SAGA Trojan War- If Achilles goes down to the woods today he is sure for a big suprise...

And that suprise is.... A trojan spear to the face. Repeatedly.

So, Achilles in his hubris from his previous victory over the cunning Odysseus thought that he would go for a gentle stroll through the forests surrounding Troy with a few of his best buddies, maybe stopping for a nice wine amongst the trees. A lovely sunday stroll one might say.

Quickly, into stroll formation!

Tragically, Hector was also out for a stroll. Except his stroll was not leisurely, it was instead murderous!

From a tactical point of view, the less said about the games the better, in short, everything I learned from my game against Odysseus I forgot. I charged things off blindly, I didn't keep my battle line in formation, and in short, I kept getting Achilles killed!

For his part, Hector was most obliging to take advantage of my tactical ineptitude, the Trojan bow armed warriors were enacting a horrific toll onto my warriors, quite simply refusing to miss, while I refused to hide behind a shield (damn cowardly that is).

But, there were some highlights, my 8 strong unit of Myrmidon Elites kept up their impressive killing streak, ably seeing off larger units of warriors and causing many, many casualties.

What do you mean "we missed one?"

And now some more pics of the Myrmidons in action...

Achilles did serve himself pretty well, I need to remember that he has more abilities than just the "no fatigue" aspect. It is interesting at any rate to run around with some cool looking hoplites.

Back to the painting board, working on a SAGA Dark Ages army....

CP

SAGA Trojan War- Teaching Odysseus a lesson for calling me "emo"

Achilles and Odysseus squared off last night in our first crack at SAGA- Trojan War.

We played a 6 point game, I was using..
Achilles (the best of the Greeks)
8x Myrmidon Elites
12x Myrmidon Hoplites
12x Myrmidon Hoplites

Jamie's Ithacans looked like...
Odysseus (the cunning)
4x Ithacan Nobles
12x Warriors
12x Warriors
8x Warriors

The Myrmidon battle line.

We were playing the "Kill the Warlord" scenario- seemed only right to describe the meeting between these two, after Odysseus' claims of Achilles being "emo"! The terrain was pretty simple, the Ithacans are good in the rocky ground, so naturally when we rolled, there was a massive bit of rocky ground in the middle of the battlefield! Cunningly, I put all other scenery on the outside, where it would have no impact on the battlefield at all.

The Achaean battleboard (here) is relativly straight forward. Achilles is an absolute combat monster, so what you want to do is get him into combat. Alot. If you keep him alive in combat, he will probably kill everything in combination with the Heracles ability, so you need nice little ablative hoplite armour kicking around with them. My plan was simple then, get Achilles in combat, get the Myrmidon Elites in combat, fluff around with the warriors.

The battle started pretty slowly, Odysseus reduces my amount of SAGA dice to 2 for turn 1, 3 for turn 2 then back up to full from there. So basically turns one and two were pretty low key, getting my troops forward to get into position to attack the Ithacans in close combat.

Myrmidons have captured the rocky ground!

The start of turn 3 saw me roll 2 6's- perfect for the Heracles ability! So there was nothing to do but to charge Achilles blindly into the intervening Ithacans in the rocks.

"Achilles SMASH!"

And smash he did. Killing a fair swag of Ithacans- 10 dice hitting on a 4+ is ruthless! Combined with his "no fatigue" makes him an absolute monster. Soon, the battle of the rocky ground was so bad that Odysseus himself was forced into the fray to save his warriors! Unfortunatly, Achilles and his Myrmidon elites had far too much fun slaughtering them, until there was only Odysseus left.

"Hey, Achilles, could we have a time out?"

All the while this was going on, I had sent one of my Warrior units on a massive flanking mission, sweeping away the Ithacan Nobles and then laying into the smaller unit of Ithacans.

Get them! Kill the unpainted ones!

But by this stage, I had lost a few of the Myrmidon Elite, giving their lives willingly (ish) to save Achilles. They were at least allowed the honour of killing the last of the Ithacan infantry!

Weren't there more of us? Fatigue sucks, why can't we be like Achilles?

The merry slaughter of Ithacans continued, until only Odysseus remained.

In spite of killing one of the Myrmidon Elite, Odysseus fell, was put into a headlock by Achilles until he said "uncle". Now the two could go off and sack Troy together, honour intact!

So, Achilles killed no less than 11 enemy models, including Odysseus.

My thoughts on SAGA? It is brutally simple in a lot of ways. Rolling to hit is simple, no great modifiers, changes or anything like that. But, through the battle board, you find some real complexity, I think I will use my battle board much more effectively next time (I think), the Achaeans don't have too much finesse to go along with them, certainly if I can keep the Heracles dice ready to use at any time for my Warlord, I will kill a lot of stuff, but I think the cunning Odysseus might have some new plans and machinations of his own.

SAGA is fun. Hoplites look awesome, the Pro-painter is doing a great job on the Ithacans, expect more games of this in the future!

There was a Day of Days update on here earlier today, make sure you check that out too.

CP