Shamash and I have developed the tradition of having one last big goofy game to end each campaign season, where I turn on all the optional army rules and build a silly list out of all the mercenary models I can legally field. In previous years this has led to some pretty wild games as three combat groups of random mercs charge across the battlefield and overwhelm Aleph with sheer numbers.
This does not work in N4. Nor in Panic Room. Nor when my dice betray me.
Things went wrong almost immediately. Two of my four Yuan Yuan whiffed their PHY roll and spent the game doing not much at all. The various Kum couldn't rely on smoke to keep them safe since Atalanta and the Marut have MSV-2. And when I did manage to get close to anything I just kept losing face-to-face rolls. I did manage to Isolate the Marut with one of the Nazarova twins – which one I could not tell you because I keep mixing up their names, but not their models – which was fun purely from a perspective of cold, cruel spite, but ultimately Shamash just parked Penthesilea and Achilles in the Panic Room and killed everyone who tried to go near it.
It was a combination of factors:
N4 doesn't allow the kind of swarm like N3 did. Only being able to field 15 models hurt pretty bad. I couldn't swarm with Muttawi'ah and Kum and various mercenaries. I also couldn't field more than 85 points of mercenaries, so I also couldn't live then dream of getting McMurrough to get into a gentleman's sword-to-the-face competition with Achilles. I also had very few regular orders to pump into the irregular troops, and I went into Loss of Lieutenant on my first turn, massively kneecapping my second turn.
Panic Room is also just a terrible scenario for this kind of madness. The army I brought was ill-suited to take-and-hold since each model was fairly cheap and had a very low chance of being able to go toe-to-toe with either Atalanta (due to her CC -6 trait) or Achilles (being Achilles is a raging volcano in the shape of a man).
I also set up the table a bit poorly – normally this kind of setup is fine for the kind of cautious approach we use for Panic Room but it was very bad for having to move a lot of light units up very quickly.
Finally I just whiffed an awful lot of rolls. I failed almost every face-to-face roll I made, losing a full third of my models in the first turn. Which is bad for morale and worse of efficacy.
In the end at the bottom of turn two, as I was surveying the battlefield, I realized I simply couldn't win or even force a draw – even if I had managed to move a single model into the Panic Room I couldn't dominate it in any way, and that model would never survive Achilles and his best gal Penthesilea's AROs.
A pretty firm win for Shamash, which to be frank was a long time coming – he's had terrible luck the last few weeks so it as about time he delivered a sound thrashing.
YouTube video: my army is the Clown.
At least you tried for something cool! Panic Room itself drains a lot of fun, so don’t worry.
We are all slaves to the will of the dice. Better luck next time.
Those are both silly lists.
Challenge him to a rematch with the FREE GAME option