"Age of Sigmar Battle Report - Spellbreakers" Topic

A new year and a new set of campaign battles to play through for Age of Sigmar! We were a little slow getting started on this as, instead of painting up the Beastmen we needed for the first battle, I got a little distracted by Seraphon. Still, everything is ready now and we are ready to embark on the Quest for Ghal-Maraz hardback!

We are going to be kicking off with the fight for the Realm of Life, before returning to the Realm of Metal and trying to get Sigmar his hammer back…

The Story So Far
When we left the Realm of Life before Christmas, the Stormcasts had won… sort of.

The Gates of Dawn, a strategically important Realmgate, had been captured but it turned out to have been utterly corrupted by Nurgle. A pitched battle outside the gate saw it destroyed by the Stormcasts but only at the cost of Lord-Celestant Gardus who leapt into the gate, the Great Unclean One Bolathrax hot on his heels.

Still, even after having lost a great hero, Sigmar's soldiers still had work to do, namely locate Alarielle, Lady of Life, and bring her into an alliance against Chaos. And they still did not know where she was hiding.

Nurgle's forces had not been idle either. Gutrot Spume and his Blightkings had moved into the area and commandeered the forces of Beastlord Gluhak, also known as the Crusted Blade, who had guardianship of an ancient artefact called the Dirgehorn. Gluhak had deployed his forces at the Hag Tree on Profane Tor, and the blasts of the Dirgehorn were now rolling over the Realm of Life, sowing discord and bleakness wherever it was heard. Such was the power of this artefact, all nearby Sylvaneth were crippled in agony and even Stormcasts were doing everything they could to get away from horn.

Before the Stormcasts could proceed in their search for Alarielle, the Dirgehorn would have to be silenced…

Full battle report and lots more piccies here: link

First of all, great battle report as usual. I have a weekend of AoS gaming myself here so I'll be posting some from this side of the US/UK realm gate.

I'm working on some more Beastmen now myself. I just finished my Bestigors and started on some more Gors today.

I think this weekend we will be doing some games to prep for the campaign next weekend.

It actually isn't that hard to balance forces when you have played the game a couple of times.

I don't usually worry about balancing forces with each other as much as with the scenario. The scenario will have a lot more to do with the balance than the models on the table in most cases.

You do it the same way you do it with any game that doesn't have points, you just use your best judgment.

Some of our games have come down to one wound. The vast majority of them have come down to the last turn and were very close.

Kenneth: Once you play through the starter set scenarios, you have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't – there is really no black magic to it :)

However, when approaching a brand new scenario, we tend to start with wound counts, and then modify based on the forces and scenario. For example, if one side is Stormcast, reduce their Wound count by about a third.

And Pictors is right, this is a very different approach to Warhammer, and you need to mentally change gear, but exact to-the-point balancing really is not required – Age of Sigmar has a habit of producing very close run games…