New Model (Army) Syndrome

With my usual immaculate timing I have invested in a new set of knives just at the start of gunfight season: the unexpected onset of 7th Edition 40K does not exactly make it easy to secure pick-up games for WFB. At present I have no plans to invest in the new edition (this doesn’t mean I may not indulge in some paranoid speculation about what’s going on with the rush-release of a major rules-set at some point in the near future, naturally) but, as luck would have it, managed to secure a match-up with a pretty experienced and very agreeable Lizardmen player with a somewhat-retro (and extremely garish, even by Lustrian standards) army.

This was my first game at 2000 points so to (theoretically) take the competitive edge off the game we played a scenario: the Lizardmen would be defending a watchtower and if I could shift them out of it by the end of the game I would win.

A big block of Sauri went down in the tower, while marching across the table to relieve them were six Kroxigor, two Salamanders, another twenty Saurus Warriors, a Stegadon, three Terradons, and two units of Skinks, all led by a Slann and a Skink Priest.

I still feel I am pushing it a bit at 2000, with a lack of solidity on the table. I had brought six Ogres of Nurgle (first use!), a Hellcannon (first use!), twelve Warriors of Nurgle, twenty Marauders, a Gorebeast Chariot of Slaanesh, a Mutalith (first use!), and four units of Warhounds, led by a Sorcerer Lord of Death and a battle standard bearer (first use!).

Well, as you may or may not know, like every other pastime WFB has a specialist vocabulary of sorts – we players happily talk about things which might baffle normal people, using expressions like cocked dice, static combat resolution, flank charge, tactical deployment drop, and so on. We also use the dreaded words ‘New Model syndrome’ and I found myself a martyr to this in this game, possibly more than ever before.

Well, things got off to a reasonable start as the BSB passed his Stupid test (Ld 9 with a re-roll) and the Hellcannon behaved itself. However, it was clearly just lulling me into a false sense of security. Came the first shooting phase, the blast template was popped down on the advancing Sauri, expectations were high as the dice rolled… And the damn thing blew itself up on the first shot. (A 1 in 36 chance on paper, should you be wondering, but a virtual certainty under battlefield conditions.)

This put a bit of a dent in my mood, but once I had collected myself I found the battle mostly going pretty well: the Warhounds all got blowpiped to death, but thatwas hardly a surprise, but the Ogres battered the Kroxigor and chased them off the board, the Chaos Warriors engaged the advancing Saurus Warriors and after a grinding combat broke and ran them down, and – after another tough fight – the Gorebeast Chariot charged and killed the Stegadon.

However, the Mutalith was, frankly, behaving entirely unreasonably. Surrounded by a swarm of increasingly baffled Skinks whose blowpipes seemed unable to penetrate its hide, I tried for six successive turns to cast the bound spell which is the main reason you put it on the table. Four times I tried to roll a total of 5 or higher on two dice and failed. Once I managed it and the Slann dispelled it with dice; once I rolled a 21 (I was getting slightly fixated by this point and chucked all my dice at it) and the Skink fished a dispel scroll out from somewhere (my opponent was genuinely apologetic about this). So I still have no real sense of how this thing performs other than as a fire magnet.

And killing the Lizardmen army wasn’t winning me the game: I needed to take the tower, but didn’t have the right unit in place to do it. Baseline Marauders are not going to shift Saurus Warriors from a building without magical assistance of some kind – two or three assaults from them just resulted in the unit being thinned down. The remains of the Chaos Warriors had a go, doing some damage and taking none in return, but in range of the Slann the Sauri were not going to budge.

In the closing stages of the game the Slann magic really started to bite, as the Mutalith and Ogres were successively banished into the Pit of Shades, and things got to the point where I just didn’t have the models left to mount a serious assault and opted to concede the game.

Well, this was a clear loss for the Warriors of Chaos, mainly due to my inability to challenge the garrison in the tower. Possibly my Warriors or Ogres could have done this, but they were both in the wrong place – and I’m not sure the Marauders could have dealt with either the Kroxigor or the advancing Saurus Warriors. As it was, the two armies pretty much wiped each other out, with the exception of the garrison unit which was still in reasonable shape. This suggests that in a standard pitched battle the Lizardmen would have had the edge – but then again virtually a quarter of my army (the Hellcannon and Mutalith) had no offensive effect on the game whatsoever. Had either of them actually showed up things might have gone very differently.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the wallop packed by the Ogres, who were mainly there to bulk out the army (it was them or some Hellstriders and perhaps another character). Possibly they were lucky in their combats with the Kroxigor and Salamanders in this game, but they have earned their place for the time being. The Chaos Warriors got their first proper test as well, and despite my concerns over the size of the unit they managed to deal with a larger Saurus Warrior unit fairly comfortably: I still think an extra half-dozen models would make the regiment considerably more effective.

The Lizardmen army has not changed much since the last time I played them, which must have been in 2005: a cloud of poisoned darts obscuring a few competently-wielded maquahuitls. The Saurus Warriors are nasty, but manageable (says the guy who just lost the game largely due to the hardness of Saurus Warriors); it’s the Skinks who are the real pain in the neck. Killing them in close combat is easy; getting into close combat with them is very difficult, and if you ignore them then you are surely going to regret it. I must confess that it seems to me that the Lizardmen have much to commend them as an army, and when the stars are right I may paint a few myself.

In the meantime, I may drop the Mutalith and use the points to bulk up the Warriors a bit. The Marauders have proved distinctly underwhelming against anything other than frightened Skaven, but I’m not sure what to replace them with, and they do provide bodies and ranks for what’s otherwise a very elite army. Part of me just wants big blocks on the table, but that’s not something I’m likely to be able to satisfy playing Chaos.