Vassal game with jimmy this evening to playtest OGBM (me) vs Steel Legion (jimmy)

We played "Push 'em harder ladz" so that it caused a critical not 1 DC.

OGBM list:

GARGANT [700] 'boss'
(Kustom) Wyrdboy Tower, (Kustom) Power Fields, Deth Kannon, Soopa Zzap Gun, Mega Lobba

GARGANT [675] 'soopa'
3 Soopagun, (Kustom) Wyrdboy Tower, (Kustom) Power Fields

GARGANT [650] 'rippa'
2 Soopagun, (Kustom) Reinforced Boiler, (Kustom) Wyrdboy Tower, Ripper Fist

GARGANT [675] 'skorcha'
(Kustom) Reinforced Boiler, (Kustom) Wyrdboy Tower, Ripper Fist, Supa Skorcha, Twin Soopagun

FIGHTA-BOMMERS [150]

FIGHTA-BOMMERS [150]

I decided to go full gargant. 32DC of gargant all covered by D3 MW AA 5+ kustom upgrades, no messing about with lootas!


Steel Legion list:
REGIMENTAL HQ Supreme Commander, 12 Infantry, 7 Chimera, Hydra
MECHANISED INFANTRY COMPANY Commander, 12 Infantry, 7 Chimera
TANK COMPANY 10 Leman Russ (inc vanq), Hydra
ARTILLERY BATTERY, 3 Manticores
SUPER-HEAVY TANK PLATOON, Shadowsword
VULTURE SQUADRON, 4 Vultures
SENTINEL SQUADRON, 4 Sentinels
DEATHSTRIKE MISSILE BATTERY, 2 Deathstrike Missile Launchers
FLAK BATTERY, 3 Hydra
THUNDERBOLT FIGHTERS 2 Thunderbolts

To get a balanced all comers list for playtesting (as Jimmy knew he'd be facing OGBM, i didn't know i was vs SL) the SL list was selected from the UK championship list database as a general tournament list with minor modifications to suite JZ's tastes.


Deployment:

map was selected effectively at random from a set of vassal maps (in that we couldn't remember which map was which and jimmy just picked a file to load). The map has a lot of roads, which favours OGBM, this was mentioned before the game start and JZ was happy on the grounds that it was not an unreasonable map in general.

Objectives are marked with green '!' tokens as the vassal objective markers are hard to make out on grey.

guard set up on the two extreme flanks, with sentinels forward on garrison. OGBM start three gargants on roads. No air assualts or teleports, so some stuff intermingled at deployment with no risk.

the two front road gargants have boilers , the one not on a road had the boss

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Small correction. No modifications other than placement of commissars which were not indicated in EUK documentation. Steve Cole, Exeter Entrenchment 2015 : thanks chap! come take your prize

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Turn 1
Orks win initiative

T1, Ork strat
>fightas ground attack deathstrikes, 1 fighta dies to flack but a death strike is also killed, breaking the deathstrikes
>boss gargant doubles on road and shoots shadowsword, 2DC damage breaks it

[img]SS%20withdraws%20behin%20some%20ruins[/img]

>manticores sustain on rippa gargant, stripping 3 power fields
>rippa gargant doubles on road and drops 4bp macro on all of the vultures and the mech inf … 6s to hits, no hits!
>mech inf march into the factory off the ork T&Hs
>vultures attempt to retain, fail, re-roll, fail again, fire anyway 3 hits, last power field removed on rippa gargant
>fightas ground attack sentinels, 3 hits, 3 kills, breaks sentinels
>hydras double forward
>skorcha gargant doubles and shoots the mech inf, … 6s to hits, no hits!
>RHQ double and shoot a load of 7s at the rippa gargant (now shields left), 2 hits but the gargant saves both
>Tbolts enter cap
>soopa gargant doubles and drops 16 dice on 6s mech coy … for 1 hit
>tank coy fail to activate and single up to the road

fightas disengage, saving a hydra hit on the way out

RHQ, deathstrikes, shadowsword fail to rally.


table at end of t1

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Turn 2
T2, guard strategy
>vults single on re-roll, blast 1 DC off rippa gargant
>RHQ retain, fail, and shoot for BM
>rippa gargant engages RHQ (starting off at –3 or –4), charges in with boiler move and DTT to pull as much in to base contact as possible. Gargant loses 1 DC and wins assault by 3, breaking RHQ (8 stands loss total to RHQ)

<intermission – jimmy attempts soup>

>boss gargant doubles back down to road to its own bltiz and fires on mech inf 14 to hit on 6, 1 hit, at least it nukes the commissar though
>sentinel fails to activate and breaks itself


> fightas stand down
>manticores march down table
>boss gargant double boiler moves and double crits itself then shoots the tank coy, missing with all its MW and TK only to kill a russ with the mega lobba
>russ coy attempt to march and … fail, single foward
>skorcha gargant singles on re-roll and shoots mech inf, 4 kils
>hydras single about a bit
>fightas stand down
>mech inf fail to activate and shuffle about a bit

