Intersite battle, comments

How to beat those cowardly High Elves?

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The golden arrow
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Intersite battle, comments

Post by The golden arrow »

The intersite battle is ended (see this thread) and I would really appreciate all your comments of the battle and how it was run as well as tips for me or anyone else who wants to do this again in the future.

I might add my own comments late, have not decided yet, but what I can say now is that it has been great fun and you guys are awesome warhammer tacticians as well and really nice blokes and I really hope that people who have read and participated in this has learned something from it.
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Lakissov
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Post by Lakissov »

So far, I will just say thanks to you, Golden Arrow, for organizing this whole thing. It really was great fun - especially during the starting stages, when the game wasn't so heavily biased in our favor.

I really hope to see more of such things in guture (e.g. against the High Elves). Also, I'd like to see the threads for the wood elves - it's really interesting to knwo what they were writing.

Also, thanks to everyone that participated in the battle from druchii side. It's the combined effort that made the victory possible (and some luck with dice, of course, as well).

Later, I'll make a bigger post with comments about the battle.
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Post by Cal'mihe »

Thanks GA for running this and Lakissov for championing our side!

For my part, I enjoyed participating, such as it was, and would do so again if the oppertunity presents itself.

I feel that this type of game is a conflict of opposing styles. On one hand you want defined actions before defined deadlines, which is something usually done most efficiently with either a single person or a well-defined command heirachy, at the risk of being restricted in its scope.
The other way, that of debate, discussion, flat command structure has the potential for more expansive thinking, at the risk of inconsistency, both in regards to deadlines and defined.

I think what made it a success for the participants of this side was that Lakissov very very quickly became the focal point of the whole thing for our side, the captain of the ship if you will.
Other people could suggest movements, make analysis, etc, but I guess it was ultimately Lakissov's summary which defined how our side acted, which I personally saw as a very good thing. The whole debate, then let the captain decide, approach allowed us to exploit the best of both the structured heirachy as well as the flat heirachy, so I would recommend that for future games of this kind.

It'd be interesting to hear from Lak how much effort this type of game consumed. I can only imagine that it would have consumed a ton of time to go through the options, settle on something, run the analysis, and finally commit to a detailed (especially for the magic, was awsome) explanation of precisely what will happen and with conditional triggers.

Interestingly, this type of playing probably suits itself greatly to showcasing the more advanced tactics, I certaintly learnt a lot and noticed that I suddently in my last two battles have begun using line of sight limits in order to force charges into certain flanks or fronts, something which I don't remember doing before :D

As for the game itself:
I personally thought the biggest thorn in our side was the Altar noble, though I see Asrai.org disagree with his usefulness, he was a constant threat to any of our support units, had a hideously big charge range, and was sufficiently decked out to be able to smash or severely damage anything he charged into. He gave the wood elves a significant strategic initative.
Turning point was probably when the attack on the right flank collapsed due to the treeman falling to his doom, it would have been interesting to see what might have happened if the dreadlord had gone toe-to-toe with him.

Lak, do you want to declare who should be Model of the Match for our side ? :p
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Post by Dumbledore »

Hi guys I followed your battle with quite keen interest. I am by no means an official ambassador but as a LM collector I'd expect the forum at pyramidvault.net to be more than up for a fun game like this. I am not an admin or anything but would happily present the idea to the rest. I understand that you might want a break after this successful campaign so I'm just putting the idea out there. (However if a game were to come into being I doubt I'd be capable of doing the maps etc.)
Hope to hear from you!
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Post by Lakissov »

Time for some comments from me

1. I like it that GA made both rosters. This really helped to make the game balanced.

As a side note, I quite like it that the setups for highborns for both armies were very unorthodox; in fact, in the same way that our dreadlord was able to kill the treeman, their highborn was able to kill the hydra (I've just taken a look at asrai.org, and the highborn had 6 attacks on the charge with autowounds, and additional wounds for each unsaved wound based on Ld differential; I haven't calculated the odds of killing the hydra with this, but I think they are around the same as for out dreadlord to kill the tree).

2. The timing is fine. One week per player turn is very good time. I think no change is needed here.

3. There were several cases when the orders of druchii (and asrai) sides were executed incorrectly. However, this is clearly due to human factor only - we are all people, and it's only natural that we get tired now and then, and don't notice some things.

Hence, I think that two things have to be done in future battles:
- summary posts with maps and clear instructions for each unit (that we did, and will hopefully be able to do also in future)
- a quick post-turn check, as soon as the organizer posts the results of the turn; this should be the responsibility of the captain; i didn't do it this time, but would definitely do it next time, and I would recommend any captain to do the same

now some comments on the battle:

4. I think, the moment when we really got the big advantage was when the highborn was neutralized. It was the biggest mistake asrai made int he battle - exposing this very fragile model to a chariot charge

5. the discussion was definitely much more detailed on our site than at asrai.org, at least in the beginning of the battle - and this resulted in more efficient behaviour of our troops in the first half of the game, ensuring us a victory in the end, even despite some failed panic tests in mid-game

6. as for time expenditure, the battle really took a lot of time from me, and, I suspect, not only from me but from several other guys here, who participated very actively int he discussion. still, if there is another battle in a month or so, I would participate with equal dedication.

