Battle Report - Harad vs Galadrim (Warbands)

This last Thursday was the last night of the league down at Collectormania.  Only Jonathan and I showed up to play, and he was about to leave when I walked in, twenty minutes late.  He suggested that we try the new warband composition rules.  I threw together a list and off we went.

The Galadrim were led by Rumil, who is the default choice of all Galadrim players.  He was asssisted by two captains, one mounted.  There were the usual five knights (2 with bows), the phalanx and the archers.  He had 36 models total, though we discovered later that he had been playing two short.

My list was the serpent's sting list from the blog.  I was able to look it up on my phone and just copy it to paper.  I wanted to test the Haradrim Warriors of Kharna with their shoot of 3 accompanying the Betrayer with his poison re-roll on a 1-2 instead of a 1.  In the interests of full disclosure, I went into this game expecting the 2 point upgrade for Kharna warriors to not be worth it.

We rolled Lords of Battle as the scenario.  Cause as many wounds as you can.  Points for expended fate as well.  Once one side is broken, roll a d6 every turn and the game ends on a 1-2.  The new scenarios have alternating deployment, which we both liked.  Coupled with the fact that, on average, half of your army will be in the forward half of the board it gets the game rocking sooner and adds some additional tactics during the deployment phase.

Initial Deployment.

Here is the Galadrim Phalanx, led by Rumil with the archers off to the left.

Here is my line.  The Mahud are proxy archers, since I was not planning on playing this list.

One thing about the new deployment rules, you can be in combat in turn one.  His captain killed my chieftan, on the right, with a timely charge.  I fired into this combat and killed one knight with a bow.  I kept feeding troops in against his knights but they managed to kill everyone and get into the center fight.

The last moments of an unsung Cheiftan of the Harad.

In the center of the line Rumil's phalanx advanced at full speed towards my line.  This was caused by the massive casualties my archery was causing.  I ended up killing sixteen elves with archery during this game.  As you can see in the picture, below, the line is already a lot thinner than it was.  Even fewer elves would make it to the Haradrim line.  That's where things went south for me though.  I had a hard time winning fights and didn't kill things when I did.  For the first 4/5s of the game I only killed two elves in hand to hand.

Rumil's elves sprinting towards the Haradrim.

When the game finally ended there was not much of my army left.  Jonathan had a minor victory.  This scenario ends up with massive points.  I think the score was 32-26 in Jonathan's favor.  I was thinking that the VPs were based on the cost of the model, rather than the wounds caused, but it would not have made much of a difference to the outcome.

The final moments of the Betrayer's warband.

I predict that TO's will be modifying the scenarios quite a bit.  Mayhem in the Mountains has always been known for having new and innovative scenarios, so we will have to learn the lessons of the new game quickly so that we can develop and test some modifications before September.

This was a great game.  The new deployment style is very different.  My army is smaller but just as fragile.  I have to figure out how to play with the lower model count.  In this game the upgrade to Kharna archers was definitely effective.  I will have to play some more games and see if it is worth the tradeoff of the five extra guys I could bring without the upgrade.  I rolled a LOT of 3's to hit in this game.  This was a great way to end the League.  I got to play against five people over the six weeks.  I won some, I lost some.  I was just getting into the swing of my army when GW changed it.  Now I'll have to get some more games in to figure out the new one.  These are exciting times with Lord of the Rings SBG.