Warmaster Tomb Kings vs Orcs: post-battle ruminations

Our second crack at Warmaster ended with a relatively comfortable victory for my Tomb Kings. Following our earlier game, the historical battle of Pharsalus, which saw two Roman armies duking it out on an arid plain in northern Greece, this time we tested out a pair of fantasy armies, plus the magic rules.

I went with 1500 points of Tomb Kings, including three units of skeleton cavalry, three units of chariots, a bone thrower battery, a death giant, and a sphinx. I also spent a lot of points on rank and file skeleton warriors and archers. I didn't opt for any carrion flyers, and only had two lich priests, along with my required tomb king general.

I probably should have added at least one more lich priest, as undead armies can't carry out initiative moves in Warmaster, which can be a problem. I began to realise this as I was deploying my army, having lost the scouting roll, again.

The orcs had two goblin heroes, an orc general, a goblin shaman in a chariot and an orc shaman on a wyvern, plus at least one orc hero. They also had a giant, two regiments of wolf riders, a regiment of trolls, a troop of boar riders and some black orcs, plus the rank and file hordes of goblins and orcs.

We played the objectives scenario in the core Warmaster Revolution rules. I had two brigades of skeletons in my centre, with the death giant, and my bone throwers on my right. These were all under the control of the lich priests. The tomb king led the chariots on the left, with the skeleton cavalry out in front. The sphinx took up position with the chariots.

The orcs probably bungled early in the game by not having enough troops to take the objective hill on my left. I managed to occupy it with my undead cavalry, scoring some important points, before goblin arrows drove my cavalry off the hill. However, I was able to dispute the objective in the later stages of the game.

On my right I got lucky by keeping two objectives just behind  my infantry line. I was facing a lot of orcs here, including the boar riders, but the orcs were just not in the mood for it, and a number of critical command rolls were failed here. I put my death giant out in front of my line, and none of the green skins seemed keen to take him on there.

I had trouble getting the chariots and the sphinx into action, but the real issue came in the centre where the trolls and the hill giant busted through my line and did great damage. Most of my losses in the battle occurred here. Some black orcs were also moving through woods and brush to my front and could have done further damage. I lost a lich priest here too.

What went wrong?

I had carefully kept the lich priest back from the line, as I wanted to avoid the same thing as happened in the Pharsalus battle. There, Mark Anthony, in command of a raw legion, had been overrun and killed by enemy cavalry, and this largely caved in my left wing. This time, the trolls drove my skeletons back so that the lich priest got caught up in the fighting against his wishes, and down he went like a sack of dry bones, stomped all over by trolls.

This created a major issue in my centre, as my troops there could not act on their own initiative, and the whole brigade was out of the command radius of the other lich priest. I needed my tomb king's orders to get my chariots into the fray. The trolls and the giant wreaked further merry havoc here. Luckily there were no objectives behind my centre, as it caved in like a rotten apple.

I finally managed to stop the surviving trolls by throwing my death giant at them. By this stage the living giant on the orc side had been wounded and wandered off to fight my skeleton cavalry, and towards the end of the battle was facing my chariots, which finally got moving.  Luckily I managed to win on points at this point, although I had 6-7 units destroyed with a break point of nine.

It was interesting that quite a few units never got into the battle. Not one orc unit was engaged, with the goblin foot and the trolls doing most of the fighting. Similarly, the sphinx and the chariots never engaged, and the death giant only fought a couple of rounds with the trolls. The big vulnerability with the tomb kings are the lich priests, and if I'm to use this army again, it really needs at least one more of these.

Another fun fact: the lich priests failed every single spell roll in the battle. I think the magic rules play well and magic does not dominate the game at this level, which feels right.