2019-08-17: God of Battles, Undead vs Blood Gorged Lizardmen

This may be the last time I have played God of Battles. With each game I play, it becomes more and more obvious to me that the combat system (and probably the whole points system) is heavily flawed, and if I cannot convince my gaming buddies to adapt some changes, the game is dead for me. Period.

The biggest problem is the Defence Dice procedure that means that it is the unit size, and not the number of hits suffered, that determines the number of 'saves' rolled, which means that a small unit with Defence 4 is prone to loose more models than a large unit with Defence 4 if they suffer the same amount of hits. This has to change if I am to even consider playing this game again.

There is a lot of things I love about the game, especially the very simple movement rules (although the rules for Formed Units lead to some very awkward situations now and then, and have to be tweaked a bit), but I am tired of seeing my bread-and-butter troops get cut to pieces by large Loose Units and/or single models with a psychotic amount of Defence Dice (T'lekkan Behemoth, for instance) without having the slightest chance of even inflicting a single wound on them.

Well, I have written down some suggestions for rules changes, and submitted them to one of my gaming buddies - we shall have to see how they are received.

On to the AAR:

The above picture shows the  battlefield with roughly half my army on the table while the next two show both armies fully deployed.

Turn 1 I had my Chariots and Knights speed forward on the left, while my infantry tried to get in position in the gaps between the jungle patches and ruins - in a kind of Refused Flank strategy.

The Lizardmen generally surged forward.

Turn 2 started well for me with an abhorrent dice roll (I forgot to add the 2 extra dice for Charge!), when a Chariot with a Blacksoul crashed into the enemy. Blue hit on 3, Red on 4....

When the other Blacksoul in Chariot attacked, I remembered the Charge! bonus - not that it mattered much...

The Chariot saves at 4+, which statistically should mean that half the defence dice should work, but never tell me the odds, as the universe does not work that way.

One of my Chariots was subsequently charged by some Temple Guards, and when it got to strike back, at least the Chariot (blue dice)  performed as could be expected, while the Blacksoul just barely managed to scratch an opponent.

I do not remember what this roll was for - looks like a Chariot save - but try counting the sixes rolled in all the pics so far...

This was the lay of the land after Turn 2. As far as I remember, both my Chariots were gone (40 pts C&S), and I had annihilated one unit of Temple Guard Watchers (12 pts, I think).

I am not sure of the sequence here, as this looks conspicuously like another Blacksoul/Chariot attack roll gone bad. It has been a couple of days since we played, and, frankly, I did my best not to think about the game until I sat down yesterday to process the photos.

In Turn 3, my knights managed to dispatch the remaining Temple Guard Watchers without sustaining a single casualty (!) themselves, but at the same time the Saurus Ravagers reached my infantry line, and the carnage began...

We opened Turn 4 with my Knights attacking and slaughtering half a Skink Archer unit, and the Ravagers almost wiped out my Skeleton Horde. Emil agreed that any dispense was gone from the game, as the Ravagers would wither down my Skeletons faster (and longer) than my Knights could hope to kill reptiles, and we called it a day.

This session completely killed my desire for playing wargames - God of Battles in its current form in particular - and just as important for painting minis, as I have absolutely no other reason for painting minis than using them for gaming.

Bad day for my hobby mojo.