Last weekend my friends and I got round to playing the end of season game for our Blood in the Badlands Campaign. The game originally had a few boards being played on at the same time, however due to on player not being able to make it, we only played on one board. So it was a siege game of 2400pts. My Dwarfs were up against 1200pts of Night Goblins and 1200pts of Lizardmen. What follows are some pics and comments from the game. I do hope I remembered it right!
The siege is set. The objectives are all at this end of the castle, so I put all my Dwarfs and siege engines there. My artillery claimed the hill to fire on the castle. I made sure they were out of bow range as well.
The amount of magic I was going up against. I'm sure there were some kniving plans being made.
The Dwarf army arrayed for battle. I took a siege tower to bypass the fortifications and a siege ram to have a go at the gate section. Then there is 30 Warriors with Great Weapons on the far left, 32 Iron Breakers with Grimwald and bsb in the middle, and finally 30 Lond beards with Great Weapons in the siege tower.
The Dwarf artillery consisted of 2 cannons, 2 grudge throwers and 2 bolt throwers. Their objective was to get more dice for the pre game artillery turns and then attack the enemy warmachines.
Lizardmen Temple Guard at the gate surrounded by warmachines and saurus warriors to the left. At this stage I didn't know how tough saurus would be in a siege. A little spoiler, they are tough.
Dwarf 1st turn sees two charges get off, my warriors rolled very low, and just sauntered a few inches.
Combat saw my Iron Breakers bounce off the temple guard and the long beards bounce off the tower due to a lucky steadfast roll.
Enemy turn sees them move a few units around the battlements, and the others at the other end of the caste, suffle along.
Dwarf turn 2 sees more assaults going against the walls. All my units bounce off, though the far left tower is ready to fall to my 30 Warriors next turn. The Iron Breakers just do poorly against the Temple Guard again. Not enough strength to get the wounds through.
Artillery on the other hand do very well. The cannons got removed in the pre battle phase, but since I didn't rune up any war machines, I just went for quantity. The grudge throwers by turn 2 have effectively wiped out the enemy war machines.
Enemy turn 2 sees more shuffling along.
At this stage it looks quite good for the Dwarfs, still lots of models. I'm sure nothing could ruin this...
Here you see my forces at the end of the turn 2 magic phasse. They got 1 spell off, a Curse of the Badmoon with Irresistable force. I effectively lost 1/3 of my army. The warriors took the brunt of it losing 23 models.
My turn 3 I try and see if there is any point in continuing. Close combat sees the remains of the warriors claim the tower (at last). Whereas everything else fails to do anything significant.
And that is where I called it, 3 turns in. Undone by 1 spell in a magic phase! Ah well, it was great to see the castle in action and have a siege game. It has been a very long time since we have had any games like this so I'm sure I've done things wrong. In the game I thought that those in the castle have stubborn or steadfast, which made shifting them very hard. I also think in hindsight that the Iron Breakers just were not strong enough to do any damage, perhaps Hammerers would have been better? Still, some things worked really well, such as the vast artillery which does a lot of damage on those walls. The siege tower as well proved a worthy investment, though perhaps next time I'll put another unit in there.
Still that wraps up the Spring campaign for now. We might get another campaign turn in before the ned of the year, but we shall see. Still it was a very cool and characterful game. One of these campaign games has to be a win for the forces of order? Surely!
Well better get cracking on painting.
Cheers.
