List building for Feora

I'm in quite good shape with my prime Severius side of Menoth. I can field good variation of lists for him with painted models. So now I'm planning a list for prime Feora. My goal is to get 35 point list painted for her that is fun and decently effective.

Everything starts with a battlegroup. Unlike with Severius, there is not that much focus to run with. So I'm reaching for something simple and what i've found to be effective with Feora.

Feora (-6)

 Crusader +6

 Reckoner +8

Crusader will be hanging closer to Feora, fitting to a role of backup heavy and bodyguard. Reckoner will be right in my opponents face, shooting with it's long range cannon. Reckoner brings some much needed long range firepower to my list and also has one nice synergy with Feora. Biggest weakness of her flamers is the pitiful rat, but with debuff from the reckoner they suddenly become boostable rat 7. One fully boosted Reckoner shot and two fully boosted flamers kill many casters quite easily and are surprisingly easy to land in my experience. Spd 6 + 8 inch spray with such front line caster is hard to hide from and Reckoners threat range is really good.

So lets go to the full list, shall we?

Feora (-6)

  Crusader +6

  Reckoner +8

min Choir of Menoth +2

max Cinerators +8

min Errants and UA +7

Knights Exemplar +5

High Exemplar Gravus +5

Total = 35

So to the battlegroup we add choir and huge load of Exemplars. :D With this we reach quite good balance of anti-infantry and anti-armor, I think. Gravus is kind of a gamble, but with such a high amount of Exemplars I think he is nice. He also brings something fast to this army, which is priceless against fast or shooty opponents.

I had couple of ideas that I was juggling with. One was to take out Cinerators and upgrade Crusader to a Fire of Salvation and add a second unit of Knights Exemplars. But I ended up taking the Cinerators so I could play a nice scenario game with them and Errants. Without Defenders Ward for errants I really lacked a good unit to hold objectives.

I'm also thinking about just dropping Errants. They are nice, but I think defenders ward is the thing that pushes them to the next level.

From this particular list, I'll still have to finish Knights Exemplars unit, Gravus and the Cinerators. If you have some suggestions or thoughts about the list, post a comment! After I'm finished with Feoras list, I'll venture to paint the Legion of Everblight battlebox. Watch out for some Legion related rambling next year. ;)

Few games and damn those cleansers!

Today me and my friend visited few Wargamers to talk about Warmachine and to borrow armies for them to play with. Demoing part was kind of easy, because they have already played a few games so they had pretty good grasp of the rules. As a hindsight, maybe I should have paid more attention to their game, but luckily Seraphi was there to explain some rules while I was busy talking about videogames. ;)

They seemed quite interested and it's a really welcome thing to have more players!

I also played one game with Seraphi. He played Retribution with Vyros and I had Menoth with pFeora. It was a close win for me, but I'll have to say that he played a better game than I did. He got more out his feat than I did of mine and forced me to try a sloppy assassination as my army was getting it's butt kicked. After a few failed attack rolls, my attempt failed. To be honest, I would have needed better than average rolls to succeed. Not crazy rolls, but slightly better than average. It just happened that he rolled really bad on his most important damage roll against feora and she was left with one damage box when my turn started. Vyros was slaughtered by Feora after that.

It seems that it's easy to build Warcaster kill opportunities that have a decent rate of success, but it takes real skill to pull off reliable assassinations. Lot, I mean LOT of our games have ended to retaliation after a failed caster kill attempt.

After quite a few games with Cleanser, I'll have to say that I still like them, but they are not very good. One guy at the PP forums described their main issue well, they are anti-infantry unit that has big problems hitting infantry. I've had most success with them when I play pKreoss as my caster. His feat turns them to monsters for one turn. +1 to hit that pSeverius offers does not seem to be quite enough... Their combined ranged attack is decent, but not great. It's cloud effect is also decent, but because it's a ranged attack with rng 8, placing it to gain most out of the cloud is not that easy. You could get quite powerful combined ranged attack from them if you play a full unit, but for 8 pts and rng 8... Nah. Also, their spd and defensive stats suck ass. But their gun is awesome. This makes up a lot. Pow is great, spray is great and continuous fire is both cool and effective. ;)

They are not horrible, but it seems to me that Repenter is a better deal for less points. I will keep playing them as flame throwers are pretty much the coolest thing ever and hopefully I will learn more about using them effectively.

