vs. Vampire Counts
Durring the voting for favorite army, this army got one of my votes. It might not have been one of the most intricately painted armies, but the overall look of a HORDE of zombies, in a coffin carrying case was really impressive. I'm always a fan of "more figures." Some of us were discussing the destruction possibilities on the large unit of 100 zombies. It appeared I was going to get my chance at it.
From left to right, my opponent had fell bats, zombies, plague cart, 100 zombies, more zombies in front of 4 vampires with skeleton escort, black coach, and dire wolves.From left to right I had knights, handguns, rocket, cannon, rocket, cannon, swordsmen, swordsmen, pistoliers, greatswords, and on the far right, more knights.
Close-up of the zombie menace.
Opening moves (top of second turn in photo, I think.) The hordes shambles forward. I shift my pistoliers around the right, along with the knights. Everyone else is going to wait, with the greatswords moving next to the big pillar thing. Fell bats chase some cannon crew back behind the line. I spent my first turn wasting rocket shots on the skeleton unit with the vampires. Between the coach sucking up all his magic dice and some lucky/unluck dice, not much happens in the early magic phases.
Mid game. It sucked to have to do it, but I charged the zombies on the left flank with knights in order to keep them off my shooters. Around the right, my flankers move as fast as they can, and chew up the dire wolves. His skeledons & vamps turn to the rear. The black coach is fully charged up, and my greatswords fail their terror check in an attempt to charge it. The coach then charges them, sending them fleeing yet again. Cannons spend several turns bouncing shots (multiple 1's rolled to wound) against the coach (prior to it going ethereal) and the plague cart. The rockets get smarter, however. They aim here:
Right at that zombie. I picked him out of the bunch. First sniper-rocket shot nails him directly! The second veers off course slightly, but still hits piles of zombies. The rockets take down 43 of them. 3 more fall to handgunners, 1 more to an archer. Both units of zombies charge in to my swordsmen.
(Side note, I love the two zombies looking at each other in shock.)
After this, I simply forgot to take more photos.
The greatswords rally, but fail another test against the coach. In the end, I lose the greatswords, but it keeps the coach in the far corner for the rest of the game.
I eventually finish off the smaller unit of zombies in the center, but can not chew through the remaining 50-ish from the horde fast enough. (Also, they are striking first with WS6.) The knights on the left wipe out the zombies, but as soon as they turn to face the center, more summoned zombies pop up in their way. The knights on the right also get bogged down fighting summoned zombies. The pistoliers and artillery end up taking down quite a few skeletons, though (not surprisingly) they just summon back up. I did nail the BSB with a cannon shot, though. I'm not normally one for "cannon sniping" but considering 4 of the 5 figures in the front rank were vampires, there was little point in killing rank & file when they could be summoned back almost as fast as I could kill them, and they still get their Look Out Sir (or Ma'am, in this case) I feel no guilt.
This was the only game that didn't go the full 6 turns, probably due to the long magic phase and buckets of dice being rolled. I'm would have been interested to see where it would have gone. Many "what ifs." Not just about the unplayed turns. I wonder "what if" my greatswords hadn't failed multiple LD tests, "what if" I didn't roll 1 to wound on every cannon shot the first two turns, or "what if" I had just targeted the mega-horde right from the start.
End result is a narrow victory for Marienburg. I killed enough zombies plus a vamp to overcome the loss of the greatswords. I didn't lose much else. Record at the end of Day 1 is 2-1.
Post-gaming
Saturday night my fiancee and I met up with some friends who live in the area. (She came down with me & hung out with them most of the weekend.) I'm not entirely certain where we went, since we traveled all over Dayton to get there, but we had some pretty good Mexican food. After all that (and a giant margarita), I was dead tired (undead tired?) and passed out before midnight.
Unfortunately, our neighbors in the hotel were on some sort of sorority party weekend or something, and I kept getting woken up by insanely loud gigling and screeching. Each time I would think, "one more minute of this and I'm going to go kick their door in," and it would quiet down and I would drift off, only to be woken up again by more of the same. This wasn't just like normal "late night" hours. This was like 4:30 am.
By the time the alarm went off (several times, since I hit snooze for 30 minutes...) I was significantly under-rested and not ready for Day 2...
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