It's a (HOTT) Knockout! - Episode One

Last week Martin Smith posted details of a HOTT campaign he'd played on the HOTT Facebook Group. It's a simple knockout campaign - more of a battle generator - designed for DBA, but easily ported over to HOTT, developed by IanH and posted on his Wargames Page.

In a quiet moment I drew up a map featuring some of the armies I had to hand, and decided to give it a go. In lieu of DBA terrain types I gave each region two items of mandatory terrain (whose total length and width must each be at least 600p in total). Even if an area is conquered that terrain type will apply. I also decided to use the optional rule that an army which loses a battle suffers a -1 to its Aggression score, whilst one that wins gets a +1. All armies start with an Aggression of 0.

Here's the map, showing the five nations in play:

The nations, and their armies were:

Elves: Magician general, 1 x Magician, 6 x Warband, 2 x Shooters
Inca: Behemoth general, 4 x Blades, 4 x Hordes, 1 x Hero, 1 x Lurker, 1 x Cleric
Prester John: 1 x Cleric general, 2 x Knights, 2 x Blades, 2 x Shooters, 2 x Warband, 1 x Behemoth, 1 x Lurker
Fishmen: Spear general, 5 x Spear, 2 x Warband, 1 x Lurker, 1 x Artillery, 1 x God
Swiss: Spear general, 3 x Spears, 1 x Rider, 7 x Warband

And here it is again with counters on it to show the starting areas of control for each. As nations are conquered the victors' colours will spread over the map:

Season 1

All Aggression scores were unmodified.

The rolls were as follows (numbers in brackets are rerolls for ties):

Elves - 5

Inca - 5
Prester John - 3
Fishmen - 6 (2)
Swiss - 6 (5)

So the Swiss would be attacking from their hills. They attack the lowest scoring nation with whom they share a border. In this case it was Prester John.

So the Swiss headed south into the lands of the Priest-king.

The two armies arrayed for battle.

The Swiss advanced. Prester John was happy to hold position before the town.

The opening shots of the campaign were fired by Prester John's bowmen, but with no effect on the rapidly advancing Swiss columns.

Almost in contact ...

The Swiss smashed into Prester John's army, driving back his knights, and the King himself, but being forced back by his swordsmen.

Prester John threw his troops back into the fight and in a dazzling display of martial prowess cut down the Swiss commander.

The Swiss pike-blocks crumbled before Prester John's knights and tribal warriors, and the battle was lost.

So the Swiss attack was repulsed, with Prester John winning a resounding 6g-0 victory. This meant that his Aggression was increased by 1, whilst that of the Swiss dropped by one as the survivors fled back to their hills.

Season 2

The rolls were as follows:

Elves: 3
Inca: 1
Prester John: 4+1=5 (6)
Fishmen: 4
Swiss 6-1=5 (2)

So despite their previous setback the Swiss were close to being ready to be the attacker again, but Prester John won it on the tie-break. The lowest-scoring adjacent nation to attack were the mountain-dwelling Inca.

The armies set up. The Inca closed down part of the battlefield with inaccessible crags, but Prester John's army attacked from them catching the Inca on open ground in front of their citadel.

Advance ...

... and contact!

There were mixed results along the line. Prester John's knights drove deep into the Inca hordes.

The hordes surrounded the knights and cut them down.

On the other flank Prester John's archers had been annihilated by the Inca heroes, leaving his army vulnerable.

The elephant charged into the attack, but the Inca stood their ground.

Fortune smiled on Prester John once more, as he defeated the Great Inca, and drove him from the field! But it wasn't all over for the Inca; their losses were still below those of Prester John's army. Indeed some of them were hordes, which were quickly replaced in order to increase the margin.

Leaderless, the Inca still had enough PIPs to swing onto Prester John's flank.

The Priest-King was driven back, straight into the path of his recoiling elephant. This broke his army, which hung around long enough to extricate their embarrassed leader from the mud, and beat a hasty retreat back to their own lands.

The Inca won 9g-8, so it was close.

So the first two games saw neither attack successful, and the map remaining unchanged. Prester John took a -1 to his aggression (back to 0) whilst the Inca were now at +1.

In the next post I'll cover Seasons 3 and 4.

Blocks

Since we moved I have been trying to get back into my regular painting thing that I started this year. I wouldn't say I have managed to paint something every day, but I've managed something most days and am slowly establishing the necessary daily routines required to get back on track.

Anyway, most of this week has been taken up painting wooden blocks. I assumed this would be easy, but it's taken more time than I thought. One batch were the Jenga pieces that I use to mark out tracks in Gaslands. We're demoing the game at a show later this month, so felt that the terrain we use needed an upgrade. Here they are painted grey and weathered a little with some dry-brushing.

Not perfect, but they'll do.

When we moved I found my 1950s Risk set at the bottom of a cupboard. It had suffered irreparable water damage at some point (along with my Gibson Games edition of 'Brittania', sadly), so I had to chuck it, but I kept the wooden blocks that were used for pieces in those days. I had an idea for something, so glued pairs of them together and painted them grey ...

... so that they make perfect small buildings for 'Godzilla: Tokyo Clash', replacing the counters the game uses for these key terrain pieces.

