So we played our first game of Epic Heroes using CalnWars miniatures.
It was a lot of fun to put together the warbands.. Basically one warband was aimed to be a lion clan elite force, the key characteristics were that all the samurai were high born, meaning that they'd ignore ashigaru casualties plus they'd fight better against lesser troop types. There was good variety of weapons among the samurai, naginata, nodachi, tetsubo and a very skillful Samurai archer.. On the other hand the shadwoland forces were lead by a fiersome Samurai centaur and a large ogre with a naginata, and the rank and file of the standard force was composed of goblin ashigaru, both mounted and dismounted, some ratskin henchmen and samurai skeletons.
We played two games back to back, switching forces and the scenario we chose was "Retrieval", which has the forces checking three objective markers to identify which one is the key objective that has to be taken off the table.
Here are a few pictures of our first game
Here is a picture of our battlefield
A close up of some of the shadowlands servants
In both games we played the shadowland forces attempted a quick rush on the objectives. The Shadowland troops had a much faster force since the mounted goblins had swift mounts plus the lighter armor from most of their troops allowed them greater speed than the heavy armored lion clan samurai.
The problem was that the rush strategy proved to be dangerous since the samurai archer and the samurai ashigaru quickly took advantage of the exposed light armored guys running for the objectives
In both games the key objective ended being the one on the bridge ( by chance ) and fierce cc actions developed around that area. Both times the Shadowland forces chose to depoy the fast ratskins with their long yaris to block the lion clan samurais from crossing the brige while either the ogre or the centaur ( depending on which game ) would try to take the objective
On the second game, having seen how the fist game evolved, the shadoland players built an effective protective pocket around their leader who was taking the objective and it seemed that this plan would work very well. The lion clan samurai would eventually cut through the goblins and ratmen but not before the centaur could take the objective away.. but luck always kick in, the Lion Clan samurai archer killed the goblin in the middle of the defensive formation and the shadowland players managed to rout 50% of their troops including the leader, by rolling a nice follow up of 1 and 2 ( D10s ) ! The lion clan samurai then cut them down while the shadowland forces were trying to regroup. Lion Clan victory.
On the first game the evolution was different but with similar results. On the first game it was the ogre who took the objective and he was doing good pace towards the end of the table so rather than chasing him down the lion clan forces tried to kill as many shadowland guys as possible to fore a break test and that strategy worked out just before the ogre could escape.
The games were fantastic. The learning curve for the game might prove a bit steep, ( might seem strange for a skirmish game but this is a VERY sophisticated skirmish game ), but two of us had a couple of BoB game under our belt so we are getting to a good sweet spot of familiarity and by the second game our two less experience players were catching on better..
The amount of traits and concepts in Epic Heroes really allow to bread life into any fantasy setting and I was glad to be able to play a nice skirmish game with my Clanwars miniatures since my forces had never grown to the point needed to use the all Legend of the 5 Rings mass battles wargame.
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September 03, 2014, 02:19:22 PM