Thanks guys.
Turn 4 continued:
With Octavian having got one of his hand to hand guys in amongst my decidedly weaker 3rd Vent team and with Jugger getting onto the top level of the middle tower, it would be fair to say that the fight had started to go a little sideways on me.
That’s not to say that I was losing – I still had a lot of moves to make and just as you never judge a wicket until both teams have batted on it, the balance of a game of Necromunda can’t be determined until both sides have had their turn.
First order of business was to sort out all this bullamphetamine parrot going on down at the other end of the table with Boaz and Amon. Given that Boaz was pinned and Amon was engaged in hand to hand with one of Octavian’s more competent combat monkeys, this could have turned into a complete disaster.
For those who might have temporarily forgotten how pinning works, this is it: If you get hit, but don’t go down, you get pinned. At the start of your next turn, if you have a team mate within 2” you can test against initiative to recover from pinning and carry on as usual. If you fail, or if you don’t have a friend close by, then you spend the turn pinned (cowering like a wuss). You automatically recover at the end of your turn*.
Given that Boaz has only got I3, this was potentially bad. And it got worse when he failed that roll, leaving Amon at the mercy of Grimskull. If Amon went down, it would leave Boaz open to being charged by both Bonecrack and Grimskull on the following turn, and that would be a hard fight for him to win.
Luckily though, Boaz has Nerves of Steel, allowing him to retake a failed pinning test. And he passed that test and rose up to his feet and turned around to Grimskull who was locked in close combat with Amon. The pilot light of his flamer flickered blue.
That was all well and good, but Bonecrack was back on his feet and would be in a position to cause trouble and needed to be dealt with. Ram was the man for that job. Ram is not only a very capable shooter these days, but with his Leap ability, he can move fast over obstacles and with his WS4, he is a genuine allrounder. That extra manuverability was key in this case, since it let him get to the bottom of his tower and move another few inches onto the top of a barrel to get an unobstructed shot at Bonecrack. And he got that hit with a bolt round, wounding him but only doing a fleshwound.
Once again, the Tower in the centre of the table was key to the battle. Jugger had busted through my defensive ring, and that breach had to be plugged in such a way as to not allow other gaps to open up. Far from easy.
At first glance, this would normally look like a pretty easy fight for my guys to win. Afterall, Cawdor and Goliaths are both close combat gangs, and my guys outnumbered his. That is sound reasoning, but it wasn’t true in this case. Normally, one on one, I would back my guys over House Bloodaxe – afterall, I have been collecting underdog experience nearly every game I have played, so individually, my guys are all more experienced than his guys.
The problem is that I have generally been spreading my skills between Ferocity, Agility and Combat, (and also picking up Techno skills wherever possible) whereas Octavian has been concentrating purely on Combat skills. Diversifying in that regard was a sound strategy for my gang, and it has ultimately served me well, but no strategy can cover every scenario, and right now, it looked like this might be a hole that my guys might not be able to fill.
The benefit of Combat skills in a close combat situation needs no explanation – Every Combat skill makes a fighter better. Agility skills are more diverse in their application, but several of them assist in getting into close combat, and Sprint and Leap in particular assist greatly in getting the charge bonus, which is often decisive. In fact, it is the access to Agility skills which makes Cawdor superior to Goliaths. But in this case, they were irrelevant because the distance between the fighters was only about 4” at most. Ferocity skills are morale based and tend to help a gang soak up damage and stay in the fight. They are of only peripherall value in melee combat.
So on one hand, my guys had a spread of Combat, Agility and Ferocity skills, and on the other Octavian had a choice of Combat, Ferocity and Muscle. Octavian has never been a fan of Ferocity skills (the shear weight of House Bloodaxe numbers has made morale unnecessary), and he abandonned the Muscle skill table after the first few turns of the campaign, so Bloodaxe, Jugger and Silverback are all Gang Champion level gangers loaded up on Combat skills and well equipped to boot thanks to the incredible income that House Bloodaxe has enjoyed for so long.
Normally, that wouldn’t be too much of a big deal for Abraham, Abijah, Asa, Josiah and Zohar (especially with a high ground and numbers advantage), because they all have the Agility skills which would give them the charge and grant them bonuses which would tip the balance in their favour, despite the inferiority of their equipment. But in this case, my guys didn’t have the charge advantage. Jugger had already taken out Esau (who actually is a bit of a Tremultuous O) and was in close combat with Asa, who really does depend on the charge bonus to be able to take down an opponent since most of his Combat skills are defensive in nature.
