It's been a while since I played HOTT on a Thursday club evening, but last night I did.
Geoff brought along his various 15mm Middle Earth armies, and used a different one in each game. I brought my Australian Aboriginal armies and Wonderland. I used Wonderland in the first game where I faced the Riders of Rohan (who are mostly knights).
The Riders were assisted by Gandalf, who quickly caused Alice to flee, leaving a big hole in Wonderland's line.
The Riders of Rohan charge home.
A lot of Wonderland's spears disappeared as a result of that first charge; I simply couldn't get a break from low combat rolls in my first two games.
One success was and ambush by my lurkers on some warband trying to turn my right flank.
I tried to shore up my line, but I had too few troops and too many knights bearing down on me.
The Queen of Hearts was surrounded and destroyed, giving Geoff a fairly comprehensive victory.
The Cheshire cat really has nothing to grin about.
In the second game Wonderland faced the Knights of Dol Amroth. This was lots of knights backed up by some blades, spears and a couple of warband.
This time Wonderland held the initial attack.
The flamingos covered the left flank against Faramir's rangers. They also mess up the colour-balance on my camera.
On my right the Gondorian blades held first, throwing back attack after attack. I just couldn't finish them off, despite having some reasonable odds in a couple of the combats.
But the knight eventually broke through in the centre, and once again my general was surrounded and destroyed.
On to the third game, and I switched to The Horrors of the Dreamtime, possibly the worst army in terms of troop composition I have in my collection. It's a mess and really hard to use effectively. Looks fantastic though.
I was up against the Army of the Dead. This was warband, knights and a magician.
I got the insect-swarm hordes onto a hill to defend against the attacking knights. They even killed one before they were wiped out.
The warband charged my troops in the centre, which consisted mostly of a magician and a couple of behemoths.
The Horrors' general, Marmoo The Evil One, fled before the enemy magician's sorcery. But he's best out of the way in most games.
Geoff's plan of attacking behemoths with warband was, as expected, a disaster, and since of the of warband the behemoths flattened was his general it ended the game pretty quickly, to give me my one victory for the night.
Once again I am left with trying to work out how to salvage a useful army out of the Horrors without compromising their background.
Great looking armies! The Wonderland Army in particular is excellent
ReplyDelete+1 It's great to see The Wonderland Army out on the table again. The creativity of your HOTT armies amazes me.
ReplyDeleteYour Wonderland army looks very, very nice. Well modelled/converted/painted. He clearly did a heck of a job just tracking down so many unusual miniatures.
ReplyDeleteThe Dreamtime horrors also look good.
Was their victory down to your superior generalship, or the failures of your opponent? How can you make the horrors a more useful army? I don’t know. That’s the compromise you need to make if you want to keep the entire army authentic to its background. Maybe add a few “extra” elements - then decide on the “core” elements (say 12-16 AP) but then select the remainder (8-12 AP) from the rest of the available troops. Either random selection (a challenge, I suspect) or your choice if playing an opponent. In “real life” commanders had to make do with what’s available, rather than whatever they would ideally prefer…
Cheers,
Geoff
The Horrors can do OK against some armies. It's real weakness is against its matched pair, my Australian Aboriginal army. That has more aerials, leaving the flyer general in the Horrors quite vulnerable and difficult to support. If I reworked it then I'd try to take that into account.
DeleteThe Horrors have three weknesses:
(i) The lone flyer general is vulnerable and hard to support.
(ii) It commits the cardinal HOTT sin of having a magician, hordes and aerials, thus being heavy on PIPs
(iii) It has a hollow centre. A good HOTT army should really have 3-5 elements from what you'd call the 'basic' troop types - blades, spears, warband, shooters, knights and riders (or, at a pinch, double that number of hordes). The Horrors don't really have that; the army is a pile of what you'd call 'secondary' troops. So it's hard to form a solid centre around which to base your battle.
I have considered dropping the flyer general, keeping The Evil One not as the general but as an assisting malevolent force. Then maybe swap generalship to teh Goose Women magician element. I may see how that goes.
Superb! Great to still see HOTT played !
ReplyDelete