TLTG:
Okay, so, I got a burst of inhuman laziness followed by absurd busy-ness in the real world, so unfortunately my original plan of the battle report after finishing these angry gentlemen in a month never happened.
I was also a little disheartened. My first experience with Chaos Dwarfs in tournament play, I ran in to Vampire Counts and two High Elves players. I salvaged two draws and a minor loss from the ordeal (and survived 19 miscasts on the day!) but I still wasn’t terribly confident. In addition, like every other tournament in the greater New England area, Epidemius-fueled stupidity won handily, beating the mirror match in the finals (because one player decided a straight up nurgle list was fine, whereas the other ran nurgle… and two units of flamers of tzeentch. laaaaame!)
The next two months consisted of me waffling between armies. Originally I decided to go with Bretonnians, because I have a pretty significantly winning record against Vamps and High Elves with them and I know I can (and frequently do) beat up on Nurgle pretty easily with them. Then I got royally served by some random stuff like Ogre Kingdoms, and thought, “well, you know, I have my OWN cheaty demon list…” My Slaanesh leadership bomb was amusing, until I ran in to some bad dice. Low model counts and fragile units means a little bad luck goes a long way, so I switched to the idea of just running my Vampires. I had to dust them off, as I haven’t opened the case in two years, and I put together what I thought was a pretty clever little cavalry based list. With a few banners that confer bonuses on the unit, and some decked out mounted characters, I figured I’d just deploy characters in specific units for specific benefits depending on the matchup. I was planning on running this until yesterday afternoon when I realized it wasn’t fully painted and frankly I want a painting score.
So the angry stout gentlemen saw the light of day again. The only significant change I made in the list was to cut a black orc for… something. I don’t even remember. Even at five they are a decent distraction and hitty enough.
Round One: Ogre Kingdoms
This is actually the player who caused me to not play Bretonnia in this event. His list is weird - two giants, Skrag, three butchers, and four gorgers ensure his units are never in my charge arc and my war machines are in terrible danger. To counter his gorgers, I completely and utterly ignored them. Unfortunately for me, all four of them came in on turn two, and Skrag didn’t even get in to combat. The game was primarily our units dancing around trying not to expose flank without actually engaging anyone. I wind up edging out a tiny lead by murdering Skrag and a butcher with magic missiles, and randomly running some ogre bulls off the table. At the end I controlled the center objective, but if we had more turns before the round ended I would have lost terribly. We wound up with a draw, but I got extra battle points for controlling the center objective.
Round Two: Warriors of Chaos
Utterly unfair. Turn one I blow up four chaos knights with a death rocket, earthshaker six warriors to death, and magic missile a unit of marauders to nothing. The second turn, I finish off the knights, get his lord in combat with black orcs (which was funny), and suck the soul out of his battle standard bearer. By the time anything of his was in combat, the whole army was under half strength and it was a mad dash just to kill my wizards. None of them actually died, and I wound up killing him to the man without losing a unit other than the black orcs.
Round Three: Nurgle Demons
Oops. I have played this matchup with the chaos dwarfs a million times, mostly against this player, and gotten hosed every time. However, I have been trying to work out a strategy that isn’t utterly hopeless against this army and I managed to make it work here. Basically, the plaguebearers are awful unless they hit you in a swarm. The actual swarms are pretty bad unless they hit really soft targets. The only really dangerous part of a purely nurgle demon list are the beasts of nurgle. I plopped a forest sort of near the middle of the board to separate the place, and started encouraging him to deploy on the wider half by putting all my dwarf core units there. Eventually he put the beasts of nurgle on the thin half to flank me out and keep them covered from my shooting, so I put a unit of hobgoblin wolf riders and a unit of bull centaurs over there to keep the beasts busy.
This game hinged on this plan working, and it worked out beautifully. He chased these two units around without getting a successful charge until turn four, and even then he only killed two things (keeping Epidemius reasonable) and pursued me off the table. Since the bull centaurs are kind of, well, woefully inadequate at best for fighting nurgle stuff, I didn’t mind losing them. And they took out a unit of swarm bases along the way too, so I can’t complain.
The rest of the game was basically the black orcs standing guard at a hill, from which my bolt throwers were pretending to be useful, while all my dwarf core stayed between my earthshaker and his army. The earthshaker did its job, keeping the plaguebearers from getting a charge until the bottom of turn five. During this time I was hitting them with fireballs, wall of fire, fiery blast, and burning head. When they got close enough, they were also getting peppered by blunderbusses. And by the time they closed the gap, one entire unit was dead (coincidentally the one worth extra victory points), Epidemius was hanging out with only two more plaguebearers and a herald, and the the third unit was at exactly half strength. He managed to break a unit of blunderbussers on the bottom of turn five, but they escaped after combat and rallied on my turn. In the end I had a bunch of bonus victory points for objectives like killing the highest point cost model (the herald in the unit I obliterated from fireballs) and reducing the entire army to half unit strength. He killed only the bull centaurs, half a unit of blunderbussers, the black orcs, and the bolt throwers.
For my trouble I wound up with best overall, which is somewhat reassuring. My list held up pretty well, if anybody’s interested it looked something like this:
Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer Lord
-Level 4, Dispel Scroll, Dispel Scroll
Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer
-Level 2, Power Stone
Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer
-Level 2, Power Stone
Chaos Dwarf Hero
-Battle Standard Bearer, Armor of Gazrakh
19 Chaos Dwarf Warriors
-Full Command, War Banner
19 Chaos Dwarf Warriors
-Full Command
15 Chaos Dwarf Warriors
-Blunderbusses
15 Chaos Dwarf Warriors
-Blunderbusses
13 Hobgoblins
10 Hobgoblins
10 Hobgoblins
-Wolves, Light Armor, Shield, Bow, Musician
Death Rocket
2 Hobgoblin Bolt Throwers
2 Hobgoblin Bolt Throwers
5 Black Orcs
-Shields
Earthshaker
8 Bull Centaurs
-Heavy Armor, Full Command