This meant that I had a decision to make. Silverback was in position to charge up the Western side of the tower, but Josiah and Zohar had that covered. Bloodaxe was ready to launch himself up the Northern ladder, but was covered by Abraham and Abijah and couldn’t defeat them both at once. The problem was to the Eastern side. Jugger had curbstomped Esau and was fighting Asa, and would probably ultimately win. If I let that continue, then he would be able to charge one of my other guys, gain the advantage of the charge and maybe defeat them, but at least draw that guy away from the ladder, thus allowing his mate to fight my other guy one on one. Obviously, I wasn’t going to stand by and let that happen.
So I decided to stomp down hard on Jugger and sent Abijah (from the North) and Josiah (West) into the melee to aid Asa. The chances of Jugger surviving a single round against the three of them was very remote, and would force Joffrey to take a morale check, potentially winning me the territory, assuming I could take out one other Goliath that turn.
Back up at my ranged team, Jacob simply had no one to shoot at because I had originally set him up towards the back of the tower to let Ram and Joshua soak up bullets. As a result people at ground level were simply out of his line of sight, so I had to spend his turn moving up next to Isaac. He could still shoot his backup lasgun though, but he missed his target who was still choking on gas. Isaac stayed on Overwatch.
Abraham stayed on Overwatch over the northern ladder and Zohar stayed on Overwatch over the Western ladder. The only other shooting I had was Boaz with his flamer.
Genius utilises a variety of different tools to expresses itself in a myriad of different ways. Rembrandt used paint and brushes to turn a blank canvas into beautiful paintings. Michaelangelo used a hammer and chisel to turn slabs of marble into breathtaking sculptures. Boaz uses a tank of promethium and a flamer unit to turn people into smouldering corpses.
Boaz had two potential targets to express his genius on. The first was Bonecrack, who was wounded and pinned and thus out of the fight for another turn. The second was Grimskull, who was about to cleave off a chunk of Amon’s arse and hand it to him. Grimskull then was the higher value target. Of course flamers are not exactly the most discriminating of weapons, so that would mean hitting Amon too, making it a somewhat difficult decision.
Not too difficult though. Boaz blasted Grimskull with fire, also catching Amon who failed to dodge (in Necromunda, a model that is only partially covered by a template is only hit on a 4+, and I had positioned Boaz and the template so that Amon had a chance to avoid the hit). This wasn’t quite as ruthless as it might have seemed. Amon has 3 wounds, and Grimskull has only one, so even in a worst case scenario, Amon wasn’t going down. Boaz is also a Crack Shot, so he could reroll the wound table if Grimskull was lucky enough to only suffer a fleshwound. Amon would then autoremove him in the combat phase.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. The fire burnt a wound off Amon and Grimskull just took the roasting like a champion. All those hours under the sunlamp at the Goliath gym must have paid off.
So it was time for the close combat phase.
Amon is not my best fighter at the best of times, and this was not the best of times, Grimskull getting 3 hits and wounding with all three. That allowed him to follow up into Boaz using his Impetuous skill. Boaz would be a much harder prospect than Amon, but that was still not an ideal situation.
Up on the middle tower, I gave Asa first crack at Jugger. Jugger was the stronger fighter, but Asa has three wounds and Step Aside, giving him a 4+ save in close combat, so I figured that even if Jugger won, he wouldn’t be taking Asa down. Jugger did win, and did not take Asa down, dealing only a single wound. Josiah went next, and fumbled badly, losing the combat and also taking a wound. I still had Abijah though, and with the charge and numbers bonuses he was rolling an extra three attack dice with +3 to hit, which was more than he needed to deal with Jugger, whom he bathed in fire with hand pistol before kicking him off the edge of the tower, which was quite sufficient to take him out of action.
End of Turn 4: Up/Down/Out
House Bloodaxe: 11/2/5
Hand of Redemption: 9/0/4
*From the above, you can see how it is possible to ‘pin-lock’ an enemy out of the game, which is what Ram was doing to Smackhand earlier in the game. Pin-locking via Overwatch (ie using a model on Overwatch to re-pin a model that had managed to recover from pinning at the start of its turn) was/is a weakness of the living (undead?) rulebook, and has been fixed up in the Necromunda Community Edition Rules to allow models pinned by Overwatch fire to automatically recover at the end of the turn on which they were pinned. It is for this rule change, more than any other (and there are a multitude of other excellent changes) that I have repeatedly nominated Mr Anthony Case for a mention in the Queens Honours list for the last several years. His repeated snubbing is an indictment on the entire British Honours system*.
*Honestly – Paul Collingwood scores a measley 17 runs in an Ashes test and he gets an MBE whereas Anthony Case spawns a new epoch in miniature wargaming and soldiers on, unrecognised, his genius unappreciated, forced to endure the drudgery of the endless cocaine and hooker parties of the Necromunda gaming subculture in total obscurity. It’s fundamentally unjust.
