The Battle of Beards
Fantasy Mega Battle Championships, Game 1

	Battle Report: The Challenge Strateegery Turn 1 Turn 2 Turn 3 Turn 4 Turn 5 Recap

Strateegery
(Like strategy except sneakier)

Gary: Matt and Nidal are pretty cocky so at the beginning of the battle, I told them that we were using 18 war machines and the rest Dwarf warriors. It was fun to see all of the color drain from Matt's face. I thought if I couldn't beat them, I could at least scare the hell out of them for about 30 minutes.

Playing Dwarves in a giant mega-battle against Chaos Dwarves is very difficult. If I could choose my army, I would go with some flame cannons and maybe some gyrocopters for war machines, no crossbow men and the rest troops. Since the field will be very crowded with your own troops, you can only place war machines and crossbowmen on hills or else they can't shoot. However, if you place your war machines and crossbow men on hills, they will get hit by one or more earth shaker cannons each turn and their shooting will be greatly reduced while all crossbowmen will not be able to shoot at all. If the size of the target was a pinhead and the template of an earth shaker cannon was a dime, Matt & Nidal could hit the pinhead 9 out of 10 times. Unfortunately, in order to create an army of 7,500 points, Herb and I had to throw everything we had to make up the points. That meant that our bolt throwers, cannons, rock throwers and crossbowmen would all lose their effectiveness by turn two or three. Outnumbered and with minimally effective war machines, the outcome didn't look good for the Dwarves but don't tell a Dwarf that.

Our plan was to hold both flanks of our line against the enemy and initiate a breakthrough in the center of the line with our huge unit of Ogres and some elite Dwarf units. When we finished setting up the board, it was obvious that we were greatly outnumbered all along the battlefield and that breaking through the Chaos Dwarf line anywhere was going to be tough.

Herb: Gary informed me of the little joke he played on Matt and Nidal. 18 War machines! Shoo weee momma that would've been fun! Would that we had the models! As it was I thought we had a well-balanced army with some decent, hard hitting, pipe carrying dwarfs. Oh yeah and Golgfag and a bunch of his friends. Damn near twenty fear causin', three wound carryin', S4 T4 2 attack, standard carrying monsters! What a unit! In retrospect we should've put all of the missile troops into two big units, one of which could've been Rangers. I was sure we would be outnumbered, so I thought we could refuse a flank and hit the other flank hard with the meat of our army. Hopefully the plethora of opposing units would get in the way of each other. Against most armies setting your dwarf artillery on a hill is a good idea, now I know it is not against guys who only know how to roll hits on the artillery dice. We could anchor the refused flank with the slayers and the hammerers two very difficult units to shift (my understatement of the year). Nice simple plan. Doomed, but it seemed good at the time.