The High Elf experience

[Meals]

Hi all,

So you've all seen the double comet list I posted last year, devised after almost losing the plot from playing Dwarves 4/5 games in a stretch following the ETC. Anyway now I'm back in the Land of the Long White Cloud, I've started building the list, from the bottom up. I'm gonna try to paint this army as I get models slowly rather than do my usual fail of buying everything playing it to the death and then finally finishing it as I get bored of the army, assuming I finish it at all...


This will be my Learning the HEs thread, where, if I remember to, I'll post my Bat reps as I play. This is something I've always wanted to do but never remembered. I think writing things down will help me digest the information better, but we shall see.


So the orignal list was:

Archmage,
   Silver Wand (+1 Spell), 4+Ward
   Level 4 - The Lore of Heavens

Noble - Battle Standard Bearer, Great Weapon, Dragon Armour
   Banner of the World Dragon

Mage, Level 2 - Fire
   The Seerstaff of Saphery (Firreball, Flamecage), The Amulet of Light
   
15 Archers, Musician, Standard Bearer, Banner of Eternal Flame
10 Archers, Musician
10 Archers, Musician
10 Archers, Musician
14 Spearmen, Musician

27 White Lions of Chrace, Full Command, Champ, The Gem of Courage, Banner of Swiftness
15 Phoenix Guard, Full Command, Banner of Sorcery
Tiranoc Chariot,
Tiranoc Chariot,

Great Eagle
Great Eagle
Great Eagle

The idea being: chaff stuff up, shoot off their chaff, and then run two near invulnerable units (magicallly speaking) into the middle of the table and play Comet chicken with my opponent.

After a little bit of thinking/reading/discussion, I don't think Comets are quite relliable enough to do solid damage to large units (they maim small units quite happily). Also Archers don't do enough (if anything) to rely on them dealign with Regen, so I decided to change the Lvl2 to Fire with Fireball and Flame Cage. Flamecage is ace because a) it messes with movement (if I'm gonna rely on Comets this is always helpful) b) in good combination with Windblast, it can maim large horde units if I have the PD left.

So getting  back to the bat reps.


Game 1.

Playing Pete Dunn with Ogres.

Pete has won pretty much every tourney he's played in the last year, and he's running filthy Ogres so this should be the best way to learn surely? Jumping in the Deep end and all...

His list was pretty much the Standard 3 by 2 MF ogre list, and you all know the drill by now, so I'll skip that part (Excellent army book design btw, GW  )

Deployment:

Ok I royally !@%$#%@ this up, I intended to sort of sweep the Lions around from one flank (as this should minimise number of units he could react with) while holding up units as much as possible with the chaff but with a fair number of buildings on the table, I ended up with my army split in two by a building and my White Lions w/BSB stuck behind some archers as I'm a complete tool and forgot to leave space for them. Good start! The Lvl2 and flamming archers took up said building, with other archers, spearmen and a couple Eagle on the other side in pretty much the centre of the table

Pete's Ogres were pretty central as usual (big blocks w/ Characters surrounded by MF) with the Ironblasters and some scouting Maneaters facing the flank with my Lions.

T1: Pete ran up the Maneaters into the face of the Archers holding up the Lions and pushed the rest forward at the other half of my list (a few units of archers, and spearmen) to kill them off while avoiding the Lions, as they'd likely maul the big units.
Magic did nothiing. Shooting saw both Tiranoc chariots targeted by Ironblasters (there wasn't much else to shoot with a cannon...) One died, luckily not the one surrounded by units out of BSB range (did I mention I !@%$#%@ deployment  )

My T1: I just pushed a few Eagles/chariot, archers up in the way of Mournefang and sorted myself out to hopefully kill of the Sabretusks with shooting, so they couldn't be annoying, and maybe cause some panic.
Magic dropped a Comet just in front of his main units in the centre but nothing else. Then my shooting faild miserably, 1 wound on a Sabretusk from 40 odd shots... WOOT!!!