RHQ, shadowsword, leman russ, and ripper gargant rally,

boss gargant takes 2 dc from fires and even gains a 3rd fire


seems i forgot to screenshot here

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Turn 3
ork initiative
>The flaming (boss) gargant engages the recently rallied RHQ and intermingles the vultures, gargant loses 6 powerfields and breaks both formations, RHQ and vultures break fowards onto T&H objectives

RHQ and vultures break and think about where to move next (vultures were intermingled before the counter charges and kills)

>skorcha gargant engages intermingled russ and sentinel in FF, wins by 2, breaking both (4 russ killed)

tank coy and sentinels break and think about where to move next (oops, had the counter view up on screenshot by mistake)

>shadowsword triples (?!) to middle of table
>ripper gargant doubles back onto its T&H and BMs the shadowsword
>manticores sustain on ripper gargant, 4BM on disrupt and a DC lost
>soopa gargant sustains on mech inf, breaking them
>hydras fail to activate and single forwards
>fightas ground attack shadowsword, killing the last DC
>fightas ground attack the broken vultures, wiping them out

tank coy and sentinel fail to rally

2 gargant fires are put out and 1 more DC taken from crits

0–0 t3, would be 2–0 if gargatns were shuffled 5cm one way or another!

Table view just after first activation of turn 4 (forgot to pic end of t3)

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Turn 4
T4 orks initiative

>fightas ground attack the rallied deathstrike and pop it (tbolts finaly decide to face the AA and CAP, take 3 macro AA off the nearby gargant, 1 survives on jink)
>RHQ triples into the central tank factory to be in contesting range of a T&H
>fightas ground attack RHQ, 2 kills, breaking them



– game called here, decided it couldn't end any other way than 1–0 (DTF) to orks
Steel Legion had enough activations left to be able to contest T&H from the orks and have something within their table half. Only change that would happen from playing until end of turn would be that more guard would die, but this would make no difference in the game points.

going to points, OGBM had lost no points (all formations over 50% and unbroken) with heavy guard losses, so winning draw on points to OGBM

obviously a big lab on luck on OGBM side with deathstrikes never getting to fire and guard failing activations
OGBM was bad at rolling 6s to hit though, dice by the handfull from MW barrage and generally getting zero-to-one hits

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Thanks for the report! SL seemed to intermingle his units alot. Why? No other way to get cover or hide from Gargants?

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Really just once but yes, some of that was since cover's a big thing with facing Gargants. However it's more the tool itself. really easy to do when a not many pixels is a cm of "tabletop" and there's no "spacial" sense to rely on like in real life. To put into perspective, at a scale to be able to see the whole board 5cm is less that a mouse pointer width. Also clicking and moving a bunch of small sprites on the screen takes forever so pretty quickly advancing a mech company just gets to something like "meh... [drag a bounding box across the whole mess of them and move] yeah ... that's about right"

So game stuff here:

We had an interesting question if does Push Them 'aarder work for consolidation moves? As worded, it could be argued for. That was a cool point where we asked ourselves that.

So all in all this didn't feel totally wonky and derp at all. At no point did I feel this was completely OTT (actually watching oodles of dice be thrown on -1, for double, and almost nothing come of it made me feel bad for Apoc.

The only thing that game me pause was the easy way, in this particular build, that the entire board could be shut down in all effects with an un-suppressible MW AA bubble when coupled with flyer that you couldn't cap with any reasonable expectation you're getting to attack. While true there's a similar deal capable in doing Ferals with just Orkasaurus and weirdboys we're talking 2 less DC each and they can't take aircraft either and lack PF and +25 more in cost AND have soft squishy parts of the formation you can kill in an assault to influence the outcome; Here, not so much. It was actually a pretty brilliant move on Apoc's part as there's 0 formations one could ground attack with such a build and by end of T1 was sitting far enough across the mid line you couldn't avoid it to CAP.

I he's think has hit on a very interesting build here by using the 4 gargants which have more than enough avg staying power to take quite a bit thrown at them and still have a great anti-air assault story. Really just brilliant [tips hat] and likely warrants a closer look at price or damage output or other mechanism. 1 data point does not a trend make however but he's onto something here. I think 2 gargants and a bunch of lootas doesn't play up the strengths possible he showed. Hate to be a marine player trying to bring in a thunderhawk here after teleporting some termies to recycle them. [shudders] Apoc's mentioned something similar with BT.

Once again the way that Mech Infantry unit did exactly it's job (which was to sit in cover and soak up fire) while other activations go about their business really shows just how great they are at sticking around. WOuld love to have a third if I could of. Hell, if I could actually get a DS to fire (I'm sure a bolter round awaits them back at command ) it would have been nice ha! C'est La Vie I really thought that I'd take down that one on the left flank which would force him to choose between scuttling back to deny T&H or give up blitz. In retrospect a classic split across the table for objectives would work for me, not against in hoe this played out.

The roll on the critical for damage on the Push 'Em 'Arder Lads was just great. Super thematic and kinda fun, even when the giant on fire beast clips your Reg HQ it was rad I'd say keep it.

