City States Battle Report 8

City States Polemarch Vs Spires Debuff Ranged Brutality

I got to play in real life and that is always a great time. Our local vanguard is a spires true believer and is anxiously awaiting the rework. Until then he has brought a brutal ranged powerhouse list full of defense debuffs and healing for chip damage. I am not familiar with spires but I knew that the leonine would be a problem for my army, and the Desolation Drones and Pteraphon would really ruin a lot of my defensive tech. I made those my priority.

We were playing on melee which is a wild scenario. Tons of points, tons of swing potential, and a TON of comeback potential. I personally cannot wait for a new scenario pack and it’s one of the only things I think is a weak point of TLAOK, I would love to see a more standardized scoring across all scenarios and a revamp of scenarios.

Sorry Tangent over. Here’s the scenario!

Pregame

Second tangent! Okay, I love spires. They’re so WEIRD. I really, really hope that PBG can nail the rework that’s coming SOON (Maybe, who knows at this point) I just love all the strange nonsense they can get into and I actually told Brent during this game “I will give you any of my factions for your spires if you hate the rework”

Looking at the scenario I was a bit cautious. My list doesn’t love kill points in scenarios. I have two very hard to kill pieces, and like 7 extremely killable units. I put out respectable damage but I always get nervous when games go to attrition. I like to stand on zones and make that everyone else’s problem.

Early Game

Round One

Brent has a light regiment. What an absolute madman.

Round 2

I get a very nice 3 mediums coming in and I waffle a lot on this decision. I don’t think I made the right one. I bring in the haspists, two floogooboloogoos and a promethean. My thoughts were, hey, a zone stander (Minotaurs) two chariots to touch a zone and shoot some dudes, and a tanky-ish monster to project threat.

The real answer was to just bring on two chariots and two companion cavalry. Early game you want to project threat and speed (often) is very threatening. Make them walk at you, make them walk into your ranged units, make them walk into your skirmish cavalry. Lesson learned for sure.

Brent really pushes onto my right hand side, setting up some scary debuff generators and overlapping fire.

Round 3

You know. Sometimes vanguard clone infiltrators march volley and hit you like 15 times. I think he rolled 5 2’s and 6 1’s and it was AMAZING. My brother and I talked this week about gaming and how it’s much better when you lean into the critical failures (We were talking about TTRPGs but I think it applies to wargaming as well). So that’s how my chariot took six wounds before doing anything useful. I put my tanky stuff on the zones that are worth the most points and I just tried to march charge the biggest ranged threats I could so that I didn’t get blasted off the table on the approach.

Midgame

Round 4

Alrighty. Battle is well and truly joined. I have lost the Promethean to Pteraphon defense reduction and approximately 8 million arrows and I also lost the Haspists for literally nothing other than board space. Alternatively, I am starting to get a substantial lead in points. I’m still quite worried due to the nature of melee but I like where things are.

Brent and I are in an interesting deployment standoff. I am deploying heavily left and right, avoiding the center third, he is center and my right side trying to chew through things which I think is very smart for his list with it’s layers upon layers of shooting. Between the size of Leonine Avatara, and the arcing fire rule from his Marksman Clones it was becoming painful.

Round 6 (Sorry team, forgot picture for round 5)

Sidebar – Holy crap the pteraphon surveyor was wild this game. Huge fan of that model and what it can do to it’s enemies. 5/7 no notes.

Anyway so the past two turns see me go first a lot, in fact I think I won supremacy the majority of this game and it was impactful. That combined with the polemarch supremacy can really, really crush a midgame and your opponents spirits.

Endgame

Round 8 and 9

We play through another round. The Pteraphon goes absolutely SICKO mode and just obliterates the Oracle. But then at this point the damage has been done. I am up by around 40ish points on scenario and he will not be able to kill or score enough. We chat out the last few rounds and call it a game.

Closing Tiiiiiime

You don’t have to go home….

Anyway. Great game. Brent is always a blast to play against. I really enjoyed it.

Things I Did Well – I think I played the correct amount of hold back and wait, and go turn push the gas. I had multiple rounds of simply march charging something to go and die and tie up his ranged shooting for another turn. My chip damage from chariots was mostly negated by the healing from the spires shenanigans, My Oracle melted much faster than I am used to, and my Sacred Band were only able to be in one place at a time. So it was pretty important to choose my moment well. I also think my supremacy turn was quite impactful.

Things I hope to Improve On – My round two card choices were just dumb. I need to take a moment, think about lists, and choose better round two pieces. I’m not advocating for choosing the same things every game but man did that impact me this game. I kicked myself about it for the whole game.

Things Brent Did Well – Brent is always a blast to play against. I honestly can find too many flaws in his play patterns. I like his plan of holding two thirds of the board and pushing towards the rest as he kills stuff with his wild ranged damage. The score definitely did not portray how close the game felt while playing it. He was able to put out some insane damage and he really did that well. Spires is in desperate need of their rework and I believe that was on full display here tonight sadly. The raw numbers just weren’t there.

As always thank you so much for reading. I do this to improve but it also is really cool to talk with people about gaming! Feel free to reach out to me with any questions, concerns, gossip, or to just talk shop. I love conquest and can talk about it all day. You can find me on Reddit as Iamarrest7, discord as Arrest, and Instagram as Arrest_Paints. I’m trying to convince the Line of Sight guys (The website hosting me) to start doing some custom tokens and gaming aids for conquest so let me know what type of MDF laser printed gaming aids you would like for YOUR faction. I’ve already got them working up some stuff for Weavers but I really want to get some Sorcerer Kings aids worked up. Maybe ritual markers? I’m not sure yet.