TheBattlehammer

As you will have seen over on the YouTube channel the Battlehammer all crowded into the Battle mobile and went on a Jolly to the Norfolk coast to play in a Guildball tournament. Unfortunately the weather decided that it was going to have its say so we didn’t go to the beach and dip are tootsies in the sea. Destination inout to sat nav and off to Wyldstorm games. I have to say it was a tidy little setup and with free tea on tap!! It was definitely a hit with me. On the day there where 12 entrants into the event, which was pretty nice as it kept it all fairly low key and gave us a chance to have the crack with most of you’s. Which is always nice as often you can get so caught up with whats going on you don’t get to properly engage with people (or cock dock). Any way enough with that rubbish you cry! Tell us how the might Battlehammer got on and who was the victor…

Well in general we all did ok. Somehow Spoony managed to end up as the highest placed Hamster and genuinely we have no idea how this happened. Baby hamster (Grant) had a pretty good day out beating Sexy Hammer (Parky) in the first round. Parky has taken his Alchemists to a tournament for the first time and I believe he enjoyed himself as he didn’t feel as much pressure to perform, unlike when he uses his Butchers. Grumpy Hammer (Straw) gave the Hunters a run out which was definitely Totes awesomeness to see and he won best painted team! I actually had a damn good day with 3 wins and 1 defeat in the last game. I did think I might be on the top table for the last round but through some quirk of fate Spoony ended up having that honour. It’s fair to say he did the BattleHammer proud by getting beaten 12-0…nice one Spoony!

So what did I actually learn at the tournament?

Well first of all let’s talk about the plot cards. I won’t go into too much depth as I think it’s too early to have a really strong idea of their utility. But my initial thoughts are that they don’t seem quite as powerful as the season 1 plot cards. Gone is the automatic pick of “don’t touch the hair” or “knee slider”, which in fairness I don’t think is a bad thing. Both of these cards where really powerful and if I didn’t have them in my hand I would always assume my opponent did. My gut feeling is that the season 2 plot cards are more about pulling you back into a game if you are falling behind. Three of them give you MP as a reward for playing the card. 5 of the cards are based around friendly actions taking place whilst the others are either reacting to the enemy doing something or you losing a player/inititive. But for me if there is an auto pick at this point it is “Home Crowd”. So if you are playing me and you don’t have it, you better assume I do. Losing the inititive but starting with 1MP is in my opinion huge! Have a little think on the possibilities this opens up and I will go into more depth another time

And now onto my Brewers….

My tournament 8 where Tapper, Hooper, Friday, Spigot, Mash, Stoker, Scum and Gutter…yup that’s right Gutter!! although to be honest she was there simply because I needed an 8^th team member (I just don’t trust Stave) and Avarisse is still getting his new suit finished… Having never used Gutter before I thought I would see how the day went and if by the fourth game I was doing badly then throw her on for a bit of variety. Alternatively I figured if I came up against the Masons she would be handy with “anatomical precision”. As it turned out I faced the Masons in the first game but didn’t use her and then I went into the fourth game on the back of 3 wins! So still didn’t use her. In the same vein as the previous tournament I went to, it was the same 6 on the table for 3 out of 4 games. With the exception to this being when I faced off against Ed’s Alchemists, with him using Smoke i figured i would need Stokers magical brew. Therefore Spigot got benched

Game 1 vs Masons 8-2 (will explain in a bit)

From what I remember my opponent Steve took Honour, Brick, Mallet, Harmony, Flint and Marbles. I have played a bit against the Masons before as a mate of mine Dan (@DanHumphrey318 and also of Ye Olde Battle reports on YouTube) plays them along with Alchemists. But as always in Guildball people can play the same team in a very different way. For a start I have never seen Harmony on the pitch before and in fairness she was pretty impressive. Unfortunately time got called on are game as I believe someone rather impatient (what a dick!!) was putting pressure on the TO , even though we each had at least 8 minutes left on the clock!! But hay ho this shit happens. I received the ball as I always like to with the Brewers if given the choice. It allows me to generate momentum by playing it aroundand the option of dodging players up the pitch to close the gap. it has the added bonus that in general my opponent has to come to me (the exception being fucking Engineers). As they will either need to fight if they want to win by take outs or to get the ball if they want to score. Either way I am happy that they are heading to me. If I remember rightly the usual thing happened with Tapper smacking shit around and then Hooper jumping on their head. I think Flint may have got taken out twice. I know Honour ate dirt and possibly Harmony but I can’t remember. There was a point in the game where I had setup a lane for Friday to cut in from the wing to shoot on goal. But first off Mash fucked up the pass, big dummy idiot! Luckily the ball just stayed on the pitch. Then Steve used 2MP to stand Brick back up so that Friday would have had to take a parting blow to get close enough to the goal to shoot. Which was a really neat bit of play by him. For some reason I didn’t see it happening. I then had to try and cut back inside to get another line for the shot. As always against the Masons it was a pretty hard going getting work done. Yeah they have low defence, but there armour is such a pain in the ass! So good game good game got the win to start the day which is always nice.

