Just a quick second game...

Woohoo! Two games in one day!

Game 2, same lists, same terrain as last time (previous post), but this time we're playing blood and glory. Now with my list it is basically if my ICKS die, usually means my Art Collector and BSB have also died, so game over for me unless I can pull something amazing out of nowhere with my Demigriffs and mages. This also means I lose my fortitude (something that will need to be looked into-might need another banner floating around somewhere...).  Ryan's army has no BSB, so has a few more banners than me to compensate, but basically has the same "problem".

Anywho, we deploy tit for tat and my deployment looks like this:

with the cannons on the extreme flanks. I would have deployed them more centrally, but the hill in the middle meant it would block their LOS considerably + cannons on flanks = chaff goes after them = not blocking my hitting force, so a sacrifice I'm happy to make.

Ryan deploys like this:

Splitting his forces into 2 equal "wings" with knight bus central (perfect) and terrorgiest to the side (perfect).

TURN 1

So I lose the roll off and Ryan goes first and moves up like so:

He then rolls up a 12 dice magic phase (not so useful to VC's when not in combat-very much like the lore of shadow in that respect). Casually IF's vanhels (killing 3 knights) and moves up ghouls and spirit host like so:

loses 4 dice (so 4 left to my 6) and decides to cast the vortex spell and somehow my 6 dice fail to dispel it.. Vortex goes through the knights killing 7 (!)  and the archer bunker...

So naturally I promptly fail a re-rolling ldship 10 panic test on the ICKS and flee of the board, loosing me the game.

END RESULT

If this was a tournament I would have played on. Charging the demigriffs into the terrorgiest if enough died, or into the knights if they survived the scream with sufficient bodies. I think that moving the spirit hosts and ghouls up was a mistake because I had an easy flank charge on the spirit host then combat reform to face off with Black Knights, and the ghouls were too far forward to be of much use except for a convenient target for the stank. A better move would have been to hold back a bit, see what the Stank was going to do (run straight at black knights) and then block it with a spirit host charge once my ICKS were not in a position to help. Even then this is risky as I had the enchanted blades spell, so any unit could shrug off the spirit hosts if I'm also threatening a Final transmute/searing doom elsewhere.

So I was a little annoyed (as you would be) that I had lost the game in the first magic phase, but that's life and at least I had a sneaky plan that could have worked...