7. the battle was also very good for finding out more about wood elves. this is not an army I play a lot against (actually, just played against once so far, and lost - but will soon have chance to play several games in an upcoming tourney). throughout the battle, I was checking the asrai army book many times, so now I know both their special rules and stats much better than before (in this respect, I would really like to play a similar game against skaven, who are another army I don't get to play against often).

8. I already gave thanks to people in general, but now I'd like also to mention some names:
Xerasi, Thanatoz, Cal'Mihe - you were there the whole game (ok, Cal'Mihe joined a bit later, but still), and participated very actively. It's the combined effort of several people that made the plans of the druchii side so thought-through, and your share in this combined effort was very big. (doesn't mean that I didn't notice the contribution of other people, but these ones are special).

Also I have to repeat that I'm amazed by Xerasi's ability with diagrams.

9. If one wants a druchii model of the battle, then I'd say it was our chariot. It was all the time there, on the left flank, scaring the hell out of any asrai unit, and it also allowed us to make the excellent second turn, removing the Asrai highborn from the game.

ah, all right, enough, time to go to bed =)

thanks again, GA, for organizing this thing. I'd like to do this again definitely.
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Post by Layne »

Excellent work all of you, for the honour of the Witch King, etc., awesome. I sincerely hope it is possible to organise more events like this. We would certainly put up an Intersite Battles sticky, and if it really got going we might even end up with a subforum.

Congratulations Lakissov and team, round of applause for The Golden Arrow for making it happen.

Well done to all concerned.
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Post by Calisson »

Dumbledore wrote:as a LM collector I'd expect the forum at pyramidvault.net to be more than up for a fun game like this.
:P More! I want MORE!!! Pleaaaaaase! :D
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Post by The golden arrow »

Well, I'm not active on any other warhammer forum than here and asrai.org, but if any of you guys would like to organise something like this I'm more than happy to help you out.
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Post by Cal'mihe »

One thought: Would it be beneficial to use our IRC chat more for this kind of thing ?
Some stages of the game, most noticeably deployment, has a lot of discussion tied to it, since that's where you define the format of the entire battle. Each individual turn is more restricted in its scope, since you're limited by where the units are placed already.
Maybe we can take this discussion into the chat in order to go through it faster and easier ?

I don't think we should make it chat based for all turns, maybe just for deployment so we have an oppertunity to hash out a general battle plan easier.

Natrually it would need to be copied into the forum so that those not part of the chat can see what has been agreed on.
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Post by Lakissov »

Actually, the one reason why I don't like chat is that you are forced to track more dynamically what others are saying, and hence aren't able to write really in-depth plans. It feels like everyone were talking at the same time, and nobody were really listening.

On a forum, you can really think well about the plan, and write a long post about it. Then everyone can read it and make proposals for alteration, etc. I think this provides a better result.
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Post by Brokenstone »

Yeah, cheers for putting it on and commiting to it everyone, it was quite interesting to be watching on for the most part. Appreciate the subtleties of it a little more with every battle i play, this is always defined by the quality of opponent, but in this case. Our own team brought just as much to be taken away from it without me even thinking very hard. Thanks muchly
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Post by Thanatoz »

I'm a bit late because I've been on vacation, but still some feedback here. I must say I've really enjoyed it. By participating and then seeing how others would do, I think really helped my own games.

I must say I'm impressed by Lakissov as captain: I nominated him early on because he seemed very active in the pre game thread, and his extensive summaries were complete and more then excellent. Congratulations to you. You've set a high standard for future captains; there's a huge difference in participating (as I did) and by outlining a detailed plan as you did. Thanks for the amount of time you put in.

But also to the others who participated and ultimately led us to victory. Although some luck was involved (our super dark riders who fought off the charge of both 8 dryads and 4 warhawks comes to mind).

@Golden Arrow: you've done a great job. Thanks also for the time and effort. I don't have any criticism that hasn't been said already.
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Post by Loki »

The only problem I can see with going to other armies is that you would pretty much need to steer away from heavy magic lists. If we were facing some heavy magic, its a lot harder to just let the Referee go do his best at defending. Since there may be times where we would attempt to dispel something on a 7 but not a 9, and if it happened several times a turn, that would usually end up with magic either being really nullified or overly powerful.
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Lakissov
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Post by Lakissov »

Given how we handled our own magic phase, I am rather confident that we'd be able to plan our magic defense in a similar way. It would be really interesting to try, for example against lizardmen, if someone were to organize a game (I personally wouldn't like to organize it, as I would be really willing to participate as a member of the druchii.net team)
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