Next up for painting is some more Gaslands terrain.

Icy HOTT

This blog has been sadly neglected of late, as despite having a gaming space I simply haven't had the time or inclination to play any games. The new house is taking up some of the time, naturally, but we're being arsed around by the real-estate and owners of our previous property (a rental) and have had to go back to attend to a few things. This has done little to improve my views about landlords and real-estate agents and how they all deserve a date with Madame Guillotine come the revolution.

I have been doing a little bit of painting, which I'll cover in another post. And I do still get along to our club on a Thursday evening. This week I was playing HOTT with Geoff again. I took along my Inuit matched pair, whilst Geoff brought along his big box of medieval elements.

I defended in both games.

In the first I used my Inuit army, which has lots of shooters. Geoff had a mix of blades, knights and shooters with the support of a gigantic airboat (they had to have travelled to the Arctic in something).

The first combats saw my dog-sled riders driven back by knights, much as you'd expect.

Combat occurred all along the line, with the Inuit archery doing little to hold off Geoff's advance.

Well, mostly. I did have one brief period of success, but wasn't able to exploit the advantage.

I lost a dog-sled. Very careless.

And then I lost my flanks. Everything was going pear-shaped for the Inuit.

My shaman behemoth got ambushed by peasant lurkers. He ate them.

But my general got ridden down, and with my other losses that was enough to give Geoff the victory.

In the second game I used the Inland Dwellers of Etah, which are mainly beasts and hordes with a magician general.

I'm not really sure what I did in this game, aside from let Geoff advance to me and get into a far better position than I was in. I lost some beasts ...

... Geoff's flyer support helped there - he scrapped the airboat in this game and replaced it, and a cleric, with a flyer and a paladin.

Kajutaijuq has a go at Geoff's knight general. As a behemoth I just has to win the combat to destroy him. It wouldn't have won me the game - by this stage my losses exceeded his - but it would have given me a fighting chance.

It wasn't to be; Geoff's aerial support helped finish off the giant head. 

And then his paladin faced my magician general, in the big showdown.

I lost, although we came a single dice pip away from a mutually destructive draw.

And so I lost that game as well, with Geoff winning a convincing 14g-0 victory!

Gaslands - Capture The Flag

We played Gaslands last night and the fickle random scenario generator gave us another flag-based game. Unlike the previous game where the flags were on the board, in this version one vehicle in each team carries a flag. To free it up for capture the vehicle has to be destroyed and then you have to drive over the flag. You win if a vehicle is carrying two flags. Sounds easy, but it isn't.

We had four players. I ran a Rutherford team with two vehicles, Bailey ran his pair of Idris speed demons, Stuart, in his first game, ran a couple of Warden vehicles equipped for ramming and close-range combat and Caesar went mad and ran a Mishkin bus with lots of guns and an nuclear engine.

We'd played a couple of gear phases before I thought to take any pictures. At this stage all vehicles were running and so all the flags were safely tucked away.

I made the big mistake of ramming the bus with my mortar-armed truck, Marvellous Engines Of Resistance. Since the bus is a heavyweight vehicle and I wasn't I ended up taking more damage, despite my ram. To the right is my other car - the flamethrower-toting Back In Black.

The flamethrower in action - burning Bailey's performance car. It didn't destroy his vehicle outright, but it did catch fire and that got him on the next activation. Since it was Bailey's flag vehicle, that release one flag into the wild.

Stuart showed how it is done - he rammed the bus with Dreamline. Again the weight disparity caused issues, but Stuart's team could pile on extra damage when ramming by adding hazards.

The ram didn't destroy the bus, but the subsequent gunfire from Stuart's car did. And that was another flag up or grabs (the pink counter).

I then lost Marvellous Engines Of Resistance, and that was yet another flag available.

Bailey had picked up his own flag with his second vehicle, and was heading for the flag left by Caesar's bus.

Unfortunately with the start of a new turn, Caesar could respawn the bus, and with pole position managed to nip in and grab his flag back before Bailey could get there. The two vehicles met in a head-on collision that left them both on their last point of damage.

An overview of the action. Stuart still had two active vehicles and was holding a flag on one of them. Bailey and Caesar also had flags on their vehicles. I had nothing.

I'm not sure why I took this photos of the bulldozer Natural-Born Killer, but here it is.

The bus was no wildly out of control, and eventually collided with some more terrain which wrecked it again. Totally destroyed this time (although it could respawn at the team's start point).

Back In Black also went out of control, whilst picking up a flag, and flipped, got wrecked, exploded and dropped the flag.

There's a gap in the photo record here, but at some point none of us had active vehicles in play. A new turn came around and we all respawned one vehicle. Bailey and I were well-positioned to drive in fast and grab a flag each.

Bailey made a run for a second flag. Caesar's bus, back in action for the third time, zipped in and unleashed a volley of gunfire which destroyed Bailey's vehicle. But the fickle nature of Gaslands is that even a vehicle in the process of being wrecked can collect items or cross finish lines, and that's what Bailey did. His car disintegrated into a mass of twisted metal against a concrete bunker, but in passing he had collected a second flag for the win.

That's two wins in a row for Bailey.