Steam-Powered Robots: Menoth vs. Mercenaries After Action Report

Paladin gazes fearlessly at the Mercenary's right flank

So having gotten settled back in Calgary, I was eager to get some games in at the local gaming stores. After some searching around on the local forums I managed to get myself a game with Dallas, an experienced warmachine player (and a great sportsman!) against his Mercenary force.

Dallas seems to play very similar to me, in that he goes more for the look of a model rather than for how uber it might be as far as the game rules are concerned.

So we met on Wednesday night and got a nice little 25 point game in, I took my Protectorate of Menoth force with Amon Ad Raza as my warcaster. I love this warcaster because he allows jacks to move pretty much without any kind of penalties as long as he has Mobility up and running. For Menoth he is the jack caster apparently and since I'm lovin the steam-powered robots why not go with a caster that will support them?

The light warjacks run up to take the trenches

Here is the list I took:

Amon Ad Raza
2 Dervish Light Warjacks
1 Revenger Light Warjack
1 Vigilant Light Warjack
1 Crusader Heavy Warjack

4 Choir of Menoth
High Paladin Dartan Vilmon
Paladin of the Wall

What I usually do is have the 2 Dervishes and Amon in B2B with the Vigilant so that they are all immune to blast templates, move them up and then use the paladins as a bolstered defense on one side and the Revenger and Crusader as a heavy hitting force on the other. I didn't adhere to that in this game though, as I got greedy and rushed up as quickly as I could to take a trench (which had my opponent thoroughly worried) but then gave up the position and pretty much failed to properly assault his force, which allowed him to bring up his heavy-hitting hammer troops up and wreck havok on my light jacks.

Jacks hold the line, but not for long enough.

I also committed a fatal mistake in that I was consistently out of warcaster command control with my three light warjacks (the Dervishes and the Vigilant) which meant that they couldn't receive any focus at critical moments and were also affected by my opponent's spells that allowed him to make all the open terrain in his command radius Difficult, which hampered my charges and movement incredibly.

In the end, he pulled out a win and I conceded. He was still fresh with a Basher and a heavy warjack of some form as well as his hammerer force whereas I had my Paladins, the Revenger and the Crusader. I could have slogged it out and maybe pulled out a win, but I was terribly out of position and the store was closing up.

It was a great warm-up game though for getting me back into steam-powered robots though! I had a ton of fun!

Next time, Dallas, next time! ;)

I pushed up too quickly with my warjacks, falling outside
of Command range. Oops!