T2: Pete charged the Maneaters into the archers then the Eagle in their way, I fled with both through the Lions, forgetting about the Sabretusk who then ran the archers off the table. Joy... On the other side, one Eagle took the Gutstar for the team, and the remaining Eagle and Chariot did a funtime double flee on the closest MF unit. Rest of the Ogres faffed about trying to avoid the Comet (useful already!)
Comet stayed up which was nice, his magic didn't do jack, but the Ironblasters killed the last Chariot, and then took a pot shot at my Lvl4, and I dutifully failed my LoS, but made my squeaky bumtime Wardsave (skills!)

In my Turn 2, The Lions charged the Maneaters, the fleeing eagle ran off the table, clearly heading to see its union about terrible working condtions, and the Spearmen tried to countercharge the MF in the flank but Pete fled with them. the rest of my centre took a few steps back to last another turn.
Comet stayed up again :) but in an effort to pop an Ironblaster and panic the other one, my Level 2 decided the warp was better fun than an Ogre army while the fireball did nothing in the process. my Lvl4 then decided to fail a 3 dice Curse of the Midnight Winds and that was 12 Power dice down the drain, yay!!!
Shooting stil couldn't kill a Sabretusk with 1 wound remaining, but thankfully the Lions turned the Maneaters into a fine paste without taking a wound at all. Something finally went right!

Petes turn 3: he decided to ignore the comet and stop dicking around, so charged the archers in the building with  MF, some other archers with the Bull block, and moved up the Gut Star and other MFs in support to hunt the stuff remaining in the centre. A Sabretusk charged my remaining Eagle, in an epic who's chaff is more useless in combat combat!
Magic still did jack all, (+5 to dispel rocks) but the Comet finally decided to land in all its S7 glory, killing the MF attacking my archers in the building, all but one of said archers and did about 10 wounds to the Bull block. Not bad! I could get used to this! Nothing paniced though...
Both Ironblasters decided to misfire, but didn't explode... apparently Gnoblars like climbing down the barrel
The remaing bulls cleaned out the archers and the Sabre tusk won combat by the charge bonus then ran down my Eagle. useless twat!

In my turn, we're pretty split by the building in the middle of my deployment zone so I really didn't have much to do. I pushed up the Lions to threaten the IBs, as they were so far away from everything else, and decided to just magic off whatever points I could and hold  my ownpoints. The Spears tried to run as far away as possible from the Guts. my lvl4 dropped both IBs to a wound or two each with a Chain Lightning, then she too decided the Warp was more fun and popped off after putting a comet in the middle of the table (basically seperating my remants from his army).

Theres not much left to say after this so in the remaining turns, Pete cleaned out the Spearmen with the Guts and remaining Archers with the Bulls, and the Iron Blasters ranaway from the Lions.

So Pete ended with the Big win, I only killed Maneaters and 1 unit of MF. though there was only 2 Bulls out of 8 left and both Blasters were almost dead... If my silly mages had stuck around, I would have had about 1500 pts on the table plus whatever they killed and probably could have clawed a small loss maybe a draw if I was lucky, but such is life...


Lessons:

1) White Lion horde goes front and centre! Thats not rocket science is it?
2) Spearmen can !@%$#%@ off! what a pointless unit... They do nothing whatsoever, any unit that basically needs Mindrazor to be effective is a waste of ink on a page.
3) Comet only needs 3 dice, I'll save it til last spell. Fire mage is good but need to test it more, could go back to Heavens ftw though!
4) The Pheonix Guard are too expensive to be a mage bunker hiding at the back. I need more of them, unfortunately I'm using Maiden Guard and thats looking impossible to achieve without winning lotto... I'll have to think about that one, any other ideas? Ideally I'd take 20+ with MR2 and run them next to the White Lions into the Comet fall but such is life.
5) Archers were crap but at least they can potentially kill chaff etc without being mauled in return, and what else can I do? Take Lothern Seagu... BAHAHAHA can't finish that sentence!
6) Chariots were just in the wrong place. With nothing else worth a cannonball in my list, they didn't have a chance. I'll keep using them as I believe the added Impacts are necessary for T3 elves to survive, but they may suffer Warmachines in the long term

ANyway thats my longwinded first bat rep, which hopefully made some sense, and there should be more to come.

Any thoughts are more than welcome

[Dave]

Initial thoughts - don't deploy like an idiot!

If he'd just ignored the comet early and run at you do you think it would have been even worse?

[cunningmatt]

Nice report. Good to see how other people are fairing with the High Elves.

