Tuesday 2 August 2011

June Update & First look: Cutlass

Well I gave a bloody good go but crashed and burned on the pledge this month....


Bought: 97
Painted : 71
Difference: -26

But to be honest it wasn't a bad innings really, considering the usual factor of work, glorious English sunshine and BBQ's and buyng 2 complete army's in one fell swoop (again!) Oh and I'm back on the MMO crack....













So to put it in a visual version...





year to date is looking pretty good as well...

Bought: 867
Painted: 756
Difference: -111

does anyone else have a "pledge" and how are you getting on??

So onto Cutlass, Yet again I pick up another system at Salute and this time I can blame it on Lee, but we suckered two others in this time...

Myself, Lee & Nick have been playing for about a month now and between us we've pretty much got the rules sorted, and the gangs/crews are coming along nicely,

With my opponent not feeling too well I was at a bit of a loose end so decided to watch Lee & Nick beat the crap outta each other only to see then both decide defend and dragged me into the game to control the invaders, So in a nut shell I needed to inflict maximum damage on there gangs so that I could take advantage when I played them another time... Cue evil laugh........

Gameplay:

You get a random amount of actions per turn this is decided by rolling your Authority level of your captain/leader, the highest score goes first and each action lets you do one of three things:

Move
Shoot
Close Combat
but you can also do Special Actions i.e. reload, hide, make ready etc..  along with one of the above,

so if you roll a 5 then the first action you can activate 5 models, deduct one from the score, and then your next action you can activate 4 models and so on until you've ran out of points, 

the thing that makes spending of your action points quite tactical is that your able to react to certain situations like if your shot at and your opponent misses, but to react you would need a 4+ on your reaction stat, and the stats are the dice that you use, most of my orc's are on a D6 but as they gain XP and level up then they would go to a D8 and could go all they way to a D12

the dice also affect how far you can shoot with certain weapons, pistols will always shoot at point blank but a guy with a musket with a D12 stat will be popping your head off at 24 inches!

so that's game play in a nutshell, the only one thing that I don't like about it is that if you roll rubbish for your action points it can become very one sided very quick! but a way that we've got round that is two roll two dice and choose, which we've stolen from the guys from the forum and it works really well.

The other thing that gripes me is that the layout of the book is very poor, the quality is good with nice pictures and all that jazz but who ever actually laid out the rules needs to look at it from a noob view as to start with we were constantly flicking back and forth trying to suss out the more interesting rules!

Models:

Black Scorpion have a pretty good range of pirate models doing various races and these are covered off in the book so you can do a undead, elf, dwarf, orc, humans both marine pirate and privateer.

You could quite easily use other stuff though after all they are pretty common, If I was to do a second crew I'd go for either a Chinese crew or French marine crew using one of the human lists.

Lastablilty:

This is where personally the game really comes ointo its own, I've always been a sucker for Nercomunda style campaigns where your crew gets better as you play, and when you lose one its like losing one of your goldfish!!

The Mission that we played the other night was an XP-tastic for both Nick & Lee but that means it'll be all the better when I take them down... 


 So onto the game and the set up of the Table... I'd be coming on from the bottom edge with Lee & Nick set up halfway in, 















To keep it "fair" I split the invaders in half and eyed up each crew, if I wanted to be horrible then I could have stacked one side but that wouldn't really be cricket!

I got initiative and declared a load of move actions... but there is a rick involved in this and I soon started to pay the price when most of my invaders were stunned due to me pushing my luck!!

So the Orc's come steaming over the hill only to see marines armed with muskets...















And on the other side using the trees as cover the orc's sprit forwards to close with and KILL the enemy!















As Lee couldn't do a great deal due to range he hid & made ready... 















And Reinforcements came to plug the pending whole in his flank


















Once I'd burned through my action points it was time to get shot at, I couldn't react as part of the mission rules though.

The Marines opened up with some superb shooting injuring an orc twice and taking him out! 


















meanwhile on the other side the orc's were still running towards Nicks well hidden ninja mofo's! Now the marker next to grot chap was to show that he was stunned.... because when he tried to run he tripped and fell! Now if your stunned your dice go down by one level which means this guy was on D4's for all his stats, So Ants tip of the day unless you need to charge then don't bother running!!


















So an overview of the field of battle,

 on the left I was getting quite close to Nick's lot with the odd guy going down here and there I wasn't stopping for anything it was going to get very dirty very quick!

On the right due to the "zulu" deployment I scooted round to the left to use the building and crates as cover and stick it to him that way! but I did leave a Goblin sneaking along the table edge....















And the following turn... the left flank made it to the battleline pretty much intact, but as most of them where stunned due to excessive running I was rolling  D4's for attacking, mind you the "exploding" dice rule which means if you roll the top number you roll again adding it on made it quite good as some of my rolls were cracking and some total pants, i.e. "doing a Spencer" ;)














Close up of the carnage around Nick's crew, loads of complicated combat with the decision that cutlass & dagger are the best combo weapons wise... because the additional combat weapon gives you an additional dice, and if you opt to use the dagger you get another making 3 dice in combat but one to damage or if you opt to use the cutlass you get two dice to damage but two to attack.














and the one sneaky gobbo managed to make it round the gunline and take out one guy in combat, blow another guys face off with his pistol then ended up in combat! whatta man!!

the other guy was holding his own against 3 combat chaps and did quite well!














In the end I think Nick won on kills but only because I took out so many of  Lee's crew, for the injury rolls no one died but some minor injuries but nothing too harsh.

So overall a good game a little long as there was alot going on, but something that I will be playing again and the carnage that I caused was great fun!!

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