It's weird how they seem to end up shooting the opposing caster. It's often not my goal at the start of the game, as with their range warcasters are hard to reach, but somehow they just end up getting that combined ranged attack to opponents caster. pSorscha met a painful end this way a while back. :)

Few games and thoughts of eGhaspy

Today few of my friends visited for some Warmachine madness. I played one game with Hannu who plays Cryx. We rolled throwdown for scenario and he won the roll for starting player. I'm going to tell what happened, as it got kinda weird. :)

When we deployed, I knew it was going to be a hard game. He had Bane Thrall bomb with tartarus, eGhaspy and one cheap melee warjack. I had pFeora, min unit of cleansers, min choir, Reckoner and Crusader. He set up with Ghaspy and his jack on one flank, Banethralls kind of in the middle with tartarus. I deployed cleansers on the left flank and everything else to the right flank. My plan was to run and grab one objective with everything else and keep the other with cleansers. I knew that he would not run Tartarus or Bane Thralls to take that objective as Cleansers have those nasty flame throwers and he would have only one target there to kill. In his first turn he ran everything closer to the objective on my right. That is when I knew that I have the left objective and my plan was to just commit everything to hold that other one in round three. I went closer, Feora did not run as she cast Fire Wall to hamper movement of the thralls. Next turn he ran closer to the objective and covered his forces with cloud effects.

I took position and used fire wall to stop his thralls from charging. I had to leave reckoner open to charge from his jack as I knew that objective was my biggest chance for winning. His next turn he ran everything close to the objective, charged and hurt my Reckoner really bad with his jack. Ghaspy threw clouds. After his movement I noticed that I calculated his movement wrong. He had enough Thralls close to objective and in such positions that killing them and his jack on the objective would be really difficult. That's when I came up with a crazy plan. My plan was to throw Feora with Crusader, get up with one focus, cast engine of destruction and unleash a can of whoop-ass on Ghaspy! I couldn't charge him because of his spell, but with 8 spd, I figured that I could reach him.

I then threw Feora. Rolled for scatter. Rolled straight back to Crusader! Dang, it was so close! But I did not throw the towel in. She has two flame throwers and I had some focus on me. Flamed on, hit him with first flamethrower. Rolled triple sixes for damage! Then I rolled the next flamethrower and sadly, missed. But he was still on fire. On the opponents turn, he rolled that the fire kept on burning. I rolled for damage. He was left with ONE box! I came so close! Obviously he would have been on trouble if I had reached close combat, but when you take a risk, it's no use to go "if....". He brutally murdered Feora on his turn, obviously.

It was a risky move, but it came so close. I could have just moved crusader in and cast Blazing Effigy on him to kill those banes. But then I would have had only two focus for Feora and Reckoner to kill that slayer. I could have also murdered slayer with my two jacks and flamed those thralls, but I don't think I had the chance to move to such a position that feora would have catched all contesting thralls with her flamers. I thought it would be tons more fun to try this and I think that plan had almost the same chance of success.

I could have left that objective and retreated, but I already made a huge investment to hold the other objective with cleansers and I knew that he would just murder me with thralls and then his feat on the other corner. Cleansers would have not been fast enough to reach combat anymore, especially when he could just cast his clouds to hamper their movement.

eGhaspy and thralls are really nasty, but I welcome the challenge. The hardest part of it is that I don't see any glaring weaknesses that I could focus on. Obviously he doesn't have much room for shooting, but with the clouds and stealth as a delivery system, he rarely needs any. One local player is getting little frustrated with them and even I kinda hope that Hannu does not use them in every game he plays in our slow grow-challenge. ;)

But like I said, it's a welcome challenge.

Edit/ DarkLegacy corrected me on the rules for shaking knockdown, you can do it in the control phase only. That made the Feora assassination attempt an illegal move as I used a focus to shake her knockdown on her activation phase. I had misunderstood the rule. I'll remember that in the future, thank you for the correction!