I'm still putting my thoughts together for my Calandra post; here's a battle report in the meantime!
So on Wednesday, I brought along a huge base, wanting to try a little bit of early play with the Mountain King. He's on my painting table, so I just brought the base to proxy for the time being; he'll be along in a bit.
I decided to try a Runes of War variant, rather than my traditional pDoomy list, to run the King. I ran:
Doomshaper, Shaman of the Gnarls (+7)
Mulg
Earthborn
Mountain King
max Krielstone + UA
Janissa
2 units of Runeshapers
This may honestly be the lowest model count army I've ever run; it felt incredibly weird to me. I'm used to running much higher model counts than what I ran in that, but I need to break out of habits anyway!
I played Andy, who ran a pThagrosh tier variant. I honestly can't replicate the list, except I know it has 3 Spawning Vessels, 4 Beast Mistresses, a Carnivean and Scythean, and more lessers than I've ever seen on a board. It looked like a unit of lessers coming across the board at me, of all types.
Andy had been running this list lately, and I was curious to see how just simply skewing my armor upwards would run on it. I felt like the Carni and Scythean were the only real dangers to the King, so if I could keep plodding through, I could make it.
The board featured 4 giant pieces of terrain - a huge hill, huge house, huge linear obstacle, and giant trench. I seriously have no better word than "huge" for any of them; the linear obstacle was the smallest, and it was a hooked wall that had about 8-10" of length, maybe more. That piece was my downfall. The scenario was Incursion (3 flags), and Andy elected to go first.
I predeployed centrally with the MK, and he put down his few models not AD in the center. I put Mulg to the left of the King (near a hill), Earthborn to the right (to abuse a wall), and Runeshapers to either side. My hope was to threaten either side with a heavy and let the King run the center; my deployment really hurt me later on. Andy put his 4 various Lesser battlegroups spread evenly across the board for AD, and off we went.
Andy mostly just sent beasts screaming across the board; he knew I had a limited model count, so my number of attacks was fairly low, and he just went with the intent of jamming me up. The lessers all hid around the various walls that were available and ate up a lot of space around me, making it very difficult for me to get to the objectives.
I kept the MK central, sprayed down a random Stinger that he ran forward with Fortune on the King, and ran Mulg and the Earthborn to try to keep a beast in either flag direction. However, I realized increasingly that the giant wall was hampering me from actually moving the King anywhere, and he might be jammed in a small area for most of the game.
Anyway, Andy came in, took out 4 of 6 Runeshapers, and plinked damage into the Earthborn, continuing his jam. The wrong flag for me had gone away, and the King was now thoroughly stuck; I realized quickly that I might lose simply from lack of mobility. Andy had put a solo on the outer flag, so he would get 1 if I couldn't contest, but the only piece that could get near enough to contest was my Earthborn, which was a guaranteed death for him based on Andy's positioning. I decided to give up the point and just hope that I could get over on my turn (when Andy would be at 3 CP's) and do my best. Spoilers: it didn't work.
Andy just simply continued jamming, held me off with Lessers, and I couldn't get my beasts out to contest. Mulg was hampered by the wall and couldn't come over to support, the MK never had anywhere near the necessary room to try and contest, so I simply ran out of options. Andy killed off the Earthborn after a bit of hardship, but it was too little too late; I did not have enough tools, and he won 5-0 on CPs.
Despite the low volume of attacks, I think the core concept is essentially fine; the MK, Mulg, and Earthborn are all hardy and can take a beating. I need to be careful of getting Bronzebacked, but this list isn't entirely intended to face a Skorne list or something similar; I would rather put it down against armies in a central scenario that I don't believe can crack armor and wear them down.
That said, my deployment killed me. I put the King behind the wall in such a position that he could never move out - he killed 10-15 points of lessers across the game from attacks and killshots, but never really had a major effect on the game from where he was located. Had I deployed him on a flank, maybe the wrong flag would have gone away, but I think he could have maneuvered and been able to make his way around, albeit slowly. So, I learned a good bit about what to look out for, and I learned how much a large piece of terrain would affect my board positioning with the King. Until you actually run one, it's really hard to realize how much space that huge base needs to occupy, and how inflexible that requirement really is.
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