With our next local tournament just around the corner I started to think which faction I should play. I think that competitive list construction should be strictly connected with missions, but I think I want to do something a bit different this time. Instead of specific battleplans lets look at the missions from higher level and generalize a bit. Let’s look at kill missions. In general, most kill missions have a problem that the team with bigger guy wins. As destruction has access to the biggest guys, I think it’s logical to start here. On the other hand, including titans must lead to lower number of fighters and as generally objective missions are won by numbers advantage it leads to a situation when you must make a compromise between the quantity in form of numbers and the quality in form of big guys (I start to think that having this compromise is the most important aspect of keeping any form of balance in the game). At this point we are only considering the number of fighters and their profiles/cost, but hopefully we can cheat a bit here with abilities. Firstly, we can try to avoid spending some of our precious 1000 points on mobility of our biggest guys if they have a mobility enhancing ability, so if possible, let’s try to do it. Secondly it would be great if we could do something similar with our numbers and there are only 2 ways of doing that and luckily one of them is available for Ironjawz – You messin’
(2nd is a new double available for all CoS Dispossed, which presents SCE with dwarven support exciting perspective of reaching double digit number of bodies on objectives for the first time, but let’s not get sidetracked). As we want Destruction titans(basically Ogre fighters) that can be allied in to any faction and access to You messin’ that also can be allied in let’s consider our options. We can either go with Ironjawz/Ogres to save at least one ally slot, or go with other faction if it has access to better chaff. As our “numbers trick” require 15+ wounds the choice of chaff we will use is limited to 3 orc factions and I believe Ardboyz are head and shoulders above competition here. This process leads to Ironjawz, so let’s start brewing with them.
Paragraphs above already prepared a template of a list: 1-2 big Ogres that will dominate in kill missions and as much other bodies (ardboyz) as possible with access to You messin’ (some brute). The cost of fighters we can chose from naturally leads to the list below:
As 6 bodies is an extremely low number, Gutlord’s 3 attacks are very unreliable and we have 10 unspent points, lets refine the list a bit. As our Titans will be individual operators we want a bit more predictable damage than 3 swingy attacks and as we want to increase our numbers let’s switch to Crushers as our titans of choice.
7 bodies is a minimum amount that I’m comfortable with, but there are still some aspects that can be refined. We want 2 titans for redundancy and any form of “net resistance”, but on the other hand we would like similar redundancy with You messin’ and 7 is still a very low number. I was thinking on the next step for a long time and the solution (that is obvious in hindsight) came to me in form of simple math: 245 = 175 + 70. One of the Ogors can be scaled down to second Brute and it leaves ally slot open for a brewgit. This simple change fixes all of the problems, as we receive additional body and all of our big guys damage potential can be elevated even further with Brewgit double.
With one change we received spare source of You messin’ and increased both our big guys and our numbers. The final version of the list:
I think the main concept behind the list is cheating with abilities – you can have a cake and eat it too on few fronts. I already mentioned that with big guys + brewgit double we have the biggest guys and with 8 bodies and fast kills/you messin’ we can quickly gain numbers advantage. The mobility cheat I mentioned in the beginning is gained thanks to the combination of 3 abilities below.
Despite the fact that I really like this list, I already won a tournament with similar list (I had Gutlord and 140 point brute instead of Crusher and 175 point brute, so if you want S6 on your Ogre you can consider my “old” list) and I won’t paint my dwarves in time I’m still not sure which faction to bring to the tournament as I didn’t terrorize people with my Grave Guards for quite some time and my last 4 tournaments were all order and destruction, so I don’t know.
As always thanks for sticking to the end, I hope you like this shorter form, bye.
Overthinking Warcry 