty wardens without back-up. I didn't give him enough buffs, and he did some damage but not enough to really hurt them. This turned out to have been a bad idea for two reasons: firstly it meant that the gatebreaker got bogged down in combat, and Rich was able to bring his Cathallar up behind the wardens and use the Goading Arrogance ability to stop my gatebreaker being able to fight in the next turn, and secondly the Cathallar was able to pass the wardens' battleshock test onto my mancrusher mob and make the two surviving gargants run away, which was a disaster.Fortunately I got lucky, and my gatebreaker survived on three wounds after having everything thrown at it in Rich's turn.

At this point I stopped making notes because we were running short of time, but essentially I managed to score enough points on objectives over the first three turns that although Rich caught up a lot he couldn't quite edge ahead. We ended up having to math out turn 5, but we figured out that neither of us were really going to be able to do enough damage to kill anything significant, and I could just stand there on the middle objective with my mostly unhurt warstomper and edge out a narrow win.

What did I learn?

• Don't charge gargants into big units of things with ethereal saves.
• I need to be more conscious of what my choices might enable my opponent to do. In this case I knew perfectly well what the Cathallar was capable of doing, but I didn't put two and two together to think about how those things would apply to the board state when I was deciding whether to charge in or not.

What did I do well?

• I scored high on objectives early on, and did a reasonable job of denying my opponent points early on, setting myself up well for the end game.
• I felt like I had a good grip on what to expect from Lumineth, even if I didn't apply this knowledge well in the end.

Game 3

In game 3 I played against Chris with a Daughters of Khaine list consisting largely of Morathi and various snakes. The scenario was Feral Foray, which I hadn't played before, but has six objectives and you can burn up to one objective per turn in your opponent's territory for an extra point.

Chris's list was one drop, so I deployed defensively to avoid giving Morathi an easy turn one charge. He gave me first turn, and I shuffled forwards and didn't commit anything. On his turn he teleported Morathi forwards, but fortunately for me he failed the nine inch charge to get her into combat.

Chris got the double into turn 2, and quickly took out one of my mancrushers with shooting. Morathi charged into my warstomper but just failed to kill him. On my turn I decided to leave him in combat and do some damage to Morathi rather than retreating him out and just having him die quickly to shooting anyway, I'm still not sure whether that was the right decision!

I didn't make many notes on this game as we were pressed for time, but essentially we ended up with the gatebreaker and a supporting mancrusher rampaging through the DoK backline, while Morathi rampaged through mine, and everything else largely stood on objectives, acted as speed bumps, and in the case of the bow snakes, shot things. I was able to score some extra points for completing battle tactics with monsters, but Chris was able to score quite a few extra points for killing monsters, so the scoring was very close the whole way through.

I had a bad moment mid game where my gatebreaker charged into both units of snakes and I was hoping he'd do some significant damage, but I foolishly decided to give him All Out Defence rather than All Out Attack, and he was much less effective than I'd hoped for.

We ran out of time at the end of turn 4, and had to figure out what would have happened in turn 5. At this stage we were both very tired and trying to get our heads round this was something of a struggle, but we ended up deciding that Chris would win by won point. This was partly because I'd made an overly conservative decision the previous turn to burn an objective in Chris's back line, which meant that we was able to score the 'hold more objectives' victory point by holding only one objective. I think if I hadn't burned that objective I might have won, though there was enough stuff still in play that I don't think that was guaranteed.

What did I learn?

• If I want the gatebreaker to kill things, I have to commit all the offensive buffs I can to him.
• I need to think things through more before deciding to burn objectives. This will probably come with practice though, this was a complicated scenario and I want to get more practice in with it.
• I need to plan ahead on battle tactics better. Part of the reason I lost was that I ended up with no battle tactics I could realistically score on turn 5, and I could have avoided this by saving something easy like Monstrous Takeover for late game.

What did I do well?

• I think my initial deployment worked quite well to limit Morathi's alpha strike potential.
• I used my solo mancrushers well to hold objectives and force Morathi to chase them around the board.

Final thoughts

I finished with one win and two losses, but all three games were very close, so I was happy with that. In both games I lost, I felt like I could see a path to how I could have won them had I made different decisions. I'm going to change up my list now to replace the mancrusher mob with a third mega gargant. The mob are great for clearing out chaff, but AoS 3 is much more about large monsters than chaff, and the mancrushers lack the ability to take on big scary hero monsters. They're also much less resilient than the mega gargants, as they degrade loads once they take damage.

Overall I'm feeling very positive about AoS 3 following the event. I had three really good games, and I think that battle tactics and the new reactive command abilities add a lot to the game. The downside is that you get fewer opportunities to switch off than in AoS 2, all of my games went right down to the final turn so I got minimal breaks between games, and I was shattered by the end of the day. Gargants are quite a quick army to play too, so if I ever want to take a more complex army like Kharadron Overlords to a tournament I'm really going to have to work on rules familiarity and play speed to make sure that I can get through games in time with them.