Battle Report – Sloan vs Damiano (Warmachine Slow Grow)

I had my first proper Warmachine game last night , which happened to be the first round of the Slow Grow League down at the local games club.

You’ve seen my progress on the battlegroup and I was extremely chuffed to be able to field them all painted up. There’s something so satisfying about seeing those painted miniatures and scenery laid out before you on the tabletop battleground.

Anyway, I lined up Kara Sloan‘s 15 point battlegroup against a mercenary group led by Captain Damiano. He was commanding one heavy warjack, a unit of Steelhead halberdier infantry and a small steelhead cavalry unit.

Here’s how the game panned out:

First turn saw us both manouevering forward and starting upkeep spells on our warcasters. I think I managed to get Kara into range to take a couple of sniper cannon shots at the towering mercenary Rocinante warjack – crippling its legs and, importantly, it’s big heavy gun. Reinholdt, Gobber Speculator, was handily standing nearby to help Kara reload for the second shot.

I got my Cyclone to lay down some suppressive fire on the left flank, which effectively slowed the advance on that side and funnelled his halberdiers behind a rocky outcrop.

On the next turn, Damiano was able to channel enough arcane energy into the warjack to get off a shot with its damaged cannon at the exposed Kara Sloan. The Cygnaran officer had to take that on the chin as she prepared to unleash a firestorm.

This she duly did – triggering her Firing Squad uber feat at the beginning of my next turn. I did waste a fair amount of focus trying out a Area Effect blast spell to try and thin down some halberdiers but this turned out to be rather ineffective.

She was better with her rifle though and was able to draw a bead on Warcaster Damiano himself. Unfortunately her shots did minimal damage, which began a laughable sequence of ineffective damage dice-rolling lasting my whole turn.

Next up was the Defender Heavy Warjack, again able to get Damiano in his sights by backing away from some Halberdiers who had charged in to engage him. More ludicrous dice rolling and Damiano came out almost unscathed.

Last ditch attack came from the Cyclone who advanced and cut a swathe through some the infantry/cavalry screen. His last shot got through to the mercenary warcaster and, yet again, the dice failed.

Damiano had survived the brutal hail of bullets and was left barely standing, but with a vital few wounds.

Trouble is, I’d gambled it all on being able to assassinate Damiano. Kara was left woefully exposed and all of my models were within charge range of the Steelhead mercenaries. The expected onslaught came swiftly and my Warjacks were mercilessly overrun.

Finally, Kara herself was overcome, and the game ended in a victory to my opponent.

It was an enjoyable one though and panned out much better than I expected. I feel quite happy with my showing from a tactical perspective, although I definitely wasted those three focus on Kara’s AoE spell, which may have just made the difference had I used them for damage boosting. Also things would have been somewhat different if my opponent had kept Damiano shielded behind the infantry. I would have had to chip away at them first, hopefully faster than they could advance into melee range.

As it was, had I rolled at least average results on the damage dice, I’m pretty confident Damiano would have fallen in the feat turn barrage.

Oh well, off to a losing start in the league. But at least I got a painting point!

Now I’m looking forward to round two. I will be adding in a unit of Arcane Tempest Gun Mages and the solo Arlan Strangeways – yet more shooty shooty fun.

As usual, watch this space for painting progress.

~ by Max Von Deadlock on January 11, 2012.