Warhounds 2 Warmasters

Me, Myself and Alex… and the Wife.

As far as my local AT scene goes – and by this I mean ‘players within the local town’ – there aren’t actually too many of us currently.

Most of my intro games and, thereafter, test games played prior to an event have been played with James and his Legio Ignatum. Hailing from a town over, James ran a good event earlier in the year at Wycombe’s TableTop Republic. We try to get in more games, but life commitments and distance make it less than regular.

My long-suffering better-half learned to play Titanicus with me during lockdown. A lot of people learned crazier things. She has retained enough knowledge to get by – she knows what each titan is ans what it’s capable of, she knows the rounds and phases and she knows that she prefers mobility over firepower – Warhounds over Warlords for her. I won’t suggest she developed a keen interest, but try as she might to move on and focus on things more naturally interesting to her, which would probably include the observing of pigment drying stages by comparison, having a titan-obsessed husband has left her suffering pretty much constant exposure to titan related imagery, talk and surroundings. Long story, short: she has a ticket to Twisted Titanicus 2.0 in Ferbruary.

My local group does has one regular AT player, Alex, and then two or three others that have bought in but don’t play regularly.

Alex plays Astorum. This means he likes to get up the table and he can do it much faster than most Legios. Astorum are a Legio with fantastic lore and decent ruels and a great colourscheme. For the first two turns of a game, they can boost-move further than normal titans BUT they have to roll on the reactor dice dice apply the worse result(!). This works to Alex’s playstyle and means, when facing them, you have to allow for movement that other Legios aren’t able to manage. This movement has, in the past, blunted some of my more aggressive lists – it being rather hard to over-threat/intimidate a mistake from an opponent by running at them when they are running at you, faster! I feel that I am, slowly, getting familiar enough with the tricks of Astorum now and have this to comment ‘they are formidable, but not broken’.

I have Warfare 2022 in less than 2 weeks, so definitely appreciate any opportunity to get a feel for running an Extermigus maniple – at 1750pts – ahead of that and so, for our next few matches at least, Alex has agreed to stand against a list that is largely made with the intention of killing as many titans as quickly as possible. Rudely.

It helps that we are both signed up for Twisted Titanicus 2.0 in February, and are working on our lists for that event. I am looking at a Vulcanum Extermigus maniple – the same I one I will use for Warfare 2022 but with 250pts of upgrades – and Alex is leaning towards an Astorum Regia maniple.

The new Matched Play book arrived the night before our first Test Match, and as per my thoughts from the initial reviews and feedback this book is good. It adds some elements and clarifies more. The new deployment zones are much improved, the Strat Hand and Pool mechanics are an improvement and mission selection is better – this is a very good addition for anyone that didn’t get hold of Open War cards. The only niggle I have is that the secondary objectives in the book are lacking. We had many options with the original and Open War deck combined and now we have six – three of which I dislike for different reasons. It just feels like there is even less choice in relation to secondaries and there are very obvious autopicks, exactly as there was before, but less variety. Just my opinion.

We will be using the new Matched Play book to form an Introductory Campaign for the local gaming group, The Maidenhead Freeguild, in the new year and hope this might increase the player pool a bit. If not, we have options to visit Wycombe more and Alex is a great opponent. He plays to his forces design, he brings lists and strats I hadn’t considered and most importantly he is a genuinely nice guy and a great sport… I should have led with that.

I’m still mid-way through drafting a post about our first Test Match, and hope to do a small series of posts about them – which might hopefully lead into my getting some practice in at framing matches as a battle report. Maybe.