You took the right army
Blaise is a great caster against Legion because she is designed to get hit and then be able to hit back. Normally she might struggle against heavies but you had the tools to take out my heavies with the Stormclad, stormblades, Gallant, precursors and long gunners. Even the Sword knights were the right things to take. So what went wrong?
Some things need to be protected
The obvious mistake was having Constance too far forward but that's not what I'm talking about. Constance's feat is that she is able to take souls from killed warrior models so you need to force me to kill warrior models. Hide the jacks behind the units so that I have to go through the unit first. I could have maybe taken one out with shooting and if I did kill any warrior models that would have given you more focus to allocate to the jacks to wipe out my beasts on the next turn. Sword knights and precursors are great for this because they are cheap and have high ARM.
Spread out
One of the changes to MKII was the unit coherency, in order to get things like shield wall and defensive line you no longer have to have your entire unit together, you can spread out and have your troops in many small groups. I have them in five or six lots of two if I need to cover lots of ground and split the unit up into 2 or 3 large groups if I want a tank unit that is very difficult to get through. Things like thresher (which my scytheans do as a chain attack) and AOEs find it much harder to damage spread out troops. The only unit I'd ever really consider deploying in ranks is the high shields (dwarves with guns, high armour, ranked attacks, combined attacks and shield wall).
Shooters need to advance too
Long gunners especially, they can't combined attack anything that is in melee and they can double shot if they don't move. First turn run them into a position where they can shoot the important areas of the battlefield and the second turn blast away. Two power 20 shots that hit on anything but a double 1 will have most heavies very worried and 20 individual RAT7 (for aiming) shots at POW 10 will shred infantry. You only need a tiny sliver of LOS in between the bases and there is no penalty for shooting past other models.
Another useful tactic to protect your caster against flying models and my ghostly solders is to surround your caster with friendly troops. It is only a delaying tactic but six cheap models properly placed will prevent even models with reach from getting close enough to your caster. Of course your opponent will happily kill them instead, so it only buys you a turn. But if the opponent hasn't committed many models it should be enough time to kill them. On the other hand, if as in the previous battle the opponent commits all their forces you should be able to claim the control points and win that way.
ReplyDeleteOf course this has its weaknesses (which is why this is such a great game), special rules such as side step, shadow play and train wreck allow models to penetrate the screen, and it is very difficult to maneuver while the screen is in place.