Wuxing vs. Carthage

Last week Kevin and I found some time to sneak in a game. He took photos, as per usual, and I was planning on holding off on my report until his went up so I could be more detailed. Since Kevin is enjoying Spring Break, however, I decided to give at least a general overview.

I'm a big believer in letting the lead developer of a faction dictate who and what he wants to playtest against, since he (or, someday, she) needs to manage the playtest games to ensure that they capture a broad mix of factions, terrain, etc. Kevin said that if I was willing to play Carthage he had something annoying he wanted to try out.

We played 2,000 points of Total Warfare with a large hill in the middle and a small forest on one edge of the board. Given that Carthage has no long-range units, I wasn't totally surprised to find out that what Kevin wanted to try was stand-and-shoot, using the terrain to help slow me down.

Having forgotten about the option of Foresight, I took several Slingers to supplement an army with two Elephants and the rest Libyan Foot. Kevin took two Rocket-Arrow batteries and a mixed line that included Spears, Salvaged and some Crossbows.

After setup, I sent most of my Slingers over the hill, one Foot and one Elephant to the "wrong" side to engage the end of his line, and the other Elephant, Foot and one Slinger (who could get through that annoying forest quickly) on the other flank. Kevin went for maximum value on his shots, targeting the near Elephant with both of his batteries but letting his Crossbowmen pepper my lead Foot on the way in.

After the game we debated whether Kevin would have been better off just shredding the Foot. His dice were terrible against the Elephant, but on the other hand it's not clear that good dice would have mattered as the Elephant ended up crashing into the rear of a unit that was engaged with Slingers and then getting pinched or maybe double-pinched and being killed with points to spare. I generally think that stand-and-shoot builds need to concentrate fire since their main advantage isn't just that they get to do damage while the other side runs in but the potential to have the other side's attacking line fall apart just as it finally gets to engage. Concentrating fire on the spot you want to break is particularly important when the "elite" units are throwing 5/5 dice (albeit sometimes a lot of them).

The line-to-line matchups went well for me. My "wrong-side" elephant had to slow up its charge (it moved L until engaging) so it wouldn't get pinched but it was able to charge a 0/3 while the neighboring Spearmen fought with Libyan Foot. On the other side I managed to break through the other 0/3 with another Foot unit, while we had chaos in the center with Slingers (he final rushed one that got too close, which meant that others pinched him and then got attacked and then the elephant and then the pinching of the elephant, etc.). The nice thing about breakthrough units that move at least 5" is that even if they break through on a flank that's far from the main battle they can get back in pretty fast. Kevin killed off a last unit and then scooped, as I had too many attackers left.

This was my first battle against Wuxing and I enjoyed it. The Breakdown mechanic is really, really interesting and different. The cost may or may not be right and it probably has some awkward rocks-paper-scissors aspects but it was really fun to have getting a unit to change color matter a lot but in a completely new way from "he might rout!" I'm not sure if Kevin's army choice was constrained by core requirements but I think he would have done better to get rid of the two 0/3s and to add a Spearmen. (If core was an issue, then cutting a Crossbowmen for yet another Spear would help.) Another advantage of stand-and-shoot is that the opponent often can't get full use of their line and in this case I didn't really have that problem. My Elephants would have had a much harder time punching through while remaining healthy if they'd had to fight through spears.