Hopefully we can see some pics of your painting too?

[Meals]

Initial thoughts - don't deploy like an idiot!

If he'd just ignored the comet early and run at you do you think it would have been even worse?

Cheers for the thoughts, Dave 
Um, probably not too much, he didn't want to close with the Lions, and that was pretty much all that was left on my end anyway. Might have actually meant the Lions had an extra turn to get into him, tbh.

Matt, I'll post some soon, but my cameras a bit !@%$#%@ after I passed out with a bottle of water in Rome, so its tricky to take decent miniature photos... 

[fatolaf]

get painting buddy, wanna see your blue Elves

[Meals]

Not blue this time. They're gonna be Red, I've painted too many cold colours recently and need a change!

[Meals]

Slightly belated progress report due to a depressing lack of actual games...

Anyway, I went to Call to Arms on the weekend, its my old clubs annual convention, including Fantasy, 40k, Warmahordes DBmm and FOG and any other number of games on display. Someone also decided to call the local news and my fellow fantasy gamers sold me down the river to national television... you can call me the David Beckham of Wargaming (so overrated?)

Due to lack of models available, as the majority of my planned army is in transit from various sources, I had to use the remainder of my High Elf army from my tweens... It looks horrible, but it did mean Tyrion!!!

Anyway the list was as follows:

Tyrion
BSB on barded steed, rerollable saves, 5+Ward
Lvl 2 Shadow, Amulet of Light, extra spell
lvl 2 Light, Destroy scroll

33 Spearmen
14 Archers
10 Archers

7 Silver helms
6 Swordmasters
5 Reavers
5 Reavers
14 Phoenix Guard w/ Banner of Sorcery

3 Eagles


I ended the tournament 16th/24 on 49 BPs, so not great, but I wasnt expecting much more tbh. I mean look at that list! its fraking awful...

Game 1: beat Skaven 12:8 killed everything but Stormvermin block with all his characters which spent all game chasing Reavers
Game 2: lost to Lizardmen w/ Life Party Slaan 14:6. Over committed to a combat where Tyrion was holding up Engine and 30 Saurus just fine by himself and decided to throw in some combat res for the Lizzies and lost everything...
Game 3: Beastmen 11:9 loss, Went for 6dice Mindrazor ftw with my Spearmen into his Mino block with Doombull and Gorebull, failed miserably and lost them putting me on the back foot with a unit of 7A minos running around but Tyrion, BSB and the SMs ate the Beastlord and 30 Gor to claw it back abit.
Game 4: 12:8 vs Skaven, won the Tower but lost Tyrion to a Dwellers on Turn 6 cast by a Skaven Warlord with a wizarding Hat to draw it back. Thats unique in the history of time and noone can take that away from me!!!!!!!!!!!!
Game 5: 12:8 loss to Dwarves. Thankfully my opponent spread himself across the board, instead of castling so I thought I'd be nice and give him a game of Warhammer for his kindness. Tyrion ate a horde of Dwarves by himself, but couldn't finish off much else while the Warmachines took their toll...


SO thats a brief summary of the games, now I'm just gonna run through the units and what I thought of them. I view this tournament as learning about the army rather than actually competing for places.


Tyrion - Absolute combat beast, and I happily through him into the most stupid situations I could think of and watched him chew through massive units by himself. I just parked him in front of the hardest enemy unit, flamed the crap out them then take the charge and stick around for turn after turn slowly grinding through the unit. Highlight was smashing a Doomwheel then overrunning into Queek and taking his head off.
Still for all that, a normal Lord with a 1+rerollable does nearly the same job for about half the price, and he doesn't need to hide from cannonballs... Who decided Tyrion should be MC?

BSB - its a BSB... need I say more?

Level 2 Shadow - a bit meh tbh... I do not like Low level shadow casters as the spells are all too high and need too many dice. Generally ended up just spamming Miasma for 6 turns.

ASIDE: I also hate 6dice Mindrazor and I've finally concluded that its a terrible tactic for reliable results... for it to be worthwhile, you are generally putting yourself in a bad situation and hoping for some good dice. If you were gonna be winning combat anyway, why are you risking your caster exploding for little gain?? I don't get it...

