Quote:
Originally Posted by dok
I can think of few things that would make me happier than my opponent rushing the Cathars over to my position in order to claim "first strike". Height advantage - so hot right now.
I said "good chance" to win - I don't think it's a slam dunk or anything. But I think it's basically a fair fight, and one I'd expect to be able to win with either side if I could wrangle some positional advantages. The point was just that I picked a strong melee build that has a high-life bruiser and concluded that it could play in the matchup.
That said, I think it's a bit silly to restrict ourselves to all-melee if we're trying to assess the power of the Spearmen in the overall metagame. Spearmen will frequently play without and ranged heroes or unique squads, but a lot of mostly melee armies have very important ranged components.
That's a pretty strong 'chaser build that I just brought up, but in an unrestricted double blind event, you'd be much more likely to see OP and MBS instead of a Warhulk. The implications of that flip should be pretty obvious. Likewise, a Marcus/MBS/Roman build will beat the Cathars on raw figure numbers and activations per turn, and the threat of that ranged ping will force the spearmen to run at the shield wall, where Marcus can absorb some spear hits and then let the Romans fill the gaps. Knights x3 + Finn + Thorgrim + Krav will be quite effective against the spearmen. And then there's actual ranged armies, of course.
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My point to restricting the battle to melee units was simply to demonstrate just how strongly they counter other melee units.
Also, I wasn't suggesting rushing in with the Cathars. You want to play them in a completely defensive position waiting for the enemy to come to you in the warhulk match up. There is no way for the enemy to close with the Cathers and attack them without spending a turn within their reach with the one exception being if get the double move by being the last player to act on the prior round and winning initiative in the next round.
This means that even playing defensively you will quite often get the first strike with the Cathars which will usually be worth it in this match up since rolling a total of 12 attack dice against a bunch of two or three defense units is going to wreck them. For the price of advancing the front line of Cathar's you would on average kill three Death Chasers or do 3 damage to the warhulk which means three of the four Cathars you have moved have already earned their points.
Now the opponent gets to move and every single one of his pieces he tries to counter attack those 4 Cathars with will now be exposed to D20 attacks, often multiple ones. If even one of those 4+ D20 rolls connects the 4 Cathars you struck first with have earned their points even if your opponent is lucky enough to roll like a god and kill every single one of them this turn which is quite improbable. On average 4 attacks of 4 will kill 2 Cathars and keep in mind each Death Chaser that gets hit by a D20 doesn't get to attack that round as well. This is not a particularly even fight outside of the Warhulk getting lucky and going nuts with its special every round.
What makes them so nasty to other melee units is that so long as you sit back and wait in a proper formation the enemy squad figures are usually going to be running a 25% to 75% chance of getting killed by the D20 rolls they have to endure just to try and get into position to attack. Losing like half of all your melee squad pieces before they even get to roll an attack is an absolutely brutal hurdle to try and cross.
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts I think that the only melee squads that really have a chance going toe to toe with the spear men are cheap bonding squads like the orcs and the romans precisely because they are cheap enough to eat the D20s.
Edit: It looks like I forgot to mention this earlier, but I think the Cathar's have a strategically rich and flavorful design which I really like a lot. I just think they are over tuned.