Cassius vs Borka

Well kids, I already failed to do what I had said/wanted to do because I completely forgot that I wanted to take pictures while I was playing.  I only managed to get in one game though, so I might be able to remember what happened enough to post a little bit about it.  First, here's the list I brought

Cassius the Oathkeeper
- Wurmwood, Tree of Fate
- Gorax
- Warpwolf Stalker
- Shadowhorn Satyr

Celestial Fulcrum
Farrow Bone Grinders (min)
Shifting Stones
- Stone Keeper
Gallows Grove x2
Swamp Gobber Bellows Crew
Tharn Wolf Riders (max)
Wolves of Orboros (max)
- Wolves of Orboros Chieftain & Standard

I squared off against Borka and his Family Reunion theme force from No Quarter.  I don't remember the entire list, but the important part of the list is that he had a full unit of Boomhowler & Co along with 1 full unit of Trollkin Champions + Skaldi and another 2 min units of Champions.  He also brought the stone bearer unit so armor was a bit on the ridiculous side.

I've played against this exact army before with a Baldur list, and I have to tell you that I pretty much got no where with it that time.  This time I'm kind of thinking that maybe Hellmouth will help out or something.  Tree is relatively safe since the only thing with shooting are Boomhowlers, and they weren't too likely to pose a giant problem.

Deployment:
I won the die roll, we're playing the Guidons scenario.  In hindsight, I probably should have gone for the scenario win ... but that's now only occurring to me as I type this, not so much as we were playing.  Anyway, I opted to setup first.  The Fulcrum needed to be pre-deployed so I dropped it down in the middle of the deployment zone.  Then I deployed the Wolves on the right flank, Wolf Riders on the left flank, Cassius and the beasts got deployed in the middle-ish on either side of the Fulcrum.

He deployed everything in basically a giant, trolly brick with Boomhowler right in the middle, and champions on each side of the brick.  He would have some advance move later.

I did my advance deploy, putting the shifting stones in a giant triangle since I had the UA, putting the gallows groves out about as far as I could and putting Wurmwood sort of middle-ish.  Nothing fancy here.  He went ahead and advance moved with Boomhowlers and I think the stone bearer unit.

A bit of self-analysis is that that playing the Fulcrum and feeling like it needed to be in the middle to be helpful sort of made positioning everything else awkward for the tree to acquire souls.  CMD 10 is pretty large, but I think with my initial thinking the WoO would have been more in the middle for getting souls.

Round 1:
Traditional round 1, I ran basically everything forward.  Teleported the shifting stones to the place they'd be for the rest of the game.  Ran the beasts forward, teleported the gallows groves forward, Wolf Riders ran their ridiculous 18" basically straight ahead.  And so on.  He went ahead and did much the same on his turn, other than the boomhowlers that were far enough forward that they just moved ahead and a couple of them attempted, and failed to his the wolf riders with shooting (he needed 10s).  Nothing really big here.

Round 2:
First, I teleported Wurmwood up, tried to kill some champions with the Fulcrum ... that wasn't happening at all apparently.  Stupid ARM 20 8 hit-box things.  The idea had been that I'd get some souls.  I tried to see if I could charge them with my Wolves, 2 closest ones weren't even close.  So the rest of the unit just spread out.  I pulled Wurmwood back behind the Fulcrum with Cassius, put Curse of Shadows on the unit of Champions on the other side that were the prey for my wolf riders.  Wolf Riders tried to do some damage and might have killed one of the 6 of them before retreating.

He then went ahead, moved his stuff up, Boomhowlers in front of my Fulcrum and Wolf Riders, Champions killed off some of the wolves, other Champions went after my wolf riders I believe.

Rest:
At this point I'm not really going to get into details about how the play went.  Basically, I was in a place where it was more or less impossible for me to get anything done.  I teleported my Stalker to try to kill some boomhowlers which got super tough.  I took 3 shots at the 1 boomhowler model in front of the Fulcrum and failed to kill it.  Hellmouthing targets wasn't really doing much either, since mostly even boosted I was still at dice minus 8, so I'm just scratching them at best.

Eventually, the game had gone long for a variety of reasons and my girlfriend was done having Deathjack eat Epic Haley (I hear her soul was delicious).  He left a small opening where my caster would be able to sit.  I have no idea what sort of stats Borka has as far as DEF/ARM, and he's only got 1 fury.  I teleport Cassius literally as far forward as possible.   I cast Unseen Path to move the tree within 2", again going as far as I can, and then teleporting Cassius and having probably only a few millimeters with which to set him behind the champions he'd moved over there.  So I've got a POW 12 and 7 fury ... nope.  He's apparently like ARM 21 between Unyielding and the Stone.  Whelp that didn't work!  Game over, but hey now I can go get food.

Assessment:
Having played against this list twice now, I have not figured out much of a good way of dealing with it.  I don't know that Cassius was the right answer at all, or at minimum not that build.  I looked at it just a bit ago, and I realized that he was mis-playing the Stone Bearer unit, because you have to pay a fury off of it to use the Protective Aura ability that was giving everything the ARM bump, and also that its by model, not by model/unit so some of the individual models would have been out of the 9" area at times.

Either way, the only model I have capable of dishing out enough damage to kill off things that are ARM 20 and 8 boxes was my Stalker and maybe my goat with Primal.  I suppose some dedicated CRAs or something and I could have put a hurting on the units a model at a time, but that would have definitely been slow goings.  I probably should have worried less about using the Gallows Groves for channeling and used them more as a way to eliminate Tough on the Boomhowlers.

Not completely ready to give up on this list just yet, as I don't think this was a good representation of what  I will see to play against and I do think that it has some good stuff to offer.  Since I didn't manage to get in another game its much harder to tell.

Edit: Was missing the Shadowhorn in the list, doh!

Hello World.

As any good nerd would do, I'm putting up the obligatory Hello World post.  The purpose of this blog is largely for me to be able to keep track of how my games go so that I can get better.  I figured that if i'm going to do that a blog would certainly do just fine!  Intent here is to have some quick pictures to add to this from games and then try to remember what the hell I was doing at the time.  At the end hopefully I improve by doing this.  Or maybe I'll just ramble to myself on the internet, its anyone's ballgame  at this point really!

Oh, and just for clarity, the name of the blog is 1/2 because of Warmachines/Hordes I play Hordes (specifically Circle Orboros) and Manrus is a long running joke amongst many of my gamer friends.  So there you have it!