Few understand RatBastard's philosophy, it must lose a lot in translation. What is evident is that he wins and is able to build unusual coalitions on the battlefield. Sunday night's scrum, "Battle of Crossroads Woods," was another example of his leadership. RatBastard (player by Allen) was able to unite the large spider army (Keith -- we are talking behemoths/beasts/hoards) with the larger, dumber reptile army (Mike -behemoths/knights/beasts/wizard).
They attacked the orc outpost, Edgewoods, of pTom (wizard/spear-ouch!/shooters) and me (blades/shooters/riders/behemoth). The battle opens with a charge of the LargerDumber reptile on our right. This had the effect of pulling Ptom away from the center, where RatBastard was moving through the woods, as well as fragmenting Ptom's army. pTom was able to defeat the coldblooded beasts in quick time, but was therefore slow to turn toward the center. I moved against the spiders and had a fierce behemoth vs. behemoth fisticuffs on the far left of our battle line. That's when the bad juju kicked in, and my dice rolling turned bad -- thanks to Mike and his tremendous kineticpsychic ability, learned from pTom just five minute earlier. Oh, I had my chance to win the behemoth vs. behemoth battle, but could not do so. I became demoralized as the RatBastard's army emerged from the woods and ate my shooters. My remaining units melted away and that RatBastard won AGAIN!
Keith's
take on the battle:"Yep - I think the rats did job the in that game...although, Mike sacrificed his 24pt dinosaur command to take on Pthomas and his 36 pt orc army.
"Joel's left wing crumpled under the assault of the 3 Arachnid Behemoths (including a Behemoth general), losing 1 Blade and 2 Riders - but his lone Behemoth orge was engaged in a titanic (what else?) struggle with the 3 Arachnid Behemoths, killing one and pretty much prventing the other 2 from being a factor in the rat/orc melee in the center. The Arachnid combo of behemoth/beast/horde had mixed results - the behemoths and beasts did well, but the hordes fought a delaying action against orc blades and died like, well...they were squished like bugs! I think if had been able to keep the hordes in a block (a 4x2 line) they would have held up better, but they got committed piecemeal into bad going to fight the orc blades. The hordes did keep the orc blades from doing other bad things, and the hordes were replaceable.
"The real fight was with the rat beasts / orc shooters in the big forest in the center of the line - ouch! Once they started gettting overlaps on Joels orc shooters, it got very ugly. And the impetous rat beasts were kind of an automatic mincing machine - once they got into contact, they just kept chewing away, and Allen could use pips to do other useful things."
Tom,
who's NOT winning, mildly disagrees:"Okay, the right wing of the GOBLIN army would like to say that we had over 1/3 of our command deployed against the Rat Bastard's army, but it never came out of the woods to play and how was I to know that all those huge scary reptiles were actually geckos with big paper mache dinosaurs taped to their backs? We would have come to the aid of our Goblin brothers quicker, but we couldn't stop laughing in time to assist them! :-)
"However, I do think that Mike's idea of a third dice rolled
for the two command side and the pips distributed as needed might be a better
solutions then 1d6+1 for each command. Command and control averaged 9 pips
for us and10.5 for the RB side, that adds up over time, especially when
trying to redeploy your army of heavy foot."