Level 2 Light - she pretty much cast Magic missles for 5 games to drop units down to a manageable size. very nice choice imo. Light is easy to cast for a lvl 2.


33 Spearmen - What a shithouse unit...  I repeat OMG WHAT A SHITHOUSE UNIT!!!!! the only good thing they did was draw fire due to be being the biggest unit in my army, which apparently makes you scary?. Otherwise I couldn't think of a bigger waste of pts... a combat unit that relies on Mindrazor to actually combat anything = fail!!!!

Both Archers - didn't die once were great bunkers and actually provided very good counter battery fire, killing a WLC and 2 dwarf WMs. Best of the badly done mandatory pts sink that is HE core... Also make quite useful little combat units and chaff when pushed to it.


7 Silver helms - They are just awful, we all knew it and nothings changed... Even as a character bunker they are average, I'd rather have Dragon Princes for that too. Seriously no Magic Banner, GW??

6 Swordmasters - 90 pts of win!!! terrifying little speedbump and always killed so much on their inevitable race towards death. Killed half a unit of Hammerers  which is amazing if I have units to actually take advantage of it. Thats a keeper! Noone takes BS shooting much bar a couple armies, so keeping them alive wasn't too hard either, which was the once thing I worried about.

Phoenix Guard - Impenetrable mage bunker! Could tank almost everything when needed, ran off 2 Aboms in the end so surely twice can't be a fluke? Expensive though, if it wasn't for the Maiden Guard I'd probably take something else and put the Banner on Lions.

Reavers - just great, double fleeing deathstars was lots of fun!! sure they are vulnerable but an Eagle would die to the same target. Best moment was the look on some nubs face when I told him how good they were. Priceless mix of shock and disbelief! Oh well, high elf players can continue to think they are shit, their loss...

Eagles -  We all know this drill. combo with Reavers for silly good unit diversion though I think I had too many so I'm dropping one. in future.

Overall, the army was lacking a killer punch to give me the big win, Tyrion was effectively my only decent combat unit, and theres only so long you can run and hide. WLs are defo up next having finally arrived!

So thats all, some good lessons had and next tournie is in Auckland in a month, either double comet or a hilarious combo of Death magic and a mounted Nullstone Lord, to make the ultimate sniper/Deathstar destroyer army, which i thought of this morning. Oh none of your characters have a ward save anymore? how sad!!!

[jackhoneysett]

Someone also decided to call the local news and my fellow fantasy gamers sold me down the river to national television... you can call me the David Beckham of Wargaming (so overrated?)

International superstar!

I'm sure it was just because you were the most charming and attractive man there. Ok, it was a room full of wargamers... but still 

[Meals]

oh and I'd remiss not to summarise my thoughts on the following two things that were different from a standard Uk tournie.

Firstly, no comp on magic, Dwellers et al were at full effect, and I noticed nothing... played a Grey Seer, and a Life Slaan, and without any viable targets they didn't actually bother to cast either of the big spells. I also had the joy of not playing any true "deathstar" lists, and possibly the best story of the weekend was the Vamp player who lost his BK bus and 3 Vamps to Gateway. 

Honestly, it wasn't a problem at all, it just needed a tweak of army list design to make it so you weren't highly vulnerable to it (and the acceptance that the death of your 400pt SC could (and did) happen so you had to be able to deal with that loss.), which frankly was ace as Denial units were getting so dull and predictable in the UK. Tournie in Auckland is standard UK changes, so will be interesting to see the difference in a short turnaround. I personally will be taking my Deathstar killing army.



Secondly was Missions, All the rulebook ones bar Battle for the Pass with 600 VPs to the "winner".

Honestly my army didn't really notice them at all, being not dependant on any unit in particular if they were in the wrong place, and could take or leave most of them...  Watchtower is still utterly fail, but thats an issue with the building rules rather than the mission. I think they do add a bit of variety though, just maybe something outside of the rulebook ones is required. I look forward tova mission with 3 objectives across the centerline of the board being played in Auckland next month, encouraging adaptable builds that can handle spreading out a bit is a nice idea imo.

anyway that is all, go back to your British Summer!

[Meals]

International superstar!

I'm sure it was just because you were the most charming and attractive man there.

Yes, yes it was!