City States Battle Report 2

2 Phalanx 2 Fluid

After a week off due to some scheduling mishaps we are back at it again! It’s currently a crazy time of life for a lot of my locals so we are playing into my Friend Steve and his SK again and we are playing head to head.

Round 1

Funny story. Neither of us have lights. Cause we’re not COWARDS. So we’re gonna talk about the lists. I had one goal, I tested Minotaurs of all flavors last game and wanted to test Agema this game. I had a nagging feeling they were good units yeet around. A great cruise missile. I put an Andromachos in each unit because the Agema were going to get my non-entourage strategic stack and I wanted to have the flexibility in both units. After the game I’ll talk about my thoughts on the list and the Agema performance.

Round 2

We deploy….pretty much like a buncha little cowards. We are far away from each other and I have just decided to windmill slam my hoplites onto the scoring zone. Steve is taking a heavy stance onto pushing towards my friendly zone in the bottom right and trying to get those points.

Round 3

Key Proxy, the mahut is the Magic/Shooting Trinvarta. Steelhearts march charge and plink a few wounds thanks to impacts into my Agema and I have started scoring the left zone thanks to Inscription of Lighter Alloys. My opponents list is starting to roll and he has an awesome combo air/fire list. His gameplan is just to alternate between the two damage rituals for the game and see what dual court nonsense he can get up to.

Round 4

Bit of a wild round here. Center Agema activate first and kill most of those steelhearts, then they get OBLITERATED by the Dhanur thanks to rerolling their ranged hits from the spell (They even had to do arcing fire, it was so brutal). On the left side another MSU of flamecasters comes in and tries to shoot some Agema. They whiff and get melted by the fluid charge clash from strat stack. The right side is starting to take a lot more than incidental damage from the rituals and we have march charged into each other.

This is my key error at this point. I am way ahead on scenario and getting into a fight doesn’t really do anything for me. I am WAY outgunned on the right side and need to recognize that a lot earlier.

Round 5

Things go VERY wrong this round and I am down to next to nothing. I am quite ahead on scenario but after this round my opponent has caught up thanks to kill points. My opponent has been extremely smart and played the scenario much better than me. He knows that the small zone in the bottom right is more than the left zone and he knows he can play for kill points. I did not analyze the scenario enough or watch the deployments enough. If I were to redo this game it would be my hoplites on the right flank just grinding through his army to get onto that back zone, and the rest of my army would be skirmishing and fighting for the big zone.

Sadly at this point I have lost nearly everything. Starting round 7 I lose the rest of my models on the right flank and with those kill points my opponent is now ahead by one point and able to touch the bottom right zone. We talk out the last few rounds and end up with a score of SK 38 and CS 32.

An absolutely amazing game. I didn’t believe in dual court SK but I LOVED how he played off the two damage rituals and by the mid rounds he had consistently 2 to 3 rituals per round. I lost card advantage brutally. My Opponent was SUPER clever with how they played the scenario and I really liked when we were talking about the game afterwards how early in the game he developed his gameplan and then he just executed it. He knew from round 2 on with the deployment of my hops and Agema that he was going to abandon that flank. and push hard for the win on the right side. Very heads up play and smart play.

Honestly. The ritual chip damage ended up being crazy impactful. Nearly every single fight on the right side of the flank was impacted very heavily by it. Hephaestian died in one clash from the rakshasa because of it. Same with the companion cavalry and the inquisitors were wounded heavily by it.

Changes to my list

Alrighty the elephant in the room. Agema. How are they what do I think? They’re…Lackluster. I won’t lie. I feel like I was wrong about them. I think they’re a bit overcosted for what they do and the andromachos is probably an officer that will get left on the shelf because 25 points is so much. The whole game I just remember wishing they were Haspists. The next thing I want to test is chariots and how they feel after the change to Fire and Advance and I am think of swapping the polemarch to a bit more of a proactive unit, phalangites with aristia.

Thank you!

Thanks again for reading! If you want to talk all things minis, painting, gaming, Conquest or otherwise feel free to reach out to me on discord where I’m Arrest7 or on Instagram where I’m arrest_paints.