Game 2 vs Engineers

I got to face off against Spoonmiester and his Engineers in round 2. Having played Spoony a couple of times before you would think I would remember how fucking annoying there ranged attacks are against the low defence of the Brewers! But alas no. I took the same team as round 1 and Spoony had Ballista, either Salvo or Ratchet, Compound, one of the mechanoids (Hoist I think), Mainspring and Rage. Spoony got off to a pretty good start with Rage kicking off the game and advancing up his right flank. Spigot went and collected the ball which left him a bit exposed. I can’t remember if he got taken out first turn or early second. Either way it was 2 cheap VP’s to give away, which I was annoyed at myself for allowing to happen. but as i tend to find when playing against the Engineers they seem to get off to a good start with their ranged attacks and momentum generation. Dealing out a good spread of damage across my players and then Tapper gets in amongst them and they seem to fall apart. I guess this is in part down to them not having any really good dedicated melee damage output. Yeah Spoony had Rage, but to be fair he isn’t to hard to control. Once he has charged in and engaged you, just put him on his ass preferably with a 2” model and then he can’t charge you. I think in Mash the Breweres have a great counter to Rage. He can knock him down outside of Rages 1” melee, then when Rage gets up and moves into range Mash can use his Unpredictable movement to get out of range again. Friday got a nice goal and I had 3 take outs at the start of turn 4. I won initiative and Spoony called it there as it was 10-2 with Rage on about 2 or 3 HP and engaged by Mash with 3 influence on him.

Game 3 vs Alchemists

This was the first time I had seen Smoke on the table, not really a surprise as she has only been out a week. But I was still pretty excited about this, I have had my eye on adding her to my Alchemists and therefore was looking forward to seeing what she could do. also Ed had painted her up superbly, i did try taking photo’s of her but they all came out a bit cack (greatly appreciate any tips). Obviously Ed hadn’t had a lot of time to practice with her prior to the tournament which probably went against him in the end. Also unfortunately for him he had miscounted the score and thought it was 4-4 when Friday popped in a goal to make it 12-4! Doh, school boy error. I actually genuinely felt bad for him, as up until that point it had been a really tough game that made me work really hard. Having stuck Stoker in the team for pretty much his first ever real outing the boy impressed me. That momentous double push on 1 success is really handy for counter attacking people. Ed played really well and made good use of Decimate in his line-up. He also had Vitriol, Flask and I really can’t remember the other two players now. It was a combination from Mercury, Calculus and Compound. But bugger me If I can remember! Unsurprisingly there where AOE’s all over the place making life very difficult. However I did manage to get in amongst his team and eventually win the game. Unfortunately it was a couple of weeks ago now and I can’t remember too much else from this encounter other than that I was really impressed by Decimate. Having never seen her on the table before I really didn’t know what she could do and it was awesome!

 

 

Game 4 vs Engineers

I can honestly say that I have never come closer to throwing in the towel in a game of Guildball. My opponent Dan Garnett played really hardball and the range knockdowns and push’s where just doing my head in. It’s not that i haven’t played against the engineers before, only earlier in the day i had beaten Spoony, so i know what they can do. To be fair my record up until this game was actually pretty good against them. But Dan just played really well (what a dick) and during my second turn I actually didn’t do anything of note. It was just standing people up and waiting for him to fluff a roll. He had received the ball so I couldn’t build any momentum to clear conditions off my players. He also used Mainspring really efficiently to keep piling on the damage with his explosions. In the end the game finished 12-10 to Dan. He really did school me in how damn annoying the Engineers can be! If i remember his line up right it was Ballista, Mainspring, Ratchet, Compound, Salvo and Rage. So both games I played against the Engineers Rage was on the pitch which I thought was interesting as i don’t actually think i have seen him used in any another team. He is a player that I love the model for, but I just feel he is a bit easy to shut down and stop from doing anything. Also I find him to be a bit squishy vs Brewers, I think i took himout twice in this game. But then maybe everyone is just a little soft in the face of the Tapper/Hooper pain train! One lesson I definitely learnt is to not get to cocky when trying to build momentum off of a player. At one stage in the game Rage  was down to 1 HP and therefore i was trying to farm momentum off him and got down to my last influence and then fluffed the roll and couldn’t take him out! Which really was a pain in the dick as then  Mash had to go in and finish him off, when really he could have been doing work elsewhere! A very very tough game and Dan was the worthy winner here. Hopefully next time I meet him I will remember how fucking annoying Engineers can be!

 

Conclusion

Overall I am pretty happy with how the day went and how I played and I certainly improved on my previous tournament outing, which was a dismal 1-3! Using the season 2 plot cards was interesting. In part because I had no idea what any of them would be like having only briefly looked at them before the tournament. Looking back I don’t think I would of changed my line-up other than perhaps taking Stave instead of Gutter to use against Masons. But other than that I am happy with the 8 I had and in all my games everyone got a bit of work done which was ace. Tapper got his usual bag of take outs and Friday pinged in 3 goals I think. Now that this tournament Is out of the way I am going to change things up moving forward. As much as I love the Tapper pain train I do feel that I have become a bit to reliant on it. At the moment it feels like the first activation is Tapper, he then either activates Commanding Aura or charges a low defence model to get it off. Then he deletes the model and moves onto the next one. Meanwhile Hooper follows up behind kicking anything that may still be moving. Don’t get me wrong I have had a fair amount of success with this recently. But I am not so sure that it is the most fun for my opponents to play against. It also means that I am probably not getting the most out of the rest of my team.  Therefore to mix it up I am either going to use Queen E or maybe switch over to the Morticians and Scapal, I haven’t quite decided which one yuet. Although I did use Scapal over the weekend in a game and she was a lot of fun. There is a gathering this week in the battle cave and so I will give one of them a good run out there… so expect a Battlehammer Bugle  report on this soon.