All in all this quickly devolved into a game going for the draw and in no way felt like the all rampaging destroying list of doom.

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Yeah they were intermingled in bad ways, however, there were reasons this was done (or not thought low risk at the time) in each case and/or the end effect was not as bad as suggested. It looked pretty devastating that at the start of T3 there were 2 intermingle assaults breaking 4 formations before guard even got to activate, but:

The intermingled russ coy BTS had failed to activate twice in a row and was trying to limp forwards to be useful. Pretty limited range of places it could be after two failed activations and trying to move towards objectives while out of LOS. Jimmy also wasn't expecting me to move off objectives to initiate an assault. Ultimately it was only 1 sentinel that was broken as the 'extra' fallout from the intermingle here – this would not have changed the results because he already had 3~ other formations he could spam to contest objectives t4.

the RHQ + vulture intermingle was a bad position to leave them in but looked 'safe' at time. The RHQ had just withdrawn a full double back from breaking, and ended the withdrawal out of LOS behind a building just off its own deployment zone. To get in to assault range I had to do a double road+'arder move (with 2 crits ont he way) right across the table in T2 (50cm gargant sprint is not something you'd ever encounter in any other situation!), and then had to win the initiative T3 to pile the assault on. The RHQ was then on a 5+ to rally with no re-roll and had it not rallied would doubtless have withdrawn out of intermingle. This had more of an effect than the russ as it broke the vultures, which would have been useful objective contesters (or could possibly have broken rippa), but i can see the double back and moving fully out of LOS looks safe vs gargants

Intermingles at start of game: no great effect. Turned out JZ had actually though soopaguns had 45cm range and so didn't realise i could hit his deployment T1. It did mean i got to drop a barrage on the RHQ and vultures in one go, but as I got zero hits it was just a blast marker.



Overall i've got mixed feelings about what this bat rep can be used for due to how it panned out: The tank coy never activated (2 failed activations then broke), the deathstrike never activated, the shadowsword never shot. For an army that actually had enough AT/MW/TK shooting to be able to knock out 8DC titans the guard weren't able to make use of these assets, and this was mostly due to bad luck, rather than gargant awesomeness (though the deathstrikes would have been better under more flack cover, which could have been managed with a different deployment). I was fully expecting to lose a gargant/a gargant-and-a-half T1 vs that guard list.

That said, im not sure why I would ever not take a flack head on all gargants. If i'd been facing air assaults id have kept the gargants in pairs ~25cm apart as much as possible to try to force 2D3 MW AA against any landings.

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What do I win?

FYI from memory the commissars were in the 2 mech cos, tank Co, shadowsword (obvs), vulture, and sentinels.

A decent result for the gargants as that list absolutely smashed amtl in Exeter. Though, losing the death strikes will have made a huge difference in your game. But worth knowing that with decent play the gargants can hold their own against a pretty strong anti war engine list!

You've raised a question for me about ferals, I've always assumed the weird boy has to be added to an infantry stand not an orkeasaurus (as the wording is add) meaning the aa isn't quite the same as with gargants. Are we playing that wrong? #threadhijack

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I have to say that not deploying the hydras in front of the deathstrikes was a costly mistake if they had popped the BTS gargant early on, things could have been severely different, also the roads were a huge benefit to the OGBM in terms of speed (25cm move gargants when pushed!!)

Interesting game and I agree the weirdboy towers need a nerf, I think they should match the feral ork weirdboy myself

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True, worth noting BTS gargant did have 7 power fields up, though still very killable with vultures, a pair of deathstrikes and an SS, depending on the TK roles.

Roads: yeah they made a huge difference, at the same time, people have city tables and this isn't an unreasonable city table set up. EUK pretty much never use roads (think ive only seen them used in narrative games) whereas other groups do use roads – though this city table was still at the extreme of 'roadyness'.

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Still I guess this goes to show that even with the deck stacked in the favour of the OGBM, it still struggles to win games

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Aye. I put the hydra down (equivalent to removing your hand from the model) and even said over skype, "that was dumb".


They should be looked at. The Ferals have no planes and an AA5+ MW (though at 45) instead of a AA5+ D3 MW. At a minimum that's 50 point upgrade.


Yeah never getting a shot off with the DS was painful (due to afore mentioned bad move), so much of the list being about that guy getting it's shots off. It was a very nice all comers list and we thank you for borrowing it. Come round the house for a rum on me!


Yeah not to go off topic but nope. States "Add up to one Wyrdboy character to any unit for +50 points"
Now that might not of been the original intention but that's another story.

So yeah even with facing an army with a crippled anti-WE component that just wouldn't come back and a constantly failing activation tank coy, the gargants eeked out a 0-1 on a table slightly favoring gargants. Hardly the all conquering list of doom.

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I observed the game, watched those dice rolls. I have to say that, from an impartial (ish, I love gargants) observer point of view, the amount of kludged-up to-hit rolls Apoc got was pretty shocking. Overall I think the dice more or less evened out in terms of how much they borked both forces plans.